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Foreign. It's the end of an era. I'm in the process of moving my last device off of Verizon and to one of those discount carriers. I'm not mad at Verizon or anything. They're great. They're fine. I don't know. I don't really have any strong opinions, but these discount carriers are getting crazy. You pay, like, 25 bucks, and you get everything you were getting from Verizon, and It's like, literally 25 bucks. How did I not know this was a thing sooner? So I'm doing that. This episode is not brought to you by anyone or anything. This is what's on my mind. This is what I'm doing right now. It's a daily podcast. You get whatever's on my mind at the time, but. But it's a big deal for me. It's the end of an age because I have been on the same contract with Verizon since the dawn of time, since the advent of smartphones. When I was a kid, there was a company called Altel. It was in Nebraska. Maybe it was everywhere. I don't know. I was a kid, I went in, and I was like, I've heard about these phones. You don't have to plug into anything. I want one of those. Give me one of the phones. And they're like, all right, well, it's your lucky day, because we're running a special. It's a contract. It's the best contract we've ever offered, and it lasts forever, for a lifetime. We have to honor it forever. So you should definitely get this thing. I was like, all right, I'd choose that one. Then I got it signed some stuff. They gave me a phone, and it worked. I made phone calls. It was fine. Everything was fine. Well, a little bit after that, along comes this new, bigger company called Verizon, and it ate Altel. Apparently, it also ate all of their contracts. So I find out I'm with Verizon now, apparently. So I go in there to the Verizon store. I'm like, hi, my name is Matt Whitman. I think I work with you now. They were like, yeah, let's just pull up your account and see what the deal is. Ooh. And the kid pushes up their glasses like, well, Mr. Whitman, I see that you are on this one super special old Altel contract that all of us Verizon employees here are aware of. And it's, like, the best thing ever. And you should stay on this forever, because we can't take it away because we're obligated to it because there's a contract. And I was like, sweet. And I snapped my suspenders with both thumbs, and I went on with my life. And every time I've gone into Verizon since, somebody's like, well, hello, how can we help you? And they're very friendly. They're very nice over there at Verizon. They're like, I'm Matt Whitman. And they're like, okey doke. See what that's about? Ooh, what is this? And they always try to get me to go off the contract. Clearly there's something on their screen that's like, make this contract go away. It's horrible for business. It's going to ruin cell phones. You got to make it go away. But I'm no sucker, and I haven't fallen for it. I'm always like, no, I'm staying on the old Altel plan. And it's been that way for a really long time. Maybe I've been off of it for a little bit now. I don't remember exactly. Whatever the case, it's a moot point because times have changed. Discount carriers, they made my Altel plan kind of obsolete. Finally, I gave the thing up. But the point of all of it is that apparently when you sign a contract between two parties that lasts for as long as the contract says. If it's forever, then I guess it lasts forever, much to the chagrin of Verizon. Likewise, there's a contract, There's a covenant in the Old Testament. It happens really close to the beginning. The Old Testament starts with the primeval age, which is super old. Very strange, but also very true. It sets up the whole story. The Tower of Babel, the flood, all of that kind of stuff. But you come out of that, and then you get into just the super, super old age, not the primeval age. And you meet Abram, who later goes by Abraham. And right there, God makes a deal with Abraham Abram and that deal to make him a great nation, have a ton of descendants, to have a land to be blessed and to be a blessing to all the nations. Apparently that contract is like the Altel one. It doesn't expire. There's no. There is no end date on it. What does Abraham have to do to receive all of those blessings? Kind of nothing. Just believe that it was real and that that conversation happened and that there is a covenant, I guess. I mean, I don't know. How much does he even have to do that? Did he ever waver? I mean, it seems like God is doing all of the heavy lift on this covenant is the point. So how did Abraham find right standing with God? How did Abraham, to use a metaphor we've been using around here, get on the right side of the surge protector? Well, faith, he believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness, full stop. That's it. But there's an important thing about that covenant that God made with Abraham way back in the day, and that is that that covenant wasn't just for him. It was expansive. It was for his descendants. It was for things that were going to happen in the future. And indeed, it apparently applied to a whole bunch of people. I mean, it must have, because people had right standing with God between Abraham and however many years, 400, 430 years later when the whole Moses thing happened. So how did they have that right standing? There was no law to obey. I mean, even if they wanted to be law obeyers, like the people Paul is criticizing in the book of Galatians, they couldn't. There wasn't one of those, where would they go to get the law? They didn't have one. So all the patriarchs, if they had right standing with God, it was because they believed the terms of the covenant that God had made with their forefather Abraham. Or more importantly, I should say, they believed in the God who was behind those promises. They believed him just like Abraham did. That's how they were justified by faith. And Paul in the book of Galatians, in the New Testament, a couple thousand years after the time of Abraham, is saying that you and me, if we believe God, we are men and women of faith, just like Abraham, and we are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. So somehow the terms of this metaphorical Altair contract that Abraham got way, way back in the day just keep extending forward all the way to according to Paul in the book of Galatians, me sweet. This is an awesome deal. And now Paul here in the book of Galatians is going to work through this reality using a practical example from everyday life. So maybe you're getting to this in Galatians chapter three, and you're like, dang, these last few weeks have been intense. Galatians 3 in general, really everything since the stuff about Peter and Paul having a confrontation in Antioch, everything since then has been hard. This has been the most difficult sledding, like trudging forward through theological Bible molasses. This is the hardest stuff we've ever done in any season ever. Maybe you're like that. Cool. Well, Paul's a Pretty empathetic guy. And he can maybe feel that pacing issue as well. So he's