08 What it Means to be Clothed with Christ (Galatians 3:23-29)

Krisan Marotta: Thank you for listening to Wednesday in the Word. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. Today we're going to study Galatians chapter 3, verses 23 through 29. This is the eighth topic in our series on Galatians. Lecture notes for today's talk are on the link below the podcast. You can also find them at Wednesdayintheword.com slash Galatians 8. Thanks for joining me. We're finishing chapter 3 today of the book of Galatians, and as always, let's review how we got here. Paul wrote this letter to churches who are abandoning the gospel in favor of law-keeping. The Judaizers have come to town since Paul left and taught them that belief in Christ is not enough. They must also keep the law and live like Jews. And Paul is writing to correct them. In the first two chapters, he defended his authority and his gospel. He argued that his gospel is completely trustworthy because no human being invented it, no human being taught it to him. Instead, he received it as a revelation from Jesus Christ. He was called and given authority by Jesus to preach the gospel. And even though he learned the gospel independently, when he had a chance to compare notes with the other apostles, they of course discovered they were teaching the same gospel. In chapter 3, then he begins confronting the Galatians directly for turning away from the gospel. And in this section of the book, Paul develops his second major theme, which is the gospel is centered on the cross and founded on justification by faith. And he is going through five persuasive arguments for the fact that we are justified by faith alone. So far, we have looked at the first three. In three, one through five, Paul says, look at your own experience. Did you receive the spirit? And he's using the spirit there as the mark or the seal, the sign that God has accepted you. Did you receive that because you got your act together and finally started keeping the law? Or because you heard the gospel and believed it? And he says, Of course, you received the spirit because you have faith. In 3, 6 through 14, then he argued that that experience is confirmed by Scripture, because the Scripture teaches that Abraham believed God and God justified him because of his faith. And from the beginning, justification always came through faith because God promised that those who had faith like Abraham would be blessed. In 3,15 through 22, Paul argued that God made a promise to Abraham, but the law which came later was a deal, and the deal does not nullify the promise. So the promise to Abraham was a one-sided covenant in which God promised to bless Abraham and those who have faith like him. The law was a deal or a two-sided covenant given to the children of Israel through an intermediary. So the law spells out the standard of holiness and righteousness and is an if-then kind of relationship. Both parties must keep their end of the deal. And Paul argued that the law was given to teach us we're not holy and that we are not capable of being righteous. And therefore we need the promise. In the section we're covering today, we're still in Paul's answer to the question he raised in 319: why the law then? If the promise of God is as good as Paul says it is, then why did God ever give the law? Is there any good reason for it? And Paul replies, yes, indeed, there's a very good reason for it. The law teaches us that we're sinful and that we need a savior. But having learned that lesson, we should graduate from law-keeping into maturity of faith. In the section we're looking at today, Paul's arguing that the law served a very great purpose in our spiritual lives. It was a purpose we needed in the immaturity of our spiritual childhood. But as we grow in our understanding of faith, he's urging us to graduate, to become spiritually grown up, mature saints who leave the law behind. And I'll explain what I mean by that as we go through. Let me read Galatians 3, 23 through 29, and then we'll go back and walk through it. 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 or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise. Let's go back then and we'll start with 23 and 24. 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. All right, let's start with this phrase before faith came. I think that refers to before Jesus came, especially because in the next verse he restates the idea as the law was our guardian until Christ came. When Jesus came, he explained God's plan more fully and more clearly than any prophet before him. He explained that it was necessary for him to die, but that he would be resurrected and God would then send the Holy Spirit. And this was always the plan, but it has been revealed to us more clearly since Jesus came and explained it. We see hints of it, we see glimpses in the prophets and in the Old Testament, but when Jesus came, he explained it more clearly and more straightforwardly than any other prophet. So when he says, before faith came, before Jesus came and explained the gospel clearly to us, we were in the protective custody of the law. We were imprisoned by the law. This word translated held captive in 323 is used elsewhere in the New Testament to describe the action of armed guards being placed around a city. Before Jesus came, what was the role of the law? The law held us in a kind of protective custody. It hemmed us in like armed guards, showing us right from wrong, limiting and fettering our rebellion. The rules of the law bound us and fenced us