Hello, my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, and we are at the very end of our nerd arc of this season where we picked a Bible conundrum and we're doing the work in real time to try to sort through what the best read on this Bible conundrum is. Paul turns this phrase. He says, so also when you were children, you were in slavery under the elements of the world.

Or another translation renders it the elementary principles of the world.

Yet another says the basic principles of the world.

And I want to know what the heck he means by that.

So we're digging into the Greek and the history around this word and Greek philosophy

and Plato and Aristotle and Socrates and I think it's super

fun.

Hopefully you're having fun too, but if you're not, today will be the end of it.

All right, let's pick up where we left off yesterday and we'll round this thing out.

Thank you. So here's what I think Paul is doing in Galatian chapter 4 after going and pulling on the thread with you in real time here over these last couple of conversations.

And so let me give you my little annotated reading of this passage and then we'll put this to bed and we'll move on to the next stuff in Galatians 4. In the end of Galatians 3, I think Paul

is saying, hey, we've been through a lot of hard stuff here theologically, but let me get toward

wrapping up my analogy. The law was great. God did a great job with it. It serves a wonderful purpose. Salvation and right standing before God is not one of

those purposes. It's a tough trustee, a tough teacher for when we were in the metaphorical

kid era of faith and relationship with God. But now through Christ, we've moved into the metaphorical

era, H-E-I-R, air, era. And now, here's my final thought on that. What I am saying,

Galatians 4-1, is that as long as the heir is a child, he's no different from a slave,

although he owns the whole estate. See, Paul says, that kind of finalizes my analogy.

Let me just finalize it a little further, though, Paul says. He's subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father.

But so also, and this is annotation, paraphrases mine, dare I say, in an even bigger perspective,

even beyond that as well, when we were children, we were in slavery under the elemental forces of the world,

the elements of the world, something even bigger than just what's inside the walls of the

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