And we're going. and we're going to be starting off, we're kind of like we left off last week. Paul gives us some kind of a geographical location, and basically we're going to pick up here in verse 16, actually a little back further than I thought, and we're going to go to chapter 2, verses 1 through 5. We're going to move forward and try to get through chapter 2. So in Galatians chapter 1, picking up in verse 16, To reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen, immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood. Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me, but I went into Arabia and returned again unto Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days. But other of the apostles saw I none save James the Lord's brother. Now the things which I write unto you, behold, before God I lie not. Afterwards I came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia, and was unknown by faith unto the churches of Judea which were in Christ. But they had heard only that he which persecuted us in times past now preacheth the faith which once he destroyed. And they glorify God and me." Chapter 2. And the heading, if you see it in your Bible, is justification by faith and not by works. This is extremely massive. Then fourteen years after, I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, and took Titus with me also. And I went up by revelation, and communicated unto them that gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, but privately to them which were of reputation, lest by any means I should run, and had run in vain. But neither Titus, who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised. and that because of false brethren unaware is brought in, who came imperviously to spy out our liberty," that's an incredible word here, our liberty, which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage, to whom we gave place by subjection, no, not for an hour, that the truth of the gospel might continue with you. We see in verse 15 and 16, actually going to the 16, to reveal his Son in me. And let's go back a little bit. How in Paul's life, and we were talking about it in great detail, I'm sorry, we're in Galatians 1 verses 16 to the end, and then chapter 2 verses 1 through 5. How are some of the ways that the Lord revealed himself to Paul specifically? And there's a reason that I'm bringing this together. Anybody remember? Yeah. That was a revelation. That was an absolute one-on-one revelation to Paul, which was a qualification of being an apostle. Remember, the prophets in the Old Testament always had God speaking audibly to them. Can you imagine being Ezekiel? Can you imagine being taken in vision? Have you ever had a weird dream? A weird dream and you get up the next morning and like wow I'm glad I'm back to earth and it's so weird you just feel like you really like were caught up in it and it was so weird you can even feel things in your dreams and when you're touching them you can feel them and it's like all of a sudden you get up and you're like wow boy am I glad that's over well The Lord, He appears to Ezekiel in a vision, and He shows him all these incredible miracles, which we could be here a long time talking about those. But these were visions, and the Lord specifically came to Ezekiel and showed these things personally. Can you imagine that happening? Well, we're going to see these things one day when we leave this earth. That's one of the infinite, wonderful things that we're going to be able to experience. Paul was approached by Christ Himself. Paul had Christ on the right hand of the Father, no doubt, and probably either hovering over or standing up, just as he did in front of Stephen, and he says, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? Why are you kicking against the pricks? In other words, why are you so hard-headed you're as dumb as an ox? Because that came from a whole teaching about what oxes do to ox carts and they're kicking against the goads and the pricks on the ox carts. Then he says, why would you even consider persecuting thou me? I'm sorry, Lisa, did you have your hand up there a little bit? So anyway, basically what happens here There were other times that the Lord appeared to Paul. Does anybody remember any other times? Remember when Paul was kind of down and he was getting ready to be incarcerated? The Lord appeared to him and said, Paul, you're going to go to Rome. And he said it in an audible voice. He said it to him. He could literally hear his voice. And so we see here, it pleased the Lord to reveal his Son to me, that I might preach him among the heathen. Immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood. What was the word heathen synonymous with now? Very important. Who were the heathen? Well, they were pagans, but who were they now? We're all one of them. Another clue. Starts with a G. Gentile. That's it. The heathen nations and all throughout the Old Testament there were prophecies about reaching out to the Gentiles. The