All right. You and I know, because we've been talking about it here and because readily available information, that Galatians is a book of the Bible in the New Testament, written, yeah, we'll talk more about it, but let's say give or take a little bit, around 50 A.D. And we know, again, because all of this information is readily available, that was written by the Apostle Paul, and that it was written to a bunch of people who lived in Asia Minor, modern day Turkey, who were having trouble with questions about exactly how being a Christian works. But we're in the middle of doing this exercise here over the course of a few days where we imagine that we don't know all that stuff. We imagine that we're picking up the book of Galatians completely cold. We're imagining that we've never read anything in the New Testament. We're imagining that we just finished the Old Testament and we still have all of the characters and the story tensions and themes still fresh in our mind from that. And then we just randomly turned a bunch of pages in the Bible, and boom, what did we get in my Bible, page 1801, Galatians chapter one. Now we're imagining that we just started reading and that the verse I'm going to read to you in just a minute is what we get. And we're coming at it this way because I think for some of you who've been around the Bible for a long time, the whole Galatians thing and a bunch of these Bible words and terms and names might just feel so familiar that it's second nature, and we might not think as hard about it. This way, we imagine ourselves to be outsiders and aliens to the whole thing. And we got to start from scratch together, just looking at the cues in the text to figure out, okay, what's important, what things we need to double-click on to try to understand better. Well, yesterday, after reading the first two verses of the book of Galatians, we figured out a lot of time has passed. And so we went back and double-clicked on what happened in history between the end of the Old Testament and the book of Galatians. Today, we're going to double-click on one name that really stands out to me in this same little opening line of the book of Galatians. Here it is Paul, an apostle sent not from men nor by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead and all the brothers with me to the churches in Galatia. I want to fixate on that Jesus Christ name, because in this text, Jesus is clearly the central character. It's not Paul, he seems subservient to Jesus, and it's not the brothers who make up this church in Galatia. They're clearly subservient to Jesus as well. Jesus is the big deal here, and we got a line in here that says he was raised from the dead, which is pretty unusual. So he seems like an interesting character to learn more about. Now, I'm not going to pretend like we haven't learned things about Jesus or like there isn't more information readily available. We're just going to unpack that today and double-click on that name and fill in the gap here in terms of who he is and what happened to get us to this point. Jesus of Nazareth was born around 4 BC. I know that's disappointing. It would be more fun if he were born in 1 AD or if there could have been a year zero, there isn't. But whenever the guy rendered or estimated about when Jesus was born, he probably didn't have the full stack of information in front of him. He got it pretty close. But the time of Jesus, it's not like the years we're counting down. We count down BC in anticipation of the birth of Jesus as the dividing line in history. But at the time Jesus was born, everybody was counting up because they were counting from the new reign of the new emperor of the new imperial form of Rome. Caesar Augustus was in charge, and everybody would have been counting the years into his reign that we were at the time. So Jesus is born during the reign of Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus. And according to the four stories that give us an account of Jesus' life in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, there was a census or a series of censuses that Caesar Augustus called to get a sense of what he had going on in his empire. And this, unbeknownst to Caesar Augustus, fulfilled Old Testament prophecy that moved a virgin who was pregnant with Jesus, Virgin Mary, and her betrothed husband, Joseph, to the foretold city of Bethlehem where the long-promised Messiah was said, was predicted to be born. And Jesus is born there under circumstances that fulfill a whole bunch of different kinds of prophecy from the Old Testament. This is all very interesting. Jesus is descended from the right people. He's got the right pedigree. Everything's happening in the right place. The attentive reader to the stories of Jesus in the New Testament would be like, whoa, wait a minute, dang, is it possible that Jesus is going to be the long-promised Messiah, the long-promised king of kings who's going to set everything straight from the Old Testament? Okay, this is interesting. I'll read on. And as you read on through the story of Jesus, what you discover is that he's remarkable from a very early age, that he demonstrates a competency with the scriptures that is unrivaled by anybody ever. And we also learn that he's got a famous cousin named John the Baptist. And John the Baptist leads a religious revival just ahead of Jesus around his 30th year of life, coming under the scene in a very public way. John the Baptist baptizes a bunch of people out in the desert, and he keeps pointing people to Jesus. He's saying, There's this one who is coming. And it seems like he's hinting very strongly that this one who comes is going to be the long-awaited Messiah, the one who is the centerpiece of God's redemptive plan that everybody's been waiting on. And so the attentive reader would get even more interested in all of this. Well, then Jesus shows up at one of John the Baptist's baptismal services, gets baptized, and the