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. So we'll go ahead and get started when we get started here.

In just a moment, we're going to be picking up at the beginning of St. Paul's Epistle

to the Galatians Chapter 5 is where we'll be picking up.

And as we start chapter five,

we're going to be starting sort of the end game of the epistle.

If you remember from the last three epistles of St. Paul that we spoke about,

you should probably be prepared for the fact that even though it's not translated

that way in English, chapter 5 verse 1 begins with therefore. So as we've talked about in the

past, St. Paul, that's a typical way of his structuring his epistles where he'll give teaching and then

there'll be a therefore where he takes what he's taught and sort of now applies it and is now

going to give direction so without going into super detail about it again st. Paul has been responding to the fact that after he left the churches of Galatia, because remember Galatia is a province, not a single city, after he left those churches, after establishing those churches, other teachers have come in, and these teachers have been trying to persuade the

former pagans, now Christians who are members of these communities, that they need to

become Jewish, they need to join the Jewish ethnic ethnic, right, by

participation in

all of the rules of the Torah that set Israel

apart from the other nations.

And so St. Paul has given an extended argument

that that's not what the Torah is for.

That's never been what it was for.

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