Jews thought that they were the absolute chosen bunch and that they didn't want to go outside of that. That's why Jonah was so utterly... Jonah, the more I've learned about Jonah over the years, I've learned Jonah was not just running away from God. He was furious with God. He was like, how dare you turn your back on the Jews and actually bring these pagan, wicked people into the fold. We don't want them. Well, we're going to see this morning how there was a problem between Paul the Apostle and Peter. And in the book of Galatians chapter 2, it actually starts getting a little bit elevated because Paul had this real, direct, pure love for Christianity and only worship for Christ where Peter still had a little bit of a connection to the ceremonial laws. And it's being pointed out here. And so here we see that in verse 17. He said, Paul says, neither when I went up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me, but I went into Arabia and returned again into Damascus." Paul reifies and he goes back to what we've learned in the second missionary journeys and his third missionary journeys. But we see here that the gospel of Christ is not of man, it is from God, and Paul confirms its authenticity. And there's no other gospel. There can be no other gospel. Now last time we read Luke 4.18 and we read Romans 16.25. Can someone read 1 Corinthians 1.17 now and then someone else 2 Corinthians 4.4. And we have to stay on this. This is important to keep bringing this together. So the first one, once again, is 1 Corinthians 1, verse 17. And the second verse, someone else can read, is 2 Corinthians 4, verse 4. Perfect. That's important. Thank you, Teresa. Who has 2 Corinthians 4, 4? Is that 2 Corinthians 4, 4 or 1 Corinthians? Chapter 4, verse 4? Really? Yeah. Thank you, Matthew. That's perfect. None other gospel. So the question remains, how is it that so many are taken by back the ceremonial law as the basis of their salvation? Why is this happening? Now Paul goes into chapter 2 in Galatians, as we skip over a couple verses just for a second, and he starts talking about Titus. Who was Titus? We're going to look at that in a minute. But I don't, I was kind of going to leave this go till maybe like we were a little bit halfway through the message today and I'm really going to try not to go until 10 of 11 today because there's some things that need to be done. It's hard not to because there's so much good information here. But I, digging in the book of Galatians sheds an incredible beacon light on what really the problem is. Really, I believe, is really the core problem why a lot of people, even in evangelical ranks, do not understand the work of Christ. And when I explain this, I'm going to take you to a Latin phrase that Martin Luther used. We're going to do that in a minute, so please try to pay attention and brace yourselves. I think you're going to find this fascinating. This Latin phrase that Luther gave brought it all together because there were so many problems back in the 16th century, even all the way 500 and some years ago, Even, let's see, 2017 would have made the 500-year anniversary. So that's about 500 and what? Seven? About 500, six years ago. This is what Luther was working on right before he died. But here's what's going on. And remember, the clue is, the heading in your Bible for chapter 2 is justification by faith and not by works. So, in verse 18 we see Paul says, I want to go through this first and then we're going to look at traditions and then we're going to look at this phrase from Martin Luther. He says, then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter and abode with him fifteen days. We studied this really, really hard for about two weeks when Peter went up to Jerusalem with Paul and he was there with James. Now remember, there were two apostle James. There was one that was one of the sons of thunder. Remember the sons of Zebedee? And they were the ones that were complaining to the Lord who would be sitting on the right and the left hand of the Lord. And the Lord said, can you drink the cup that I have? Remember. Then there was another one. There was James who was the half-brother of Jesus himself. And one of those got martyred and one of them, and I believe it was James the son of Zebedees, the one that was beheaded by Herod. And so what happens here is that what we went through really gets attached and plugged into our situation today as a Christian church. What did we have two Fridays ago? We had a presbytery meeting. And something that I'm going to bring up in the announcements today, the elders of all of our sister churches want to get together with me and I want to get together with them. And we're going to start trying to have a Bible study once a month. We're going to try to do it remotely because they're all scattered across the country, a lot of them. There's ones out in California. And what we're going to try to do is we're going to try to have like some kind of a meeting where we get