Galatians 3:28

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still woe. On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing Galatians 3.28. This is a passage that has come up many times in past episodes. It's uh an episode that we've discussed for a while doing separately as its own thing. It's a passage that comes up all the time in the church today. In church life, you frequently hear past Pastors and others pointing to Galatians 3:28 is a very important passage for one thing or another. The problem is that virtually every time this verse comes up today, it is for evil purposes. So today we are going to be exegeting very closely the entirety of this verse. It's 26 words in most English translations.

1:26 It's 23 words in Greek. They basically mean the same thing. I'll give you a transliteration in a minute of the Greek and the English. There's one error that's common in almost all the translations today that goes back to the King James that we will be discussing at some length. But it's not an error that used to matter because it didn't change what the verse meant until these new attacks occurred. We've talked a lot in past episodes about how the new modern global religion has new doctrines, it has new tenets of the new faith. And one of them is the inversion of Galatians 3.28. So today we're going to be continuing half a dozen past episodes where we've just brought this up in the episode on amongst the ashes we talked about the fact

2:14 that black lives matter on their original website part of their manifesto basically went line by line through or word by word through Galatians 328 and inverted it, which is pretty weird when you're talking about something that was ostensibly a group that was supposed to be anti-racist and just make sure the black people didn't get beaten up by cops. That was sort of how it was sold. And that sounded pretty good to some people. So why would they attack Galatians 3.28? So we talked about that in that episode. We're going to rehash a bit of that today because it's really important. And In three of the human race episodes, one on foundational matters, on scripture and soteriology, and on racism, in different contexts, we

2:56 discussed how this passage is used to falsely bind consciences and things that are not found in scripture. On the episode on women, scripture and ontology, the same thing, saying that sexes don't exist because of Jesus. Somehow that makes sense. If you paid attention two weeks ago to the Gnosticism episode, will sound very much like the Gnostic heresy. Because that's exactly what's going on. I want to reiterate as we said in that episode: when we call something Gnostic, this is not the generic internet. I don't like it, so I'm gonna call it the G word. There are a lot of people online that have just latched onto that and say, well, it's Gnostic. We're not doing that. I'm conscious of the fact that it's become a meme.

3:37 And it's unfortunate because there is actually a portion of the first and second century Gnostic heresy that's come roaring back today. And so when we deal with this passage today, it's in light of the things we said two weeks ago. Remember Gnosticism, one of its core tenets was denial of the flesh, saying that the flesh is it's not real or it's wicked, it's not really us. We're spiritual, that is the higher realm, and all this fleshly stuff is evil, it's wrong, it's not us, it's incidental, it's accidental. That's a heresy. That is an anti-Christian heresy. It's an anti creation heresy, which makes it an anti-creator heresy. So in the episode we dealt with the fact that these things are going on in the church today.

4:24 And then in last week's episode we established the same thing that Paul is establishing as he's writing this letter to the Galatians, which is that you people are falling away. I've taught you the truth, and now you're believing lies. Where'd these lies come from? And so we'll explain how the fact that Paul would have these concerns, that God would have these concerns in Galatia should give us pause today. We're no better than them. Paul didn't plant our churches. Paul, through the Holy Spirit, has given us hard doctrine. He's given us the words that we hold to, but he certainly was going to do a better job planting his church than any of our churches. I think that's fair to say. Now, insofar as a human is going and doing something, that's true

5:08 because he was an apostle of Christ. Insofar as God's word is taught, there's always the possibility for any church to be completely faithful to God's word insofar as it believes what scripture says. But that's the problem. Do you believe what God has told you, or do you believe lies you're bringing in from elsewhere? Same problem that they had in Galatia is a problem we have today. So we talked about in last week's episode that this is this is the modern fight. It's a fight against not only ancient heresies, but against the unbelief that's inherently in all of our hearts. And last episode that we've previously referenced significantly Galatians three twenty eight was in Hebrews, Israelites, and Jews, where we talked about the Talmudic

5:49 prayer and how one of their prayers is directly condemned by Galatians 3.28, that what the Jews pray to this day is an inversion of what God says here and why that's significant. Just to give some historical context, Paul and Barnabas's first missionary journey in about AD 47 and 48 went into Glacia. If you don't know, Glacia is an Asia Minor, it's north of Jerusalem by quite a bit, north of Judea. It's in modern day Turkey, kind of centered probably around the modern city of Ankara. The problem with us hearing that today is you think, oh, Paul went to the Turks and you know what a Turk looks like. You know they're something about their language and you know, a little bit about their culture.

6:35 You know, they're Muslim now, that they're you know, brown and swarthy and like that's what they are. Okay. Well, you don't know if you don't pay any attention to the historical context is that that's not what they were then. The people to whom Paul took his first missionary journey in Galatia were Celts. Celts, the same people, the are really only extant today in Ireland, and a bits and few other places. But basically when you think Irish you think Celt, that's who lived here. Galatia in modern day Turkey was Celtic, it was not Arab, it was not Shemite, it was Japhethite, and incidentally the same is true of much, if not all of the Mediterranean. For example, King Tut, couple thousand years before, his DNA was Irish,

7:26 it's Celtic. He had red hair and blue eyes, and he wasn't the only one. The pharaohs, in many cases, they had japathetic DNA. Now they're also, I believe, shemitic in ancestry, but there's inbreeding, this happens. So the problem is that today, when we think, oh, I know what an Egyptian looks like, I know what a Greek looks like, I know what a Turk looks like. It doesn't apply. Two thousand years ago many of those people looked different. And it's particularly true of where Paul was taking his missionary journeys. When he went to these people, they were Celts. They had light eyes, light skin, light hair, they were European. Now, this only matters because of the very first couplet in Galatians

8:12 three twenty eight. I'm gonna read the whole thing from the ESV. It's similar in most of the other translations, and I'm also going to give the transliteration from Greek so you can see that they're the same thing. In English, it says, There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And then the transliteration from the twenty-three words in Greek, neither there is Jew nor Greek, neither there is slave nor free, neither there is male and female, for you one are in Christ Jesus. We'll get into some of the details there because there's one word that's mistranslated from the Greek in the majority of the modern English

8:59 in other translations in other languages, going back to the King James. So it's not just a modern issue. There's just a sloppiness. And the sloppiness didn't used to matter. It didn't really significantly change the text. But the modern attacks do make that change matter. So we'll talk about that in a bit. I give that text now because the first thing it says is there is neither Jew nor Greek. Well when Paul is speaking to the Galatians, there were almost no Jews there. They were and they weren't Greek either, they were Celts. They were speaking Greek. They were part of the empire of the West. It was first the Greeks and then the Romans. You know, that their empires were huge. So they were conquering and ruling these lands.

9:42 When Paul says Jew nor Greek, he's drawing a distinction that matters. And today we're told it matters because of race. It meant something completely different at the time. Because when you look at the dispute in Galatians, the actual problem that Paul was trying to solve by writing this to them was Judaizers. The Judaizing heresy had emerged in the church that he had just planted within just a couple years. We talked about that three weeks ago. There were those who came along from the so-called circumcision party who said, You guys, okay, you're Christian now, that's great. You all have to be circumcised, you have to live as Jews, you have to follow the Mosaic Law. And Paul's writing to the Galatians, because he's not only horrified, but

10:30 he's pissed, he is angry. And I think the fourth chapter, he actually says in effect, I don't know who it is among you that is telling you to be circumcised, but he should emasculate himself. He should castrate himself. He should chop it all off. He's saying this guy's telling you to take off your foreskin, you tell him to take off the whole thing. He was angry. God was angry that these Judaizers had shown up in a church that Paul had just planted, and these were Christians, and the first words in chapter three that we're going to read in its entirety in just a minute are, O foolish Galatians, who bewitched you. I highlight this before we read the whole thing because that is a warning to us too, as the warning from last week on

11:14 apostasy. We have this nonsense view in our heads that we are somehow immunized from falling into error because we say we're Christian, we say we believe the Bible, we have a confessional document, and whatever our church body is, and we definitely really hold to that. And so given all those things, how could we possibly be bewitched? Well, Paul came to these people and he told them everything, and as soon as he left someone snuck in and gave them a different gospel, and they ate it up, they loved it, and they switched sides. They were abandoning the Christian faith right behind his back. So when he follows up with the church in Galatia, it's not to congratulate them on their perseverance in the faith.

11:54 It's to say, Oh foolish Galatians, who bewitched you? Who is it among you that has spread this Judaizing heresy? That was tearing apart their faith. It was about the faith that all of this hinges. So when we look at the context of Galatians and you look at everything that's being said, the particular things that are said today about this one verse become just completely nonsensical They're simultaneously retarded and just absolutely demonicalized. There's no possibility for anyone who reads Galatians to come to the conclusions that pastors will try to get you to reach when they just give you the 26 words in English. Yesterday, just for the sake of curiosity, and so I can make the point today as we're recording, I read Galatians from start to

12:39 finish in one sitting. It took me eight and a half minutes. I'm a fast average reader, not a speed reader by any stretch. I would imagine that most of the people listening could comfortably do it in ten minutes or so. I highlight this to say that we're so lazy about saying, Oh, I'm just gonna read a verse or I'm gonna read part of a verse, or maybe I'll read a chapter, but man, that's a commitment. Well, it's typical the the intros to Stone Choir run about fifteen minutes before we even really get into the meat of the subject. So if you have two hours to listen to a stone choir episode once a week, you have 10 minutes to read a book of the Bible. So just like last week, we said, you know, go read 2

13:18 Kings chapters 17 through 23, probably about the same amount of time if you did that. Galatians gonna probably take you about the same amount of time. Please, after this episode, go read Galatians. It'll take no more than fifteen minutes of your life. It's God's word that he put there for your benefit. I say this specifically because when you do that and then you look at the arguments that are made about Galatians 3.28, they're just garbage. They're completely insane, in addition to being false doctrine, in addition to being evil, they're just absurd. No natural reading of the text would arrive at the conclusions that are being shoehorned into it. So it's only the proof texting of this verse that makes it

14:00 possible for this deception to occur. So, by the end of this episode, what we're going to attempt to do is draw a moat around the entirety of Galatians 3.28. We're going to draw a bright line around everything that is permissible for anyone to say about this verse. And we are going to extend as a challenge of defiance against any teacher who would say anything differently than we say here. We are saying to you that they are outside of the Christian faith in whatever they say that's contrary to what we say here today. There's a very limited scope of what can be said about this verse. And anyone who says anything different is going to make one or more of the errors that we're going to lay out today.

