Welcome to the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast.

Right now, we're going through the entire Bible to understand it is one big cohesive story.

We're covering one book each day, and this one is about Galatians.

Galatians is a letter written by the Apostle Paul to a whole bunch of churches that he started in modern day Turkey, Asia Minor.

And it's probably one of the earliest letters that was written in the entire New Testament, probably one of the earliest books of the New Testament.

And it is meant to tackle a very specific problem that had arisen.

Here's what happened.

Paul went out on one of these missionary journeys and he founded a whole bunch of churches in Asia Minor.

And stuff's going pretty well there.

I mean, they were hard-won churches.

Paul took some pretty serious abuse to get those things down.

He probably had the equivalent of a tattoo for each church that he founded there in the form of some sort of scar or lash or cut or injury that he took with him.

And after carefully establishing these churches and establishing leaders along come these super zealous Jewish Christians up from Jerusalem who heard a rumor that somebody somewhere wasn't acting Jewish enough and they weren't doing the whole Old Testament law.

And you can't be a follower of our God if you don't do the whole Old Testament law.

And so in their zeal, they go and track down somebody somewhere who still isn't doing the right thing.

And I think this probably had to have broken Paul's heart to an even extra degree because that's what he did.

That was his mistake.

He was super zealous for Jewish stuff in Jerusalem.

And then he heard rumors that there were people outside Jerusalem who were still saying things that were wrong about God.

And he was going to go get them and imprison them and punish them.

So these hyper-aggressive Old Testament-minded Jewish Christians don't understand the Jesus thing yet.

Paul is going to get them and resonate with them, but also he's losing patience with them as they go and do all kinds of damage and tear up the good things that are happening in this region of Galatia among these fledgling churches.

...