online and we can either by video or whatever have a Bible study, have a couple of the elders pray and just give updates on the churches in order to just encourage each other. This is what was going on here in Jerusalem and no less than three times here we see in verse 18 Paul says, I went up to Jerusalem. Why is that so important? It's very important because the problems many churches have today Paul is a missionary of missionaries. He spoke with Jesus. He even said back in verse 16, the Lord Jesus Christ revealed himself. And as powerful as he was, he never thought that. And as important as he was, he never even considered that. But you know what he did? He went back to Jerusalem. How would you like to go, if you're in the middle of Damascus, if you're in the middle of some of the northeastern bordered countries up there that are on the borders of some of the waterways and all, and you're out there doing all of your missionary work, how would you like to have to drop everything you're doing and to travel by either horse or camel or by foot and go all the way back down to Jerusalem which took days in order to spend a couple days there with the Jerusalem council. Why was he doing that? It's pronounced here, and we're looking at this verse by verse. When he says, I went back to Jerusalem, he's trying to tell the Judaizers and the followers of the Galatian churches, I went back to Peter. See, what they were saying is, Peter, James, and John were real apostles, but you're not. They were basically accusing him of not being a real apostle. And he's saying, I went to the council. I sat and look at here, he says, I was with Peter, I was with Cephas, I was with James. I was with these men. Then he brings up some of his understudies. These are very important details to show that Paul was showing evidence that not only was the apostle an apostle, he was teaching the gospel of Christ to even those that were considered pagan, and they got saved. And we're going to see Titus. Titus has his own book name. The evidence is a writing from Paul to Titus. Titus, the name itself was Greek. He was a Gentile. And so here Paul had gone back to Jerusalem, and the main reason that I'm getting to is so that he had accountability. He was there and he was being weighed out by the Jerusalem council and what he was doing, he kept record of it from Luke. Luke kept a lot of record. Remember, Paul had a really hard time physically. He couldn't even write very well. Evidently, he had some real problems from historical accounts. He had tremors in his hands. He had a horrible time with his eyesight. Luke did a lot of recording for him. John Mark, who went back to Cyprus with Parnassus, he did a lot of work with Paul. And so Timothy did. And these writings, they went back to the Jerusalem council. And everything he did, he confirmed it with them. And they said it was wonderful. But Peter and Paul had a problem. Those two had a problem. We're going to look at that. Traditions are a problem. We were looking at that several weeks ago. Traditions have problems and there's two ways that there are people, there are many sects of churches and political establishments. that go away from the unbridled direct truth of what is factual and what goes all the way back in our Constitution to the preamble, the Bill of Rights, and back to the Bible, to the Ten Commandments. And there are ways that this can go off the beaten path. And this is what Paul is going after. we spoke several weeks ago about up at Temple University, there were 50 students that were picked, 30 were the creme de la creme, and their job was to tell the professor why they believe in macroevolution. Now, one of them came back and said it's because of causal substances, that causal substances or common substances come from a common source. But what they couldn't answer was what was that common source? It's like the debate that R.C. Sproul got in with Carl Sagan years ago. And he went on about the Big Bang. He went on about all of this stuff and the fire and all of the earth and the mountains came together. He kept asking him, where did that first ball of gas come from? Sagan got furious and he goes, science can't answer that. He goes, well, if it can't, that's not science. Where'd it come from? Why is this happening? And why is this widespread bowl of lies, these horrible lies, spreading through even evangelical churches today? Matthew. Right. That's right. Right. Well, what you're saying is extremely important because adaptation is a derivative of the original evolution theory or hypothesis, they call it. There's no factual empirical evidence of an original evolutionary existence. There is none. If it happened billions of years ago, that's just throw people off the beaten path because nobody could ever even attest to it. Here's the problem with adaptation. What does adaptation require? What does it require? It's the same thing evolution requires. Time. It requires time. What if you're a fish in the middle of the