14:42 So there are a lot of errors that are in the wind. We're going to talk about a few of them. But principally this is another tool giving episode. We're going to give you the tools to understand here's what this means. Anytime you hear anyone for the rest of your like bring up Galatians 328, your ears should perk up and you should start listening for these errors. Because in virtually every case, you're gonna find them. And you need to be aware of that because those errors are going to cause serious problems spiritually for anyone who believes what they say. And we can the reason we're not gonna have an exhaustive list of all the possible errors is that there are new ones every day. There are new insane false teachings about this that we can't possibly

15:26 give you a list of. There's always going to be more. But what we can do is say this is literally all all that is permissible for anyone to believe about this verse. I know it's a bold claim, but we're gonna make the case for that today. This is a simple verse. And so as we're doing this episode, we're not proof texting, we're not trying to pluck this out of context, we're gonna put it in its context so that you understand clearly what is and is not being said here. And then from now on, for the rest of your life, whenever Galatians 3.28 comes up, whenever you hear these words on anyone's lips, you're immediately gonna know, are they saying what the Bible says about this, or have they completely ignored the context?

16:03 Have they flipped it upside down and turned it inside out to do something wicked with it? That that's why we're here. And it's why Stone Choir exists, because this verse, if this verse were not being maligned and inverted, this podcast wouldn't exist. We have done so many episodes where we refer to this because it is the key. Way in which Satan is attacking the church today. And this is again this attack coming from inside the church. BLM is inverting it in their own words, but in the church, we're seeing inversions that are far more harmful. And so as we go through these today, we want you to be equipped to understand just like the heresy episodes on Judaizing and Gnosticism, there's an entire set of heresies surrounding Galatians three twenty eight.

16:49 that incidentally all revolve round Judaizing and Gnosticism. So as promised, we will start off by reading Galatians three so that you have at least the entire chapter. But again to echo woe you should go and read the entirety of the letter to the Galatians at some point this week. And so Galatians three. O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law, or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish, having begun by the spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? Did you suffer so many things in vain, if indeed it was in vain? Does he who supplies the spirit to you and works miracles among

17:43 you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith? Just as Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness? Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham, and the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the nations by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, In you shall all the nations be blessed. So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. For all who rely on works the law are under a curse, for it is written, cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law, and do them. Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for the righteous shall live by faith, but the law

18:32 is not of faith, rather, the one who does them shall live by them. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, Cursed is every one who is hanged on a tree. So that So that in Christ Jesus, the blessing of Abraham might come to the nations, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith. To give a human example, brothers, even with a man-made covenant, no one annuls it or adds to it once it has been ratified. Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say and to offsprings, referring to many, but referring to one and to your offspring, who is Christ. This is what I mean, the law, which came four hundred and

19:19 thirty years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void. For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise, but God gave it to Abraham by a promise. Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made, and it was put in place through angels by an intermediary. Now an intermediary implies more than one, but God is one. Is the law then contrary to the promises of God? Certainly not. For if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law. But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin, so that the promise by

20:04 faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise. I would just like to start off by pointing out a quick

20:54 grammar point for those who may have been listening particularly closely to Woe's literal reading of the Greek at the beginning of this episode. Different languages handle negation in different ways. Many languages do it in a way that sounds unnatural to the English here. It's something that we don't really have. German, for instance, has something similar. And so, for instance, if I were to say, there is beer here. I'll butcher the word order in German just to make it the exact same so it's easier to understand for an English speaker. Es gibt beer here. Now the negation of that would be there is no beer here. In English we use no, so we sort of drop that article we use no as our negation. German is es gibt kein Bier, which would be the equivalent of

21:46 if we had a negative form of the article A or an, so not a. Greek is closer to that latter bit, and so what you hear there in the literal reading is ook and then any, the the verb for is. That ook is a negative prefix. And what that does is it negates the following verb. And so in English when we translate it, that's why we have neither nor, that nor being uda. And so when you hear the literal translation of the Greek, that's why it sounds unwieldy to an English speaker. But the other thing that I wanted to pull out here and why it's important to understand or pay attention to the grammar with the particular nuance is that you see that there are three couplets, neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, not male and female.

22:42 Now it is the same underlying word there for neither and not. It is translated differently within the scope of the term, so the translation is fine, but it is translated differently in order to make it sound like English. Some very literal translations don't do that, and it sounds very strange to an English ear. But the important part to notice there is that middle word, because the middle word is in fact different. different, the connecting word between the terms. So it is Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, not male and female, because the Greek word there is chi, the word for and in the pairing of the two sexes. This is an important distinction. We'll get into it more later in the episode, but it's an

23:26 important distinction between the first two couplets and the third. There's a difference there in what is underlying this in the nature of these things, so the first one is ontological, immutable and inherent, it is dealing with race. The second is ontological, indirectly so, whereas the first is directly so, but indirectly ontological because the nature and the status as slave or free flows from things that are inherent, in many cases, not always, of course, and that's also important, but indirectly ontological, mutable, because this can be changed, and inheritable, so not inherent. Whereas we get back to the same sort of nature as the first couplet with the third, because it is directly ontological, the difference

24:17 between the sexes is an ontological difference. It is a difference in being, it's a difference in nature, and it is indeed immutable and inherent. And yes, you could say it is heritable, but that is a different thing. You're talking about biology then, which is involved here, but it's not the entirety of what is in view. So that gives you some of the grammatical structure, some of the underlying workings of this, the underpinnings, in order to build a foundation on which to place what we're going to review in this episode about the nature of this verse and why it is so important and why Satan is attacking it. There are many parallel or related verses for this, I have about fourteen or fifteen of them at this point that I've collected for

25:05 I'll probably eventually write something longer on this particular verse, this subject. But this is the key one. And one of the ways you can tell this is the key verse is this is the one that's attacked. Satan is going to attack the thing he wants to destroy. Now he may get to it in a roundabout fashion at times, and he's done that in this case. He's attacked each and every one of these couplets separately, building up to a direct attack on this verse because it undermines Christendom, it undermines creation, it undermines everything. But this is the important verse, because this Because this is the one that's being attacked. And so this is the one that we need to defend. We may touch on some of the other verses as well, because

25:49 they do add some nuance. They're interesting at the very least. But by and large, we are going to focus on that's why it's the title of this episode and why it is the focus of this episode, Galatians three twenty eight, because it is the core of this entire matter. Within these three couplets lies what you need not only to defend the Church and God's creation, but what Satan, if he can subvert them, needs in order to destroy both of those things. And that is why you see it so frequently in the mouth of false teachers and false pastors, because they are serving their master by teaching falsely, by isegeting, as opposed to exegeting. Isegeting is to falsely interpret by isegeting this particular passage.

26:37 So as I mentioned at the outset, Paul is writing to Galatia. He's writing to Celts who live in a different culture. context, but they're Christians now. They've been given the gospel. The Judaizing heresy has emerged among them, and they're being told that they need to begin circumcising. That's the full context of all six chapters of Galatians. I want to read again the twenty ninth verse, the last verse in the third chapter. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise Now this helps to explain everything that's going on here. The concept of Abraham's offspring being the key to salvation was the fundamental belief of the Pharisees. It was not the faith imparted to them by God.

27:31 It was the Pharisaical heresy, where they believed that salvation was racial. That was their belief. It was a belief of the Pharisees, of most of the Jews in that day, the salvation was racial, that belief and all that stuff was incidental, but as long as they had Abraham as their father, and then they held to the Mosaic Code, they would be saved. And so much of the ink spilled in the New Testament is throwing them all under the bus, saying you lying brutal vipers, everything you're doing here is false. And so the first couplet, there is neither Jew nor Greek. It is about races, but it's specifically in the context of the Abrahamic Covenant Because again, they believe that because they could call themselves sons of

28:20 Abraham, they could say they had a claim on salvation. And so that was what the Judaizers are doing. It's what the circumcision party was doing, saying, okay, that's great, you're you're Christians now. You gotta circumcise yourselves, you have to follow the Mosaic Covenant, which was the opposite of what Paul had just taught them as Christians. We see this also in uh Matthew 3. This is right as Jesus is being baptized. Listen to what John the Baptist says. But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come, bear fruit in keeping with repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, We have

29:02 Abraham as our Father, for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is laid at the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. This is entirely keeping with the overall theme of Galatians. Who is a son of Abraham? Well, again, what's verse 79 say? If you're Christ, then you're Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise. And the heirship is something we're going to get to in the third couplet because why is he talking about sex? Why did Paul bring up sex in this context? When you read Galatians, it's one of the most exhaustive treatments of this subject, but we also find it in Romans 8.

29:49 What Scripture makes very clear is that every Christian is a son of God. That is the term that God uses. Every woman who's listening, every girl who's listening, you are sons of God according to the promise. When Paul says, when God says there is no male and female, that's what he's talking about. He's saying that salvation is available to all human beings. Sex has nothing to do with your salvation. And by what means does salvation come? It comes as heirs of God. Sonship is necessary for being an heir. Listen what Romans eight says. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God, for you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption

30:37 as sons, by whom we cry Abba Father. The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. So repeatedly uses gendered language, and it's not that it's excluding women, it's not that it's saying, Oh, only men are saved, it's saying that In Christ, when you're saved, you become a son of God, so that you may inherit eternal life. We are all sons of God and effectively brothers of Christ for the purpose of salvation. And that's the crux of the entire battle around misapplying Galatians, particularly verse 328, because every argument that says, well, this is a proof

31:29 text against race, this is a proof text against slavery or classes. This is a proof text against any distinctions among or between the two sexes. The only way to reach that conclusion is to rob this passage of its soteriological import to say this passage isn't about salvation when the very passage itself says for you are all one in Christ Jesus that's something we focused on in the past. we're going to repeat here. the in Christ Jesus part is what the whole thing hinges upon. And for is synonymous with because. For and because are the same. They could they could just as easily say because you are all one in Christ Jesus. So in Christ Jesus matters because who's in Christ Jesus? Is everyone on the planet in Christ Jesus?