in, teaching us what's right, showing us what's wrong, until we learned the depths of our sinfulness and cried out for a savior. Often when you have a rebellious child, you love them by laying down the law. You might restrict their freedom, limit the time they spend with their friends, take away their cell phone, and so forth. And the more rebellious they are, the more rules and boundaries you sometimes must set. And partly this is to keep them from harming themselves. It's also to teach them right from wrong. But the goal is always to teach them something and end the rebellion. And that's the kind of picture Paul is painting here. God gave us the law to give us boundaries, to put us in a kind of protective custody. He restates that in the next verse, we were kept under a guardian or a tutor. So then the law was our guardian until Christ came in order that we might be justified by faith. There's no single word in English capable of translating the idea behind this word guardian in 324. It's a kind of a learning enforcer. In his commentary on Galatians, John Stott explains it this way. The Greek word means literally a tutor, i.e. a guide and guardian of boys. He was usually himself a slave whose duty it was to conduct the boy or the youth to and from school and to superintend his conduct generally. The AV translation schoolmaster is unfortunate for the pedagogue, or the tutor, was not the boy's teacher so much as his disciplinarian. He was often harsh to the point of cruelty and is often depicted in ancient drawings with a rod or a cane in his hand. Perhaps the best modern equivalent would be to picture a drill instructor at basic military training. So you've probably seen those Hollywood movies about the military, and there's often a strict, no-nonsense drill instructor who breaks in the raw, undisciplined new recruits. Or sometimes this sergeant is working with juvenile delinquents, trying to force them to mature and grow up. So we see the drill sergeant yell in the rookies' faces, require them to tackle physical challenges and live by hundreds of rules, and all these rules are for their own good. Well, that's how the law operated in our lives. It insisted on obedience in order to hem us in and to limit our sin. We needed the law to restrain us, to teach us, and to mature us. And the law was necessary because we human beings are sinners. We would be much worse off without these things. As humiliating and demanding as something like basic training is, the intent in terms of character building and maturity is good. And similarly, the law has this kind of good purpose. It may be a very demanding and stretching experience, but it teaches a very valuable lesson. The Old Testament law was intended to keep us safe, just like a child is given rules for his own safety. It warned us of the dangers of pursuing other gods. It taught us what is evil, what is good. It showed us how to be just and fair. It explained what it means to love God and love your neighbor. Had we followed all of its rules, we would be much better off. We'd still be sinners, but listening to the law would keep our feet from running into so much evil. The law guided us, coached us, and directed us along a path that was in the right direction. The law keeps alive the knowledge of God and the promise he made to the children of Abraham. Read the law, and it's filled with language about I will be your God and you will be my people. I will bless you as I blessed Abraham and so forth. The promises to Abraham are woven throughout the law. The law keeps alive the knowledge that God requires and expects his people to be holy. If you really start taking the law seriously, you immediately come up against the demands of what it means to love God with your whole being and to love your neighbor as yourself, because it's all over the law. And the law reminds us that God expects obedience to him alone. If you take the law seriously, it would keep you from wandering off after idols and counterfeit gods. God expects people to honor him, seek him, and obey him. If you try to keep the covenant seriously, you can't get away from that. The law also kept alive the expectation that God was going to establish a kingdom where he would be their God and they would be his people. The law has built-in reminders of the promises of God. That's not an exhaustive list of what the law does for us, but you can see how that is a kind of protective custody. The people of God who really seriously tried to follow the law would learn all those valuable lessons, in addition to the fact that they were sinful and needed a savior. I think that's why he ends in 324, in order that we might be justified by faith. The law could teach us a lot of valuable lessons that prepare our hearts for faith and point us in the right direction and keep us from evil. Then 325, but now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. Having gone through basic training, we don't need to go back and repeat that lesson. Once the process has been finished, once the intent has been met, the lesson has been learned, why go back to the guardian? We were intended to grow up, to be set free from the law. When faith comes, we ought to live as free and responsible graduates. Only a fool would want to go back to basic training and start all over again. Now that the Messiah has come, we don't need to stay in the protective custody of the law. The demanding drill sergeant of the law is necessary for new recruits and rebellious children, but it was not intended for those who had already graduated into the life of faith or become spiritual grown-ups, so to speak. 