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The Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast
GAL127 - Can You Truly Be a Nuggets Fan if You Don't Know Who Raef LaFrentz Is?
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I root for the Denver Nuggets. They're a professional basketball team from Colorado. That's where I grew up. I can't help but like them because they were the team and that's the team. That's where you're from. That's who you fall in love with and that's who you like. And they've been bad for a long time, but I don't care. Root for my team, no matter what. And so while the major markets, we're getting to watch people like LeBron James and Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O' Neal over here in our little dusty old cow town, we're watching Bryant Stith and Aaron Aflalo and Rafa Friends. And you probably don't know any of those names, which is my point. Well, maybe you know who Rala Friends is if you're from Kansas. But the point is, I've rooted for players that you haven't heard of. Those are great guys, by the way. No knock on them. They're really good basketball players. But I've rooted for players you haven't heard of because I root for a small market team. And then you get kind of a chip on your shoulder and like, well, we're kind of the minority around here. It's us against the world. The major markets get all the great players. And there's this lore that is built up around being a fan of the Denver Nuggets. Well, then in the mid-2000s, the Nuggets drafted a kid named Carmelo Anthony in the same draft that LeBron James and Dwyane Wade came out in. And he was great and likable. Then he put the Nuggets back on the map, and we all got excited because we were like, sweet. We have a superstar, and you have to have one of those to have any chance of winning a championship. And he's not going to a major market. He's our guy. Until he left for New York, then crushed everyone and made everyone mad at him. Is that fair? It's probably not fair. Like, he's just a dude, you know, he's a basketball player. He wanted to play for a different team. It's fine. You're allowed to do that. But Nuggets fans were crushed because it played right into the narrative. So much suffering. Well, now the Nuggets are good. They drafted another guy. His name's Nikola Jokic. He's maybe like an all time great. He's a Serbian Orthodox Christian who doesn't do social media, doesn't care about the glitz and glam he just likes horses and to be with family and spend time with brothers and play with daughter and also basketball. Making basket fun, but passing more fun. Because basket make one person happy, but assists make two people happy. That's not how Serbians sound. I butchered that. I don't know how. I don't know how to do a Serbian accent, but you get the idea. He's great. He's fun. So because he's charismatic and likable and really good at basketball and different than what you normally get in a basketball superstar. People like the Nuggets and there's all these new fans now, and that's awesome. But there is this weird little impulse even inside of me to be like, I don't like that. Because you haven't suffered. You don't know what it's like to have gone through what I've gone through as a Nuggets fan. You haven't earned it. You just saw that it was good and that you were allowed to become a fan. So you just took it and became a fan and that's it. You don't know any of the lore. You haven't endured anything. You haven't given anything up for this. What the heck. But the reality is, it's stupid psychologically. I should just be happy that other people want to be Nuggets fans. And I think I do that pretty well. So if you get a group of Nuggets fans in a room, you can really easily tell who the wide eyed, happy, optimistic Nuggets fans are who just signed up for this and they're like, this is great, this is a blast. And who the old long suffering Nuggets fans are who've been through so very much. Likewise, we got that same kind of conversation going on here in the book of Galatians. And today we're just going big picture on this to kind of reset it a little bit. You got two groups. Group number one are just bright eyed and bushy tailed. They just found out about a new thing and they signed up for it and now they know God. And it's amazing. How did we not know this was here? These are the Gentiles, the Galatians. But then you got another group of people who know all the lore and they've been long suffering and they've been through so much and they've given up so much. And they feel the generational burden, burden of all that has happened, good, bad and otherwise, going back for a thousand years, more than a thousand years, and now all of a sudden here in the church in Galatia that Paul is writing the book of Galatians to, they're all in the same room together. And that same human phenomenon that still rears its ugly head in modern basketball fandom was rearing its ugly head back here. The Galatians are totally outsiders to the whole redemptive story story of God. All of the legacy and lore, Old Testament Jewish stuff. They didn't know much of any of that at all. They couldn't tell you probably off the top of their head what years the horrible calamities happened and when Nebuchadnezzar came and what happened to the temple, then who crushed who and when there was a civil war. They don't know. It's just not their thing. They're from a totally different ethnic background with a totally different story. Galatians, it has Gaul in the name. That's probably where of this region came from. Gaul is France, bro. That's like a whole continent away. These people in Galatia were probably the descendants of ancient French barbarian refugees or colonizers who had been there for a few centuries now. And their story is way more Central European and Celtic with a little bit of Greek mixed in there and a little bit of Roman stuff. They're not going to have the Jewish thing on the radar at all. All yet. They just heard this message about Jesus. Oh, he's Jewish. And they heard the message that he's the son of God, God in the flesh, the Messiah, the Christ, and that he's for everybody. And they're like, I believe your story. I'm in. I sign up and then the Holy Spirit shows up and miraculously confirms that and indwells them. And they're like, this is amazing. Like a brand new Nuggets fan during the Yokich era. This is awesome. Why would everyone not be on this team? This is the best thing ever. There's life and there's hope and there's joy. This is great. But then there's the other group in the conversation here in Galatians, then these are people who have given up a lot and feel a tremendous burden and they've been long suffering fans. That is a big time stretch of the metaphor, but please just bear with me on that. They do know all the stories about everything that's happened. They do know all of the calamities. They do know the day, month and year that those calamities occurred. And they