ocean and if you have not grown gills yet and you can't breathe oxygen yet? They don't answer that. You can't survive. What if you're a human being? Well, you're not a human being, you're a mammal. You came out predicated on the ice age. What happens if your body has not adapted yet and you have not grown and evolved lungs inside of your body? How are you going to survive? They can't answer that. And you go all the way back to the garden and you see the different animals. Look at the process of Genesis 1 in and of itself. Did the human beings come before the herb-yielding seed and the plant-yielding, the fruit-bearing trees? What came first, the tree or the human being? Well, the human being had to eat. So the fruit in the orchards came first. The two-footed creeping, the beast, the creeping things, everything that creepeth. Four-footed beast, tooth that came before man. Man's food came before man. The Lord created the adaptation immediately so that the habitats that they were in, that they could survive. They immediately had oxygen. What if everything had been evolved and it just blew into a big bang, but oxygen hadn't evolved yet? Would that have made any sense? What if man's teeth had not adapted yet? It would have been hard to eat without a dentist back in the garden when sin came into the world. So that's very, very important. And the question in macroevolution was very simple. To these 30 creme de la creme, where did you get your empirical evidence? Where did you come up with your answer of where macroevolution started? And all they had to say, they had five, they had to give five substances, answers on why that was. And all they could come up with was common resources or common substances come from common sources. Second was, that's what they taught us in high school. That's tradition. And what tradition does, There's a term, and when you hear this term, everything you learn on news and what's going on today, we're gonna see something, and I'm hoping I can remember this in the service this morning. But there's something called an informal fallacy, and it's constantly repeated in the world, especially among the educated, and it's called the informal fallacy of the argumentum ad populum. I know we have no idea what that means right now. The argumentum ad populum. What it means is particularly an argument to the populace or the people. In other words, 60,000 Frenchmen cannot be wrong. You count noses and when the current community culture steps up to the platform, that becomes the truth. Not the absolute truth. Lady Justice. It's Lady Justice. Has anyone ever seen the statue or a pictorial representation of Lady Justice? What is Lady Justice wearing? Is it ever supposed to come off? Never. When Lady Justice wears the blindfold, that means Lady Justice goes back to policy, original constitutional policy. Does anybody know what happened the Saturday before yesterday? I bet none of you even know what happened. I wouldn't have known. I just tripped over it. Yep, Chuck Schumer said, this is the beginning of the end. The Constitution is not valid. Ted Cruz blasted him. He said, this is one of the darkest days in 257 years of our country. Chuck Schumer up in New York, that wicked liberal. He actually said that, and the rebuttal from the Republicans was minimal. You know what happens when Lady Justice peaks and becomes very much adapted to the masses? Yes. Then all of a sudden, policy becomes eschewed. The masses take over, and you have Roe versus Wade. Then you have what was called, look at this, When you count noses and the standard becomes the populist, you see what happens with Roe versus Wade. I hope you're holding onto your chairs when I'm about to tell you this. I found this Friday evening. Has anyone ever heard of the Briggs Initiative in 1978? I've never heard of it. You never heard of it? Why don't you ever hear of it? Because they covered it over. They didn't want anybody to hear about it. The Briggs initiative in 1978 was from John Briggs who was a senator in California who had promoted a legal bill to make sure that no sodomites would ever teach especially young children in public schools because they were worried about the effects of that and now we've seen the effects of it and he wanted it passed that not only could they not teach in public schools, but they could not sit and have voting rights on Congress or in any major places. As Christians, are we for that or against that? Of course. Guess who the governor in 1978 was who overturned it? And not only overturned it, but crushed it. Does anybody remember who the governor was in 1978 of California? Yes. Reagan crushed the bill. Read about it. If you want to find out about it, go to the website that's called Log Cabin Republic. Look it up. It's real. 42 years of conservative sodomites. And guess what? And I'm sorry to say this. Next week, Melania Trump is having a rally for the Log Cabin Republicans in Mar-a-Lago. They're going to support them, led by Rick Grinnell. The