25 and 26, but now that faith has come, we are no longer under our guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith. This is the first time we've seen Paul use the phrase sons of God in this letter. I think it's just another way of describing the people of God, the heirs of Abraham's promise. The emphasis in this verse is all of you. All of you are sons of God. All of you are sons of God through faith. The path to eternal life is the same for Jew and Gentile. If you have saving faith, you are a child of God. It doesn't matter if you begin that journey to faith as a Jew or as a Gentile. Once we've come to saving faith, we've graduated and finished basic training under the law. We are no longer under its custody, we are no longer under that drill sergeant. We've left our stormy, rebellious adolescents behind for mature, faithful adulthood, and we are now free, responsible heirs of the promise of Abraham. Why would you need the Mosaic covenant once you believe the teaching of the Messiah? You won't learn anything from the Mosaic covenant that you haven't learned from Jesus. And by anything, I mean you won't learn anything necessary to find salvation. That's the issue on the table. Paul and the Judaizers disagree over what it takes to receive eternal life. Is belief in Jesus enough, or do you have to believe in Jesus and live like a Jew? And Paul is saying Jesus explained the full picture of how to find life in his kingdom. He didn't leave anything out. There isn't anything in the law about how to find eternal life that Jesus didn't explain. You have graduated from the law. If you're following and embracing the teaching of Jesus, the very truths the law pointed you to are in Jesus' teaching. You don't need to be in the protective custody of the law anymore. Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the caretaker of the law. Gentiles can learn and know all they need to know about finding eternal life from the teaching of Jesus. They don't need to go back and keep the law to learn it. It's all in the teaching of the Messiah. Now, if they go back and study the law, will they learn some valuable lessons? Most likely, but they don't need the law in the same way. Remember, the Judaizers have two problems with Paul's teaching. One is that he doesn't make the Gentiles live like Jews, but second, and equally annoying to them, is he doesn't require believing Jews to live like Jews. Paul eats with sinners. He goes to the houses of Gentiles. He sits next to them and rubs shoulders with them. Socializing with Gentiles is a completely non-Jewish thing to do, and the Judaizers are outraged by that behavior. Paul is explaining why he as a Jew feels free to socialize with Gentile believers in Christ and thus disobey the Mosaic covenant. The law was his guardian, his caretaker, but he's not under the guardian anymore. He's a disciple of Jesus. He's following the teaching of Jesus. Now, is there overlap between the law and the teaching of Jesus? Of course. Both clearly teach we are to love God and love our neighbors. But Paul is free to socialize with Gentile believers because he's graduated from the custody of the law. Jesus gave him a much fuller picture and he's following it. The law had its place, but once faith has come, the law has a different place. Part of his point in this section is to explain why Jews no longer have to live like Jews and why Gentiles don't need to live like Jews either. Now, can Jews continue to live like Jews if they want? I think Paul would say yes, but not as a means to earn their salvation or to please God. It's not wrong to keep the law out of love for God and a desire to honor Him. And we see Paul keep kosher and keep the Sabbath and celebrate the feast and so forth when it's appropriate and when he wants to. But he's not keeping the law as a means to earn salvation or find eternal life. He understands that those blessings come through faith in Jesus, but he can keep the covenant to honor God and his people. And sometimes out of love, Paul keeps the covenant because he doesn't want to offend the Jews he's teaching. At other times, out of love, Paul breaks the laws because he doesn't want to confuse the Gentiles he is teaching. He has the freedom to do both. 327, for as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. First, let me talk a little bit about baptism and what it is, and then we'll explain how Paul is using it metaphorically. Baptism is a celebration of the fact that someone has committed to becoming a follower of Jesus. And I think there are at least three main ways to think about baptism. The first way is to see it as a sacrament. We are told to be baptized because the ritual itself has some kind of power in it, and you can't be fully saved unless you have gone through this ritual. So we're told to be baptized because the rite itself is necessary and you can't really believe without it. Now, a lot of people believe that. So rather than having some kind of spiritual power in and of itself, it is commanded and therefore something we ought to obey. Salvation is not dependent on whether or not we do it, but it is commanded. We can be saved if we never have a chance to be baptized, but we are being disobedient not to do it. And that's another very common view. That one makes more sense to me than the first view of it having some kind of power in and of itself. But I think you can make a better case for view number three, which is that baptism is a culturally