This is the fifth season of this podcast, and we are not far from starting the sixth season of this podcast.

I have decided what the next book of the Bible is going to be.

I will formally announce that soon.

But in the meantime, I'm just looking back today as I'm getting ready to turn on the microphone here and thinking about what we're going to talk about, I'm looking back at the other seasons we've done. We did Matthew. It's a story. It's right through the front door. If you can follow with a story and a plot and characters who have consistent motivations, then you can follow Matthew. Same is basically true with Ezra and

Esther and Nehemiah. It's just a lot older, and it's in a more foreign cultural context,

because all of that happened 500-ish years before Galatians, and we don't know a ton about ancient Persia, but even then,

the personalities are still there. We can still piece it together. Galatians, though, this

season, has been a different animal because this isn't a story. The plot isn't as obvious in

Galatians. It's a letter from the Apostle Paul to not even just one church, but a handful of churches in a region that at some point he helped establish. And we don't get the other side of the conversation. So as we're going through it, there's a whole bunch of stuff in Galatians where I think it's really easy for you and me to figure out what's going on and for you and me to feel what is going on just intuitively. As we read it, we come upon some of these things that Paul's saying. And we're like, oh, yeah, well, I say stuff like that when I'm really making an impassioned argument. And if somebody does this, I will often say things just like that.

I totally see what you're doing here, Paul.

But again, because we're only getting half of the conversation, there are other moments

where it's kind of tricky because we don't know what Paul is responding to, but what we do know is that his speedometer

throughout this entire letter is somewhere between 80 and 100 miles per hour. He is never

feathering it back to, you know, let's take a chapter and just do 25, like a school zone or something,

and catch our breath a little bit.

It is passion, passion, passion, argumentation, argumentation. And like we talked about yesterday,

I think we got to salute him for that because people were lying enough to get adult circumcised here.

And Paul knew that is a Rubicon. That is a blood ritual where if you cross that line,

you will then psychologically talk yourself into having been right, no matter how much

deep down you might eventually become persuaded you were wrong. Do you know what I mean by that?

I use the expression, blood has been shed, but

it's not always literally blood that's been shed. Like, if you can convince somebody to do something

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