All right, my friends, we got a weird episode today because I gotta cover some housekeeping stuff on the front end, and then we gotta keep moving ahead with this lightning summary of acts that we're doing, working our way up to the actual text of the book of Galatians, which is the book that this season is about. So, housekeeping thing number one, I wanted to say thank you to so many of you who I've heard from here over the last couple of weeks who've been kind enough to give me feedback as to how you think this new season on Galatians is going. Every time I pick a strategy for how we're gonna tackle a given season or a given book, you know, I'm always curious about is that working for people? Are you having fun with it? Because very rarely when you're doing Bible stuff, does it make sense to be like, well, now we're gonna talk about this book of the Bible. Verse number one, and away you go. Well, the Bible didn't happen in a vacuum. There's a lot of stuff that you want to cover to get all of us on the same page and really tee up that book of the Bible. And this time around, the obvious thing to do if you want to connect the dots between the end of the Old Testament and the book of Galatians, is we got to do a lightning summary of who Jesus is and what he said and what he did and the cross and the resurrection and the ascension and all of that stuff. And then we got to do a pretty decent look at what happened after that and how Christianity happened, how the Holy Spirit showed up, what happened basically in the book of Acts. And always deep down I have this little worry, this little phobia where I'm thinking to myself, ah man, if I do a whole bunch of history or extra biblical things, are people gonna get bored? And if I do too much Bible stuff that is from different parts of the Bible before we get into the part that is actually what the season is about, will people get impatient with that? And so you know, it's totally cool for you to be impatient with any part of it that you want to. You of course can like the parts that you like and not like the parts that you don't like, but the feedback has been so good and so encouraging. So thank you for having the same roughly list of curiosities that I do. I'm interested in acts for this setup. Apparently, most of you are too. There's a lot of indicators that tell me that you are as well. So awesome. We're gonna see this acts thing through as intro to Galatians. We're gonna keep chipping away at that a little bit later today. So that's housekeeping thing number one, housekeeping thing number two. I got feedback in person yesterday from two people who support this program, Garrett and Kerrigan. Thank you for getting lunch with me. That was rad. That doesn't always work when people are coming through Rapid City, South Dakota because I'm running around and being a dad and doing different things. But our schedules happen to overlap, and I just enjoyed the heck out of hanging out with you and processing the world and the internet and all of that kind of stuff. Thank you for making time with me. That was awesome. Thing number three, maybe some of you are like, hey, you know what I've been hearing during the course of this conversation is a jackhammer. And you know what? You are absolutely right, because my neighbor, who is awesome, is jackhammering out his driveway today. Then ditts very, very loud. I think he took a little break right now. Maybe it's going to subside for the rest of our conversation. But here's why I bring up the jackhammer. Reason number one, because there's a jackhammer, and you might as well just speak to the jackhammer in the room. Reason number two, because I know a lot of you are just jumping in with this new season and you're kind of catching up on the vibe and the feel and the inside jokes and the rhythm of this podcast, and this seems like a good opportunity for me to tell you just a little bit about it right here. I try to record this thing ideally every day in real time. Now, sometimes that doesn't work because I'm trying to put out an episode every single day. So I work ahead for Christmas or Thanksgiving, you know, any kind of holiday. Because even on those days, I don't want to give you some special edition, like, oh, it's Christmas special. Generally speaking, my goal is to just give you another episode on what we're working on every single day, especially because a lot of people are in the back catalog binging the thing. And, you know, if they're listening to it two years from now, it's not Christmas for them. So let's just keep it rolling, right? Time shiftable media. You can use it whenever you want. That's one of the cool things about it. So hopefully, what we're getting here is a real human in real time with the pressures of the moment and the day in the background, looking at a document that is timeless that is held out as having the God of all time and all creation behind it, which is what I happen to believe. So hopefully it's just a really interesting intersection of you going through your life like a normal person and me going through my life like a normal person, and also having this little thing built in where we touch something and