understood ritual that is a sign of the reality of belief. The command is to believe. Baptism is the symbol of that belief. What have we been commanded to do? We've been commanded to believe the gospel, repent of our sins, and to become disciples of Jesus. That's the real command. Baptism is a ceremony or a ritual that we do that symbolizes the reality of coming to faith. Without underlying faith, the ritual is meaningless. It has no power in and of itself. What's eternally important is the reality that the ritual or the ceremony symbolizes. So I think you can be saved if you've never had the chance to be baptized and you are not disobedient if you are never baptized. The baptism itself is not the issue. The reality of the belief is the issue. And I would understand the passages that command baptism as really commanding the preaching, teaching, and making disciples. Baptism is the accepted and understood symbol that accompanies belief. So Paul tells us in this verse, the baptized have put on Christ, or some translations say, clothe yourself with Christ. Clothing ourselves is a common metaphor in the prophets, and Paul uses it a few times in his letters. The thing you clothe yourself with, or the thing you put on, defines you the way we put on clothes. We present ourselves to the world through our clothes. We wear business clothes in the office. We wear formal clothes to a special event. We wear work clothes to do yard work or dig in the garden. The clothes we wear involve a decision about how we want to present ourselves. Our clothes say something about us, about what we intend to do, what kind of people we are. Wearing designer clothes sends a different message than wearing thrift store clothes. To put on Christ or to clothe myself with Christ is to define my identity as one of his followers, so that when you see me, you see me as a follower of Jesus because I have identified myself with him. That's what Paul says is the significance of baptism. We were baptized because we chose to become followers of Christ. Baptism is the ceremony that signals that I have made that decision. Now, some scholars think Paul is alluding to the Roman ceremony where a young man reaching adulthood donned a special toga to symbolize that he was now a man. So they had a ceremony that as a young man moved from childhood into adulthood, he graduated to wearing a special kind of man's clothing or toga. Similarly, when we move from childhood under the law to adulthood, we put on Christ. It's that kind of image. A more familiar image to us might be a graduation ceremony where all the graduates wear their cap and gown. The clothing they put on, the cap and gown, symbolizes that they have completed their degree, finished their course, and are ready to start the next phase of life. Baptism is a ceremony that symbolizes that kind of graduation. So paraphrasing 325 to 27, Paul's saying, Since Jesus came and explained the gospel, we are no longer under the guardianship of the law. We are all children of God because of our faith, and that is symbolized by our baptism where we identified ourselves as followers of Christ. Going on to three twenty-eight and twenty-nine, 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's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise. So further, he concludes this little section by saying, All of us come to faith the same way. There's no different path to faith for a Jew or a Gentile. Jews may have an advantage in that they learned of the law earlier and sooner and learned about God sooner, but we are all saved by grace. There is no hierarchy in the body of Christ. Everyone is placed in the same spiritual river. There's not one river for rich people and one river for poor people. Everyone is metaphorically immersed entirely over his or her head and comes up as wet as everyone else. We are all equally sinful and equally saved. The point he's making is we all come to faith the same way. Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, it doesn't matter. We all come to faith in the same way. We all need the drill master of the law to teach us we are sinful, we all need the same savior, we all need to graduate from that basic training into faith. But it's the same faith, faith in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, that saves us. This is the issue he's tackling with the Judaizers. They also claim there's only one way to gain the blessing of Abraham, but their way involves keeping the law. Paul tackles that directly and says lawkeeping does not gain us the blessing of Abraham. If you have faith in Christ, then you are a child of Abraham and you stand to inherit the promised blessing from God. Doesn't matter how you started out. It doesn't matter what your cultural background is. It doesn't matter if you grew up rich or poor, free or slave. It doesn't matter if you grew up in the blessing of a faithful household or not. It doesn't matter which side of the tracks you lived on, and it doesn't matter whether you had privilege or poverty, whether you had the best education or no education at all. All of us are sinful, all of us need that drill master of the law to teach us we're sinful, but in the end we all need the same faith in Jesus Christ. To extend my metaphor a little more, our graduation robes cover whatever we're wearing underneath. It doesn't matter whether we're wearing a Jewish prayer shawl or a Roman toga, the rags of the homeless or the finery of the rich. We all need to be clothed in Christ. Each man, woman, slavery free, Jew or Gentile has