32:21 No. Almost everyone is outside of Christ Jesus. Only those who have faith are inside Christ Jesus. This is talking about saving faith. Only those who have faith does Galatians 3.28 apply at all? So, as we said in the racism episode, the notion that somehow the phrase there is neither Jew nor Greek somehow means that races are not real. Even if that were true, when taken in the context of its soteriological import, it won't only apply to Christians. It would mean that there are races until you become Christian, and then once you become Christian, the race dissolves, and you cease to be Christian, you're just a spirit body. Well, that's Gnosticism. That is full-born Gnosticism. We do not change who we are or how God created us.

33:13 Because the only way to read Galatians 3.28 in opposition to races existing is simultaneously to say that sexes don't exist. That's the other prong of this battle that we see everywhere today. It's very common for radical feminists, for some of the most evil people who pretend to be in the church, but they're wolves, they will use this as a feminist rallying cry, saying, We're all priests of God. There's no more distinction of male and female, therefore, there's no such thing as an office that's specific to a man, because there's no male and female in Christ. There are really kind of two camps who abuse this passage, those who ignore the in Christ and those who embrace it. And so those who ignore it will just focus on there's no

34:00 races, there are no classes, there's no sex. Those who acknowledge that in Christ is present will not do it properly. They won't do it to glorify God and say this is about the gospel. Instead, they'll do it to dissolve the church from within. Say, okay, well, inside the church there's no male and female, therefore anyone could be a pastor, anyone could do this, that, or the other thing, because there's no difference whatsoever. All the other parts in scripture that make clear that that's not true are deliberately ignored and this is used as a solvent to try to wipe them off the board. But that's not how God works. God's word is never set against itself. A house divided against itself will fall because it's evil.

34:45 That's describing hell. It's describing the devil. It cannot describe God's things. All of God's things are a coherent whole. And so when we see passages that say things like there is no male and female, and then we see literally everything else in scripture saying the opposite. It's not a conundrum if you understand the context, which is why this is where beginning. The context of all of Galatians is salvific. And again, Paul is addressing the Galatians long way from Judea, a long way from Jerusalem, a long way from most of the Jews. I don't know how many Jews were there, not many, but there were certainly enough to ban to destroy their faith faith. And so he has to tell them, why are you talking about

35:27 circumcision? Why do you think that circumcising yourself and living under the law is going to make you a son of Abraham? How are you sons of Abraham? The racial component was a complete denial of a gospel, which is what all of this revolves around. See, when men like Corey and myself are called racist and evil and all these things, we're told that we hate the gospel and we hate other people. What's actually happening is that the destruction of these passages in service of anti-racism and anti-feminism and anti-misogyny and anti-slavery. All of those things, when those are drawn and pointed at the church, the function that they have is to destroy the gospel. Because this is a gospel passage, this is a gospel passage Context.

36:17 All of Galatians is about salvation. Now it's a rebuke, and again, that's crucial. A church that Paul planted four or five years later, they've gone off the rails. Oh, foolish Galatians, who bewitched you? He's looking at them in just disbelief and anger, and he actually says I wish that I were there face to face, so I could use a different tone, but he had to make sure that they understood how important it was that the Judaizing heresies that they were embracing were endangering their salvation. Not a small matter, not a minor detail, not flipping a nor to an and. They were actually denying the faith by saying that they had to live as Jews because somebody came along and told them that. There are always going to be false teachers in the church.

37:01 Always. Every single one of our churches has false teachers inside it and has a line of 'em trying to get in. Why? Because that's where the Christians are. It's where the sheep are. Satan doesn't need to worry about the animals that are outside the sheepfold. He's already got them. He's devoured them. It's inside the sheepfold that the sheep exist So when these attacks come and they're done in the name of all the good modern religion things, just keep in mind what they're fundamentally doing when they attack this passage by inverting it is they're denying how we're saved. They're denying how we are saved. And part of that is denying how we are created. Again, this is all Gnostic. The only way to deny there is Jew or Greek in reality

37:47 is to become Gnostic to say the flesh is nothing, this is evil, this will all fall away. In the racism episode, we treated the fact that when you look at passages like Acts 17:26 in Revelation 7:9, where it talks about the different nations with their boundaries, and it shows the distinct races in heaven before the throne of God. These are natural. These are created. They're things that God made. They're how God made us. God made me, English and German. I am broadly Northwestern European and nothing else. Do I like that? Sure, cool. I'm good at it. Do I think that if someone is Japanese or Ugandan or whatever, that they're worse than me or less than me? No. God died for them, do he's given them gifts that I

38:29 may lack. But I am proud of what I am and I'm happy with what I am because it's God's gift to me. Talking in the past about the fact that I'm average in height. Well, I like to be taller, sure. I'm not going to complain about it because there are upsides. I like being me. I know how to be me. I wouldn't know how to be anyone else. And I don't have to worry about because I have been given one life by God. And it's a particular life. I have a genealogy that goes back to Noah and back to Adam. I can go more than some people, but I don't know all the details. I don't care. How God made me is the same way that He made each of you. It's unique. We all have a uniqueness in how we have been winnowed down

39:08 through time into the particular humans that we are. That is to God's glory that there's so much diversity and variety. It's amazing. It's incredible. And different people have different gifts. And so the attack on anti-racism, the attack on the existence of race, is a denial of the creator to say that that's garbage. There's neither Jew nor Greek. Well, if you understand what Paul was talking about and to whom he was speaking, the reason he said Jew was that he was dealing with a Judaizing heresy among people who weren't Jews. He's like, What does it matter? You're Celts. Why like this verse could just as easily say there is neither Jew nor Irish. It would make just as much sense. It would be just as true.

39:52 It would be more directly applicable to those people in that day. Now the Irish by that name didn't exist. They were Celts. There's neither Jew nor Celt. That is exactly what it is saying here. It was particular to that place. And the Jew part, it was only highlighting the Abrahamic promise and covenant because they were denying it. They were denying the true nature of what it means to be a child of Abraham. John the Baptist explained it. Do not presume to say to yourselves, we have Abraham as our father, for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. This passage says the same thing. We are made children of Abraham because we have the faith of Abraham. That is our gift from God.

40:33 We become sons of Abraham by becoming sons of God. It's synonymous. And therefore it's not racial. So the first couplet dealing with races is specifically denying that race saves. We don't think that, we think the opposite. There are heresies like Christian identity that believe that. They think that non-whites, non-Europeans are not human and cannot be saved. That is blasphemous. Those people are all going to hell. That is a wicked and perverted attack on the Christian faith. We think nothing of the sort, because scripture says nothing of the sort. But it doesn't mean the race doesn't exist. It boggles my mind that people can't hold two separate simple things in their head. It can simultaneously be true that your race doesn't save you and

41:19 that your race still exists. How is this hard? It shouldn't be hard. It's not. It's not. It's a simple thing. A five-year-old can understand it. It's only when people get older and their heads are folded with lies that suddenly these things get complicated. And so much of this battle is about explaining simple things simply so the people can get back to having a simple faith in God. You this is not complicated. It's the lies that make these things confusing. So please, as you go through your days, just keep in mind, anyone who's talking about Galatians 3.28, if they ever talk about it in a way that isn't connected to salvation, they're a demon. Full stop. They are speaking the teachings of demons because this is a verse

42:07 about how we are saved. It's a verse about our sonship with God, how we become heirs of salvation. that's salvation talk exclusively. And then once we're saved, we're still a man or a woman. If you're a woman, you should be happy to be a woman. I'm happy to be a man. I know how to do it. I could never possibly be a woman because God didn't equip me for that. And the fact that someone can have some delusion in their head to think that, oh, well, I'm actually the other thing, that's a Gnostic heresy. They're departing from the faith that they ever had it. They can't have it anymore at that point. But they're denying their creator actively by saying, I'm not what you made me, I'm this other thing.

42:47 No. You're one particular thing. And thank God for it. And when someone comes along and says, no, none of those things exist, just know that not only are they attacking creation, but they're attacking your salvation. Because the point of attacking this passage is to destroy the gospel. Galatians is about the gospel, and it's about the Judaizing Gnostic heretics who are attacking it then, and you're attacking it today. And when they succeed, as they were succeeding in Galatia, faith is destroyed and souls are condemned to hell for eternity. On the note of this verse being simple and really the entire book of Galatians is simple, I would like to divide this in two through an interpretive lens as it were, on the one hand,

43:36 the immediate verse three twenty eight is very simple. On the other hand, like much of scripture, it is also inexhaustible. God managed to pack a lot of information into not very many words. Woe mentioned that the word for there in English can also mean because. I want to emphasize that by pointing out that the conjunction there in the Greek gar is explicitly causal. The reason that the beginning, the first part, the first half, as it were, not in terms of size, but in terms of meaning or weight, as it were, is the division between the two halves of this verse, the first half must be understood in light of the second. These things are so because or you could say if and only if you are in Christ Jesus.

44:33 Because it says that you are all one in Christ Jesus. That is the requirement here. And so this most certainly does not apply in any way, shape, or form form to those who are outside the church, those who are not in Christ. However, it is vitally important to understand, and quite frankly it's insane that people manage to miss this. Many do it maliciously to subvert things, but some in an innocent fashion miss this fact. If the three groups, the three couplets, are not real, if they are not actual things, if they do not have an existence in reality, then the verse is incoherent. It has no meaning, it has no import. It would be utterly pointless for it to be in Scripture, and God does not include things in Scripture that are pointless.

