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The Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast
GAL128 - Well Great, I Guess We're Going to Have to Post a Sign
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Foreign was a tough deal. We're not going to sort through exactly what happened there, what to make of it in this conversation. We haven't really had a national reckoning even about that yet. Maybe we never will. We're certainly not going to do it here. But it's a fresh example of a really big thing, a very revealing thing that we all just went through together. So I can't help myself but to bring it up from time to time because I think it's useful for understanding certain parts of the Bible. Before COVID there were rules at some stores that I would go to, especially, like, mom and pop shops. They'd have old handwritten notes, had yellowing tape around the edges from 30 years ago that were like, starting July 17, 1990, 1994, we will no longer be accepting checks. Why is that still up there? You don't need it anymore. We get it. You're fine. If somebody starts to write a check, just be like, we don't do that. Or just write a new sign. Maybe, I don't know, you get that kind of stuff. But there weren't generally a lot of signs about how you treat people like, please be nice to our employees. That is more of a post Covid thing. And I remember it happening, and people went kind of feral. It was weird. It was hoarding and yelling and blaming and finger pointing. And understandably, people were scared and upset and people got terribly sick. People died. It was a huge deal. I get it. It was a lot of pressure on a lot of us at once, and ugly things are going to come out. Well, one of the ugly things that came out was people who worked at stores started getting treated real crappy. And I think it happened a lot. And so signs started to crop up. Signs that didn't used to be necessary started to appear. At first handwritten, then formally printed on a placard or in stores. And they'd say something like, if you verbally abuse our customers, you'll be asked to leave, or something like that. It's very hard to staff at all right now. Please be kind to the people who showed up. That is kind of the language of one that I often see printed and displayed at different businesses. Well, here's the thing. We all knew before COVID that it was bad to be verbally abusive and cruel to people at a store. Right. I think we knew that. I think we were clear on it. But then people started doing it a lot. It became fashionable and normative and started to really hurt businesses and started to cause the fabric of the social contract society to fray a little bit. And all of a sudden, what didn't used to need a sign, now because of recent bad behavior, did need a sign. There was always the promise of we can do business together. If the sign says open, then, you know, the lights are on or whatever. You can come in if you're a human. We can do business together. Come on in. Of course we want to do business. Everybody wants to make money. Everybody wants to do this. I want to earn money. You want to buy. The thing that I'm selling is good for everybody. That promise is just implicit with having a business that is open. But eventually a law had to be added to that promise, because this transgression, this ugly thing that started happening, abuse of employees was becoming an epidemic. Likewise, in Galatians, chapter three. We are running into a very important question for Galatians, for the New Testament, for the whole Bible, for you and me as we read it. And the question is, what then was the purpose of the law? That's Paul. It's a rhetorical question. He's asking this to make the reader consider the question. And here's the first part of his answer. Moving forward. In Galatians 3:19, the law was added because of transgressions until the seed to whom the promise referred had come. We're going to cut that in half. We'll deal with the second half of that phrase tomorrow. It was added because of transgressions. Okay, so the law was added. Added to what? Well, all you got to do is just scroll back a couple sentences here. And this is exactly what Paul has been talking about, that the first thing that happened was the promise business is open relationship with God is possible. Come on in. You see what I'm doing with the metaphor here? And that initial flipping of the sign to open was done between God and Abraham. God made a covenant with him. So even the nation's outsiders are going to be blessed through you on this thing. And Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. Boom. The Old Testament says it. Paul just reiterated it in Galatians chapter three, that those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. Somebody was right with God on the right side of the surge protector in the time of Abraham and his descendants. It was because of the grace of God, and it was because of faith. That's it. Then, 430 years later, the law was added. It's very important that Paul is using this language here. The law didn't replace the promise that God made to Abraham, rather, the law given to Moses was an addition to that. The promise seemed like it was really good to Abraham. Why do we need a law? Why Was it added 430 years later? Well, according to Paul, because of