sodomites now have a conservative platform. This is populace. This is argumentum ad populum. It's when masses get together and people start getting together in masses, what they vote on and what becomes current community conscience becomes the standard. And why that applies to what's happening to Paul is because Paul went into these churches and taught them about Jesus Christ and when he left they went back and said, Well, our grandfathers, our uncles and our aunts, we've been serving at the feasts for 40 years. Don't tell us we can't go to Passover and worship in the synagogue and do our animals. Don't tell us we can't bring our animals in, turn them in and pay a 50% duty to the Romans in order to get cleaner ones. Don't tell us that we can't go to the Court of the Gentiles to the big carnivals that's 35 acres of carnivals at Passover at the Court of the Gentiles. Don't tell us we can't go to that. Paul was going back to them here and saying, why are you going back to that? It blows the mind. Epistemology. This is what that question about macroevolution came back. Epistemology or the science of how we know what we know. That's very important. If you can't tell people honestly why you know what you know, then why is it have a platform? Sit down and talk to ten Roman Catholics and ask them what transubstantiation is. I give you a hundred bucks if all ten of them can answer what it is. I've asked many of them over the last at least ten years. They don't even know what the word means. What is transubstantiation? Lisa. Right. Right. That's what they call it, the man in the box. They think that's actually Christ in the box. His corporeal presence, his literal physical presence is part of the communion and the Pope has the power to take his literal body and for them to re-commune it. Which is this utterly voodoo, it's vile. Right. That's right. And you see these crucifixes with Christ hanging on the cross. Isn't it amazing how you always see him hanging on the cross with nails in his hands and blood in Catholic churches, but you never see the resurrection? I've never seen a representation of the resurrection in a Catholic church. Maybe you have. Maybe there are paintings, maybe I'm wrong about that, but I know this, the platform is he died. Why? Because the Pope has the power to re-crucify him and commune with that body. The Pope is the vicar according to them, which to me is total blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. That in and of itself is argumentum ad populum. That means masses of people have been told by the Catholic Church that when a penny and a call for clings, a soul from hell springs, they give their money and they outsource their eternity to a bunch of people who also are going to be burning in hell. Unless the Lord saves them, and it happens, it does. I've seen Catholics get saved. What I have seen a great number of in the last five years is professing, they would never be possessing, professing Christians going back and being reconfirmed in the Catholic Church. That just blows me away. But it happens. Dave. Yes. Right. And that's tradition. It's hard to pull them out of tradition and go into the things that their mother and father and grandfather and grandmother, the tradition of it is what's happening here. Here's the same thing happening with the Christian church who Paul himself had Jesus Christ himself from heaven talking to him and he showed that to them. And as soon as he turns his back, they go running right back to the Judaizers and going back to the feasts, going back to the sacrifices and doing it all over again. And now you can see what's happening in churches today. A lot of people are going back. And what they're saying is, here's the next part of it. I want to get to this somehow, get to this this morning. But you see how many people are chosen. There's noses that are counted. And when it turns out that the populace or the populum, they all agree on one thing. As we can see now in our Congress, that's the standard today. Things that are wrong, and I'm going back to that just for a second, and I remember hearing a message about this a while back. Isn't it amazing how the most basic, fundamental right that there is in this world is the right to life? And because of populum, now a baby can be aborted at any stage. And that's because Lady Justice peaked and catered to the masses. Christ Himself, He would rebuke the Pharisees. Christ Himself showed us, because of what we're about to talk about, this is so important, we're going in to justification by faith, and Christ Himself said, In Mark 7, 6, he answered and said unto them, Well hath Isaiah's prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. Oh, you don't want to be one of those people where your heart is far from Christ. Everything in your blood, everything in your veins and in your cells should be about Christ. Every decision, are you going to be perfect? No. Are you going to sin? Yes. Are you going to feel bad about it? You