45:24 The reason that it is important, the reason that it matters, the reason that it it means something to say that we are all one in Christ Christ, despite these things, is because these things are real. There is a real division between the Jew and the Greek. There are differences between and among the races of man. That couplet, that distinction has to be real for it to matter that we are one in Christ, that we are all one in terms of how we are saved, if indeed we are. And as Woe pointed out, in this context, which in this case I mean the broad context, which would be the Greek world, the Roman world, and the Jewish world, in that world, inheritance passes to the sun. This is the case in most ancient civilizations, it's the case in

46:15 most civilizations until fairly recently. Women did not inherit, daughters did not inherit. The reason that daughters did not inherit is because a daughter became part of the family into which she married. She ceased to be part, legally speaking, of her original family, of her birth family. And so she didn't inherit from the father because the inheritance went to the sons who remained part of the family, period. They carried on the family name, they carried the family forward. She became part of another family. And so the word there that we see in verse 29, the word for heirs, Greek, unlike most cases in English, distinguishes between the masculine form of a noun and the feminine form, and not just

47:00 in terms of grammatical gender, in this case in terms of masculine referring to men who are who are that noun, versus women who are that noun. It's masculine in the Greek. I want to be careful here not to imply that you need to know Greek in order to understand scripture. That's not the case. Anyone who tells you that is lying to you. Is the Greek language important? Yes, it is the language that God used to give us scripture, and by that I mean both the Old and the New Testament. And so Greek is important. But you do not need to know Greek in order to read scripture and understand it. There are some things that are accessible only in the Greek, like this. You don't see that that word is masculine if you're looking

47:47 at only the English. Now from the balance of scripture, you would still understand that, even if you had only the English, because it says we are sons sons of God, we become heirs in Christ, it speaks of that in terms that are understandable, simply in English without access to the underlying Greek. And of course as Woe has pointed out many times previously. There are many software programs out there, including free websites, where you can see this information and have ready access to it even without being able to read Greek. Because you can probably still read, for instance, if I just hover over errors, I have it up in logos. If hover over heirs, it tells me that it is a noun, it is nominative, it is plural, it is masculine.

48:29 There. We can all understand those terms in English. So I do not want you to think that you need to have Greek. The Greek is useful. It is not absolutely necessary to understand scripture, but in this case like I said, useful because I can pull out that airs is explicitly masculine in the underlying Greek. Because we are heirs in Christ. We inherit. That is why it says son. It doesn't say it because only men can inherit. It's saying it because in that context only men inherited, and so in order to inherit, you had to be a son. And so even those who are female, women are also sons according to the promise, because they because they inherit along with men. That is why you have the masculine there, and also one of

49:21 the reasons we have not male and female. That distinction with regard to salvation is largely irrelevant. We've gone over previously some of the ways in which it is relevant tangentially speaking, and so for instance, the issue of headship becomes relevant, because certainly if you are a woman married to a man who is faithless, you are much less likely to remain faithful than if you were married to a man who is faithful, and so headship matters. Of course that does flow in the opposite direction as well, because wives are also supposed to help their husbands stay in the faith. But I want to pull out that earlier distinction with regard to the second couplet that I mentioned. The second couplet

50:08 is mutable, which distinguishes it from the first and the third. And the reason that is relevant is partly because of historical context, and partly because it gives a greater scope to the totality of this verse, because if all three categories were immutable, if they were all purely and directly ontological, Then all it will be saying is that an ontological, immutable category does not affect your salvation in a causal way at least. But because this one is mutable, the scope of the verse is that none of these things and you could put in any number of different things in these various parts, as Woe said, you could swap out Jew and Greek for Jew and Roman, or you could swap it out for Greek and Scandinavian if you were so inclined, because it's saying that

51:05 race does not save you. In this context it's saying Jew because the Judaizers were the issue, but today we have those who will try to say, as Will mentioned, that your race is what saves you. And so you can add any two races there, feel free. It retains the meaning of the verse. Neither slave nor free. You could swap in working class and upper class. Because this one is a condemnation of those who would say that it is your social standing or your success in life, and so there goes the prosperity gospel, among other things. Those who would say all of these other things that are ultimately irrelevant are what actually save you. They're necessary for salvation. They contribute to your salvation.

51:50 A lot of them hearken back to and are basically in their essence works righteousness. This condemns all of that. And in the ancient context, part of why that is relevant, perhaps more so for the Romans than for the Greeks, but many of the ancient cultures viewed success in this life as an indication of favor from the gods. And the Jews did this as well. That is why at certain points in the New Testament, Christ rebukes the disciples when they advance this idea that, well, this person must be successful because he's a good person, or this person must have been cursed because his parents were bad persons, anything like that. The Roman case would largely be because some of the public religious

52:42 rites that were conducted in Rome were expensive if you wanted to participate. And so if you were wealthy, you could participate in the religious rites, and therefore you were more favored by the gods. It was a very transactional religion. You had some of this in the Greek case, but it would partly depend on which gods you were worshipping in which region. But this is a condemnation of all of that. You are not saved by your works. Just because you have wealth does not mean that you're saved. Now, wealth is a gift from God, and you are to use it in an appropriate fashion. He gave you the wealth in order to use it to further good in the world, and no not in the New World Order sort of sense, but by helping your neighbor and by helping your

53:33 church, helping fellow Christians, all of those things. You are given your skills or your abilities or your assets in order to further things that are important to the church, that are important to a Christian life, that benefit your Christian neighbors. And so this is a condemnation of those who would say that no, my wealth means that God loves me and I'm saved. That's not what it means. We know what God says in the pages of Scripture about wealth and how it can be a hindrance to entering the kingdom of God. And then when it comes to the third couplet, that condemnation of those who would draw a distinction between man and woman with regard to salvation, that is a condemnation of a number of things.

54:19 One is that there were some cults in the ancient world that basically said women cannot be saved. Women some of them went so far as to say women do not have souls, but there were also, including in the Greek world, some who said that women in the next life would become men. And so it's a condemnation of all of those denials of the good created nature of sex, it being part of God's creation that is preserved in paradise. If you are male in this life, you are male in eternity. If you are female in this life, you are female in eternity. God made you the way you are. He wants you to be the sex that you are, and you will be that forever, because that is how he made you, and the good things that God creates are not destroyed.

55:10 So this is an affirmation of the goodness of God's creation, of his created order and a condemnation of those who would say that no you actually have to be male in order to be saved, or you have to be male in order to have a soul, or any of the various things like that. But again, as I started out saying, it is necessarily the case that all three of these are real in order for the verse to have any actual meaning. Because if you say that these are not real, then what does it mean for them to not matter if you're one in Christ? What does it mean for something that isn't real not to matter to salvation? That's a meaningless statement. So they have to be real. So those who deny the reality of race or the reality of

55:57 hierarchy or the reality of sex are denying one God's created order, and so they're tacitly denying God, but two, they are asserting that this verse has no meaning. And so in a very real way they actually subvert their own argument, not that it matters, because the appeal to hypocrisy never really matters in these discussions. But they are subverting their own argument, because they say, Well, we're all one in Christ, and so these things aren't real. Well, if they aren't real, then it doesn't matter that we're all one in Christ. But you have to pay attention to the false teachers and the false pastors, who would use this in order to subvert the created order, because ultimately again they are basically Gnostic.

56:43 The rejection of any part of this is Gnosticism. You have the rejection of race, which is the rejection of the flesh. You have the rejection of hierarchy, the created order of things in the world, which is a rejection of the material world. That's one of the most hardline forms of Gnosticism. And then the rejection of male and female is again a form of Gnosticism that was particularly an issue in some parts of the ancient world. I think it's important with this second couplet not to completely divorce the slave nor free from slavery, qua slavery. We did an entire episode entirely on the subject of slavery as being morally licit. Scripture permits slavery. This is a fact. In fact there are many cases in Scripture where God blesses some

57:33 men by giving them more slaves. That would not be the case if slavery were per se sin. So when the status of being a slave is brought up in scripture in these passages, it's important to understand how God treated, I think, another Good passage that illustrates that is Ephesians six. Paul again writes, Slaves obey your human masters with fear and trembling, in the sincerity of your heart, as you would Christ. Do not work only while being watched, as people pleasers, but as slaves of Christ. Do God's will from your heart. Serve with a good attitude as to the Lord and not to people, knowing that whatever good each one does, slave or free, he will receive this back from the Lord. And masters treat your slaves the same way, without threatening them, because

58:24 you know that both their master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him. And the word favoritism there is usually usually translated as partiality. We've talked about partiality in the past. It's particularly in the context related to this, where social status was treated by some as a matter that would distinguish whether or not someone received more favors in the church. This is what happened in the in the epistle of James. When he condemns the showing of partiality, it's that the rich were given a higher place in the church. They were they were given the best seat, and the poor guy was stuck in the back. And James condemned that. He said, like the rich are the ones who drag you in

59:06 the court. What are you doing preferring them? And God certainly doesn't show partiality. God doesn't care about who has more money or more looks or IQ or any of the rest. Because you know what? Whatever good we have, God gave us. I think that's one of the things that Corey and I will point to Job for, because when Job came to God complaining, God's response was basically, who do you think you are? Where were you when I created the foundations of the world? He didn't take him seriously as a challenger, because whatever good, whatever blessings Job had before Satan came and took them away, God gave them to Job. Whatever you have, whatever I have, whatever good anyone has comes from God. So the notion, therefore, that oh I have this good thing,

59:58 I'm gonna use this to prove that what I get more salvation, I'm gonna take the gifts that God has given me and then come to God and say, Look how good I am. You need to give me more. That's insane. That is just is deranged. And it's the sort of smackdown that Job received from God. Because to whatever degree he was up and he and out of the line, God put him back in his place. He's like, Who do you think you are? You have no business challenging me. That's God's attitude. Whatever we have came from him. So whether someone's a slave or they're free, if they're rich or they're poor, those distinctions not only don't they matter for salvation, but relative to God, in those terms, we're all exactly the same.

