You're listening to the 10 Minute Bible Number podcast. It's best unfree daily deep minute Bible. And right now we're talking about Galatians.
SPEAKER_00All right, I got a question for you. What makes a fairy tale different than other kinds of stories? My kids asked me this years ago, and I it was surprisingly difficult. I struggle with this one. But in the end, I came up with a bunch of things, but I'm just going to share one of them that stood out to me because it's relevant to our conversation here. I think that fairy tales generally the setting, it doesn't matter at all. It doesn't matter when it happened, it doesn't matter where it happened, because fairy tales tend to address basic elements of the human experience that transcend moments in time or certain cultural realities. And this plays out. I mean, the compendium of fairy tales was read to you when you were a kid, or that maybe you're reading to your kid right now or whatever. I mean, those are from all over the world. They're from all kinds of different times. And they just get stripped down to their parts and repackaged a little bit. It doesn't matter where the far-off kingdom was or who the old king was or what political dynastic succession problem happened to get that king on the throne. Who cares? There's a king. We understand kings. We understand power. And then there's this boy, and he's an enchanted boy. Then he seeks magic and there's a problem with hubris. He's too prideful, but he learns some things along the way. And it's a fairy tale. It just works. You can drop it in anywhere, and it works. A fairy tale written in Han era China can easily be translated into English and read to an eight-year-old kid in Conway, Arkansas. And that kid, though he couldn't point to China on a map, is going to have no trouble understanding. Well, from time to time on the internet, I'll run into people who don't share my same view of the world. They don't think there's a God, and they're kind of irritated that I do think there's a God. They don't like the Bible, and they're kind of irritated that I do like the Bible. Now, most people I run into, I disagree with, oh my goodness, they're great. I mean, whatever. You don't need to think my stuff to get along. Hopefully I don't need to think your stuff to get along. I mean, we have a ton in common, no problem. But sometimes, you know, people, they're in a certain place in life. They get their insecurities and the stuff they're working through. And every now and then someone finds it very threatening on the internet that someone doesn't think they're things. And sometimes when I run into people like that, the go-to insult that they'll fire off at me is like, oh, you believe in fairy tales. Okay, I think it would be more effective and accurate to say you think there's a God and I don't, because just demonstrably and definitionally, I don't think the Bible holds itself out as being a fairy tale. It's different. I mean, you'd almost be head to be like, you believe in an elaborate, all-out lie that is a very complex fabrication that took a work of genius over 1,500 years to cobble together to trick people for millennia after the fact and to get people to think it's true. I mean, to just call it a fairy tale and imagine that stupid people read it and they're like, oh, it's like Jack and the Beanstalk, but I choose to believe it's true. It just, it's not a good critique because it's not materially reflective of what is actually in the Bible. Here's what I mean. Remember what we were talking about earlier? Fairy tales, it doesn't really matter the setting, it doesn't matter where it is or any of that stuff? Well, with the Bible, it super matters when and where all of it happened. I mean, there are a few books that are more poetic in nature or just kind of speak in broad, sweeping prophetic terms, and it really could apply to any point in the history of the Iron Age or the Bronze Age. Maybe it doesn't totally matter what the circumstances are. Maybe the book of Job is dealing with really big themes about suffering and life and hubris and our relationship with God and imagining we could do it better if we were in his shoes. I think Job kind of intentionally tries to avoid being locked into a place and a time to sort of keep it really relatable and big picture. And I could even be reading that wrong. But with those exceptions noted, overwhelmingly, the Bible is highly dependent on setting. And it doesn't make a ton of sense when you divorce it from its setting. For those of you who were here for the previous season on Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, the Persian Age of the Bible, I mean, you just saw it with your own eyes or heard it with your own ears, however you want to put it. That doesn't work if it's not in Persia. It works because of the context, and the whole story only makes sense and is cohesive against the backdrop of Persian politics and Persian bureaucracy and everything else that was going on in that little window of history, in that little window of geography. Well, again, the same thing is true for pretty much every single book of the Bible, and I would argue the same thing is true for literally every single book of the New Testament. When it happened, who it is written to, what is going on when it is written, the occasion that prompted a given book of the New Testament to be written, all of it is really important. And what I found over the years is that if you take a book of the New Testament and you divorce it from its circumstances, it tends to have a bunch of really great one-liners or little individual thoughts in there, nuggets that you can kind of extract. But if you divorce any of these books from its original context of time or geography, it loses all of its cohesiveness. The connective tissue within the book is like, you know, it's just a filler. Why is this even here? I don't even care. But if you read it within the context of those things, oh my goodness, it's dynamic. Then it pops, then it makes sense. Then you start to have some sort of interpretive matrix to know what to do with some of the trickier passages, to kind of put yourself in the shoes of the people that that book was written to. And if you look at any of these books in the New Testament, in the context of this one thing I'm going to say next, then it all really clicks. What is the one thing? Okay. The New Testament is a response to Jesus of Nazareth. The New Testament