feel the institutional, the ethnic, the religious, the historical, the political burden of every ounce of that thousand year old, 1500 year old 2000 plus year old story at this point. Now, understandably, they would look at this new thing where outsiders are suddenly just in and it's just by faith and that's it. And they would have this human impulse to be like, well, you. You don't get it. You don't fully appreciate what you have. You don't know any of the lore, the legacy. You don't understand that Carmelo Anthony betrayed us. You don't even understand what narrative his actions betrayed. Something feels wrong. And so look, the people who are trying to rain on the Galatians parade in the book of Galatians, they are the bad guys. They are in the wrong. They are being corrected also. I mean, you can kind of muster empathy for how they would get there intellectually and emotionally. And I don't have to stretch that hard because I can think of momentary flashes of resentment I have over something much less consequential than all of this. That being a stupid, silly basketball team. Who even cares, right? So there's real deep human drama and tension behind this little letter to the Galatian church that we get here in the middle of the New Testament. And it's tense from the word go. Paul comes out swinging. I'm astonished that you're so quickly deserting. The one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But guys, the guys is mine. Even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preach to you, let him be eternally condemned as we've already said, so now I say again, if anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned. Paul comes out swinging and he's making it clear that, look, even if there's empathy to be had for new Nuggets fans, old Nuggets fans not necessarily seeing everything the way. And old Nuggets fans may be feeling some resentment for New Nuggets fans having it so easy. Even if you can understand the psychological phenomenon, it still just isn't going to work. That's unacceptable. That's a rejection of the message of God. That's a different thing than the message of God. And Paul is here to firmly correct it. So again, he lays out his case in chapter one. You guys, the ethnic outsiders and the ethnic insiders included, you guys were following Christ. You were getting it right. Then I'm told somebody came in here and said you weren't getting it right because you didn't have all the lore and you weren't doing all the things. And those people are wrong and you need to ignore them. Now, I also understand Paul goes on to say in chapter two that they preemptively criticized me and tried to undermine me, Paul, so that you wouldn't listen when I inevitably would come back and try to straighten this out. So let me just go resume real quick. And Paul takes a big chunk of chapter two to say, here's exactly my timeline. Here's what I did. Here's where you got this message. Here's where I got this message. All the things they've said about me are slanderous. The message I got is from God. All the other disciples agree on that. And these agitators who came to mess with you guys, they are out of line. Then, after Paul lays out the thesis of the letter, which is to say, you are saved by faith in Christ, not by trying to pretend to be old school Nuggets fans, not by trying to adopt all of the weight of that ethnic burden and all of the lore and legacy and history and all of that stuff. That doesn't make you right with God. You're not made right with God by adhering to the Old Testament law. You're right with God by belief in Christ. Faith in Christ. After Paul lays that out through the first two chapters, then we get into chapter three, where you and I have been hanging out for a very long time trying to wade through what isn't actually that complicated an argument. But remember, at this point, Paul is talking to a room full of people who are brand new to this new Nuggets fans. I like Jokic. He passes ball, ball goes in basket. Nuggets win. This is fun. And old Nuggets fans, I remember when Chris Jackson changed his name to Mahmoud Abdul Rauf and wouldn't sing along with the national anthem. It was a scandal. If you don't know what I'm talking about there, that's actually good because it illustrates my point. That was a reference to some old Denver Nuggets lore thing that only insiders would know. No, what Paul is spelling out explicitly is that he showed up and he preached to the Galatians, Christ crucified. Then he goes on in chapter three to pay that off and he's like, you know he was crucified, Right? Okay, well then what does the Old Testament say about that? That there's a curse to that kind of death. But because of who Jesus is, he isn't just Dying, a curse to death, he is becoming a curse for us. He is defeating sin and making forgiveness and right standing with God possible. So there's the Christ crucified thing that he's laying out there, and then there's the Abraham was right with God by faith thing that Paul lays out there in Galatians chapter three. And he uses the example from Everyday Life of a contract to make that more clear that the initial deal God made with Abraham was one where right standing with God could only have been achieved by faith, by the work of God himself. So now, by the middle of chapter three, everybody knows what the letter is about. Everybody understands the social, religious situation that is unfolding here in these Galatian churches. And everyone understands the heart of Paul's argument that salvation, right standing with God, being on the right side of the search protector, is only by the work of God, only by faith, only by believing what you heard and believing God, just like Abraham did all those years ago. And the law then is a different thing. It serves a different function. It's there for a different reason. Right? Standing with God and salvation is not the point of the law. So now we're here. We're all nice and reset. We're all together. That takes us up through Galatians 3:18. And it takes us to a question that I bet every single one of you, if you've been with me from the beginning of this season, have been asking. What then was the purpose of the law? Why have one at all? That is the logical question. That is what we're supposed to be asking. Let me read you the next verse from Galatians chapter three before we wrap it up for today. What then was the purpose of the law? Huh. Looks like we're right on the same page with Paul, so that's pretty exciting. He's taking us to the next logical question. We're all set up and ready for it. Why is there a law then? Why did God do that? What are you and I reading this today? Most of us are new Nuggets fans, metaphorically here. What are we supposed to make of the fact that there is a law? Well, tomorrow we're going to tear into that next chunk, that next big movement in the book of Galatians, picking it up where we left off tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again. Sam.