1:00:43 the riches that we have on earth compared to the riches of God, they're not they're not the same category. It's not the same type of thing. And this is part of the nuance in the verse that it's just completely wiped away if you start saying these things are real. Obviously it's real. If someone has more, someone has less. If someone is a slave, if they're literally owned by another person, they have a lower station in life. There are things that they can't do that others can't. They don't have freedom. But when God addresses those with freedom, he chastises them, he warns them, he admonishes them, don't treat your freedom as license, because it's not. Whatever blessings we have, whatever freedom we have, it's still enjoined

1:01:26 by God's will. You can't go outside of that. And so in many cases, those who have more options just make their sin worse. They make their sin more elaborate. They're gonna get creatively evil in ways that the guy who has very limited means and very limited scope in his personal life as a slave, he's not gonna be able to do the things, as somebody like Andrew Tate will do. Totally different class. And the one who's a slave is gonna be far better off. Even if he's wicked, he's gonna be better off because his sins are gonna be simpler. The man who has no limitations makes hell far worse for him without God. And so again, the soteriological context, the fact that this verse is about our salvation, is what makes it interesting, makes it valuable and

1:02:10 a blessing. It's a reason that the epistle of Galatians is is beautiful. It's one of the epistles that opened Luther's eyes to the gospel, because he saw arguments and things that were here that made clear that things he'd been taught in the Roman Catholic Church were simply not true. For us to fixate on this verse today is not to get tunnel vision, it's to highlight, it's to shine a light on the fact that these are God's treasures, all these little nooks and crannies of scripture. And when suddenly some verse suddenly starts getting outsized attention, or words too, you know, I've on Twitter I've pointed out that Imago Dei is something that's used all the time now. But when you do a Google Mgram search for it, it took

1:02:55 off in the last like ten or fifteen years. But it sounds really Jesus y, right? It sounds like a super Christian thing to say. But to say Imago Dei in Latin, that that new trend, it's a completely new thing. Now there's always been discussion of the image of God, but it was in different context than today. Whenever anyone says Imago Dei today, they're using it as license for bad things, for bad theology. But they're hiding behind that Jesus dust. they can they can put that mask on and then they can present false doctrine and say, look, well, I'm I'm Jesusy, and so we gotta do this. And when they say Imago Dei, they're saying you can't execute murders because some of them are black. That makes it racist.

1:03:40 Well We think the concern is that why are so many blacks murdering? That's what concerns me. Why are there murderers? And then why do they predominantly come from certain groups? That's relevant. We did a whole episode on that. Galatians 3.28 doesn't condemn that because it doesn't say there's no such thing as a black guy. It says as there's no such thing as a black guy being given preferential or disadvantaged salvation. Same Jesus, same salvation, same cross. The differences or how we respond to the message of the gospel. That's a personal question. It's not a racial one. It's not one derived from our sex or from our status or anything else. For those of you who are listening and are Lutheran, I want

1:04:25 to point out that you are technically confessionally bound to deny that those who are not in Christ have the image of God. Our confession states that the Imago Dei is lost in original sin, and it is not restored except in baptism, except when you are given faith, when you are placed in Christ. I am less familiar with the confessions of the various reform traditions, so I do not know if you have something similar in yours. Perhaps some of you do. I know that the Book of Concord denies the Amago Dei to the pagan. In this case I just mean unbeliever. One thing that I hope that comes through in this episode, and I believe that it will, given that we're going to spend about two hours on essentially one verse, although with other verses pulled in,

1:05:10 is just the depth of the wealth that is present in scripture. If we can spend this much time and discuss this many different aspects of a single verse, it should be very clear that you can read scripture for a lifetime and never exhaust it. You could read a single book in Scripture for a lifetime and never exhaust it. Which again is very clear proof this is the Word of God. You couldn't do that with any other book. If you read whatever your favorite book is, pick your favorite science fiction book, great piece of historic literature, whatever it is. You could exhaust it in twenty years. Regardless of what it is. You cannot do that with scripture. You will always be able to find more and a deeper meaning, a deeper understanding when you return to Scripture,

1:05:57 no matter how many times you read it. And so on that note, I want to pull out something from Galatians 3.28 that will make some of you very happy and perhaps annoy some of you a little bit, but in this case, I wish to make very clear to you that this is actually important in this case. In many cases, you will find those who interpret scripture who will attempt to find chiasms, chiasmus everywhere. Because it is one of the forms of writing, it is one of the little tools in the Shemitic toolbox that's just popular in that part of the world, and so you will find it in the pages of scripture. And notably, it does appear both in the Jewish context and in the Greek world. And so it makes perfect sense that you would find it also

1:06:47 in the Greek of the New Testament. In the case of the Germanic world, so also the Celts, incidentally, you're going to find less chiasmus and more parallelism. Now, to be clear, to make sure that you understand what it is I'm saying, if you have a structure of a particular chunk of text that you have a thought and then another thought. Let's just go with two thoughts formulated two different ways. So you have A, A prime, B, B prime, two different thoughts formulated different ways. To the shemitic mind, you are going to write that in a chiastic structure, which is to say that you are going to have A, B, B prime, A prime. You're going to have it inverted, as it were. Whereas to the Germanic mind, this includes those of us who speak

1:07:44 English, you are more accustomed to seeing parallelism. So A prime B B prime. That's the sort of comparison that we expect. However, in this case, neither one of those appears here in Galatians three twenty eight, because that second couplet basically subverts all expectations. So if you had, say, a Pharisee reading this, he would see there's neither Jew nor Greek. Well that's going to annoy him, but if he gets over that and keeps reading, neither slave nor free. Okay, that's fine. Those two, the first and the second alone, that would be chiastic to a Pharisee reading this. Because how he would read this is he would read it, the Jew is free, the Greek is a slave. Great, I I agree with that.

1:08:36 That's I like that. But then he would get to the third part, and the problem is inherently, having three parts, you can't form a chiastic structure in this way, because it would be A, B, C, C, B, A, is how you would do that. But he gets to it and goes, okay, the Jew is free. But now we have the third one. We can't form a chiasm here. And it's inverted. You can't do parallel either. Because you would be expecting you know, the Jew is free and male, and I'll get into that more in a second here, and the Greek is a slave and female. It's not a chiasm, it's not parallel, so it subverts the expectations for both groups. And another place that Scripture does this is a related passage to Galatians three hundred twenty eight.

1:09:22 This is one of the passages that I want to bring in from outside Galatians as it were. Colossians three hundred eleven. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, scythians, slave free, but Christ is all and in all. And so you can obviously see, very similar to Galatians three twenty eight, but here you actually have two chiasms, because you have Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised. And so the Jewish reader is going to say, okay, so the circumcised Jew and the uncircumcised Greek. Great. Then you'll get to the second chiasm. Barbarian Scythian slave free. For those who do not know, the Scythians at this time in this cultural context were considered the absolute worst of the barbarians, the

1:10:14 most feral, uncivilized people on earth. And so it's saying barbarian and the worst of the barbarians. Here's where you have the problem for the Jewish reader. Because the Jewish reader will look at it and go, Wait a minute, this chiasm taken together with the first is comparing Jews to the worst possible barbarians. And not only that, but it's saying that the Jews are slaves. And so there's a critique there that you see in Paul when he's writing this. It's implicit, it's not explicit, but it is there if you understand the literary forms that are common to these peoples. But to return to Galatians 3.28. One of the things that you will miss in Galatians 3.28 if you do not have the background context, the historical context, is that

1:11:10 this is an explicit polemic. If you want to say it's an implicit polemic, then it is right on the line. It is as strong of an implicit polemic as you can make without it being explicit, because it doesn't explicitly mention the Talmud. This is the inversion of a prayer that Jewish men traditionally pray as part of their morning prayers. And so that inversion in the second couplet is an important part of this condemnation, of this polemic against the Jewish prayer, but now I'll read you the translated text of the Jewish prayer. There are three blessings that Jewish males traditionally pray as part of their morning blessings, as part of this specific prayer within those blessings. The first is Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the

1:12:04 Universe, who has not made me a goi, which is to say a non Jew, a Gentile. The second, Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has not made me a slave. And the third, blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has not made me a woman. This is the Berkotha Shakar, if you want to look up the prayer and manage to spell all the phlegm that I just got on my mic. But these three blessings that are traditionally prayed by Jewish males as part of their morning prayers are rejection of God's created order. They're a rejection of God's created order because they're not praying Thank you God for making me what I am. That's fine. Go ahead and pray to God, thank you for making me male,

1:13:00 thank you for making me German, thank you for making me whatever the thing is, about which you are thankful, that's fine. You should be thankful for what God has made you, what God has given you, because don't forget that your attributes are also gifts from God. Everything you have is a gift from God. The problem with how this is prayed, partly it's the intent behind it, but you can see the intent in the wording, because it's not thank you for making me, it's thank you for not making me these groups, a member of this group that is lesser than I am. This is the prayer of the Pharisee versus the publican, or the tax collector, whatever you want to call the gentleman, this is the prayer of the man who stands up in the synagogue or who

1:13:44 stands up in the temple and says, I am so much better than everyone else, thank you God for making me so holy and great. Thank you for not making me like the rest of these sinful wretched people who are surrounding me and making the building smell bad. This is not a prayer of humbling oneself before God. This is a prideful prayer. It's not even really a prayer. It's an insult to God's face. And so this verse in Galatians is a polemic against this prayer. It is a polemic against the Jewish religion, against Judaism, which is not Christianity, which is related to Christianity only insofar as it is a perversion of Christianity. This This verse in Galatians specifically condemns it and does so in

1:14:37 part by using the exact same three couplets. Because that's what we see. Thank you for not making me a goy, and it says doesn't matter, Jew or Greek. Thank you for not making me a slave, it doesn't matter, slave or free. Thank you for not making me a woman, it doesn't matter, male or female. But it also inverts that second one. And so you have Jew slave male instead of what these Jewish males who pray this prayer in the morning would expect, which is Jew free male. And so it's just one of those layers to bear in mind when you read Galatians, and just to think about the depth of what is put into scripture for us. And sure, if you don't understand the historical context of this you will still understand the meaning of the verse.

