{"id":5060,"date":"2025-11-24T08:25:33","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T13:25:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5060"},"modified":"2025-11-24T08:25:33","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T13:25:33","slug":"galatians-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2025\/11\/24\/galatians-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Galatians 1:1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n


\u00a0Each day this month we\u2019re looking closely at one of the 1:1 verses of the Bible \u2013 exploring what we can learn from chapter one \/ verse one of various Old and New Testament books.<\/em>

\u201cPaul, an apostle\u2014sent not from men nor by a man,\u00a0but by Jesus Christ\u00a0and God the Father,\u00a0who raised him from the dead\u2026\u201d

It happened just 24 years ago, but Americans are still trying to wrap their heads around 9\/11.

How is it possible that such a small group was able to generate so much destruction and loss?

A great many Americans (53%, according to a recent survey) think there simply has to be more to the story than we are being told. Were U.S. agents somehow behind the terror attacks \u2013 so they could provide the Bush administration a pretext for invading the Middle East?

According to Christopher Bader, a sociologist at Chapman University in California, a great many of your fellow citizens are comfortable with a degree of paranoia. Conspiracy theories abound. The moon landings may have been faked. Are government officials covering up an alien autopsy in Roswell, New Mexico? JFK was surely assassinated not by a lone gunman, but by Cubans or mafiosos or Russian operatives. Right?

\u201cWe found clear evidence that the United States is a strongly conspiratorial society,\u201d says Bader.

Here\u2019s a telltale sign: More than a third of those he surveyed believe the government is concealing information about \u201cthe North Dakota crash.\u201d There\u2019s no such thing as the North Dakota crash. Bader and his associates made it up.

Science writer Michael Shermer, editor-in-chief of Skeptic<\/em> magazine \u2013 and quite possibly the world\u2019s leading expert on conspiracy theories \u2013 points out that just because something is identified as a conspiracy doesn\u2019t mean it isn\u2019t real.

We know that the Johnson administration, for instance, conspired to cover up the nature and extent of the Vietnam War.\u00a0The Nixon administration plotted to hide the details of the Watergate break-in.\u00a0And there are good reasons to believe that a small group of highly committed individuals did indeed conspire (and succeeded) in launching the 9\/11 terror attacks.

Conspiracy theories<\/em>, on the other hand, are unproven assertions that claim to know the \u201creal story\u201d behind significant events.\u00a0

Conspiracies and conspiracy theories are part and parcel of Bible history, too.

A consortium of powerful individuals, including members of the Jewish religious establishment and Roman occupiers, conspired to kill Jesus.\u00a0When claims circulated that his tomb was empty, they decided to float a conspiracy theory that his body had been stolen by his disciples.\u00a0In 1965, British scholar Hugh Schonfield published ThePassover Plot<\/em>, a conjecture that Jesus (with Judas\u2019 assistance) schemed to fake his own death on the cross by drinking a slurry of drugs.

Then and now, a great many people will settle for a conspiracy theory instead of doing the hard work of discerning reality.\u00a0Why?<\/em>

Conspiracy theories are exciting.\u00a0They give us a feeling of control. At least we know a bit of what’s really going on.\u00a0And they tend to absolve us of responsibility.\u00a0Strange forces and mysterious figures are running the world’s show, and there\u2019s almost nothing we can do about it.

The Jesus Story that emerges on the pages of the Bible is different.\u00a0

It invites verification.\u00a0\u201cThese [details of Jesus\u2019 life] were written so that you may know that he is the Messiah\u201d (John 20:31).\u00a0 Paul lists the names of people who met the resurrected Jesus, as if to say, \u201cCheck out their stories for yourself\u201d (I Corinthians 15:3-8).\u00a0It claims to be public news, not esoteric information for a handful of insiders: \u201cThese things were not done in a corner\u201d (Acts 26:26).\u00a0

Look again at Galatians 1:1: \u201cPaul, an apostle\u2014sent not from men nor by a man,\u00a0but by Jesus Christ\u00a0and God the Father,\u00a0who raised him from the dead\u2026\u201d

At first glance, that seems fairly innocuous. But when we take into account the widely accepted timeframe for Paul\u2019s letter, that final phrase becomes pretty special.

Bible scholars of all theological stripes agree that Galatians was possibly the first New Testament book to have seen the light of day. Evidence suggests that Paul composed this correspondence in A.D. 49 or 50. That\u2019s only 20 years after Jesus\u2019 final Weekend in Jerusalem.

It\u2019s not uncommon to hear religious skeptics assert that Jesus\u2019 resurrection was a late \u201cadd-on\u201d to the Christian message. One hundred, maybe 200 years after his death, so the theory goes, a few church bureaucrats began to float the notion that Jesus was somehow still alive and well. He rose from the dead<\/em>. Yeah, that\u2019s it. Let\u2019s say an angel rolled away the stone from his tomb.

Galatians, however, was written within two decades of Jesus\u2019 time on Earth. And Paul was saying at this very early time that God the Father had \u201craised him from the dead.\u201d

The story was already out.

Paul composed his letter to the Romans some five to seven years later. British scholar N.T. Wright observes, \u201cPaul\u2019s letter to the Romans is suffused with resurrection. Squeeze this letter at any point, and resurrection spills out; hold it up to the light, and you can see Easter sparkling all the way through.\u201d

By the mid to late 50s in the first century, the claim concerning the empty tomb was racing around the Mediterranean as fast as a new TikTok dance craze.

The resurrection wasn\u2019t presented as the latest nutty idea from Judea, that nation of nutty people who for some reason believed in only one God. Its advocates agreed with Jesus, who had said: \u201cAsk and it will be given to you;\u00a0seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.\u00a0For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds;\u00a0and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened\u201d (Matthew 7:7-8).

In other words, don\u2019t settle for urban legends, rumors, and conspiracy theories. Do your homework. Go find the truth.

The Jesus Story makes demands.\u00a0It not only claims to make sense of the world but insists that we do something about it.\u00a0

The world is a mess.\u00a0So are we.\u00a0

God is a God of action who has rolled up his sleeves and is asking us to join him in the ongoing work of rescue, healing, and redemption.\u00a0

Paul insists, from Sentence One of his earliest book, that we won\u2019t be attempting such a thing by ourselves.

The risen Christ will be with us every step of the way.<\/em>
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here \u00a0Each day this month we\u2019re looking closely at one of the 1:1 verses of the Bible \u2013 exploring what we can learn from chapter one \/ verse one of various Old and New Testament books. \u201cPaul, an apostle\u2014sent not from men nor by a man,\u00a0but by Jesus Christ\u00a0and God the Father,\u00a0who… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5061,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1029,159,207],"class_list":["post-5060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-11-series","tag-conspiracy-theories","tag-resurrection"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5060"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5062,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5060\/revisions\/5062"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}