Hey, everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast. And the first tedious joke that I can remember from childhood was people saying things like, if you love it so much, why don't you marry it? You understand the structure of this joke, right? Fortunately, it's mostly died out. But you say something pizza awesome i love pizza if you love it so much

why marry it oh i walked right into that i can't believe i fell for that but it's not uh funny

and it never ever was but i think i understand the structure of the ineffective joke and it was just real real simply like if you're really into a thing,

then why don't you go the whole way? And that's what we're getting here in Galatians.

Paul is kind of hitting them with a more inspired version of the same structure of the joke.

Hey, agitators who are trying to get

Gentile adult Christian men to be circumcised to make them loyal to your understanding of the law

and the Jewish traditions and bring them back into a state of spiritual slavery. Hey, Gentile agitators

here in the book of Galatians. If you like circumcisions so much, why don't you marry it?

Why don't you go the whole way and emasculate yourselves?

I mean, that's literally the verse we're looking at.

It's Galatians 512.

I think it gets treated a little bit like a throwaway verse.

Sometimes people preach sermons and write books about this because it's an embarrassing topic.

I don't think it's a throwaway verse. I think it's the killing stroke of this entire line of

argumentation from Paul. But he just says, as for those agitators, I wish they would go the

whole way and emasculate themselves. So yesterday and today we're working through as many of the

layers of meaning that we can come up with here that are baked into this one very clever turn of a phrase, this very clever dare or challenged from the Apostle Paul.

And yesterday, we were talking about, okay, you know, pretty clearly this is just, it's a jab, but it's an inspired jab.

Why is it inspired? Because Paul is using absurdity to point out the absurdity of their position. They're saying that circumcision somehow pleases God and bind you to the law and earns his favor. And so Paul implicitly is raising the question, well, how much circumcision?

Why wouldn't you do more then? Do you have anything left to give? Well, then why wouldn't you

give it? If some is good, wouldn't more be better? But also, I think they were saying a minute ago,

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