Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and I have many quirks, but one of my quirks is that I grieve something in my soul dies when I'm watching a movie or reading a book, and I just love the characters, and they do a big time skip. I hate time skips. It feels like you're just saying that that huge chunk of time that we just skipped over, like 10 years later, just didn't matter. It's like 10 years of this character's life just died, and I didn't even get to see it. It makes me super sad. And I think the reason it happened was because of this very impressionable moment that I had when I was a kid. My parents would read to me all the time. The first books they read to me were like Green Eggs and Ham and The Pokey Little Puppy, which was a golden book and had the golden spine, you know, square, one-by-one ratio about a puppy who was pokey, I guess. I think he found a caterpillar or something. I don't know. It held my attention back then. It was age appropriate. But I remember the first young adult novel that my parents ever read to me was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis from the Chronicles of Narnia series. And they read me the whole series. It was mostly Dad who read that one to me. And I remember everything about that. It was so magical. I remember the way that book smelled. I remember the sound that it would make when the glue perforated as Dad folded and turned the pages. I remember the art on the pages. I remember the length of Dad's beard when he was reading it to us. It wasn't the real short sandpaper length like he kept it sometimes. It wasn't the real long Brillo pad length. It was kind of the in-between. You know, he'd give us hugs and give us a kiss goodnight and stuff. I remember everything about it I remember. I remember falling in love with the characters. I remember grieving the sad things and reviling the bad guys. And I remember that between two of the books, there's this huge leap in time, and all the characters I knew weren't there. And now there's some new characters. I don't even know who they are. I don't even know where we are, when we are. Everything feels wrong and disorienting. And the book went on to be great. The whole series is great. But in that moment, I learned to hate big time jumps and stories with characters I care about. And so as a result, I've always been a little slow to come around when you do a prequel or you jump way forward in a sequel. And maybe you're the same way. If you are, today's the day, then I'm gonna try to start making that a little better for you as we jump into the book of Galatians. Because if you have hung with me over the last two seasons, and even if you haven't, that's okay. But if you've been with me over the last two seasons, we've been in the last chunk of the Old Testament, the Persian era of the Old Testament, the final narrative segment of all of that. And we're in this magical, mysterious, wonderful, otherworldly enchanted land of Persia with colorful characters and stories who we care about. And we rounded all of that stuff out, looking at the books of Ezra and Nehemiah and Esther. And then as we turn the page from literally last Friday was the end of the series on Nehemiah, to literally yesterday is the beginning of the season on Galatians. We're jumping ahead five hundred years. We're jumping ahead three empires, depending on how you count it. We're jumping forward to a new common tongue of the people. We're jumping forward to new sensibilities socially, we're jumping forward to new realities in terms of law and politics and the global economics. We're jumping forward into a new set of tensions within the mind of the people that the book is being written to and the characters on the page. So much has changed in this amount of time, and the whole story is set against a brand new backdrop in really just about every way imaginable. And it's kind of sad. 500 years is a long time. Think about what you were doing 500 years ago. That's right. Nothing. We're just gonna round up. We'll say that it's 2025 right now. So 1525. Dang. The Protestant Reformation was just getting started 500 years ago. Henry the Eighth was gonna be a big name 500 years ago. Nobody had heard of Queen Elizabeth I 500 years ago. She wasn't really a thing at that point. The King James Bible didn't exist 500 years ago. The United States of America wasn't even a twinkle in her mother country's eye 500 years ago. It's so long. Even the version of English that existed 500 years ago, you and I would labor to understand. This is a massive passage of time, and you don't have to grieve it, but dang it, I am going to grieve this time leap a little bit, and I'm going to do that now. Okay, moving on, because we can't be sad forever. What are we going to do about it? Well, we're going to figure out what happened in there, and we're going to get reset and reoriented for where we are now as we open the book of Galatians, which raises some questions like who are the Galatians? That's not in the Old Testament. Where do they live? Why are they having a letter written to them? And further, who is this guy whose name is the first word of this book, this letter here in Galatians 1.1 that goes like this Paul, an apostle, long hyphen, 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. All right. Well, I suppose based on that, we've got to talk about who this Paul guy is. We've got to talk about who Jesus Christ is and what his relationship is to God the Father. And it's kind of a big deal that apparently there's someone named Jesus Christ who has been raised from the dead. And that seems to have pretty serious implications because just based on these two verses we've read so far is that we're being dropped out of the sky into this letter. Apparently that prompted the creation of an institution or an organization called a church that didn't exist in the Old Testament and what we were looking at before. So that's a little disorienting. And apparently, these churches that have formulated around this Jesus Christ fellow because they believe God, quote, raised him from the dead, apparently these churches are somewhere called Galatia. Okay, well, let's take the remaining couple of minutes we have here to do a quick recap on what happened between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament. In the Old Testament, God, who