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The Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast
GAL270 - Real Christianity vs. Fake Christianity and The Real Message vs. Fake Messages
00:13:21
Galatians 6:11 Thanks to everyone who supports TMBH at You're the reason we can all do this together! Music by
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Foreign. Hey, my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast and we are down to the very end of season five of this program. Season five has been on the Book of Galatians. And I know that every single day, my little data thing that I get, I get a report on what the heck is going on with this podcast, and it tells me a little bit about who's listening and who's not. And one of the things that I learn is that every single day on this podcast, there are new people here. And also, I know that some days are more natural in terms of you being able to jump in and understand what's going on. If this is your first day, thank you for being here. That's awesome. Also, clearly, we're right at the end of this whole big season and, well, I mean, there's a lot here, there's a lot of water under the bridge as we've been working through the New Testament Book of Galatians. So I was going to give everybody a heads up here. We are only a few days away from starting our next season, which is season six, which is on the Book of Philemon. There's a whole bunch of stuff in there that we're going to have to cover about a church that is kind of in the circle of these Galatian churches, the church at Colossae. It's also kind of in the orbit of the church in Ephesus. But also we got to talk about what slavery was like in the Roman world and compared to what slavery was like in the American South. I mean, there's just so many interesting things we got to unpack to make that one go. So you're probably thinking, Philemon, that's a really short book. That's only going to take us a minute. No, it's going to take a while. We're going to work on it. It'll be a little chunk of time. We're going to dive deep into the history and all of the fun stuff with it, and we're going to try flip that from being a book that everybody kind of is like, yeah, I know it's in there. And it's important, I guess, to a book that you have in your hip pocket. So my point in all of this, I know that some of you are here for the very first time, and this is going to be one of the few times where I'm really going to allow myself to do a lot of inside baseball here. I'm going to assume that everybody's kind of up to speed. On this season on Galatians, and we're going to try to land the plane along with Paul, trying to look big picture at what has happened in this book. So if you are new and this feels a little overwhelming, I don't think it's usually as overwhelming as this time around. Hang with us and then jump in next time around with Philemon. Okay, here we go. This is where we're at. Paul, at the very end of the book of Galatians, grabs the pen from his scribe who's been writing this stuff down. He's like, I got some things I want to say right here at the end. As best as we can tell, he never gives the pen back once he takes it. And as best as we can tell, it looks like he's just drilling home the big points he's made throughout the letter. And I think this is clever on Paul's part, because this is a weird letter. It's a great letter. It's in the Bible. I'm obviously for it. That's why we did almost 300 episodes talking about it together. It's a great letter, but it's a letter written from a position of weakness. Paul isn't there. Bad guys are there. They've clearly won the ear of this network of fledgling Galatian churches. And so Paul is trying to fire off this letter really quick from a long ways away. He's trying to anticipate everything that the bad guys are going to do. He's trying to anticipate all of the weaknesses and frailties of the people who he founded these churches with. And he has to do it all from, once again, this position where he doesn't get to answer anything without a huge time delay. So it changes the way he writes. And as a result, to just go back and look at it, you might be like, man, half of this letter is about his authority and the resume and timeline questions. Then we get into the deep water, the theology questions. Then it gets pretty practical. Those are big movements in a very short letter. So I would understand why Paul, who seems to be really good at language and writing and communicating and all of this, I understand why Paul would get to the end, and he's like, I got to make sure everybody gets what this letter is actually about. Just give me the pen. I want to put my name and my authority behind this, and I want to make sure everybody knows I own these words. If you take nothing else from this letter, get these things. Well, that seems like a really good cue for you and I to take, to be like, hey, we should make sure that we get whatever the points are that he's drilling here down the road. In the last few days, I've sort of done this fun emotional breakdown of what I think is the emotional and rational undercurrent of what he's saying here. That's been really fun. But now we're going to go a little bit more surgical and just point by point with what he's saying. Okay. See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand. So the first thing that he wants us to know is that Paul indeed did write this, and he's physically writing this part of the letter. We've talked about why that matters. The second thing that I think is implicit There in verse 11, though, is that it matters that Paul wrote this, because Paul has unique authority and certain Christians have unique authority. Now, I know that there are a whole bunch of you who are listening to this who do not go to any kind of church at all. You're not even sure what to make of Christianity and the Bible and God. But you find this stuff really interesting, or you have great empathy for people in your lives who are into it, or you're just intellectually curious about the stuff that has shaped society. You're here gaming this out with me. That is awesome, by the way. Thank you for being here. And so you don't really have a dog in the fight. You don't really have a strong opinion about how church ought to be or what kind of authority even a modern church you might go to might wield. But I know there are others of you who are part of the Protestant side of the family tree. And you go to a church that doesn't do a lot with any kind of claims of church authority. Our authority is the Bible, you might say, and from the authority of God's Word and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we pick pastors and elders and they give us good direction, all subject to the Bible. And that's really about as far as our church authority structure goes. Maybe there's a denomination, hey, that's a great way to do church, but cool. I know that's where a lot of