the same Savior and the same Lord. Now the fact that we're equal before God has lots of implications for how we see each other and how we treat each other, and we could spend hours challenging ourselves with what it means that we all come to Christ the same way. I'm not going to go through all that. I'll leave that to you to think through maybe in your small groups. The problem is that 328 has been used as a touchstone by the so-called biblical feminists to claim that Paul says there's neither male nor female, therefore there's no difference whatsoever between men and women ever under any circumstances or in any area of life. The question I think they failed to ask is in what sense is there neither male nor female? Consider this verse in the context of Paul's argument. His overarching purpose is to prove to the Galatians that they are turning away from the true gospel by going back to keeping the law. He's argued that the true gospel is not man-made, but God himself revealed it to us. He argued that he received the gospel through revelation and was given a unique role to proclaim it and teach it. He is in the midst of five arguments for why justification by faith alone is the true gospel. We're in the third of those five arguments, and he has digressed slightly to explain the purpose of the law. He has just argued that the law serves as our drill master in a kind of basic training to teach us that we need a savior, and he concludes this section in 329. And if you are Christ, in other words, if you have faith in Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, i.e., then you are a child of Abraham, heirs according to the promise, and you stand to inherit the promise of eternal life. All of that is to argue that the promise is better than the deal. The law was never intended to save us, only to teach us. No one who is saved got that way by keeping the law. Those of us who are saved are saved because we had faith, not because we got our acts together and kept the law. Now, in the midst of that kind of discussion, that line of argument, do you think Paul would stop and say, Oh, and by the way, there are no gender differences anymore under any circumstance in any relationship, especially marriage in the church, which is the point that the biblical feminists want to make. I don't think that's very likely. The context of Paul's argument is salvation. How do you become a child of Abraham? Who stands to inherit the promises of God? And his argument is there is only one path to the promises of Abraham. There is only one path, and all of us must walk it. And that path is justification by faith alone. And it is the same for everyone, regardless of your race, your gender, or your economic status. It's highly unlikely in that kind of an argument that Paul would suddenly make a claim to abolishing gender roles in marriage. As an aside, this is one of the five C's of Bible study. Since part of my goal here is to further your study skills, let me digress for a moment and review what I'm talking about. The five C's of Bible study are a way to decide is an interpretation of a passage valid? And it has to fit all five of these words that begin with C. I have a blog post on this on my website and I'll put a link to it in the lecture notes. The first C is credible. An interpretation of a passage is a valid interpretation if it is credible, and that means that it understands the words, the syntax, and the grammar according to their normal usage at the time the author wrote. Words change meaning over time and in different cultures. For example, suppose I'm watching a Doris Day movie and she says of a man in the movie, he's gay. Then I watch a Sandra Bullock movie and she says the same thing. I would understand them differently because that word has changed meaning. Doris means the other character is happy go lucky. Sandra means he's not interested in her, and we would not expect him to be her love interest in the movie. And we see this as Bible translations are updated. As words change their meaning, the translations must be updated to avoid confusion. For example, in the 1970s, translators changed a passage in Acts from Paul was stoned to Paul received a stoning, because in the 1970s, being stoned meant something different. So the first C is credible and has to understand the words and the grammar and the syntax according to the way they were used at the time the author wrote. The second one is comprehensive. That means an interpretation must explain each and every detail in the passage, even if that contribution is stylistic. So we can't leave out a phrase, we can't leave out a sentence, we can't leave out a word, we have to interpret everything that's there. For example, in the parable of the widow and the unjust judge in Luke 18, that story begins, he told them a parable so that they would pray and not lose heart. However, we understand the parable, we have to consider the author's comment that the purpose of this parable has something to do with not losing heart. And any interpretation that ignores that statement is not as good as an interpretation that includes it. The third C is coherent, and that is, it fits the flow of thought in the passage and in the larger context of the chapter in the book. The way to picture this is suppose you're standing on a bridge over a river, and you look on the left side of the bridge and the water's flowing downhill, and then you walk to the other side of the bridge and the water's flowing downhill. You expect the water under the bridge that you can't see