transgressions. Well, what does that mean? What transgressions? Well, it's pretty easy with the whole example of the store sign. Before, maybe we just assumed everybody knew not to be horrible and mean and cruel and verbally abusive and threatening to store employees. But then I guess enough people forgot that. Now we need to actually put that in print and have a sign and make it a policy. You look at that time between the giving of the promise to Abraham and the giving of the law 430 years later to Moses, and you would think that you could just assume that everybody would know to only worship God, especially the people who were there with Moses at Mount Sinai when the law was being given. You can picture the scene. These are people who just witnessed the plagues of Egypt. They just witnessed, not witness. They lived through. They crossed this body of water that God miraculously parted for them to escape their Egyptian pursuers. And then when they got to the other side and the Egyptian army is there trying to chase after them, the walls of water close in, and Pharaoh's army is all drowned. I mean, the Hebrew people, the Israelites, the former slaves who were now free on the other side of the water, they just saw these mirac. Now they go to Mount Sinai, and what do they see up on the mountain? The physical manifestation of the presence of God. When they see Moses, they can see the radiance of the holiness of God, like, vestigially still on his face, radiating so much that eventually they have to put a veil on Moses to be like, there's just too much holiness of God still bouncing off of you because you were in his presence. We can't even look at you. So they know God's there. You would just assume, right? Well, people are inherently intelligent and people are inherently decent. Surely no one in their right mind could see all of those miracles happen in rapid succession. And indeed, an ongoing miracle is visually happening on the mountain that Moses is on right now. Surely nobody would look at that and think to themselves, you know what we should do? Melt down some golden fashion, a golden calf in the style of Egyptian paganism, and we should just worship it real quick. Huh? What? What are you doing? Well, okay. I mean, that's the kind of incident where as a store owner, you're like, well, surely no customer would ever do that thing. I don't need to sign for it. Well, then they do it. And you're like, dang, I guess maybe now I need a sign. Well, surely we're not going to have a glut of customers who come in and just do this horrible thing. And then they do, and you're like, oh, I guess we can't just treat that as assumed knowledge anymore if we want to continue to function with the inherent promise of having a business whose doors are open, where you can come on in and do business together, we can have a relationship. If you want to continue to do that, I guess you're going to have to spell out some of these laws. You might not even think you should probably have to. But people's transgressions and behavior, sometimes they make it so that you do, and up go the signs, or in this case, up goes the law. So maybe the most obvious transgression that Paul would have in view would be just exactly that. The sin, including the idolatry that happens immediately after the crossing of the Red Sea and out in the desert wilderness as God is there dwelling among the people, and they're still not even obeying him. Okay, so God's like, all right, we're going to put up some signs here. And frankly, based on your behavior, it's going to be a lot of signs. Buckle up, here we go. Well, one of those is don't worship any other gods before me. You get the rest of the Ten Commandments as well. But then you also get a whole bunch of laws about, about just how to live and function as a society. And so clearly one function of the law is to just make order out of chaos so things don't spiral into complete insanity and moral madness. And apparently you can tell it's going to without God laying down this law. But also another reason is clearly to demonstrate the character of God so that people will look at that and be like, oh, he's way up there and I'm way down here. I am more aware than ever of my sinfulness and my shortcomings before this holy, righteous, perfect God. So the law then also would point out the transgressions in a positive way that would push people, nudge people, thrust people even into the arms of a loving God, so they would depend on him through faith, through the promise with Abraham, and have life in God, be on the right side of the surge protector, have right standing with God. But at the simplest level, I think what is going on here, and you will notice that I said think a little bit in italics, this is a hard passage. I think what is going on here is that Paul is saying that the law is not a replacement to the promise, or even really an augmentation to the promise. The promise is still the promise. Rather, the law is added because of human frailty, because of human shortcoming before God. And the law is going to serve a very useful purpose for providing order, but also for pointing people toward the mercy of God, toward the promise with Abraham over the long haul, eventually to be fulfilled in Christ. But we'll unpack that more tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again.