1:15:24 Because the meaning is there right on the face of the thing. It says you are all one in Christ Jesus, so these things, soteriologically, do not matter. That's blunt from the face of the text in Galatians 3. But you get this additional depth of meaning here of the condemnation, of the polemic against false religions. And it just shows you how much there is in Scripture to be discovered for those who spend the time to meditate on God's Word to study God's Word. He has given us an immense wealth in His Word, and we should be very thankful for it. And another one of those details that stuck out to me a couple years ago was the fact that these three couplets are not and and and or nor nor nor. It's nor nor and

1:16:14 I saw some discussion online and for some reason I noticed that the ESV translates this correctly, even though a number of others don't. And somebody else had quoted a different one and they said nor nor nor and I thought, I think my Bible says differently, but of course I didn't do what we condemn here and say, well my Bible says this, so you're wrong. I said, well I'm gonna look at the Greek and see like clearly somebody dropped a compound word somewhere, who was it? And it turned out that King James and a number of others use a NOR. They make all three of these couplets parallel. And that's not what the original language did. As I said earlier, it doesn't really change the purpose of like

1:16:57 the text works either way in its own context. So when you're treating Galatians properly and you're treating it as a soteriological passage, it's totally fine if a nor is there instead of an and for male nor female instead of male and female, which is correct. It doesn't really change it. I want to say that explicitly. I'm not saying, oh no, those those Bibles are all terrible. they're wrong. They have this terrible corruption. It's a mistake. It's clearly a mistake. It's not ambiguous. They are wrong. But it doesn't damage your understanding of this passage if you're just treating the passage the way it should be treated, which is this is about salvation. It doesn't matter if you're Jew or Greek.

1:17:41 It doesn't matter if you're slave or free. It doesn't matter if you're male or a female. But as Corey is just saying, there's a there's a depth and a richness to the way God presents these things that when this came under attack, that's when I started looking. And I think that Corey and I first discussed this because we were talking about Galatians as we realized just how important this was. Like, not that the difference of that one word is groundbreaking or earth shaking, but it's notable. God said one thing, let's leave it the way He said it. And then when you start looking at the attacks, and keep in mind what are the attacks today, when you get outside what Galatians 3:28 says, what God says, and you start looking at what evil

1:18:28 men are doing with it, what do they say? They say there are no races. They say that there are no sexes. There's no distinction between male and female. We're absolutely the same, we're interchangeable, we're just we're fungible, we're human beings. That's clearly false. And then in that context, when someone is trying to attack the created nature of reality, this distinction becomes important where it never mattered for for you know, how many hundreds of years people have been mistranslating that one word. It didn't make any difference, but in the twenty first century it does. Because as Corey said earlier, there is an ontological distinction between a Jew and a Greek or a Jew and a Celt. Just as there's an ontological distinction between a man and a woman,

1:19:17 that is according to their nature. It's not an accident. It is how God made you. So those are similar in that way. You are made whatever race you are, whatever mix of races you are, you're made one sex. You're either male or female. Yet the distinction between male and female is sufficiently different from even the ontological distinction between a Greek and a Jew or a Jew and a Celt. That God treated it slightly differently. And this is when I started to hone in on it. And Corey and I had really interesting discussions around yeah, this is here's what's actually going on here. Because the Jew and the Greek and the context of the verse, God's saying it doesn't matter for your salvation. Absolutely true.

1:20:08 The anti racist says, well, that means that there are no races, which is absolutely false. Yet at the same time, it's true that a well behaved Jew, you know, completely separated from whatever problems that group has, if they're well behaved and they like believe God and just did the right things, whatever differences they had from Greeks who were similarly faithful to God, it wouldn't be that much. be the things that we call ethnicity. They would have, you know, maybe different food, different music, different language, but they would all basically behave in similar waves. Some would be better at some things and worse at others. You know, Jews seemingly at least today tend to have more gifts

1:20:48 and you know creative endeavors sometimes. I don't know there have been a lot of impactful Greek people lately, but again, going back to what we said earlier, the Greeks today aren't the same as the Greeks then. Doesn't matter. If the two different races, whatever two races you want to distinguish from each other, that are somewhat similar, if they're behaving and they're doing what God wants, they're gonna have enough similarities that they could get along. It would be okay. I would never say that they were interchangeable, but I think that one of the distinctions we have today that kind of illustrates this is Western cultures and Japanese culture. You know, when we first came in contact with them before we

1:21:27 screwed them up by westernizing them, there were some things that were very weird and very different, and they're still weird and different because they're Japanese. They're alien to me. I don't think that's bad. It's just that they're they're very different. And yet there's certain things about the Japanese in particular, even among all Asians, that I think many Westerners, when they look at it, they find certain things that they do very laudable. You know, when Japan got into scotch in the early eighties, they bought up a bunch of scotch distilleries. But they didn't change what they were doing, they just made them even better because they fell in love with whiskey, with spirits. They already had sake.

1:22:06 But what they found when they became when they had this love affair with whiskey was is really in a way a very Japanese thing to distill something in nature to its essence and then to wait patiently for it to transform into something sublime with all these very subtle distinctions. That's it's a very Japanese thing culturally. And so they just took to like, yeah, this is like this Scotch stuff, we love it. We love Scotch. And they m they made it their own in a very, very subtle way. So there is an overlap, even from vastly disparate races and cultures, yet there was an overlap and appreciation of that particular thing that was complete harmony between two people who had been scattered for thousands

1:22:51 of years. That's an example where although the Scots and the Japanese are not remotely the same or remotely interchangeable. Nevertheless, there's a certain overlap in the type. The best of the Scots had something that was also the best of the Japanese. Even if they came at it from some different angles, they were still doing something beautiful that was mutually intelligible. And I highlight this in terms of races because when God distinguishes there is no neither Jew nor Greek and then says there is not male and female, that's a distinction in kind. Because what I just said about the Scots and the Japanese, you cannot say about men and women, period. There's no version of womanhood that can have that sort of harmonious

1:23:46 interaction with manhood. There's appreciation, but it's an appreciation as alien in some sense. The ways that man and woman complete each other are because we're both missing something. Adam was perfect in the garden, and yet he was not complete until until God created Eve. Even in his perfection, he was incomplete. He there wasn't enough without her. And then when God created Eve, he said, At last, this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. He was like, Yeah, this is it. And when from that day st until today, when a man finds a woman and loves her, the same way that Adam loved Eve, it's the same feeling. You're like, I was missing something and now I have it. But it's not the way the the Japanese discovered scotch.

1:24:34 It wasn't okay, I'm gonna take this and make my moan and I can go off in my corner. No. They have to exist together for it to work. Men and women have to exist together as a one-flesh union for any of it to work. When they're separated, they're their own separate things. So the distinction with this one-changing a nor to an and when God did that, he said there's no male and female, he was respecting that not only are they distinct, but that they are maintained in their distinction at all times. We talked about this in the Gnosticism episode when you are resurrected from the dead, as a Christian, even though you are soteriologically a son of God, even if you're a woman listening, you're gonna be

1:25:16 raised a woman. It doesn't change who you are, it doesn't change your name. It's solely for the purpose of inheritance of salvation that you're a son of God. That's a blessing from God because how he says he does it. We don't have to understand, we have to second guess, like okay, you said it, I believe it. Praise the Lord. That's the end of the discussion. Nothing else about you as a woman has changed. You're still a woman. And when you're resurrected from the dead, your female body is going to be perfected. Whatever is wrong with it now is going to get fixed. You're going to be perfect, and you're gonna be a woman for eternity because that's what you are. You're not gonna be some spirit body that's some asexual in between.

1:25:55 You're not gonna be an angel. Corey and I are gonna be raised as men. It's what we are, it's because it's how God made us. And so this one small word here of nor versus and, it didn't matter in the context, but it does matter today because it's yet another of the thousand different examples in Scripture where God makes clear the men and women are different in a unique and special way. That's a blessing. And just as with the other couplets in this, it's not to denigrate one. You know, the the distinction that there's no distinction between Jew and Greek, slave or free, male and female, is not to set one over the other. It's say that before God we're all the same in terms of salvation, but we don't lose who He created.

1:26:42 He created you, He created me, we're different. That's a good thing. I wouldn't want anybody else to be like, Mia, what's the point? There's one of me is more than enough. The variety that God has created is awesome. It's something that we should celebrate. Like we should celebrate diversity. That shouldn't be like it kills me that something that's actually a beautiful part of God's creation has turned into the solvent that's destroying faith and it's destroying creation simultaneously. Because if not for that, we could actually appreciate foreign food. Like that's one of the reasons a Europeans explored and conquered the planet was looking for spices. You know, the jokes online today is that white people don't spice

1:27:25 their food. Well, we literally conquered entire continents looking for spices for our food. So get real. We have good food. We know how to make it. And we know how to find recipes. But if someone else does something great, awesome. When someone does something different, like the scotch, the Scottish making scotch and the Japanese discovering it, that's great. And Japanese whiskies now as they've been developing over the last you know many decades, but especially in the last thirty years, forty years, they're sublime and they're distinct in a way that's very subtly Japanese, that's different than Scotch or American whiskey, and that's beautiful. There's one more amazing whiskey in the world because the Japanese made

1:28:04 it their own. That's the kind of diversity I celebrate. I don't want the Japanese to be wiped out of existence by being replaced by other races, because what they're good at would be gone. I don't want women to cease to exist. I want everything that God wants to create to be sustained and for us not to mess it up in discussing Galatians 3.28 for a couple hours is precisely because the world including within the church is not immunized against making these errors. Obviously the world is going to be evil, but when we find the evil coming inside the church and attacking God's creation, that's when it's our problem. When we see our own pastors and our own teachers spreading Judaizing heresy and Gnostic heresies and this other filth that upends creation by

1:28:51 denigrating each other, we have to go after it. We have to defend it. Because there's no one else to do it. Paul's not going to write any more epistles to us. Can you imagine what the epistle to the Americas would be like? Oh foolish Americans who bewitched you would be the least of the problems in there. Paul'd be spitting fire. It would be banned. You want to talk about banned books? If Paul wrote an epistle to America, you would never be allowed to see it anywhere on the internet because it would tell the truth. It would tell us what God thinks of the things we're doing. And the Galatians are in far better shape than the churches of our day. So that's why I said earlier the the passage of John speaking to

1:29:32 the Pharisees, their attitude, where they presume to say to themselves, we have Abraham as our father. That's the attitude of every church body today. I'm particularly talking about the conservative ones, the ones that have historic confessions, the ones that have tradition that are preserved the things that were inherited from of old. And they say, I believe the Bible, I'm this and I'm that. When these things happen, when Galatians three twenty eight comes under attack, where are they? Are they joining in the fight? Are they splitting the difference? Are they saying, well, I'm gonna hold the line on trannyism, but yeah, we gotta stop racism? You can probably guess some of you who I'm talking about with

1:30:11 that. That's very common. The boomer stalwarts of the old generation and of the new religion, they will happily burn down half of this verse to try to defend the rest. And everyone wants to give them credit for sitting on their laurels when all they're going to be remembered for is the evil they're doing today. When we have guys who did good things in the past, and then they openly embrace doxers against men in their own churches, and for once I'm not talking about myself here. This is bad news. When it takes podcasters to say, hey, maybe Galatians 3.28 matters. The church is in real trouble. I don't, I was telling Corey was we were doing prep. I pray every day that we will eventually succeed in making this

1:30:53 podcast obsolete. I don't have to talk about this stuff. I want it to be so common and for us to have equipped so many men that anytime I get up and see some new horror, I see 500 guys piling in and saying what I would say. Because the things that we have to say about these matters, they're not particularly clever. We're just paying attention. It's literally just paying attention. I've been very frustrated recently with the illiteracy of even intelligent men, where things like our distinction of because and for being causal, and that actually mattering for the sake of Galatians 3:28. If you don't understand the causality inside this verse, you're illiterate and you're a fool and you don't understand anything.

