You're listening to the 10 Minute Bible Member podcast. It's best on free daily deep night bible. And right now we're talking about Galatians.
SPEAKER_01We got this little dance that we do in our family where somebody will ask somebody else to go get something like out of the cupboard or the fridge or something like that. And you go, go get me the whipped cream out of the fridge. And my son will be like, okay, I'm going to go get it. You know, because he's, you know, he's always willing to help and everything. He goes over there and I hear him rustling around. He comes back a few seconds later and announces it's not in the fridge. There's no whipped cream. It's not in there. And then I'll be like, okay, but I think it's in there. And I think I told you right where it was and everything. You were supposed to get it. And then I go over there. And if I find it, you know, he gets a real sheepish little smile on his face, like, oops, you got me. He doesn't argue or debate or make excuses because what are you going to say? It was right there all along. He just didn't see it. I don't know why. He just didn't see it. But if I go over there and it isn't right where I said, then I get kind of a sheepish little smile on my face because, again, scoreboard. It's just, it wasn't there. It wasn't there. And I was wrong. I was mistaken. I was wrong all along. And I kind of like this little exercise because there's no room for interpretation or debate. It's either the thing was there or the thing wasn't there. And then we can all have a laugh about whether we were right or we were wrong. It all gives us the opportunity to practice being wrong about things and be in a good sport about it. So there's that. And likewise in the book of Acts, you get a whole bunch of scenes that are all constructed roughly the same way. The question is, is the power of the Holy Spirit, the power of Jesus, is that the real thing that the disciples are carrying with them? Or is the real power the other power, the worldly power, the pagan power, the magical power, the other religious power, whatever it might be? And in each of these scenes in the book of Acts, I mean it's just, it's unarguable. When the thing is over, it's like, oh, okay, well, that one's God right there. The one who won the confrontation, that's God. Your thing didn't do any miracles. The Jesus thing did miracles. I guess that's it. It's just settled. And I suppose for an entirely different set of reasons, I appreciate that lack of ambiguity as well. It's cut and dried. It's real simple. We get a scene like that in Acts chapter 13. But Acts chapter 13, I gotta pause for a minute before we tear into this here. It represents a pivot point in the plot structure, the whole narrative of Acts. We've had this B plot, A plot thing going, where the B plot has been this come lately character named Saul, and the A plot has been all of the original disciples of Jesus who we've really loved and cherished, going all the way back to season one. But this other character who's come along later, you know, he's interesting, he's promising, dynamic things are happening there. And really, as we turn the page into Acts chapter 13, that A plot starts to fade. It's gonna make a few more appearances. We're gonna be back to Jerusalem for a big conversation in chapter 15 with all of the big important characters being on screen at once. And we're gonna be back to Jerusalem under less enjoyable terms toward the end of the book of Acts. But from here on out, Peter is not the main guy anymore. We're not gonna hear much more from him at all. From here on out, we're following Saul, who, well, in this very passage we're gonna look at today, becomes known as Paul. I've got an interesting theory in the back of my brain as to why this is where the shift maybe happens with that name. More on that in a minute. Through the first 12 chapters of Acts, the recurring plot cycle has been the season one, original disciples of Jesus, go and talk about Jesus with Jewish people, basically in or around Jerusalem. The Jewish religious leadership gets threatened and angry and responds with varying degrees of violence. And then the disciples respond with rejoicing that they are suffering for the name of Jesus. And tons of normal everyday people see what happens and they respond to the message of the disciples, the message of Jesus, and they sign up, and the church just keeps growing and growing. And the disciples go right back to doing what they were doing, no matter how much the religious leadership tells them not to. But with each recurring cycle through the first 12 chapters, it gets bloodier. It's more red each time. Now we get to chapter 13. Now we're going to get into a whole new cycle. This new plot cycle that we're going to follow is going to have Paul go into a whole bunch of cities from around the Roman Empire. And most of the places he visits are culturally, historically Greek, maybe with still vestiges of Persian influence from way back in the day. Greece and Persia were super, super, super intermingled back in the day. It's fun to imagine them as, you know, two superpowers fighting, like the Soviet Union and the United States of the mid-20th century, but it's not like that at all. It was much more ambiguous and the culture is much more mingled. So it is into that heritage, that cultural world, that Saul is going to take these trips. And everywhere he goes, he's going to start by going to find the Jewish people. He goes to the synagogue, so the place where the dispersed Jews from across the centuries, dating all the way back to the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom in the 8th century BC, and dating to Nebuchadnezzar's conquest of the southern kingdom of Judah in the early 6th century BC, and also dating to the dispersion of