Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast

The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the

Reformed Church, but now an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church

in Lafayette, Louisiana. Okay, so we'll go ahead and get started.

And when we get started here and just a minute,

we'll be picking up at the beginning of St. Paul's Epistle of the Galatians

Chapter 3.

So by way of catch up to where we are right now St. Paul is writing this letter

to not just a church because Galatia isn't a city it's a province so he's writing this to a group

of Christian communities and separate cities in that region of Asia Minor, what's now Turkey.

And he's writing in chapter two, and really when we pick up here in chapter three, we're picking up right where we left off in chapter two.

So St. Paul has been talking about the fact that since he left, after planting these churches and preaching there, others have come in teaching what St. Paul has described as another gospel.

And we saw in chapter two, he got into a little more detail about exactly what they were

teaching, that these were teachers who were teaching the Galatians who had been pagans,

that part of them coming to Christ and coming into the church was them essentially becoming Judeans in the sense of adopting the

way of life described in the Torah. And so St. Paul was arguing in Chapter 2 that the way of life in Christ

is superior to the way of life described in Torah, that he and St. Peter

and all of the other apostles, even though they were Judeans, right? They were Jewish. They had

spent their lives following the Torah had now embraced

christ and moved on to this way of life in Christ because they knew from the Torah and from their

experience with the Torah and their knowledge of Torah that the Torah wasn't sort of an end in itself.

And St. Paul has argued that by saying that these pagans need to come under the Torah,

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