should. But when it comes down to it, what our Savior did for us, you can't even begin to process it. All you can do is love it, worship him, and thank the Lord for what we're learning here. And one day, all of this will be revealed. But these things are important. And here's the problem. as we go forward. Paul here is teaching justification by faith, which we can alone and singularly only be saved by the blood of Christ. By Christ's righteousness can we be saved, although we're still just in sinner as we are in a process of sanctification. Now I'm going to read you something. This is a direct copy from a transcript and I want to make this known because I do not want to plagiarize ever. This is a direct transcript of R.C. Sproul's, one of his lessons many, many decades ago on justification by faith. And I want you to hear this. Martin Luther's phrase, this goes back to Luther. Perhaps the formula that Luther used that is most famous and most telling at this point is his formula. If you want to write this down, remember this. This is very important. Simul, S-I-M-U-L, justus, J-U-S-T-O-S, US, et, E-T, pacator. Simul justus et pacator. Doesn't sound very easy to understand, but when I explain it to you, you'll never forget it. I never have. I've heard this about 25 years ago. I've never forgotten this. Simil means simultaneous. That's a Latin derivative. A lot of words that we pronounce in the English language are derivatives of the Latin, of course. Eustis, what do you think that means? Justice. Thank you. Simultaneous. Justice. Et. That's a very simple little word. Let me go over this with you. Symbol means at the same time, Eustace is the Latin word for justice or righteousness. And we all should know what the word means. It is the past tense of the verb to eat. Right. Have you had your dinner? Now, of course, I'm just kidding. No, you know that's not what that means. You remember in the death scene of Caesar after he's been stabbed by Brutus, he says, et tu, Brute? Then fall Caesar and you too, Brutus. It simply means and. So you have simultaneous, justus, justice. Et means and, pacator. That's the big one. Here's the big one. Pacator. All peccator means. Let's read this. And so with this formula, Luther was saying in our justification, we are one and the same righteous or just sinners. It simply means anis et peccator means sinners. This is the problem that most people have. This is the conundrum. Most people cannot believe that you can be just and a sinner at the same time. So what they have to do in order to make that some kind of a consolation for themselves is they have to use an embroiled or an emboldened system of works in order to convince themselves every week that there's some justice inside of themselves. When you take simul justus et pacator, and you take that out of what you believe, that leaves you to your works. Because the only reason we're justified and sinner at the same time is Jesus. He's the one that died. Christ died for us, and it's His blood that cleanses us from our sins. And at the same time, yes, we're just. Yes, we are sinner. But we have been redeemed. Job said, my Redeemer liveth. Job lived before the law. He said, my Redeemer liveth. And he says, I am just, I am still a sinner. because there is an alien righteousness in us. That alien righteousness does not resonate from our existence. It resonates from the work of Jesus Christ, that perfect corporeal work where he, corporeal, I mean by his body, came down to this earth. Now, what would have happened if Jesus would have just came right down from heaven? He that ascends is one that descended. What would have happened if he would have just went right to the cross? You might have gotten out of hell, but you still would not be just. How did He exact? I mean, we're learning about eternal life here, so this is important. How did He exact and how did He solidify what He did on the cross by what He did on this earth? by what he didn't do. So that's why it was necessary for him to come down as a little baby, born of a virgin, part of the opening of the gospel, the first advent, talking to his mother and saying to her at 12 years old, he said, I must be about my father's business. Know ye not that I must be about my father's business? And then when he goes to turn the water into wine, what happens? Mary says, listen to Him. She said, listen to Him. He didn't say, as the Catholics would believe, listen to her. No, she said, listen to Him. Everything He says, listen to Him. Everything He did, He fulfilled perfectly. He never once broke the law. He never abrogated the law. He fulfilled it. And what He had to do is live that justice. And when He lived the justice, and He died on the cross, and He was able to raise Himself from the dead in three days, He enacted that justus, simul justus et pacator, that justice that simultaneously we can be just because of Him and sinner at the same time. That is a real foundational epicenter of Christianity. If you don't understand