You're listening to the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast. It's fast on free daily deep dive Bible. And right now we're talking about Galatians.
SPEAKER_01There's a team in college football that is not very good, and there's a team in college football that historically has been very good. And they played this weekend. It was supposed to go one way, but it did not go that way. It was a huge upset. The number one team in the country lost to a team that is just traditionally one of the worst college football teams. And so, of course, when the underdog team won this huge game, all the students run onto the field and they tear down the goalposts. For those of you who aren't from the United States, that's a tradition. The goalposts have a little pin that pulls out. So when you tear them down, it doesn't break them, you can put them back up later. It's just a thing. I don't know, your sports app things too. I'm sure just insert your weird sports thing like the Wiggleby Cup and how we have to have two scoops of mustard to celebrate defeating Chumtershire upon Wombly Brook. And that is how we celebrate the victory. It's just like, I don't know, whatever your thing is, that's our thing too. Everybody has stupid sports things. That's our super sports things. In college, when you win a game, you weren't supposed to win. You ripped down the goalposts. So the kids did that, and they're running around, they're all excited and everything. And you look at it and you're like, how could anybody tell them not to, really, at this point? Because there's no debate. Nobody could go out there on the field and be like, oh, if you stop, I think if you go back and review a play that happened in the third quarter, you'll see that the outcome of this game is actually in question. No, there's no question. The final whistle has sounded, and the winners are clearly the winners, and the losers are clearly the losers, and now everybody's just gonna have to go crazy for a while and celebrate. It's final, it's cut and dried. Once the outcome is determined, everybody is gonna respond accordingly. Likewise in the book of Acts, you got a situation where you have a showdown between two different parties. You got Saul, who's about to become known as Paul in the book of Acts, chapter 13, who has been commissioned by the Christians in Antioch to go out and see if anybody else might want to become a Christian. And Saul starts on the island of Cyprus. He goes and talks with some Jewish people in synagogues there, and he opens the Old Testament and tries to explain how look, Jesus is what all of this is pointing to. Some of them listen, some of them don't, but it turns out that there's a shifty character on the island named Bar Jesus. He's fashioning himself after Jesus, but he doesn't believe the Jesus stuff. He's just using his primitive magic to try to imitate what he imagines Jesus to be. And somehow the interaction between Saul and his team and this sorcerer, Bar Jesus guy, lands Saul in front of the highest political authority on the island, a guy named Sergius Paulus, who, like we talked about in the last episode, we have incredible amounts of verification that he was indeed the governor there, that he was there at the right time. Everything all adds up to the timeline. Everything checks out. It's all where it's supposed to be. So Saul gets invited to this, which is crazy. This is the first stop on the Christianity tour, kind of in the history of the entire religion. I think a reasonable expectation for what a win would look like here would be like have a couple people come around and sign up for the thing and maybe don't get stoned or flogged that much. But instead, stop number one results in an invite to the royal gubernatorial palace. And not only that, it results in an invite to basically have a sorcery showdown between this Bar Jesus guy and the actual power of the Holy Spirit. And here's how that works out Acts chapter 13. Whatever way this thing goes, if it tips to the underdog, if it tips to the favorite, either way, there's not going to be any debate at the end of this. Just act accordingly. Tear down the goalposts, go crazy. Whoever wins, there's going to be consequences to that. Acts 13, verse 6. They traveled through the whole island until they came to Paphos. There they met a Jewish sorcerer and a false prophet named Bargesus, who was an attendant of the proconsul, Sergius Paulus, who is right where he's supposed to be at exactly the right time. The proconsul, an intelligent man, sent for Barnabas and Saul because he wanted to hear the word of God. But Elimos, the sorcerer, so he goes by a couple names, much like Gandalf, Bar Jesus and Elimos, for that is what his name means, opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul from the faith. Ah, so this guy has the ear of the proconsul already, and he knows that if the Saul thing turns out to be true and the proconsul is persuaded by Saul, he's not going to need Bar Jesus anymore. Bar Jesus is going to lose face publicly, he's going to lose money. Basically, the gig's up, the racket is over. He cannot afford to take this L. So Bar Jesus or Elimos cannot get Saul and Barnabas off of the island of Cyprus quickly enough. And no doubt this Elimos, Bar Jesus guy is sweating bullets when they're all in front of Sergius Paulus, because Sergius Paulus is the decider. He is the scoreboard. So then Saul, who was also called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked straight at Elimos and said, You're a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right. You're full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord? Now the hand of the Lord is against you. You are going to be blind, and for a time you'll be unable to see the light of the sun. I'm not going to tell you what happened just yet. Let's just break down some of what we saw here. Okay, first of all, this is the first reference we get in verse 9 to Saul also being called Paul. From here on out, we're going to call him Saul less and Paul more. Generally, the line of thinking here with the whole Saul Paul thing is that Saul was a name that made sense when he was operating in Jewish territory, but he also had the name Paul because everybody in this time had a degree of multicultural