Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And yesterday I did the thing again where I meant to get through all the stuff that I said we were going to do, but there's just a lot of stuff. And the Bible's interesting. And sometimes, you know, you get into it and you need a little more time. So a little more time we have. We're going to pick it up where we left off yesterday. If you did miss yesterday's episode, today's going to make a lot more sense if you go back and catch it. All right, and I'm Jeff play some music. We're going to get after it. I got more from John. Let's do John 1335. This one I remember. This is one of the Bible camp ones that you memorize and then you have it forever. A new command I give you, this is Jesus. Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples if you love one another. And you can see how that teaching of Jesus in John 13 is further developed in the passage I just read from John 15, and then further, further developed in Jesus' prayer to the Father before he gets arrested in John 17. By this will all men know you are my disciples if you love one another. When you have that in the back of your head and you're going through the rest of the New Testament, it really helps to remember that that was a command of Jesus. He's like, this is how it's going to work. When Jesus says, Go and make disciples of all nations and teach them to obey everything I've commanded and baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, this was the commissioning as well. He restates this commission repeatedly here in the book of John. You gotta love one another, you gotta love one another, you gotta love one another. That's key to the whole thing. Paul says, all these other beautiful attributes of the kingdom, you can't hold them all at once unless they're bound together by the carrying case, the rhythm, the conveniencing knot that is love. That's the thing that holds all the stuff together and makes it make sense for the Christian life, for the Christian mission. This is the thing. So back to my point. When you read through the whole New Testament, and I recently had to dig deep into all of it in a very short period of time because I'm writing this book, this field guide for the Bible that's going to be coming out soon. And I'm trying to distill every book down into its raw, essential material. Why is this in the Bible? What is it doing? When you go through the New Testament epistles, pretty much everyone is like, hey, you're not being loving. Come on, Corinth. Come on, Galatia, come on, Thessalonica, come on, Colossae. Come on, former slave owner. Come on, what do y'all like we can't nothing works if we don't have love? We're a resounding gong or a clanging symbol.
SPEAKER_01The whole enterprise is a self-refuting joke if we have all this other stuff that is so important to us and that we can speak about with great philosophical complexity and at great length, but we're jackwagons to each other. It doesn't work.
SPEAKER_02You gotta have the love thing right. One of the last books of the New Testament to be written is by John. It's one of the letters that, I mean, he's a very young man when he's hanging out with Jesus. He lives to be a very old man. He's the only disciple who isn't martyred, who doesn't die prematurely and violently. And toward the end of his life, John's still writing letters to the church in a very friendly, grandfatherly tone that we'll look at maybe in a future conversation. And there, he's just pounding what is loving and what is orthodox, what is right, what is Christianity. But all of it comes back to love. Love in teaching things that are true, repeating true stuff about Jesus that was handed down to us, loving your brother in the ways that Jesus defined. I mean, this theme runs from the chronological beginning of the New Testament to the very chronological end of the New Testament. It is everywhere. So I think one of the big things about love in our quest to understand what this term means throughout the whole Bible and everything, that we take away from the Gospel of John, maybe a little more fleshed out here than what we get in the first three Gospels, is the strategic vitality of love as the calling card of the Christian. Now, what we get from the earlier three Gospels and Jesus' teachings that are highlighted by the Gospel authors there is what Jesus means by love and how incredibly unusual and different that is from what love looks like in an otherwise entirely transactional world where pretty much everything's a negotiation, pretty much everything's a deal. You bank things and you give things. Maybe we could scrape to the far edges of the human experience to find exceptions. But even in loving relationships, it's fairly normative. I mean, it's certainly presented this way in television and books. It's fairly normative for love to be polluted and perverted with manipulation and withholding and keeping records of wrongs, and basically doing the opposite of all the stuff that's described in 1 Corinthians 13. Fairly normative to do that, even in a relationship that you might get a good look at from the outside and be like, that's pretty loving. That's pretty self-sacrificing. Jesus is talking about more. He is talking about something that goes beyond the normal what we see every day, human expectations for what counts as love. And then in the fourth gospel, John He's saying this is the centerpiece, so this is what is gonna make it make sense to people. I suppose the argumentation is important, there's a lot of that in the Bible. Jesus makes theological arguments himself about himself using scripture, but love is the thing that makes it go. And the I I guess I already said this exact phrase, but I'll say it again. Like the whole enterprise implodes without it. The whole thing looks like a laughable joke apart from this thing that is a trademark, the calling card of the Christian. So here's what I think we found so far in our big volume journey through the Bible. I think we probably have one more day to look at some of the outlier authors of the Bible, but here's what we've done so far. We've looked at a whole bunch of Paul. He is the second most prolific author to contribute to the New Testament. Did you know that? It seems like Paul would be the guy who wrote the most, the majority of the New Testament, but it's not. Luke beats him out by word count, by just a little bit. So we've looked at the two most prolific authors of the New Testament, and both of them are talking in very specific terms about what love actually is. We get the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke. We get incredible direct detail from the writings of Paul. So those are the two big contributors. Matthew is a huge contributor to the New Testament. That's where we get the love your enemy material that we looked at. The golden rule is in Matthew. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Great Commandment is in Matthew. Mark is also a huge contributor to the New Testament. He's also representative of the Petrine. That sounded fancy. I'm not Matt settle down. He's also representative of the tradition and the teachings of Peter. It seems like history says he traveled with Peter and relayed stuff from Peter. And he gives us a robust handling of the greatest commandment question as well. And now we're looking at John, who's one of the big three contributors to the New Testament. And John seems to be particularly interested in defining love by saying, look at the actions of God. Look at the actions of Jesus. How is he? I mean, this is real love. A friend would lay down their life for somebody else. Greater love has nobody than that. So John is fleshing it out even more by saying, look at the example of Jesus, look at the example of God. But then he goes even further in highlighting that Jesus commands his followers to exhibit this as well. And then he goes even further by saying that Jesus himself and the Father are in agreement. This is the strategy. This is the thing, the trademark, the calling card that is going to make outsiders look at this and say, uh, okay, that's compelling. Apparently, even more than the argumentation side, though that is important too. So that's where we're at at this point. What a robust look at what love is biblically we're getting from this exercise. I mean, good job, Bible. This is great. We'll see if we can round out the remaining corners of the New Testament and complete this little task tomorrow and then be on our merry way through the rest of the fruits of the Spirit after that. All right. Oh, hey, quick note on the way out the door. Uh I saw that a bunch of you had jumped in to support the program. Uh, thank you for that. I hope that a lot of you are doing that in anticipation of the Galatians stickers. We uh do I want to tip my hand to this? Yeah. Uh okay. No, I'm gonna tell you more about where we're at with the stickers and when they come out and what that's gonna look like next time around. We're having fun with this, and I think I think it's gonna be pretty cool. So uh yeah, more on that later. Again, everybody who supports the podcast in any way on any platform at any level is gonna get mailed at least a gold outline, mission accomplished, achievement unlocked Galatian sticker here in not too long as we wrap this thing up. Some of you, you know who you are, have gone way above and beyond. You're gonna get the cool, super limited edition hologram Galatian sticker. So if you want to jump in on that, I mean support the program at any level, on any platform, if you don't, that's totally cool too. All right, that's plenty for now. Land in the plane on the What Does Love Mean overview of the New Testament manana. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.
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