Hello, my name is Matt Whitman, and this is episode one of season six of the 10-minute Bible hour podcast on the Book of Philemon. And also, my mom had a crush on Spock from Star Trek when she was growing up. I have never felt anything like that towards Spock, but I'm not going to judge my mom either. Because I think for a little girl growing up in the 1960s, a guy like Spock, who's in control of his emotions and has neatly cropped hair like the Beatles, and wears a uniform and is in space and is on TV, I could see it. And she probably does not like that I'm telling you this, and she does listen, so she's finding out that I'm telling you this at the same time that you're finding out that I'm telling you this. But I think it's sweet, Mom. I also think it might be a little bit of why Star Trek was on in the background a lot when I was a kid. It was a syndicated show by the time I was growing up. Star Trek was campy and kind of silly looking, and kids my age didn't really watch it much. But I couldn't help but absorb a little bit of the lore along the way. And probably, in fairness, you who are listening here, nice to meet you by the way, if we're meeting for the first time, if you've been here for previous seasons, nice to see you again. But whoever you are, however old you are, wherever you're from, you've probably absorbed a little bit of Star Trek as well. Even if you're not into it, you've never even watched a single show. Because it's iconic, then it's the kind of thing that just leaks beyond its boundaries and it has lore and stuff that gets out into the larger culture. One example of that is this bit of Star Trek lore called the Kobayashi Maru. And as I understand it, there was this test at the Starfleet Academy where all of the aspiring young captains had to go to train that was unsolvable. It was an unsolvable pickle that they would put the captains in in this little fake starship and they'd go through the whole scenario and they'd all lose. And the point was, you know, what do you do when you're under pressure? And what do you do when you face a no-win situation? And nobody could beat it. And nobody that is, except for one James Tiberius Kirk. Captain Kirk could beat it because he refused to accept defeat. So I don't know exactly what he did. If he hacked the system or whatever, he cheated. And then, of course, all the stuffed shirt, stodgy officers are outraged and indignant. You can't do that. You'll never be a captain in Starfleet. But then he was like, I never accept defeat. And they were like, that is a really good point. Here's the Starship Enterprise. You now have no accountability and a gigantic spaceship, take it out far into space and explore everything and just let us know how it goes. I don't know if that's exactly how it went, but that's how it came off to me. James T. Kirk solved the unsolvable pickle that was the Kobayashi Maru test. Likewise, in the book of Philemon, we have got our own Bible, Kobayashi Maru, an unsolvable social conundrum, an unsolvable legal pickle that puts the protagonist of this little book, the Apostle Paul, in an impossible no-win situation. Law, culture, expectation, distance, everything seems to be stacked against the Apostle Paul and the people he's trying to help. But like Captain Kirk, he's got a trick up his sleeve. Captain Kirk's trick was dirty, filthy, duplicitous deception. The Apostle Paul's trick is the tender love and forgiveness of the Lord Jesus Christ. Okay, that didn't go quite as well as I wanted it to. I'm laughing because that is among the worst examples in my example and career. But I stand, I stand by it because really, Jesus and forgiveness and the gospel and the message of God, that is Paul's secret weapon. That is his outside the box thing that is going to enable him to defeat this otherwise undefeatable Kobayashi Maru situation that he finds himself in. All right, I got to set this whole thing up. And we are going to start from the very, very beginning, big picture, so that we're all on the same page. Because I know that there are some of you who are here for whom you just got invited to check this thing out by a friend or something. You're not necessarily like a Christian or you haven't been around this much. This is your first day of anything Bible or any of that stuff. So we're going to make it make sense. Let's get our feet under us right here. Here we go. No matter where you are in the grand journey of life, you've heard of Jesus. He is the main character of the Bible and of Christianity. And the Bible divides up pretty neatly into the first two thirds being called the Old Testament, that deals with the story of the Jewish people before the time of Jesus and the Roman Empire. And then the last third of the Bible is called the New Testament. And the New Testament tells the story of Jesus and the early church, the Christians who came after him in generation one and generation two of Christianity after Jesus. Now, the first four books of the New Testament all tell the story of Jesus of Nazareth. He did miracles, he taught incredible things, he lived a perfect life, he was smarter than everybody, but he didn't act like it. He was humble and he served people. I mean, whatever you think about politics or anything, if you just go