to be flowing the same direction. So when we reach difficult verses, they can be like water under the bridge. We expect them to fit the flow of the verses before and after them. The fourth C is consistent. It's consistent with information which is not in the book, so the author's other letters, the rest of Scripture. Scripture does not contradict itself. If we come across two passages that seem to contradict each other, we have to assume that our understanding of one of them, or maybe both, is wrong. The classic example of this is the question of whether James and Paul agree. And I would say good Bible students start from the premise that they do agree. We assume God inspired both their understandings and they were teaching the same gospel. And any interpretation that says, well, James was wrong and Paul was right, or vice versa, is suspect. And finally, the last C is conforms. The interpretation must conform to the author's purpose and the author's plan. A passage means what the author intended it to mean to his original audience. If you and I are having a conversation and I say A, but you hear B, when I respond, that's not what I meant, that should settle the issue. I may have failed to communicate, but what I intended is the only correct way to interpret my words. So for example, if a passage says Jesus fed 5,000 people, and we suddenly find historical evidence that proves he actually fed 5,010, the text isn't wrong because the author never intended to give a precise headcount. He was simply making the point lots of people were fed. So I would argue that the way the biblical feminists interpret Galatians 3.28 to claim that Paul is abolishing all gender roles is just wrong. That interpretation fails the coherent test, the consistent test, and the conformity test. Paul is talking about how we are justified, and he is arguing we are justified by faith in Jesus, and that there is no distinction between men and women, Jew or Greek, slave or free, when it comes to salvation. That's what this paragraph is about. That's what the chapter is about. That's what he's going to keep talking about in the next section, and really it's what the whole letter is about. Paul is not saying that maleness and femaleness have ceased to exist in every sense and in every relationship. He is not saying that we are to make no distinction between them in any context whatsoever. It's not even on his mind. He's not talking about society norms and he's not talking about marriage roles. The only thing he's talking about is how we come to faith in Jesus and how we receive the blessing of Abraham. We are all the same with respect to our inheritance and the kingdom of God. We will all find that through faith in Jesus. To take Paul's statement out of context and try to derive any other kind of rules or doctrines or regulations is bad methodology. I think we could argue that Paul sees all of us as made in the image of God, especially when we bring in his other letters. He would strongly argue that the command to love our neighbors as ourselves requires us to treat everyone with respect, honor, and integrity. He would never argue that believers are free to have and mistreat servants or slaves. He would never argue that husbands are free to mistreat their wives or that the rich are free to take advantage of the poor. He teaches us that we are equally sinners before God and we all have the same Savior. I do think Paul would argue that husbands are not to lord it over their wives, but not because there's no distinction between male and female, because we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. We are equal heirs of the promise, equally made in God's image. Similarly, I think he'd argue we shouldn't have slaves because people shouldn't own each other. Slavery is not wrong because it's a class distinction that has been done away with. Slavery is wrong because it violates this principle of loving my neighbor as myself and seeing and understanding that every human being is created in the image of God, and that alone makes mistreating them wrong. But that's not the context of Galatians. Paul is not trying to say that there is no distinction between these groups whatsoever politically, economically, or culturally. Obviously, there are distinctions between these types of people. For better or worse, their lives and experiences are going to be very different because of these distinctions. But the one way they are not different is how they gain life in the kingdom of God. We all have the same problem of sin. We all have the same guilt before a holy God. There's only one solution to the problem of our sin and our guilt, and all of us need it, and that solution is the cross of Christ. You've been listening to the Winstand the Word podcast. My mission is to explain not only what a passage means, but how we figure it out. Please follow, rate, and review us on your favorite podcast app. The more people who do that, the easier it is for others to find the podcast. All previous episodes in this series and many other series are on my website, Wednesdayintheword.com. Our theme music is graciously provided by my friend and favorite musician, Reggie Coates. You can find his wonderful music on heartfeltmusic.org. Thanks so much for listening today. I'm Krissan Marata, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word. In the meantime, try to find some time to visit my website, WednesdayandTheWord.com, and take advantage of some of my free Bible study materials. There's no ads, no spam, and no requests for money.