interact with something and are informed by something that is absolutely timeless, that transcends even the notion of time and the distance between the finite, like you and me, and the infinite, the divine, God Himself. Which means sometimes there's just going to be jackhammering in the background. I guess that's my point. Final housekeeping note on the front end of this weird episode, which is also meant to help bring newer listeners up to speed. You might have caught a strange and different musical outro on yesterday's episode. And I want to give everybody who's new a heads up. It is always worth listening all the way to the end, and it's always worth paying attention to the musical outro because my friend Jeff Foote, who is a wildly talented man and the editor of this podcast, he is also the guy who does all the music. On the front end, the back end, it's all either completely original or he does homages or parodies of different songs from time to time. He's like a human version of AI, that sounds really weird, who I can just input ideas into. And then 20 minutes later, that really weird idea that shouldn't be able to exist musically does exist. And then without any further thought, we just throw it on the podcast for fun. So from time to time, I say something or reference something in the course of a podcast, and then I'm kind of giggling to myself, I'm like, well, there's sort of a musical opportunity there. I mean, that was a nod to something. There's a musical theme there. We should throw a musical Easter egg, a little surprise at the end that sort of references back to and pays off whatever that little thing was. Well, yesterday I was talking about the introduction in Acts chapter seven and acts chapter eight of the Apostle Paul. Back then he was called Saul. And I likened him to this space cowboy character from Star Wars lurking in the shadows of a space saloon. And I talked about my affinity for the space cowboy motif that exists in some sci-fi. And then I got done with the file and I uploaded it for Jeff to edit, put all the music on and everything. And I called him. I was like, hey, dude, I know you got Wednesday night church stuff and everything happening tonight, but when you get home, if you have time, would you take John Williams' Imperial March theme and mash it up with the Steve Miller band's The Joker, which of course has that famous line about some people call me a space cowboy. And Jeff, without hesitation, was like, yep. And then he just went and did that. So if you didn't catch the music last night, it's worth going and catching. It is also worth knowing that from time to time I do a big batch catch-up where I share all of those little musical nuggets. You can use them for a ringtone or whatever, with everybody who supports the program on any platform at any level. So thanks again to everybody who does that. So much front-end material. And you're probably thinking it would be easier just to wrap up now and have this be one of those special days where we don't get anything done. But no, I don't care if there's a jackhammer, I don't care if we had housekeeping stuff, we're getting stuff done. Particularly what we're getting done is the rest of Acts chapter eight. So you recall yesterday, Saul initiates this big persecution in Jerusalem, and without even knowing what he's doing, he accidentally makes what Jesus told his disciples they were going to do geographically happen. Christians understandably scatter when this Jerusalem persecution put on by Saul begins. The main disciples seem to have stayed put to endure the thing, but everybody else goes somewhere else. But a whole bunch of other Christians, they maybe go stay with friends or family out in the countryside in the Roman province of Judea or the larger region of Samaria. And unsurprisingly, when they go there, they tell more people about Jesus. And so inadvertently, Saul is kind of the guy who kicks the Christians out of the nest and forces them to learn how to go and fly. What a wild providential thing, because I think it would have been really easy for all of them to just stay in Jerusalem and accidentally conceive of their following of Jesus kind of in the same ethnically exclusive way that Judaism in the first century had evolved into as being, you know, a very local thing, a very standoffish thing, a very culturally separated thing from everybody else. You know, the stuff out there, it's not clean. We are trying to be clean and pure and set apart from God. Well, Saul wrecks all of that. And now all these Christians have this crisis in the early going that they can't just academically address and chit-chat about from the comfort of Jerusalem. They have to think through their ethic of what to do when they go outside of Jerusalem and start getting around more people who aren't Jewish with the message of Jesus. Now it's still going to be mostly Jewish in Judea, but Samaria, if you were around for the whole Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther stuff that we looked at over the last couple of seasons, you know that the Samaritans are kind of the halfway step. They're sort of Jewish, but they sort of took a fork in the road