and read about Jesus, he's compelling. He's like the end run around every stupid thing that we fight about all the time and all of the things that divide us. There's something wildly compelling about Jesus. And it was the same for people back then. He made everybody's compass spin. He was so compelling that all kinds of people gave up a tremendous amount to follow him. Well, Jesus runs afoul of the local religious leadership, the Jewish leadership back in the day, and he runs afoul of the Roman leadership, and they conspire to execute him. They hang him on a cross and he dies up there. But then three days later, he's raised back to life. He hangs out with all of his disciples and preps them for what's going to happen next, which is basically you guys are going to go out to the whole world and you're going to tell them about me, and you're going to establish this new great grand family of faith that is the church. And it's going to win. This is what's next. And then Jesus ascends to the right hand of the Father. So those first four books of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, sometimes collectively called the Gospels, they tell the story of Jesus. The next book is a really big book called the Book of Acts, or the Acts of the Apostles, because it tells the story of what all Jesus' disciples did when they carried out the message. And it's it's an awesome story. It is in that book, the book of Acts, that we meet this guy named Saul, who later is going to be named Paul. Paul and Saul, they're the same guy. Saul at first, then he becomes Paul. Saul does not like Jesus and does not like Christianity. He never met Jesus face to face, but he knew enough about him to know that he was bad and dumb. Saul was a Jewish religious leader and a zealot, willing to engage in violence, if need be, to snuff out these dangerous new religious ideas surrounding Jesus. Things start to heat up in Jerusalem pretty quickly after Jesus' death and resurrection. And Saul, later Paul, he shows up at the first martyrdom. A bunch of the Jewish religious leadership who killed Jesus, they get real mad and they kill one of his followers, a guy named Stephen. And Saul is there and he's cool with it, but he's not satisfied. Even though Christians scatter away from Jerusalem after that, Saul is like, hey, um, you know what? Why don't I go uh chase him down? I will be a road warrior and I will go on a road trip and I will track them down and I will root them out. So Saul starts on one of his persecuting journeys, but he doesn't even make it very far, and he meets the resurrected Jesus supernaturally on the road up north toward Damascus. And Jesus is like, Yeah, we're done with this. You're gonna follow me now. And Saul is like, uh, dang, you were real all along. Okay, that's a lot of paraphrase there. But Saul does a 180. He completely flips from being a road warrior who's willing to go out on the road and harrowing long journeys and willing to inflict violence to snuff out Christianity. He goes from that to a guy who's a road warrior willing to go out on the road and endure all kinds of violence toward his own body to tell people about Christ and Christianity and the gospel. So Paul goes all over the Roman world on three mega journeys, gigantic Odyssey style adventures. And he goes to all these towns, and everywhere he goes, he seems to take abuse. Sometimes he gets beaten so badly that people mistake him for actually being dead. But dude is brilliant and he's relentless. So he goes to these towns, and even though it's hard, he leaves behind churches, not like a building, but like people who meet in a large home, and there's a whole community of believers from a bunch of different households, and he sets up leaders, and then he corresponds with them with letters. Pretty much the rest of the New Testament after the book of Acts are those letters corresponding with these churches that he established. Well, after years of doing this, finally he goes back to Jerusalem. It doesn't go well. His old classmates who still want to persecute Christianity, they conspire to have him arrested, and he gets taken on yet another harrowing Odyssey-like journey all the way to Rome as a prisoner. And the book of Acts ends with Paul in a prison in Rome, awaiting trial before the Emperor Nero, a guy who's not super hinged, if you remember anything from history class. And that's where the storytelling part of the New Testament wraps up. Everything else we know about the story of the New Testament, we cobble together from the details of these letters that are written back and forth between mostly Paul and these churches he established. So Paul, huge swing. He went from being the enemy of Christianity to the chief advocate of Christianity, established all these churches. He's in jail in Rome. It's probably about 30 years now that have passed since Jesus was crucified. Now that we've got Paul sitting in this Roman prison, kind of under like a house arrest, it wasn't the worst arrest ever, but there he sits. And while he's there, he's allowed to receive guests, and lo and behold, one of the guests that he receives, or somebody he runs into, is a guy named Onesimus, and he discovers that Onesimus is a runaway slave. That's a big deal. We're going to