influence and would have had names that would make sense in different languages, not all names translated real neatly. All of the emperors, like you remember, I just read you Claudius' name in the last episode. It's like 10 names long. I guess you just pick one of those and kind of land on it. So a lot of people think that the reason we're going to refer to this guy as Paul from here on out, without really another miraculous encounter where his name gets changed to like Jacob to Israel or Abram to Abraham or Sarai to Sarah is just because it was a shrewd common sense pivot in what name he was going to use. That seems sensible enough to me. Maybe it'll come up later. Maybe it won't. From here on out, we're going to call him Paul. Note that it says right after that in verse 9 that Paul was filled with the Holy Spirit. Huh. So is Stephen. Paul was there approving of people hitting him with rocks in the head until he was dead. So that's kind of an interesting thing that that same Holy Spirit, who a couple pages earlier Saul was trying to quench and snuff out, is now indwelling Paul and empowering him in this difficult situation. Third quick note on this little passage that we just looked at. Remember all the way back in Matthew chapter 10, it's kind of the first of the commissionings that Jesus gives his followers. It's one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible. Matthew 10 is the second of the five big discourses around which the book of Matthew is structured. That is the missional discourse. And it contains, I'm even looking it up. I know this one. It contains one of my favorite verses of all the verses, Matthew 10, 16. I'm sending you out like sheep among wolves, therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. Sometimes it's called the lesser commission. And in Matthew 10, there's sort of three eras that Jesus is speaking to as he gathers together his disciples and fixes to send them out. He's kind of saying, All right, this is what it's going to be like when you guys go out right now, as soon as I'm done with this speech. This is what it's going to be like when you guys go out later and this becomes your job. And then the third movement of Matthew 10, the missional discourse, is him saying, This is what it's going to be like forever as Christians go out. And in there is the promise, you don't totally have to worry about what you're going to say. God is going to be with you. The Holy Spirit is going to handle this business. And so it's kind of hard to say, are we in movement two of that speech or movement three of that speech that Jesus gave? Encouraging his disciples and even providing guidance for future Christians who would go out and do this. I don't know. Maybe Paul is kind of grandfathered into movement two of that speech from Jesus, but either way, what Jesus said would happen is happening here. God is with him. God's with him in speech. Will God also be with him miraculously? Because he's engaged in kind of spiritual combat here, right in front of somebody who you'd really like to be impressed with someone who is claiming to wield supernatural power as well. So anytime we get this clause throughout the book of Acts, filled with the Holy Spirit, I mean, you got to interpret the next thing a little bit more carefully. That means Christians believe, it means the Bible is holding out that the next stuff that happens is from God. You get the curtain, the supernatural curtain, pulled back, and you get told, no, he was filled with the Holy Spirit. So he looks at this guy and he says, You're an enemy of everything that's right. You're a child of the devil, and now you're going to be blind. Now, that's ironic. Coincidental? No, I'm going to go with ironic. I wonder if Paul knew what he was going to say next, or if the Holy Spirit kind of had his hands on the wheel here, and if Paul kind of had a moment where he's saying this stuff and God is with him in a way that maybe I've never experienced myself. And he's like, and you're going to be blind for a time. And I wonder if Paul was like, oh dang. Huh. Can't believe I'm saying that. I mean, takes one to know one, I guess. I uh sort of feel for you, man. I've I've been there. It's gonna be rough for a while. Trust me, this actually works. This is a real thing. You're gonna find out here in just a second. Well, whatever Paul has in mind at that moment, it works. And God, as promised in Matthew chapter 10, was indeed behind Paul's speech, as well as providing miraculous supernatural backing for Paul, because it says immediately mist and darkness came over him, the sorcerer that is, and he groped about seeking someone to lead him by the hand. Well, when the proconsul saw what had happened, he believed, for he was amazed at the teaching about the Lord. What a fantastic first stop on the first of the missionary journeys. Maybe there is a little bit of doubt in the back of some people's minds. Like, is this really what we should be doing? Is this really what God wants? Well, dang, uh, that should eliminate a lot of the doubt. And as we learn from the next few hundred years of Roman history, if the governor signs up, if an important Roman authority figure signs up to follow Jesus, that has a massive ripple effect. And indeed, there's even evidence to suggest that maybe somehow Sergius Paulus adopted the Apostle Paul or named him an honorary member of his household. Then there are some smart people who think that maybe the connection between Paul going by that name instead of Saul from here on out might in some way be related to him becoming associated with the household of Sergius Paulus, who was that impressed by all of this and came to view Paul as something of a spiritual father, a spiritual relative. Maybe, maybe not. Either way, this is a huge, gigantic win, and this huge, gigantic win is gonna fuel what we look at next as Paul and his buddies go into the Galatian cities to try to communicate the Jesus thing to them. Is God gonna show up in the same way? Well, we're fixing to find out.
SPEAKER_00But here's a spoiler alert if there's a book of the Bible called Galatians, there's probably a pretty good chance it works out. So I guess we'll just find out tomorrow.
SPEAKER_01All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.