you are coming from. I think there's a lot about that that makes sense. There are others of you who are from the Protestant side of the family tree, and you've got a little more of a hierarchy with your thing. Maybe you even have a Protestant version of a claim, a provenance that you can demonstrate of all the leaders of the church going all the way back to Paul and the apostles and Jesus himself. And you would say, hey, we're not Catholic. We're not Orthodox. But no, we have a direct chain of succession. It goes back like this. And our institution is very strong, and it's much bigger than just the local church. And that's how we do things, and that's how we govern things. And it might make us move a little slow, it might be a little unwieldy, but this is how we do things. Cool. That's a good way to do church. That's a good way to structure things. Great. Glad you're here. Further, there are some of you here who are Catholic. Like the expression of Catholicism attached to Rome. And even the way I said that might rub you a little bit the wrong way, because you're like, why would you even clarify the one attached to Rome? I mean, it's the one true church. I know that this is what you believe, that you are the original church, the institution, the paperwork, that's you. You're the original church. Your headquarters ended up being in Rome. And obviously your claim to authority in terms of how the Church works is we hearken back to the leaders of the Church who came in the past. Then our leaders now speak with the same authority as the leaders going all the way back to Jesus. Some of you listening to this are Orthodox. That is, you're a part of Eastern Christian traditions. Maybe not like Far east, but Eastern Mediterranean Old World traditions. Some of you have converted to that very recently. Some of you, ethnically, that's just who you are and where you fit into the scheme of things. You would have a similar view of church authority to your Catholic brothers and sisters. You would just say, when there was a little fork in the road, historically, the Catholics picked the wrong fork. The true authority flows through the Church of the East. And of course, I know there are more of you who are outliers here. Why am I talking about all of this stuff? Because every expression of Christianity has an appeal to authority. And of course, everyone's appeal to authority is going to include God and the Bible. After that, there's some differences of opinion about how to weight what different people thought at different times or what institutions chose at different times. But very few Christian traditions would look at the history of the Church and say none of that mattered for anything. That is just like Jesus happened, and then maybe Paul kind of counts, and then nothing. And then whoever founded my church with the paperwork, that's my thing. Christianity got real again right there. I know there are a few fringe groups that really do think that way. But usually when someone accuses another Christian of thinking that way about the history of Christianity or the church, it's a bad faith jab at that other tradition. Everybody knows that God has worked through Christians through the centuries by changing people's lives through the Gospel that we're reading about in Galatians. Everybody knows that God has used institutions as well as individuals. Everybody knows that what the Bible is clearly teaching is there is this new family of faith that is in Christ and God is in it. So you'd want to pay attention to it. That's a really big deal. The finer points of exactly how that authority works or how it is to be weighted, you know, different Christians are going to see that a little bit differently. But here's my point in all of this for today. Galatians 6, 11. The first thing that Paul is emphasizing of the handful of points that he's making in his closing arguments here in Galatians, one of the first things he's saying is there is authoritative Christian teaching and authoritative Christian leadership, and there is not authoritative Christian leadership that is born out of nothing, and that deviates from Jesus. What Jesus taught the Gospel that was handed down faithfully through all of the different generations of Christian faith. And clearly what Paul is intoning is there is a difference between the two. You can know the difference between the two, and you need to know the difference between the two, or you're going to get confused and you're going to be awash like these poor Galatians are right now. Now, there are other parts of the New Testament that give us more about how to test everything and hold on to the good and get rid of the bad and know the difference between false teachers and true teachers. In fact, a vast majority of the second half of the New Testament deals with that theme really pretty heavily. So it's not like you're on your own with this. I mean, the Bible is there. The early Christian leaders knew that there were fake Christian leaders right around them, and they showed you how to tell the difference between the two. But my point here is that in his closing argument, Paul is saying there is such a thing as Christian authority. There is such a thing as true teachers who are teaching the true message and who should be listened to. With all of their teachings being tested against the words of Christ, all of their teachings being tested against the Scriptures. Paul spends the first, almost third of the book of Galatians clarifying this authority, that he has it, that he is a part of the actual group of actual leaders descended intellectually and spiritually from Jesus, that he is saying the message of Jesus, that he is a real true apostle, not somebody who's just making stuff up that subtly deviates from the real thing. There is such a thing as the true church. I believe it exists in many different institutional expressions today. But Paul is saying, there is a true church and there are imposter churches. There are true teachers and there are imposter teachers. And in this circumstance, Paul is saying, I'm a true teacher. Everybody who counts has vouched for me. Everybody who knew Jesus has vouched for me. I'm saying Jesus stuff. I'm saying the same stuff as the actual apostles. You should listen and take it seriously. And you guys should have the talent and discernment and ability to look at this other stuff and say, that isn't it. That isn't descended from what Jesus taught. This is not approved of by the disciples, the original apostles. This is deviant both in terms of the people delivering the message and wherever they came from. But also the substance of the message deviates from the real stuff. You Galatians should be able to tell the difference on both counts. Tomorrow we will continue breaking down all of Paul's final points. It seems good to let him take the lead on all of this stuff. I'm having fun. More tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again.