1:31:38 And I don't say that to be mean. I say that as a warning that if you're just gliding through the text and you're not actually understanding what's said. Best case, you just don't draw any conclusions. But you're also not equipped when a false teacher comes along and tries to separate the three couplets from the causality. Because the in Christ causality in this passage is the whole thing. It only applies in Christ. It doesn't apply outside of Christ. It shouldn't take us pointing that out. Everyone should be saying the same thing, because it's not a hard problem. Uh but apparently it's hard for people to pay attention. So one of the things we beg people, like just pay attention. As Corey said earlier, it's not about reading Greek.

1:32:21 I don't know Greek. I'm never gonna learn Greek. I don't want to. The more Corey learns, the less I need to care because I I have one more guy can ask questions about these things. That's fine. I've solved the problem. I can ask someone who knows. It doesn't need to be complicated. Just believe what's actually there, but believe all of it. When God said not a jot nor tittle will be fall away. That was about the stuff, about the little details. The smallest ladder, the smallest mark, the tiny details, if those are important enough for God, maybe we should pay attention. And it doesn't mean obsessing. We're giving this verse more attention than we give most verses, precisely because Satan's pointing.

1:33:02 Satan has a spotlight pointed at Galatians 3.28 because with things like BLM, he's driving a truck right through it. It's he's he's showing us what matters. You could be completely a deaf mute, and you could still feel the vibrations from this attack. That's how clear it is that these types of things are what matters to hell. And if they matter to hell, they have to matter to heaven. Even pagans understand this. There are a lot of men who are seeking out God because when they see evil in the world, they understand that there has to be an opposite of that. And when Christianity historically has been the place where it was claimed we had that, they come looking at Christian churches. And unfortunately in most of them, they find people attacking Galatians three

1:33:46 twenty eight, just like the global religion, saying, There are no races, there are no sexes, slavery's bad, classism is bad, there are no distinctions, we're all equal, man. Anyone who doesn't know God yet, but knows that those things are lies, is going to keep looking for God elsewhere because the very people who told him yeah I know about Jesus, let me tell you about him. When the first thing that they say is a lie, the intelligent man who doesn't know God is just gonna keep walking. Like, no, that's more the same. I don't know about their Jesus, but I know this is a croc of crap. I want none of that. That's why this stuff is consequential. It's not just fiddly and it's just not just about nors and

1:34:26 ands and obsessing with one verse. It's when you betray the gospel by subverting creation and its creator, you make it impossible for the gospel to be spread to those whom God is trying to reach in these days. Woe saying jot or tittle reminds me of one of the ways that I have taken to saying that, and for those who don't know, it basically just means the smallest parts of writing, the title and example of that being the dot on an eye. One of the ways that I've liked to say that is either iota or yod. And the reason that I like that is because it highlights the two languages that God used in order to transmit his word, because the Yoda is the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet, and the Yod is the tenth letter and the smallest letter in the Hebrew

1:35:16 alphabet. And so we have a promise from God, this the promise that neither jot nor Tidal will pass away, of course, is a promise from God about scripture being transmitted to us without losing anything. And so today we can say that not an yoda will be lost. And we already see historically he fulfilled the promise if we say Yodor Yod, of a yod not being lost because when Scripture was translated, when it was transmitted from the Hebrew into the Greek, nothing was lost, we have God's perfect word, without anything being lost, as He promised, in the Septuagint, with regard to the Old Testament. And that's why I will continue to say Yoda or Yod, despite the fact that very obviously We are going to emphasize the use

1:36:09 of the Greek instead of the Hebrew in the Old Testament. We'll get into that more in the future. But I want to emphasize something that Woe said about that third couplet in in Galatians three twenty eight. If you start with the first, let's pick two examples, the French and the Japanese. If there were no Japanese, would the French still be French? The answer is yes. And the inverse is also true. If there were no French, the Japanese would still very well be Japanese. If there were no slaves, would there still be freemen? Yes. If there were no freemen, would there still be slaves? Yes again. I could go into greater depth on why that one is true, but we'll save that for another time. But this does not apply to male and female.

1:37:02 You cannot have man without woman, and you can't have woman without man. Because as Woe mentioned, even though Adam in the garden was perfect, he walked with God, God said it is not good for man to be alone, because Adam was not complete. Man without woman is not complete, woman without man is not complete. And so that is why there is male and female. And that highlights another thing that I want to say about this verse. This is one of those times in scripture where you can actually say the exact opposite of the verse in terms of the literal wording, and it still be true. Now that is only the case if you ignore that final clause, because if you pay attention to the final clause then you can't

1:37:55 do this. But without that final clause you can say and have it be entirely true and consonant with scripture there is Jew and there is Greek. There is slave and there is free. There is male and female. Because that is what the verse again, as I said earlier, is saying. It's saying these are real categories, these are real things, these are part of the created reality, as God intended it, as God made it. And so that is why it matters that if you are in Christ, again causal, if you are in Christ, then you are all one, and these things do not matter soteriologically. But I just wanted to emphasize that difference of that third couplet, and the reason for the difference is because both male and female

1:38:45 are necessary for the totality that is humanity. You cannot have one without the other, whereas with the other two couplets you can very well have one and not the other at any given time in any given place. Now that we've drawn a clear line around the proper context of this verse I hope that everyone who's listening who agrees with our arguments, I don't I'm not sure how someone could disagree, but if you agree with them, if they're sound to you, know this. There is no possible claim that can be made about this verse that we have not addressed here. Anything else must necessarily defy some portion of this. Either denying that this is about salvation or denying that it's about the ontological nature of created reality.

1:39:34 God's creation is material. It has particulars. They include race. They include sex. And indeed they do include things like slavery and class. There's some men who are simply not fit for anything other than the lowest stations. And to say that everyone's like, oh, that's so mean. Why would you want to do that to them? There's nothing that's harder on a man than not knowing his place in the world. I don't know what I should be doing. I don't know what I want to do. I don't belong. I don't have any sense of self. That's something that it's common in all times and places, especially for younger men, just trying to figure things out. Now, it's worse today because we're no longer inheriting the occupations of

1:40:21 our fathers. It used to be that if your dad is a tanner, you're a tanner. If your dad made stained glass windows, you make stained glass windows. That's just how it worked. When that went away, young men ceased to really understand, well, what do I do. Whenever it's like, oh, you can do anything you want, you can be anything in the world. Well, that's nonsense. The overwhelming majority of men can't be anything they want to be. They're going to be good at a few things, they'll be mediocre at a fair number, and they'll be bad at a whole bunch. And And the best they can do is to try to find something that they'll either be mediocre or really good at, and hopefully they can feed a family with it.

1:41:04 The fact that there are men who are not good for anything except for the lowest stations in life if it's how they're made, if it's what they are, then to deprive them of even that is worse than not. If a man is only good for flipping burgers or fries or digging ditches, whatever you want to say is the lowliest thing, I don't say any of those things would be insulting. My paternal family was ditch diggers for generations. That's that was the family business, digging ditches. It's hard work. I'm glad I don't do it. I'd be bad at it. But the fact that when we look at these things, we don't have a sense anymore of what we should do. Hurts everyone. And especially hurts the man who isn't equipped for much.

1:41:49 To say, you know what? You're going to be a janitor. You have an 80 IQ. You can't even live on your own. But you know what? You can be a good janitor. Here's the mop, here's the bucket, here are the floors, go to these rooms in this order, go from wall to wall. When it looks like this, you're done. Someone who's retarded can do that. They're actually capable of doing a job like that. When you say, oh no, you can do way better than that, no, they can't. If that's the best they can do, if that's their station in life, don't rob them of it. And so just as women have been robbed in the last century, certainly, and the last few generations by feminism, they've been deprived of motherhood. They've been deprived of the very thing that God made them for.

1:42:32 They've been told, no, you need to compete with men in the workplace. You need to go get the same jobs as them, have the same crummy hours, same miserable political fighting all day long. You have to go up against them and compete on their terms and anytime it doesn't work as well for you and you're unhappy, well that's men's fault too. It will never have anything to do with the fact that a woman is in a place she doesn't belong, doing something she doesn't want to do, and is giving up on the thing that she does actually want to do, even if she doesn't know it. And it's tragic today. You see a lot of videos like on TikTok, I'm a fake TikTok, but shows up elsewhere on the internet where girls say, I

1:43:13 just figured it out. You know, I'm thirty, thirty-five, I I realize I want babies, and here I am with this house and this career, and I've done all this stuff, and I'm not happy with any of it. I just want kids. She should have been told that when she was fifteen. She shouldn't have gotten all those years into her life before someone for no one told her, and she had to figure out on her own what she really wanted. So when Satan attacks a passage like Galatians 328. So there's no male and female. the or and the and doesn't matter anymore. Because when he's going after it, he's saying that we're interchangeable. He's saying that you go girl and girl bosses and all that stuff is gonna work out for 'em.