talk a lot about slavery in the Roman Empire and what all the ground rules and everything were there, but slavery in Rome was bad, different than the slavery that existed in my country a couple hundred years ago, but it was bad, and the punishment for aiding and abetting a runaway slave was pretty steep. You didn't want to be somebody who was doing that. Well, I mean, normally the protocol would be just turn the guy in, rat him out, don't risk your own neck for some rando runaway slave. Oh, but things get a bit more complicated. This runaway slave, named Onesimus, was wildly talented. He seems that he was very well educated. And not only that, but he converts to Christianity under the guidance of Paul. Well, now things are even more complicated because now this isn't just some random runaway slave. Quickly he becomes a Christian brother. And to hear Paul talk about him, a really capable one who's accomplishing important things in this new burgeoning Christian scene in Rome. But things get even more complicated because it turns out that Onesimus is not just some guy from some remote corner of the empire that nobody's ever heard of and that Paul is unfamiliar with. No, it turns out that Onesimus' master, who Onesimus stole from, probably and ran away from, is a Christian and a leader in a church back in modern day Turkey, Asia Minor, that Paul is familiar with, that Paul knows people from. Onesimus' master is a guy named Philemon, who Paul apparently is on some kind of terms with. Now Paul didn't establish the church that Philemon is from in the community of Colossae, but Paul did establish the church just down the road in the city of Ephesus, and Paul knows the guy who took the message of Jesus from Ephesus down the road to Colossae and establish the church there. So now you're starting to see Paul's Kobayashimaru take shape. On the one hand, you gotta send Onesimus back. The institution of slavery is not something that Paul is going to be able to defeat from a prison cell in Rome single-handedly. The law is the law. You kind of got to send him back. If that sounds horrifying to you, stick with me. We'll talk about it more as we go along. You also kind of got to send him back because you can't have Paul, the leader of Christianity, knowing about this offense. There was theft involved as well, and not doing anything about it when the offended party is like the leading elder of one of these really important churches in Asia Minor. You have to work that out. Also, Onesimus is a Christian, though. So Paul has said that there's neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. He just said that in his letter to the Galatians that he probably wrote about 10 years earlier. He says the gospel is bigger than that, that everybody being Christians are bigger than our social divisions. So also, Paul's going to want to practice what he preaches here and be like, hey, there's a real opportunity to demonstrate that the Christian family of faith is bigger than these social distinctions, and we should be able to overcome this Roman caste system in some way. But things are further complicated because the rumors out there that Christians are real troublemakers who are trying to undercut Roman law and make a mess of things. And Paul is preparing his defense before Nero himself, who a little later on is going to go on a crazy rampage and kill a bunch of Christians. And so Paul doesn't want to give the impression that Christianity is a rebellion. But then once again, on the other other other hand, Onesimus is a Christian. Philemon is a Christian. The Christians at Colossae are Christians. The Christians in Rome are Christians. This is bigger than some of these legal questions. How are you going to thread this needle? How are you going to put the church back together? How are you going to give Onesimus good direction in terms of what he should do with his life? How are you going to accomplish what you need to accomplish in Rome? How are you going to help the church in Colossae to move forward? How are you going to help Philemon, the leader of the church in Colossae, to grow and move forward with a good reputation and with spiritual maturity out of this situation as well? On paper, given the immutable social realities of Roman culture and Roman law and just expectations that everybody would have, this is a pretty much unwinnable scenario, a true Kobayashi Maru. But in just 25 little verses in this book of Philemon, we are going to see how the Jesus thing, the gospel, positions Paul outside the box, outside the parameters of this seemingly unwinnable scenario. And if we look really closely, what we're going to see is that the gospel, the message of Jesus, the grace and forgiveness of Christ, the whole Jesus thing is also what enables you, me, us, anyone today who will hear it to outmaneuver and defeat the seemingly unwinnable Kobayashi Marus that we encounter in our lives as well. This book is awesome. You're going to love it. We're going to deep dive into it historically. And even though it's 25 verses, we are going to get our money's worth. Tell a friend, bring somebody along. We're just getting started. This one's going to be a lot of fun. All right, we'll see you tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.