Holy Spirit and God the Father both show up and supernaturally confirm that Jesus is who people are thinking that he is. God himself says, This is my son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased. So understandably, that's going to move the needle for people. But immediately after this, Jesus goes out in the desert and he has a spiritual, physical showdown with Satan, and he prevails, depending on the word of God to overcome the temptations of the devil. After Jesus gets back out of the wilderness, he recruits a team of unlikely followers and begins to teach them. And one of the most important and voluminous teachings that he gives his disciples happens between Matthew 5 and Matthew 7. It's called the Sermon on the Mount. And here, Jesus goes up on a mountain, his followers go up with him, also a bunch of people who don't know what to make of him go up with him, and also some people who don't like him at all go up with him. And Jesus lays out the values of his kingdom, which are upside down. They're inverted from the values of the world. But the values of Jesus' kingdom sound way, way better than the values of the world. Stuff like blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, and blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy, and blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. And people are no doubt wondering you know, is this guy coming to get rid of the whole Old Testament and Judaism and everything that we had that was handed down from Abraham and Moses? And Jesus seems to anticipate that question. And he says, I didn't come to abolish the law and the prophets, I came to fulfill them, indicating that he himself is the completion of the whole story and all the overt prophecies and everything from the Old Testament. He's going to fit lock and key in all of that to be the centerpiece of God's redemptive plan for all of humanity. And he goes on to teach about the law, a whole bunch more. His teaching pushes his listeners to go beyond cold, rigid obedience to the point of loving God and obeying God at the level of the heart and of the motives. And he gets to the end of this amazing speech. And he says, effectively, you know, the fool builds their house on the sand, but the wise person builds their house on the rock. And therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like that wise man who built his house on the rock. And then everybody who are connoisseurs of teaching and how teaching goes, they're all just blown away by what Jesus said because he taught with authority, not like their teachers of the law. Jesus comes down the mountain and is immediately met by a series of situations that demonstrate his unbelievable power over nature and distance and time and disease and even death, but that also demonstrate his power over religious notions of clean and unclean and divisions between different classes of people based on that. He's demonstrating both obedience to the law, but also authority over the law, even authorship of the law. He doesn't say it immediately, but it's intoned with this massive authority with which he speaks and acts. And anytime people get fussy about who he is and what he's doing, he points them to scripture and also confirms the reality of what he's saying by breaking the laws of time and space in front of everybody and freely forgiving and living out the values of that kingdom that he was talking about. And his disciples start to catch on. And the more they catch on, the more they're intrigued. They don't immediately get it right. But you know, they're trying. They're still thinking about the kingdom kingdom in world kingdom terms. But the more Jesus does this stuff and the more Jesus teaches and breaks the laws of time and space doing miracles, the more his enemies start to catch on to what's going on as well. And we discover that his enemies are the intellectual and spiritual descendants of some of the people coming out of the back end of the Old Testament. And this becomes the central tension, the central character plot tension of the whole story of Jesus' life. It's Jesus advocating for the values of his remarkable upside-down kingdom that is full of life, that is promised by God, that is affirmed by the miraculous work of God. It's Jesus teaching about that and the religious leaders of the day resisting that teaching and digging in. They feel threatened and insecure. And maybe if we're to give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe we could say that the most charitable take we could give on what they were going for is that they were really trying to get everyone to relentlessly not just obey God, but obey even bonus rules that God never gave in the hopes that God would bless the nation and get rid of the Roman oppressors and restore them to having a kingdom once again. And maybe these religious leaders really believed that by rigorous adherence to the law of God and also the bonus laws that they had made up over the centuries, maybe they really believed that that was how things would get better. That the soul of the nation and the souls of the individuals would be healed. But that isn't how it was playing out. What the religious leaders, the enemies of Jesus, were doing was producing gross things. So there's the beginning of the Jesus story, there's the summary of what he was teaching. I suppose the most direct summary of it is repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. That's something he kept saying again, again. So there's the first part of the Jesus story, there's the quick version of what he was teaching, and there's the setting of the stage for the tension that we're gonna carry with us into the second half of the story of Jesus next time around. And all of that is gonna roll over really tightly into the tension of the book of Galatians. We're filling in these gaps pretty quick, and I'm having fun. More Jesus tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.