historically back during the era of the Assyrians in the 700s BC. And so the purest Jewish types, they have a great resentment for them. In fairness, the Samaritans aren't big fans of the purest Jewish types either, but the Samaritans would say, no, we're following the right and true tradition. It's you Jerusalem Jews who are getting it wrong. There's a whole reference to this tension in the book of John when Jesus meets the woman at the well. And so now the message is going out to more regional Jewish types under the pressure of Saul, but it's also going out to people who are kind of on the fringes of what could be considered historical Judaism. And so we can see the plot trajectory of the message of Jesus as well as the plot trajectory of the book of Acts moving forward. And the first thing that happens after this bad news about persecution from Saul is that Saul goes off-screen. We travel to Samaria and we discover people are receiving this message. Now, this is wild because a bunch of Jesus' most prominent disciples, last time they went through Samaria when Jesus was still physically around, they were mad that the Samaritans didn't like Jesus and they were like, Jesus, you should call down fire from heaven and just burn all their villages and their thatched roof cottages. And Jesus is like, no, we're not going to burn the Samaritans and their thatched roof cottages. Stop with all of that stuff. Well, now the message goes right back to the people that the impatient disciples wanted to rip up by the roots and burn down, and it sticks, and they become followers of Jesus. Then next in Acts chapter 8, those same disciples who were interested in burning the Samaritans with fire from heaven, they get word from Jerusalem that the Samaritans are responding to the message of the kingdom, and they go back to help strengthen them in their new fledgling faith. That is crazy the way that narrative has now come full circle. Peter and John go out to the Samaritans. Are they Jews? Are they not? Where are we in this story? And they place their hands on these new Samaritan believers, and there's miraculous evidence that the Holy Spirit shows up and miraculously confirms. Now these are real, actual Christians. They are in, it's not a matter of opinion or esoteric debate. There's the physical, demonstrable breaking of the laws of time and space that looks just like the early breaking of the laws of time and space by the Holy Spirit to say what is happening in Samaria is the same thing, the same act of God that was happening in Jerusalem amongst exclusively historic Jews. This is wild. Well, some other stuff happens up in Samaria. There's a guy who practices pagan magic named Simon, who likes the power of the Holy Spirit better than his pagan Greekish spells that he casts and he tries to buy, he tries to pay for the power of the Holy Spirit. That practice for all of time since has been called Simone or Simone. It's named after Simon the sorcerer. And Peter, who's there to confront the whole thing, is like, yeah, no, we're not going to do that. It's not for sale. Gross. And then the chapter ends with the message of Jesus going even further out beyond the boundaries of Judaism with an Ethiopian eunuch who was apparently interested in the things of Judaism. He's reading material from the Old Testament, and Philip, a follower of Jesus, encounters them on this road, led there by the Holy Spirit. And Philip comes up to him. He's like, What are you reading there? And he's like, I'm reading this stuff from the book of Isaiah, which happens to be stuff that is talking about Jesus. The eunuch is like, it's real hard to understand. So Philip's like, All right, well, let's take a look together. And as Jesus did, as Peter is done, as now so many are doing, Philip goes and he shows him how the Old Testament is pointing toward Jesus. And the eunuch, in so many words, is like, Great, I believe, I'm in. And then he says, Look, here's water. Why shouldn't I be baptized? And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him. And then after that it says, The Holy Spirit took Philip away. Is it like a miraculous teleportation? Or does that just mean he guided Philip somewhere else? I don't know. It's kind of hard to say for sure. But what I do know is uh chapter eight wraps up saying Philip appeared at Azotus. I don't know where that is off the top of my head, and traveled about preaching the gospel in all the towns until he reached Caesarea. So I guess context clue wise, that would mean that this Azotus place would be kind of on the coast, moving up toward Caesarea, which would be further up the coast from where the incident with this Ethiopian eunuch happened. I guess I'm kind of triangulating that. Whatever the case, what we're getting here is Saul trying to wreck something, but what Saul intended for evil, God intended for good. And now the message has gone out to regional country Jews. It's gone out to sort of half Jews, and now it's going all the way out to people from entirely different countries. Something crazy is occurring and it is unfolding very quickly. Acts chapter nine, manana. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.