Look at verse 11. But I certify to you, my Israelite brothers, that the Besorah, the gospel, which was proclaimed by me, it's not received from men. For I neither received it from man, neither was I taught it from men. But through the revelation of Yahushua HaMashiach, for you have heard of my former halacha, my former conduct, in the past of the Jewish...
the Yahudim's religion. How I intently persecuted the Israelite congregation of Yahuwah, I even tried to destroy it. And I progressed in the Yahudim's religion above many of my equals in my own nation. Above all, I was especially zealous for the teachings of my avod, my fathers. You know, right here, Shaul kind of gives you a bit of an autobiography, doesn't he?
This is what I'm up to, this is where I've come from. And you know, I've done that to you as well, you know. Because people want to know, where are you?
Where have you come from? What's your history? What have you gone through? Because oftentimes we can learn from our mistakes if we are willing to humble ourselves and tell people, hey look, I spent 20 years totally secular. I had a black and white conversion.
I spent a decade in the institutionalized church. I know the doctrine. I was a leader, a teacher, a youth pastor.
I know the doctrine. I spent a decade, over a decade, in the messianic in Hebrew roots. I was an ordained rabbi.
I know the doctrine. I know it. The arguments, I understand them.
I used to use them. I even have a cassette tape that I keep it somewhere. I don't know where it is.
It says, when I was at Calvary Chapel giving a sermon to the whole church, well, of course, we can't keep the Ten Commandments. I know the doctrine. Now, where I'm at now, it comes, like many of us, through what? Maturity and walking down a road, a narrow road, because He is going to finish the good work that He started in you. And sometimes we need to go through those journeys and not despise those humble beginnings.
Because I learned so much when I was at Calvary Chapel. And I learned so much when I was in the Hebrew Roots and Messianic Movement. Good and bad in both. And I do not despise that because now that allows me to see so much more clearly because I understand the doctrine. I taught the doctrine.
So now I can defend the true gospel and rightly divide the word of Torah. So we see this autobiography. And the word here in the Greek for the Jewish religion or the Yahudim's religion is idiosmos.
Idiosmos. And it's used only here in the whole Brit Hadashah, once in verse 13 and once in verse 14. Now, it's found in the Septuagint only five times, and there only in Maccabees. Idiosmos means a fenced-off area where Jews lived and lived. Because they lived within a fenced-off area. They made constructs from which you were only allowed to enter into that construct if you submitted to their interpretation of the book of the law.
And that's exactly what it is today. It's a fenced-off area of constructs. But the term... It identifies that the followers of Yahushua, well, they had a very, like us, a very different definition of covenant membership, don't we? Very different.
Because they had broken through the boundary. They had broken through the fenced-off area of Judaism. They'd broken through the fenced-off area of Judaism, which had been defined by a book.
Of the law, Pharisaic schoolmaster is how they viewed the covenant membership. That you could only have membership if you had ritual circumcision and then adhere to their interpretation of the book of the law. This is the thrust of Galatians.