1:43:54 It just doesn't. It absolutely doesn't. And anyone who's deceived into believing that it does ends up worse off for it. And then you have guys on the internet pointing and making fun of them for it. And to some extent, it is necessary to have negative examples to say, look, don't turn out like this person. But unfortunately there's a lot of Schadenfreude and cruelty involved, which there shouldn't be. If someone screws up, let them be a lesson to others, and let that lesson come down to the younger generations who can avoid making all the mistakes. When Satan comes after this verse, when he comes after these distinctions, when he says that Africans are interchangeable with Europeans, when people with

1:44:38 an average IQ of eighty-five are interchangeable with people with an average IQ of 100, he's lying to him. Everyone's being lied to. We're not interchangeable. We can't do the same stuff. And when that lie is told, it sets everyone up for failure because suddenly you have Boeing miss drilling holes because of their diversity efforts. And you have white guys who'd have a good paying job on a factory line, they can't feed their families because some diversity hire got the job instead. And planes follow the sky and everyone complains about it. And like it's inevitable. You had someone doing something they're not equipped to do. What do you think is going to happen? I couldn't be a mother. I couldn't run a nursery.

1:45:19 I'd lose my mind. It's just preposterous the notion that I could do the things with small children that women, all girls are virtually all equipped for just naturally. It's alien to me. Like at a scale, you know, if I had one kid or two kids, I could handle it. But the things that we're good at are distinct. And that's okay. It's a blessing. That's part of the actual godly diversity that we've been given. Every attack that happens in the world against that makes the world worse. It makes daily life worse. Forget the even the false doctrine, forget destroying salvation by denying the Creator. It just makes everything worse. That's also part of this argument. It's not the main argument here, but you know what?

1:46:02 When all these attacks on Galatians 3.28 are provably and measurably making the world we live in a worse place, that's an indication that maybe we're up against God. We're maybe we're doing something that God says not to do, and we're believing the opposite of what he says. Because whenever you find people obeying God and doing what he says to do, you find God's blessings. Not in the way we were talking about earlier where we're trying to measure whoever has the most money must be the most blessed by God. That's not the point. Sometimes having wealth, having a lot of stuff is a test, it's a test that a lot of people fail. It could be a blessing if they were faithful, but when they have a lot, the way that they use it and how it

1:46:46 preoccupies them takes them further away from God. Whereas if they had less or had nothing, they would be better off. I wonder I want people to remember that this verse, whenever you hear someone talking about it, if they talk about it in ways that aren't about salvation, if they talk about it in ways that attack how God created everything, they're from hell. Full stop. I don't care who they are, what their reputation is, how much you like them, how much else they've gotten right in the past. The Galatians got stuff right. Paul planted the church in Galatia. They had sound doctrine. They could have only possibly had sound doctrine because their teacher was an apostle of Jesus Christ. It was when someone else snuck in and bewitched them and fed

1:47:31 them teachings of demons, and they believed them too because they couldn't tell the difference. We are no better than the Galatians. We're no better. We're worse in every demonstrable way. Because we are arrogant. We are the Pharisees. We're the ones who say that we have this confession, we have this logo, we're Christians, we're immune from that. No, we're not. The four part series culminate culminating in apostasy laid bare. That we are not immune. Not only you're not immune, but it's happening before our eyes. And this verse is one of the chief ways it's happening. Don't let it happen among you. When you hear somebody bring it up, test what they're saying. And if they're not talking about how this verse in Galatians is

1:48:14 a celebration of how God saves us from sin, death and the devil, if they want to try to make it about reordering this life, saying that the Christian life no longer has sexes, that you don't need to be husband and wife anymore, you don't need to have distinct nations, we can all just mix together and be one. They're from hell. Because everything, every single thing that will come downstream from those teachings is evil and does harm period. When Satan came to Christ in the desert in order to tempt him, he did it by quoting Scripture. And he didn't even misquote Scripture really. He quoted Scripture in a way that was misleading. It is possible to use basically any good toward a wicked end. It is possible to abuse things that are good in themselves in

1:49:11 order to use them to achieve evil. That's what Satan does with the law. God's law is perfect and good. It is used to kill us because we are sinners. And incidentally again to remind you of what we've gone over before we sin because we are sinners, it is not that we are sinners because we sin. The causation matters there, because original sin matters, but we've covered that previously. So for this verse here in Galatians, Christians need to pull out two sets of truths. The one is what it says on its face, but you must be careful to recognize, as Wo just said, that it is in the soteriological context only Only. And so there is neither Jew nor Greek, which is to say race does not matter to salvation.

1:50:02 There is neither slave nor free, which is to say your position socially or hierarchically does not matter to salvation, and there is not male and female, which is to say your sex does not matter to salvation. That is the first set of truths that you must pull out of this, and you must be careful to remember that for is causal. If and only if you are in Christ Jesus, then these things do not matter. Because that is the core of the Christian faith. The core of the Christian faith is that you are saved by faith alone. You are not saved by your works. I know that some who are listening are going to be up in arms, but that is the core of the Christian faith. There is no avoiding that. Well what about James?

1:50:51 That is about the end then what Which is part of what this podcast is. It's the end then what. How do I live a Christian life now that I'm a Christian, good works will necessarily flow from a living faith, but you are not saved by those works, those works do not contribute. What does Scripture say of those who would be justified by the law? You are damned, if you would be justified by the law, because you are severed from Christ. And so this verse is purely, in its literal wording about soteriology, it is about salvation, and so those first truths, that first set of truths that you must pull out are about salvation. The second set are the exact are the exact inverse of the literal wording. Because again, as I mentioned multiple times in this episode, this verse

1:51:47 is coherent if and only if these couplets are real things. And so as a Christian, you must pull out, race is real because there is Jew and there is Greek. Those are real things. That they are real is why it matters that they do not matter in order to be saved with regard to salvation. There is slave and there is free, which is to say that hierarchy is real. There is a real social hierarchy. God has created different men with different gifts. And that creates all of our hierarchies in civilization. It creates betters and lessers. It creates those with greater talents and those with lesser talents. That is not to say they are lesser men, that is a different thing. It is to say that some men are more capable than others.

1:52:45 And so there is slave, and there is free, with regard to the natural order of things. And finally, there is male and female, and that is a very real distinction. You are one or you are the other, and so you are either male or female. The exclusive or in English. You cannot be both, you must be one. And so anyone who attacks any of those three truths, is attacking Scripture, is ultimately attacking God, is anti Christian, is a false shepherd, is a wolf. So if anyone tells you that if you're male, oh you can be female today if you choose to be. No. And we didn't go over this in the episode, but those same words in Greek can be masculine and feminine. So if you're a male you're masculine. If you're a female you're feminine.

1:53:39 So if someone tells you as a male you can be feminine, that's a wolf. The second one, going in reverse order. Higher Hierarchy is part of God's created order. So those who seek to subvert it are seeking to subvert God's created order. What we have today is atomization. We have so many individuals who have taken themselves to be purely individuals, I stand alone, I am my own thing, I am an island unto myself. All of this stems ultimately, of course, from pride. The declaration that God's created order does not matter, and I can be and do whatever I want. And that's simply not true. We already went over that. If you're male, you're male. Period. Forever. You will be male in eternity. The gifts that God gave you, you have no control over those.

1:54:37 He decided how intelligent to make you, how tall to make you. All of these things are from God because everything you have is a gift from God. And so a rejection of those things is a rejection of the created order, is a rejection of the Creator. And finally one of the ones that is most stridently attacked these days. Not that hierarchy isn't certainly, but the simple fact that God created the races of man. We see that all throughout scripture, we address this in multiple episodes, many episodes at this point. We did a series on race. Race is a very real thing, it is part of God's created order, and to reject it is to reject God. And so one of the truths that a Christian must pull out, from this verse in Galatians, is that there is Jew, and there

1:55:31 is Greek. Drop in any national term you want there. There is Japanese and there is French, there's German, there's Russian, there's American. These things are real and they exist. We cannot reject either on the one hand that these things do not matter in terms of salvation, because that is to reject salvation by faith alone. And we cannot, on the other hand, reject that these things are real and part of the created order, because that is to reject the first clause of the Creed. It is to reject God the Father as creator. It is to reject what He has done in this world and stated this is my work, this is true, you must believe it. Because you cannot deny the creation without denying the creator.

1:56:22 Those are one and the same. And so for the Christian we must pull out both the negative truth from this and the positive truth, so to speak. And this isn't just a command, this isn't just you must absolutely do X, Y and Z. This is God's word to us, his truth, and there is blessing in believing that. Because I mentioned today we have so many individuals who feel atomized, who feel separated from everything. You have women who realize in their thirties or forties or God forbid their fifties that they wanted to have children. Because certainly by the time you're in your fifties it's too late. Yes, there's the occasional outlier, but it's very seldom. If we live our lives in accord with what God has designed,

1:57:15 in accord with the way that He has made us, we are going to have happier lives. And so saying that anyone can do anything is just lying to people and making them miserable. That's from Satan, that's a subversion of hierarchy, he is the one who wants to sow chaos and discord. That is not what God does. God is a god of order. This is his order. We see it in this verse, we see it in creation, because the truth isn't just here in the special revelation that is scripture. It's out there in the world too. All of these things can be known from natural revelation. And all of our ancestors knew them. And so what we want, not just for those who are listening, and not just for those who agree with us, but for all

1:58:04 Christians in all places, and all peoples we want to be Christian, of course. We want people to live in accord with what God has created, because that is the best way to live. That is in fact the only way to have a good life. And so, yes, on the one hand, if you just recognize these truths, you will have a better life because God does bless you when you live in accord with the nature He has given you. But the fullness of that blessing is when you are in Christ. And so it is when you have faith, when you are an offspring of Abraham, an heir according to promise. And so again we encourage you to go and read the fullness of the letter to the Galatians. It'll take you ten, fifteen minutes. See God's blessings.

1:58:56 See why this matters. See what God says in his words. You are what God created you to be, whether it's a Jew or a Greek, slave or free, whatever talents, abilities, wherever in the hierarchy he's placed you, and whether you are male or female. That is what God created you to be. That is a good thing. Live your life accordingly.