is four books that give four overlapping accounts of the life of Jesus, communicated in a way so as to emphasize events and theological themes and teachings of Jesus that are going to make sense to a variety of different audiences because the Jesus thing, the new family of faith, the kingdom of God that he was initiating, it's for everybody. Even now, even for you, even for me. Then the rest of the New Testament is all people responding to that. It's all God carrying forward what he did with Jesus and carrying forward the stuff that Jesus said would happen and that he promised would happen. So the very next book, after Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the four books that give you an account of Jesus, is the book of Acts. We started talking about that yesterday. This is the one that answers the question, why is there a Christianity? A question that you and I might never think about because it's so baked into the reality in which we live. But wouldn't it be easier for there not to be a Christianity? It's actually kind of important that there's some sort of documentation as to where that thing came from, because it's a pretty big deal historically. It is the thing that the most people have ever believed as a belief system in the history of the known cosmos. It would be odd if there was no origin story for that. Well, the Old Testament is the deep origin story with all of the deep dive lore. The Gospels, those four books that describe Jesus' life, I mean, that's the really action-packed crux of the matter part of the explanation of where Christianity came from. And then Acts, which is a sequel to those four books, that gets us into the next generation of people who believe this. Well, how did Generation one of Jesus' followers tell Generation Two? How did anybody in Generation Two who never saw Jesus or met him or saw any of the miracles or anything, why would they believe in that stuff? What were the core tenets of belief in Jesus? What did Christians do? How could you tell somebody was a Christian as opposed to something else? Did they have outfits? Did they have a little saying? Did they have special art that they made? Did they have buildings that they labeled in special ways? What did their club or their organization look like? Did they have any disagreements in the early going about how things ought to be? This feels deeply personal, a pretty high stakes thing. Jesus isn't physically in the room anymore like he was before, and the disciples disagreed with each other when Jesus was in the room. Probably there should be some disagreement here. Are we going to get to hear about any of that? And the answer is yes to all of those things. All of the obvious questions that should need to be answered as to where Christianity came from or why is there a Christianity largely get tackled in the book of Acts. But then the rest of the New Testament, which is primarily letters written by Christian leaders to different pockets of fledgling Christianity scattered around the world, the rest of the New Testament is answering largely the same question: why is there a Christianity? And what is it in its truest form? What is it to follow Christ? What is it to be the church? And Galatians is part of that. So maybe some of you who are super eager to get into Galatians, I respect that by the way, are like, can we just get into Galatians? Can we do a little bit less of the backstory this season and just get right to the book? Well, I want to tell you why we're not, because it's not a fairy tale. And where it sits and who these people are and when it happened and what had happened right before and what precipitated the writing of this letter that is the book of Galatians, it's hyper important. And I fear that particularly with this book, the book of Galatians, if we don't put in the time to figure out how we got here and what the occasion of its writing was based on the rest of the Bible, I think it's the kind of book that we could accidentally read so badly if we were to read it like a fairy tale, that we would draw the exact opposite meaning of the intended meaning of the book from it. Also, it's possible I'm just trying to justify spending more time looking at more big chunks of the Bible because I really, really like this document and I enjoy the story so much. And any excuse that I can come up with to talk about it with you, I'm gonna take. So we have this giant pregnant question that we left off with yesterday, and now I've added a little bit more bonus question to it today. The giant pregnant question yesterday was Jesus has ascended to the right hand of the Father. He said, The Holy Spirit is coming. Just hang tight, and then you're gonna go and be my witness all over the world. You're gonna do all this stuff. But the disciples, you got 11 guys just standing there. Um, our leader just got executed and then ascended into heaven. This is kind of unprecedented. What do we do next, guys? And there's just a few paragraphs that go by at the end of Acts chapter one before we get the answer as to what we do next and how it's gonna happen. And the answer comes in the form of an inarguable miracle that happened in public in front of everybody. And this one miracle that answers the question of how is this all gonna work out sends shock waves through all of history, all the way to this day. You in this moment are writing on one of the shock waves of the miracle we're gonna talk about that happens in Acts chapter two next time around. If you are listening to this podcast and we are talking about Jesus of Nazareth and the Bible, whether you're a person who thinks there's a God or not, you are riding on the shockwave that is sent forward into history from what we're gonna look at next time around in Acts chapter two. So, two questions to unpack over the next few days. How is all of this gonna work out and why is there a Christianity? And all of that should help us de-fairy talify the book of Galatians when we get to the text of that book. Hey, did you hear my wife at the beginning of this one? It took a minute, she was busy and stuff, so I didn't have her over to record the intro until just today, but I always think she really dresses up the podcast. Her name is Camilla, if you haven't met her before. She's wonderful and delightful, and I like that she lends her voice to our conversation as well. So thank you, Camilla. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.