all the Jews that happened in the 500s and 400s and 300s under the Persians, and also dating to the massive dispersion that occurred when Hurricane Alexander the Great passed through the entire ancient world and shook everything up. Because of all of this change, you got a situation where the Jewish people have somehow maintained their identity. I mean, somehow, in my opinion, is God was persistent with them. He had plans to prosper them and not to harm them. He was still going to fulfill his promises to Moses and Abraham and David. So even though it was weird, he kept them together through all of these changing empires and passing of time. And I think another reason they stayed together and held up their identities, they had scriptures, scriptures that you and I read on this podcast. It just blows my mind that there is a people group this old whose cultures and traditions and scriptures are still intact. That is not normal for human history. But at the time of Acts chapter 13, in the middle of the first century AD, Saul is using roads built by Romans and the freedom of travel afforded him by merit of his dual citizenship. He was a Jew, but he was also a Roman citizen, full on citizenship, all rights and privileges. So he had massive freedom of movement and he had the ability to navigate the legal codes for his advantage or the advantage of the message of Jesus as well. And he was from Tarsus, which is from the intersection of old Persian culture and Eastern Greek culture and northern Jewish culture and Roman culture. I mean, it was just all there. So he could talk to anybody. He was really, really effective at this. And I keep saying there's a plot cycle here, and I keep not describing it. Here's the plot cycle. And he goes to a new town, he goes to a synagogue where dispersed Jews from centuries past had set up an outpost of Judaism to read the scriptures aloud, to teach young people the scriptures, and to debate the meaning of the scriptures and how best to live out their Jewish faith in whatever culture they were plopped in the middle of. Paul goes there and he reasons with them in the same way that Jesus reasoned through the scriptures and in the same way that Peter is imitated in the first 12 chapters of Acts. He goes and does that, and he tends to have pretty good luck. He persuades some people. In this story cycle, we'll also see that he irritates some people at pretty much every visit. And that represents the next plot beat in this repeated story through the rest of the book of Acts, which is that then Paul runs afoul of the wrong people in a given town where the gospel has experienced initial success. And they get mad and they try to undermine him through nonviolent or sometimes even through violent means. About half the time, it seems like Paul takes a beating or a flogging or a stoning or basically looks dead and gets dragged out of a city. And then, like the puppy who just keeps chewing on the metaphorical chord, he just goes to the next town. He's like, all right, well, let's go back to the synagogue here and we'll talk to the Jews, wash, rinse, repeat. And he believes that he should just keep doing this until God stops him. And that's basically the plot of the middle chunk of the book of Acts. A lot of times you'll hear people use the phrase Paul's missionary journeys. And we know that for sure there are three of those journeys that happened because they are recorded in the book of Acts. Now he's got another journey in the book of Acts at the end. It's not an ideal journey. That one is a journey as a prisoner to go and face maybe his execution. The end of the book is a little ambiguous about that. So we really get three round trip journeys of Paul and a journey as a prisoner at the end. Maybe there's one or two more tucked in there somewhere as well. Smart people debate that. I'm not sure. Maybe we'll talk about it when we get there. But you and I, my friends, at the beginning of Acts chapter 13, are at the beginning of the first missionary journey. And the first missionary journey, a lot of people think, is where we meet the Galatian Christians to whom the book of Galatians is going to be written a few years later. So it would be who us to look closely at what happened there to try to get a better sense of what's going on in the book of Galatians when we get to that in a little bit. At the beginning of this, I made all of these bold promises about how we're going to talk, about how Saul and the messengers of the gospel have these confrontations with other powers and authorities and even spiritual forces and how they keep winning, inarguably. And we are totally going to pay that off tomorrow. Because I ended up talking about how the whole structure of Acts works and how these missionary journeys are, and well, that's all the further we got. But that's the beauty of this format. We just get what we get and we have time. We can keep chipping away at it. It's kind of how the Bible, I think, is intended to be read anyway, slowly and repeatedly over the course of a lifetime to really internalize the stories. And maybe if I'm making a rapid fire summary video or something over on the YouTube channel where I'm trying to cover 50 chapters of a thing super, super, super fast, okay, that might have to be warp speed. But here, you know, it's kind of fun. Chip away at it as we chip away at it. So tomorrow we're gonna look at this showdown on the island of Cyprus between Paul and a sorcerer who was trying to ride the popularity of Jesus, but it turns out this sorcerer is a fraud, and then something I think pretty amazing happens that even has some extra biblical verification after that. And that's what we'll look at, manna. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.
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