Isaiah 19:1-21:17, Galatians 2:1-16, Psalm 59:1-17, Proverbs 23:13-14
Today is September 15th. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian and it is wonderful to be here with you today. This is the dead center of the ninth month of the year. Halfway through another one of our months together and I would like to say that we are in the dead center of the book of Isaiah, which is what we are reading in the Old Testament right now. But we’re not, we’re not quite to the middle yet. Isaiah has 66 chapters. So, we would need to be at chapter 33, and today we will be reading chapters 19, 20, and 21.
Commentary:
Okay, so, in our reading from Galatians today, Paul is continuing to essentially give a retelling of his testimony and how it is that he arrived with this Gospel that he is preaching, how it is that he came to the convictions that he is spreading throughout the Empire, and then bringing the story to discuss the disagreements that had arisen in the early church, basically over who gets to be in. How does one become initiated into this Gospel? How does one become in? So, according to Paul’s own testimony in Galatians, he had been living into his faith in Jesus. So, away from being a Pharisee and living into walking with Jesus for over 17 years. And his claim was that he did not, he did not receive the truth of the Gospel from anybody else. He’d only met Peter once and that was 14 years earlier. The only other person that he’d ever met was Jesus brother James. So, according to Paul, what he preached is what he received directly from Jesus himself. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem there is a church forming, growing out of the original followers of Jesus and they were, they were wrestling with who gets to be in. What about the Gentiles are coming to faith in Jesus. And what we can see from Galatians is not everybody was on the same page. This is an early controversy in the church. In fact, let me quote from our reading from Galatians today. “This matter arose because some false believers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus, and to make us slaves. We did not give in to them for a moment, so that the truth of the Gospel might be preserved for you.” Okay, so it’s easy for us to go okay, so those are the bad guys. But it’s just so much more complicated than that.