Hello, my name is Matt Whitman.

This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast.

This is Season 5, Episode 250-something.

That's a lot.

And we are nearing the end of this season on the Book of Galatians on this podcast.

We just pick a book of the Bible and we go right through it.

It takes as long as it dang well takes because it's a real-time podcast with an actual person who would like to understand the Bible. And so sometimes I get real hung up on certain parts and we're just there for a long time. And other times I see something in a book of the Bible and I think to myself that's interesting. and it questions, and it makes me think about other parts of the Bible.

And I'm going to go chase that down, and I'm going to take all my friends with me.

And so if you're here for the first time, you pretty much get the podcast now. That's it. Except there's a guy named Jeff, and he edits it, and he plays fun music at the beginning and the end. and sometimes the way he edits and plays music is kind of like him ribbing me or even making jokes at my expense.

And I totally accept because all Jeff does is make it better. There now, you're totally up to speed.

We're at the end of the book of Galatians. This has been a letter that was written out of a circumstance of pressure.

There's this brand new little church in the middle of modern day Turkey in Asia Minor. they called it back then, and the church was going pretty well. Paul apparently had a hand in founding this church or this little network of churches. But then some of Paul's old buddies from back when the apostle Paul was a part of the really legalistic Jewish crowd, those guys came up and they did kind of a weird hybrid of Christianity and Judaism

after Paul had left Galatia.

And they screwed up the church and people quickly reverted to their baser instincts and

started fighting and metaphorically backbiting and metaphorically devouring each other. And the church turned all mean

like in one of those sci-fi shows or thrillers where some sort of mind contagion gets introduced

into an otherwise peaceable space. Then everybody just goes back to savagery. And so it just

things went crazy. Paul finds out about it and he writes this letter,

Galatians, to get things straightened out. For the first two-thirds of the book, he addresses

the theological question of how do you have right standing with God? And he makes the case that

there's only one way. It's faith in Christ. God did the work. That's it. There's no other way to have

right standing with God. There's too big a gap between people and God. What we have as humans is a

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