Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour podcast. And that clicking you are hearing in the background is the lovely Camila. She is getting a bunch of cool Bible art ready. We're in the final stages of a giant Bible art project that we've been working on. So if you hear clicks, it's her. Could you just click something? So we there there you go. Thank you for doing that. Now you know I wasn't lying. Also, hi Camilla. Hi, everybody. That was nice. She's great. And she is this has been crazy. We've been working for the better part of a month, nonstop, all the time, on art about each book of the Bible. And one of the hard parts of making such art is first figuring out how would you try to capture the essence or the memory hook of each book of the Bible in one little illustration. So we had to think about that a lot. And we had to make it all. Now we're in the finalizing stages. And it feels pretty good. But this has been a gigantic project we're working on. And it's for a book that I did here over the last six or eight months. I've been working on a book called The Lightning Fast Field Guide to the Bible. Wait, it has a subtitle. You gotta hear the subtitle just right after I remember it. The subtitle is totally Camilla. What's the subtitle? It's Your Compact Companion to the Best Book Ever. That's the subtitle. I don't say that part as much. Yeah, it's actually out there for pre-sale. Now, I haven't told you. It's been sitting out there for a while for pre-sale on Amazon, and people seem to be interested. I'm kind of excited about it. We did the book with HarperCollins, Zondervan, and they've been great to work with. But what a fun process this has been. The point of the book is to try to make the Bible make sense. So kind of like the point of this podcast. So I thought you might be interested in it. At any rate, there's art in the book too, illustrations for each book of the Bible. I think it's going to be like the kind of thing where you look at it, and a person who's maybe got stickers celebrating Bible things and books of the Bible they have in their hip pocket. I just imagine it being the kind of thing where they'd be like, hmm, this is a field guide to the Bible, but also it's sort of a sticker book. Like from when I was a kid. Feels like a sticker just needs to go right there on the chapter about Galatians, right, right there where the Galatians art is printed in the book, a sticker would it would be super to go right there. So I'm just saying that. I'm just throwing it out. Did you have sticker books when you were a kid? That was a thing. Anytime a movie that was kind of targeted to little boys and stuff, I think it existed for my sister too. I think there was like Barbie and Jem and the hologram sticker books, but you could go to the grocery store, you could buy the sticker book, and then you could buy little packs of stickers, and you didn't know what was going to be in the pack, and you tried to fill the whole sticker book, so you had all the pictures and the whole story. I filled my entire sticker book about the motion picture Willow, and it took a lot of lawn mowing to buy all those stickers, but I did it. At any rate, we've been working on Galatians 6.10. We've been here for a long time. We're going to be here for a little bit longer because I think this springboards us off into something unique that we don't always get to do on this podcast, and that is to look at how a challenging teaching that comes in pretty close to the end of the Bible, chronologically, to look at how that plays out in the life of Christians who read it. How did this affect the fate of Christianity? And we're looking at such a verse right here, Galatians 6.10. It says, Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people. Obviously, clearly that makes sense. That would be what God would want. That's what's taught throughout the Bible, but then there's a comma, comma, especially to those who belong to the family of believers. Now, for all of history, that would have been common sense. It's like, well, yeah, I mean, you you have a new set of boundary markers. You've got a family of faith here, sons, daughters, agents, heirs of the kingdom, brothers and sisters, you know, we participate in this household. Of course we're gonna look out for the household. You know, who else is gonna look out for the household? But in recent times, eh, that seems maybe a little unfair. It seems like maybe not exactly how you're supposed to think. And over the course of the last few episodes, we've talked about how if push comes really to shove, we realize that all of our lofty notions of everything should be exactly equal, they actually sort of go away under pressure, and pretty much all good people I know would say, yeah, you should care about what's going on in the far reaches of the world. You should care about other people you don't know, and you should do things. You should put action, money, time toward doing redemptive things in the world. But also push comes to shove. Like, come on, especially to the people in your family, or even especially to people in church, in that circle, your brothers and sisters. So we kind of worked through the initial shock of this passage, and then we looked at how this principle exists in the Old and New Testament with this passage. And then yesterday we started looking at how this played out in the first few centuries of history by looking at this book, The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark. And it's written from sort of a not Christian, accessible, academic perspective. And I have long been fascinated by chapter four of this book called Epidemics, Networks, and Conversion and the arguments he makes here. We set that up yesterday. If you didn't catch yesterday's episode, you should definitely go and get it, because now we're just going to cruise ahead with Rodney Stark as he kind of lays out how Christians adhering to this teaching in Galatians 6.10 and other teachings like it, how Christians abiding by this changed the fate of the West and caused people to realize the reality and the truth of Jesus, and it caused a mass transformation of society as people drifted away from classical old world paganism and toward Christian faith. So yesterday we talked about a plague that happened during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. That was in the 160s A.D. Otherwise, other than that, you know, it was a pretty wonderful time in Rome. Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln? It was a very dark time, though. I mean, some of the estimates are just crazy in terms of how many people died during this plague. Some people are saying like 75% of society died. Stark thinks that's a little high. I think that's gotta be a little high. But there are ancient reports of Romans going out into the fields in Germania and just seeing entire villages of people dead in the fields. Nobody put the bodies there, nobody tended to the bodies. There was nobody left. People just started dying where they were. It was horrible. There was no immunity built up to whatever this Aurelian plague was at the time. Entire villages, even regions got devastated by this plague. And he gives us a bunch of the ancient examples. I could read them all to you. You'd find it very interesting, but I'm not going to read them all to you because we're going to keep moving ahead on all of this stuff. So you have this crazy death toll, and you'd think, man, that's about as bad as it could get. But then Stark goes on to tell us about a handful of other plagues that happened in the coming decades or centuries. And it looks like some of these were maybe even worse than the plague that happened during the time of Marcus Aurelius. Then what Stark does is he walks us through how the pagan Crete uh pre-Christian, excuse me, world thought about plagues in general. What does it mean, right? Like we went through something. I mean, I'm I'm talking to people right now who lost people you love during the COVID pandemic. Now, in the end, I don't want to minimize that loss one bit. That's not what I'm trying to say. In the end, from a very cold, callous, 10,000-foot view, that plague that was very disruptive to us and that brought about loss and sowed chaos in our world, chaos that maybe from which we still haven't recovered, that was a fraction of the mortality rate or of just the insanity that was wreaked by these ancient plagues. Now think about how we felt during that time, during some of the weirdest moments in it, just whatever made you mad about it before that. Think about how you felt during that time. Or heck, think about whatever made you mad about it, too. It really grabbed the ant farm, the metaphorical ant farm of society and even of the pathways of how we think about ourselves, our neighbors, God, politics, culture, art, going to work, not going to work, the digital world, the real physical world. It grabbed that ant farm and just I'm shaking it. Can you tell that I'm shaking that shook up the ant farm and all the pathways got wrecked, and then the ants all scramble around like crazy. And that was a fraction of what was happening in the ancient world. They didn't have any answers. They didn't do virology or immunology. They didn't know about the microscopic things that cause diseases. And so there wasn't really any kind of meaningful scientific explanation that they could point to. They couldn't explain it by virtue of who the gods were or what the gods would have wanted to accomplish through all of this. Everybody just had kind of nothing. You were left to speculate about what was going on. You were left empty if you wanted to know why or what the deal was. It was just sort of a raw survivalism that kicked in during these times. Yet at the same time, as we discussed yesterday, early Christians, they had this mindset that suffering was almost good. Because if Jesus could suffer on the cross and do what he did for the ancient Christian, then many of the ancient Christians were like, the least I can do is get this crippling disease and endure this given what was done for me. That seems to be the prevailing attitude that people had. But also because of the gratitude people had toward Christ within the church for the medicine that he had provided to the sickness of sin. And you know, he's a great physician, the great healer of their souls. And they wanted to give that away too. They wanted to do good to all people, but especially to those who belong to the family of believers. It's Galatians 6, 10, once again. This is what Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, had to say about a plague in 251 that came his direction in North Africa. He said, The just are dying with the unjust. It's not for you to think that the destruction is a common one for both evil and good. The just are called to refreshment, the unjust are carried off to torture. Protection is more quickly given to the faithful, punishment to the faithless. Okay, quick aside here for me, it can be pretty shocking when you read ancient language for the first time. If you haven't heard this stuff before, you're like, eh, he sounds really harsh. Also, you got to remember that centuries of violence had been done against Christians intermittently. Seemed like you know, every decade or two there'd be a new wave of horrible violence against Christians. So it's not really crazy for Cyprian to want to muse and ponder on what happens to the just, that being the people who suffer continually at the hands of the oppressors, and the unjust, that being the people who, you know, like Saul did before he became Paul, the people who like to kill Christians. Cyprian goes on, how suitable, how necessary it is that this plague and pestilence, which seems horrible and deadly, searches out the justice of each and every one and examines the minds of the human race, whether the well care for the sick, whether relatives dutifully love their kinsmen as they should, whether masters show compassion for their ailing slaves, again, as they should, whether physicians do not desert the afflicted, although this mortality has contributed nothing else, it is especially accomplished this for Christians and servants of God, that we have begun gladly to seek martyrdom while we are learning not to fear death. These are trying exercises for us, not deaths, they give the mind the glory of fortitude, by contempt of death they prepare for the crown. Our brethren who have been freed from the world by the summons of the Lord should not be mourned, since we know they're not lost, but sent before, that in departing they lead the way, that as travelers, as voyagers or want to be, they should be longed for, not lamented, and that no occasion should be given to pagans to censure us deservedly and justly on the ground that we grieve for those who we say are living. So that final thought is kind of like the one that we get from Peter about you know, as Christians, we don't want to give anybody any just or right reason to lay into us or criticize us or censure us to use the word that Cyprian uses here. Rather, if their complaints are you guys are weird because you see hope in death, and you guys are weird because you think you're dead or actually living in eternity with God, well, okay, let them think we're weird for that, let them be angry about that, but not because we did actually stupid stuff. I want to keep going with this. There's and I'm going to. I makes it sound like I was, oh, I want to keep going, but I'm not. No, no, I want to keep going with this, and we're going to keep going with this. But I think that's a really powerful look into the mind of somebody who was well read. He knew Galatians 6.10 really well. And Cyprian was teaching people this stuff, and he's looking around and he's saying, This is bad. It's hurting people. But also, he is absolutely enamored with the hope that he has in Christ and celebratory of the fact that people are imitating Christ in the church and obeying the commands of Christ. They're doing what Galatians 6.10 says, and he sees it as making a legitimate difference. We'll get into an attempt at the raw numbers of what kind of difference and how significant the difference might have been for the Christian approach during these plagues next time around. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.