that, then you can understand why works are so important. Because if Christ's blood is not enough, well then it's got to be something I do, right? That's why many Pentecostals have Pentecost every Sunday. Every Sunday is another falling down of the Holy Spirit. It's like, I remember hearing this, I think it's great. What is the flower of the Reformation? Does anybody remember? Yes, tulip. Total depravity of man. One pastor said, what's the flower of the Arminian? It's the daisy. Because today, He loves me, He loves me not. He loves me, He loves me not. They believe today you have your salvation, tomorrow you don't have it. Today you have it, tomorrow you don't have it. So every Sunday, why do you see we're going to have Pentecost this Sunday? Because we're hoping the Holy Spirit visits us today. That's what they do. And so when your salvation is predicated on your works, it's no wonder that Catholics are always saying, I hope I make it into heaven, because he better hope it falls on the right day. But it never does. Lisa. Right. Right. Never. Why is that? That's what you're saying is massive. Why doesn't baptize save the babies? And why do so many believe this? Are you gone? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. Go ahead. Right. That's right. That's right. Why doesn't baptism save you? I'm going to fix that real quick. I'm going to fix it. If you all are worried about it, you have to answer that. Why? Because there's a really good passage about that. Lisa. Right. That's right. Right. That's right. But why doesn't baptism save us? Who baptized who in John 1? Who baptized who? Christ went to John the Baptist and said, baptize me. And he said, not so, Lord. I can't do that. I'm not even worthy to tie the latchet of your shoes. And what did Christ say to him? It must needs be. Do it, just like he told Ananias with Paul. Ananias said, Paul, this guy is public enemy number Saul of Tarsus. Do it. If baptizing was saved, saving people, Why was Christ baptized? He never needed to be saved. He is salvation. So why was He baptized? If your salvation is predicated on a ritual, baptism, then Christ had to have been a sinner if John the Baptist saved Him. Think about it. Think about that. It was a sign. All it was was a sign. It was an obedience to the Lord, as Lisa says, of cleansing and purification. And He was doing that, showing that He is going to purify and cleanse us from our sins. Not that He needed it. That's very important. Right, it's a landmark. Right. Right. That's right. So moving. Thank you. And for moving forward, we're going to have to stop here in a minute. In fact, now just one more thing we'll pick up next week. Does anybody remember back in Acts chapter 15 at the Jerusalem council? We know that I'll remind you. I know it's hard to remember way back. Acts chapter 15, what the problem was. And this resonated later on between Peter and Paul himself. This is the first five verses of what we're dealing with as we're entering into it. The first five verses of the book of Galatians. What we were dealing with was a real problem between the actual ceremonial law and the new purified church of Christ dying and rising again. The thing that they were still going back at was circumcision. Circumcision was the problem between Peter and Paul. Peter was sitting down and eating with those who were circumcised, and he had gotten a little upset at Paul and said, you know, how could you eat with these unclean people? And Paul brings Titus. That's why we see this in verse 1 and 2. He brings Titus, and Titus is a manifestation. And if you go all the way back to Acts 1, there is actually a verse that points to Titus. Titus is a Greek preacher. He turns out to be saved, and he was saved by the ministry of Paul the Apostle. He's a Greek. He actually was a pagan at one point. And he winds up being an understudy of Paul, just like Timothy. He, now here's the problem. At one point in Acts 16, verse 3, Timothy is circumcised. But in the other side, there's Titus, who's also an understudy of Paul. He's not circumcised. And that goes back to a word we'll pick up next week, a word that we learned, audiophorous. And that means when the Lord has a plan, He can use basically any means that He wants. He could use circumcision or uncircumcision. But the problem now that's happening and it's funneling into the Judaizers, they're saying circumcision is your only means of salvation. Going back to what we were talking about, that populum phrase, Everybody believes that circumcision is your salvation. There, they go outside of simul justus et pacator, justice, simultaneously just and sinner, and they're saying, Christ is not enough. That's what they're doing. And Paul is burning. He's furious. Lisa. Right. That's like on the doorpost of our hearts. And without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins. That's it. We're going to have to finish here this morning. Brother Dave, Deacon Dave, could you close us this morning? Thank you.