going to take things down a notch. He's going to flip around the chair and straddle it and flip his hat around backwards and be like, hey, guys, let's get real for a minute. And this is how he does it. To throttle back and make a little more sense of things. For a normal, everyday person like you and me reading this Galatians 3:15 Brothers let me take an example from everyday life. Just as no one can set aside or add to a human covenant that has been duly established, so it is in this case. Ah, the Altel thing. Yeah. We've all made contracts with people. We've done business. We've had deals that expire. We've had deals that don't have any end date on them. Okay, I get it. So you make a deal and the deal is still in effect. And while that's the case, you can't really add or subtract anything to it. It's binding. Okay, yeah, I get it, Paul, keep going. All right, verse 16. Well, the promises of this covenant, this deal, were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. The scripture doesn't say and to seeds meaning many people, but and to seed meaning one person. Now maybe at this point you're like, well, who's that? It'd be nice if you'd tell me. And there's kind of a dramatic pause from Paul here, and then he's going to tell you, who is Christ? Oh, okay. This might seem totally semantic, and if it's a contract that doesn't affect you, it is the kind of thing where you're going to be like, oh, it's gobbledygook. I don't know. I don't want to go through the finer details in the language of some contract that has nothing to do with me. But if a contract had something to do with you, like my beloved Altel contract, then you're going to pore over those details and you're going to make sure you're reading it exactly right. Paul is inviting us to pinch zoom in on the fine print of the deal between God and Abraham to notice a very important thing. Because apparently the common thought, the conventional wisdom among the people who are wrong in the book of Galatians and the people who were wrong during the life and ministry of Jesus was that the promises of Abraham were just for his literal ethnic descendants. And that is where the transferability of that metaphorical altar contract were going to go. But Paul is Saying no, you're not looking close enough. You're not reading the terms of the deal God made with Abraham. Close enough. The deal says that the promise was to you Abraham, and to your seed. And that clause right there, Paul says, is not a reference to every descendant of Abraham who would ever live. It's a reference to something singular to one individual who is Christ. And at this point I think a right response is to say, okay, I'm listening. Continue verse 17. Paul goes on. What I mean is this. The law introduced 430 years later. So this is 430 years by Paul's reckoning. After a certain point in Abraham's life, the law is then revealed to Moses. That's a big chunk of time, 430 year gap here with no law in place as we think of it. Well, that's a gigantic deal. What were you doing 430 years ago? Let me say 430 years ago, it's almost exactly like 1600. I was doing nothing. I was still dead. Everyone I know was still dead at that point. Very dead. Everybody they know was still dead. Everybody they knew was still dead. It's a super long time ago. There wasn't an America like you think of it at that point. The political concerns in the world were not what you think. One of the biggest worries on planet Earth were the Ottoman Turks constantly harrying the people of Eastern and central Europe. It's a very, very different time. Right? Well now think about that much time and that's how far Paul is reckoning. We go from Abra to Moses and there's no law already here. The light bulb should be starting to flip to the on position for anybody listening to what Paul is saying before he even does his likewise and rounds out the point. The point is what happened to all those people between Abraham and Moses. If salvation and right standing with God and being on the right side of this urge protector can only be achieved through absolute rigorous adherence to the law. They didn't even have one. Well, that's a really big problem and a really big weakness of the law. But what Paul is clearly indicating is that hope in Christ is vastly superior because that's born out of faith. And why was Abraham considered righteous? Well, because he believed God. He was the man of faith. The faith thing ultimately is going to center around Jesus of Nazareth. But the rays, the arcs into history coming out of the timeline are going to spread in both directions as far as the eye can see. The principle that faith and believing God is how we have right standing with God is a forever principle. But the idea that you are saved through the rigorous adherence to the law and that that was a thing that God gave to ultimately save the souls of people, the mistaken idea according to Paul that that is the case, that doesn't shoot forward and backwards into history. That means that every single person who happened between Abraham and Moses, if they had right standing with God, if they were on the right side of the protector, it was by the grace of God and it was by faith. It was the same way that Abraham got it. It was by believing God that they were declared righteous in God's sight. Now, it's really easy to do the math on this because of what Paul's already written in Galatians and we're cheating. We've read a lot of the rest of the Bible. Maybe you did 800 episodes on the book of Matthew with me. But even if you're just reading Galatians 3 alone, by the time you get to this point, what I mean is the law introduced 430 years later. Even just getting there, we can see the likewise coming from a mile away. Paul is setting up a masterful point using a practical example. We've all made contracts and I think it's going to really hit home as we round out this point tomorrow. This is going to clarify so much of this really tough sledding we've had going theologically here. But the point is that Altel contract was still in good standing for forever because I signed some deal with them in the early days of cell phones and if they wanted to still have a company, they were going to have to hon it forever and ever and ever and ever. No matter how much the world changed, no matter how many circumstances turned over. Just like what you and I have looked at for the last week and a half or whatever it was. You go through the whole up and down topsy turvy story of the Bible and the Old Testament and the New Testament. All kinds of things are happening. Doesn't matter. The plan is the same, right? Standing with God is by faith. God always intended to uniquely bless the descendants of Abraham, but God always had the nations in view as well. These things are baked into the covenant to the deal to the character of God. And they are, even if you can believe this, more unbreakable and unchangeable than a mid-2000s cell phone contract with now defunct all tell. Think about that. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour podcast. Let's do this. Sa.