is a creative and relational being, makes people in his image. But the people sin, and there's a distance between God and humankind. God decides that instead of washing his hands of the people or just making a new creation, he's going to redeem the one that's already there, even though it's pretty screwed up. Throughout the Old Testament, there's a whole bunch of different ways that people might dream up to try to fix the problem of bridging the gap in a relationship between finite, fallen, broken people with relatively short lifespans and relatively little self-control, and a perfect, flawless, infinite God. All of those different approaches to fixing that relationship ultimately fail on the human end. People can't keep up their end of the bargain, even though God has no problem keeping up his end of the bargain, because he's perfect, he's God, he gets everything right. The relationship between God and people plays out in a lot of different environments, but primarily through the Old Testament, we see it played out between God and his chosen people, the randomly selected descendants of Abraham, who at times get called the Hebrews, the Israelites, as we get toward the end of the Old Testament, they're called the Jews. I think that term is derived from one of the twelve tribes of Israel, specifically the tribe of Judah. Well, from very roughly 1000-ish BC to very precisely 586 BC, there is some sort of political kingdom of these descendants of Abraham who at times obey God, but usually struggle to do so. When they obey God, he blesses them. When they disobey God, he punishes them. Ultimately, the big bad Babylonians from out east, modern-day Iraq, come and they conquer Jerusalem and they destroy the temple where God lives among his people. And Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians take away all the Jewish people into captivity. No more temple, no more Jerusalem, no more sacrifices to God. It looks like everything is ruined about God's redemptive plan to fix everything. But about 70 years later, things change. The Persians defeat the Babylonians and their first king, a man named Cyrus. It's like, you know what? I'm going to let some of these conquered people go rebuild their religions and their homelands, and we're starting with the Jews. Here's some money and here's some stuff. Go back to Jerusalem and rebuild. And so they do under the leadership of a guy named Zerubbabel, and it's really hard and there's a lot of paperwork, but eventually they get it done. It's not as good a temple as the first temple they had, but still it's a temple. And so they resume sacrifices and things are going okay until about 40 years later, when a high-ranking official in the Persian court decides he's going to kill all the Jews. But he gets out foxed by a clever lady who's a secret Jew and queen in the court of King Xerxes. And in the end, the evil Haman who wants to kill the Jews ends up swinging on his own gallows or impaled on his own gallows. And the Jewish leadership is elevated and they enjoy a position of honor in the Persian Empire. One generation later, a new Persian king comes along in the mid-400s BC, a guy named Artaxerxes, and he's got a Jewish guy as his cupbearer and trusted friend. Well, it turns out that Jerusalem's in trouble because it doesn't have any walls, and it's a long way from the Persian capital. And when Nehemiah, the cupbearer, finds out that there's a problem, he's like, hey, I got to go rebuild the walls. And the king's like, cool, and also here's some money. Go get them. It's very difficult, but Nehemiah gets those walls rebuilt and does his very best with the help of his priest buddy Ezra to try to get the people rebuilt as well and to put things back together and to get everybody to finally obey the rules of God. Because when we obey, God blesses us, and when we disobey, God punishes us. Come on. And where the book leaves off, it's kind of ambiguous as to whether or not they're going to get that right or just go back to acting like they've been acting all the way through the entire Old Testament. And then that's the end of the Old Testament. Well, from extra-biblical sources, we know that Persia got defeated by the Greeks or the Macedonians, who were like Greeks, under the leadership of Alexander the Great, about a hundred years after the time of Nehemiah and Artaxerxes. Alexander the Great conquered the Persians in the 330s BC, then promptly died. Didn't leave an heir. That was disrespectful. So his generals carved up the kingdom. And at first the Ptolemids, who dominated Egypt, had control of the Jews in Jerusalem. Then eventually the Seleucids, who were more from Syria, had control of the Jews in Jerusalem. Eventually, they came to a head. The Seleucid Empire, they really wanted the Jews to be more Greek, and the Jews really wanted to still be Jewish. And so they fought. They had a big war. Ultimately, the Jews, under the leadership of the Maccabees family, won. And in the 160s BC, they established a new kingdom, the Hasmonean Jewish Dynasty. And for a hundred years, under pretty corrupt leadership, they managed to keep together their own kingdom the whole while a new empire, clear out west on the Italian peninsula in Rome was becoming very powerful. Eventually in the 60s BC, the Hasmonian dynasty in Jerusalem was such a mess that they asked Rome to come in and provide some military presence and help get things straightened out. Rome showed up, but they never left. Rome immediately turned the Hasmonian dynasty into a subject state, a province of the Roman Republic, which would soon become the Roman Empire. And it is into this fledgling Roman Empire and during the Roman occupation that Jesus of Nazareth is born. And that gets us through the connective tissue between the Old Testament and the New Testament, and gets us to a point where tomorrow we can figure out who this Jesus Christ, who God the Father raised from the dead, is and what his story is about, and why his legacy was so impactful that organizations have quickly sprung up, centered around the worship of this Jesus Christ in a matter of just a few decades after his life and death. For those of you who've been with me for a while in the Old Testament, it's been a minute, but tomorrow we're back to Jesus. Kind of fun. All right, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.