Hey, my friends, it's Matt.

This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, and today we're looking at a passage that reminds us that some of the values of the deeply distant Old Testament times are a little bit foreign to us.

Things worked different.

We're going to look at a passage today that predates the Old Testament law.

We don't even have this stuff from Moses at the point that we're going to go back and look at here.

So it's really interesting when you get to things before Moses, because you kind of got to run the mental calculus of how did the characters know what to do? Sometimes God spelled it out for them. Other

times not than the super distant ancient near eastern world was well, very, very, very different

from us and frankly very different from even the Roman world of the New Testament.

I mean, we're talking real, real old here, where we're going to go and look at.

We're talking like 2,200-ish BC.

So a total of 30, what do we have?

22, 42, 42.

Are we, man, like 4,000 plus years before right now. How often do we even get to engage with

anything that's 4,000 years old as we go through life day to day? It's crazy. Here's what we're doing.

We're in Galatians chapter 4. Paul is making the argument that right standing with God is a result

of faith in Jesus plus nothing. He's well into developing this

argument. He's just finished making an emotional plea for the people in this church to

listen to him and believe that right standing with God is a result of faith in Jesus plus nothing.

And to round out all the points he's made so far, he's tapping into a story from the

deepest parts of the Old Testament about Abraham and his family. There were two women by which

Abraham had kids. And it was a very complicated story. And I think Paul is assuming here in Galatian chapter 4, as he uses this story as an example to drive home his point, he's assuming that the original audience knew the story, and so it makes sense that if we want to understand what's going on, we're going to have to follow suit.

So I'm going to turn this many pages.

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