All the questions looks like maybe God. I think I'm gonna open it. I'm gonna open it.
SPEAKER_01One of the things that I think is really interesting about the Bible is how you got all these different genres. Normally, when you read any document that's bound up together, it might be that you get different authors in there and stuff. It might even be that you're reading a compendium or a collection, or like, oh, I took a group of lectures and I put them together to make this book. That's the thing that's pretty common that fancy academic types do to keep their tenure progress intact or whatever. But it's very rare that you read a document that is made of pretty much every genre of literature ever. And you get that in the Bible. The first time I ever encountered something like that was when I read Bram Stoker's Dracula as a kid. And if you've listened to this podcast for a while, you know that apparently that book made a great impression on me. But that book is it's like a found footage book. You remember the found footage craze from movies Cloverfield was one of those. And what was the one that started it all? Oh my goodness, Whitman. Come on, all of you are yelling at right now. You're like, oh, it's in the woods, and it's a Blair Witch project. The Blair Witch Project. That was the first found footage movie that I remember where the movie is a collection of all of this supposed footage from different camcorders and things like that. And so with the Bible, it's just bizarre that in the same bound-up document that I have right here, it's all it's got leather on the outside. You have got history, you have got philosophy, you've got poetry and music, you've got apocalyptic prophecy, you've got simple predictive prophecy, you've got political rhetoric. I mean, it's from a very different time, maybe doesn't quite hit us that way, but some of it's political rhetoric. You've got military campaign documentation, you've got genres of literature that maybe we don't even know what they are anymore. Like I'm not even a hundred percent sure that the genre of literature that is Job or the early stuff of Genesis is something that we even have a full understanding of in terms of just what it was and what the rules of that genre were back in the day because the documents are so very, very old. And in the midst of all of this stuff, you have letters, personal letters written from a dude to another dude, or from a dude to a church. And what an unusual thing. I mean, just think about this. I know a lot of you read the Bible a bunch of times. This is all old hat to you, but I know for a bunch of you this is pretty new. Let's all just try to put ourselves in the shoes of the first-time Bible reader who's never been through this ever before. And they start at the beginning and they just go right through it, and they go through the whole Old Testament, and then there's a giant gap, and you're like, wait, what happened in here? And then all of a sudden, yeah, Rome and stuff, where did Persia go? What on earth is happening? And they get reoriented after four trips through the story of Jesus from different angles, written for different audiences. Maybe by Luke, they would start to catch on and be like, Is this the rest of the Bible? Is every remaining book just a retelling of this story? But then they get out of John and they're like, Okay, all right, now this this is new. Now the story's moving forward again. Okay, this is interesting. They get done with Acts, and maybe they're expecting the next thing will be what happened to Paul? Did he get executed? How did things work out for him? Where's Peter? Are we gonna round out the A plot and the B plot? But nope. Then they turn the page from Acts to Romans, and the next thing they get, especially if they had Mrs. Springer's fourth grade class where they taught you how to write letters, and the next thing they get on page one of Romans is Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God, the gospel he proclaimed beforehand through his prophets and the holy scriptures regarding his son, who, as to his human nature, was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of Holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God, by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord. Through him and for his name's sake we received grace and apostleship to call people from among the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith, and you also are among those who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, to all in Rome who are loved by God and are called to be saints, grace and peace to you, from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Huh? Now for that person who's hypothetically reading through the Bible for the first time, I very much hope that they uh took fourth grade with Mrs. Springer at Cardinal Elementary School in Makata, Iowa, because if they did, they would know all of the hallmarks that give away that what you're reading is a letter, because they're all there. And at that moment, this hypothetical first time Bible reader who knows nothing about the Bible is like, wait, what? They got letters in here? Now, they would have seen letters at other points. There are a few little excerpts in Acts and in the Old Testament where we get letters or decrees from kings like Cyrus or Darius. But a whole book of the Bible is gonna be a letter? Well, now imagine what they're thinking as they get to the end of Romans, and they're like, huh. Well, that was an interesting aside, but I guess it makes sense because back here, one page, Paul is in prison in Rome. And so I don't know why he would be writing to Romans while he's in Rome. I mean, couldn't they just come and talk to him? But uh, okay. Uh, you know, I guess it kind of makes sense. Maybe this is just a little aside in the grand narrative of the Bible. Now we'll probably get back to uh what happened to Paul when Peter and everything, when we turn the page over here to what's next. First Corinthians. Well, when are we gonna hear in the first Corinthians? The Bible is so confusing. Paul called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God and our brother Sosthenes. The heck is Sosthenes to the Church of God and Corinth to the okay, this is just another letter. Grace and peace to you from God our Father. How much of this is letters? And then they just start grabbing the rest of the Bible and they're thumbing through, like there's a second Corinthians. Well, that's probably another letter. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God and Timothy are yeah, it's just it's another letter. Okay, Galatians. What the heck is Paul, an apostle sent not from it's all letters, and then they get to Revelation and they're like, ah, interesting. This is not a letter. And then they're like, What the heck am I reading now? And then the Bible's over. Huh. It really is fascinating. And I gotta admit, uh, and this, I don't know, this might cost me a few credibility points with everybody here. But when I picked up the Bible and started to read it for the first time when I was a kid, and I didn't really know what was in it. I mean, I knew the big stories like Noah and the Ark, because I had a wallpaper border in my room that had animals in a boat and a guy with beard, bald guy with beard in there, fully clothed, I might add. And he was in there in the boat and they're floating along, like, ah, it's Noah's Ark. Everybody knows that story, children's stories and everything. I knew like David and Goliath, and my parents read the Bible to me in little Bible storybooks and stuff when I was a kid. So I knew some of the high points. I knew who Jesus was, but I had no idea how the Bible was actually structured or how this information was delivered. And I just set out one day to read the New Testament as a boy, and I started through it, and that scenario that I just described to you a minute ago is this hypothetical thing. Like, what if somebody picked it up? Wouldn't it weird them out? That is actually my experience. That is how I felt reading through the Bible for the first time. And this is the confession part. I was sort of disappointed because I didn't want to get it all in letters, because when you're a kid, you want action. And secretly, when you're an adult, you like the action parts too. You don't want words and chit-chat. I want action. And so I got done with the gospels and with acts, and I was like, oh, this is a lot harder for me to read now. Now, in truth, as an adult, the second half of the New Testament has become far more interesting to me because, in a way, this is action. This isn't just a letter that happened in a vacuum written by no one to no one. It's the kind of letter that is action. It is filled with tension. And that stupid thing that my daughter and I did at the beginning, where we were goofing around about the idea of getting a letter in the mail. That's kind of how I think this went down when this letter arrived, and probably the elders and the leaders of the church in Galatia got it, and they were like, Oh, we want help. But Paul, he's pretty intense. Let's just see how this starts. Oh boy, it's from Paul and all the other Christians, and it's from God. This is gonna be intense. This is gonna have implications. And we're gonna have to read this in front of everybody. Gulp. All right, let's see what we have here. This wasn't a normal letter, and the way it is framed at the beginning, with Paul saying, Paul, an apostle, meaning not just a follower of God, but someone uniquely appointed by Jesus to play a unique leadership role in the advancing of his kingdom in this fledgling stage. So he's dropping the title there. That's a resume thing. You don't get to just grab that title and assign it to yourself, and he will defend that claim as the letter goes along, by the way. So not just some guy with an opinion who tweets things, Paul an apostle, sent not from men nor by man. Uh-oh. Okay, so this isn't just dude's opinions and more opinion fest and talking head punnets and things like that. This is this is authoritative, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father. Okay, I thought that might be who you were referencing when you said sent not from men nor by man. You meant God, didn't you? Yeah, you meant God. Okay. And just in case people are like, well, is God and the stuff that he says like really that authoritative? Will he raise Jesus from the dead? Okay, well, that's a pretty good flex. And all the brothers with me. So literally every Christian that I'm talking to or that I know is in agreement with this thing as well. I just, we don't feel the tension from a distance. We get to a letter like this, and maybe we feel a little bit of little kid me reading through the Bible, or first-time Bible reader, reading through the Bible, and we're like, oh, a letter. Okay, hit cruise control. Just relax, slouch back in the chair. This one's not gonna be action-packed and everything. But think about what it would be like to get this letter if you were you. Think about what it would be like to have something with an authority that's bigger than the government. Think about how you feel when you get something and it's from the IRS if you live in my country. It's usually just like, we have noted your change of address or something boring, but one of these times, it might not be something boring, and you know that. And your heartbeat accelerates a little bit as you open it up because there's nothing it's gonna say that's gonna be good. It's from the IRS. And then if it's something mostly innocuous or that only robs you of a significant amount of money instead of a crippling amount of money, you're like, uh, okay. This is from an authority bigger than that one. This is a letter that is citing in the first two sentences authority of the highest magnitude and highest order. And this is addressed to the churches in Galatia. So the people who are opening this, they're not getting ready to read the following words and thinking, cool, we can relax. This isn't an action story, it's just a letter. No, no. This is action, this is tension, this is resolution to a long festering crisis, and it's being spoken to authoritatively. You know what it's like to have a long festering crisis, a relationship that's gone to weird places, and you know it has to be dealt with, but you don't know what to do. And at some point you're gonna have to tackle it. That is action in your life, that is real tension. And usually a conversation is gonna be how you work that out, but it doesn't feel boring and not action-packed when you're going through that. It's high drama and high action. And these people, as they popped open this dangerous letter they received, and know that they're gonna have to read it to everybody, and know that this is binding upon them and their lives and the church, are holding their breath as they get ready to read through it and find out what the verdict from Paul and Apostle, from all the other Christians, and indeed the letter holds it out as being from God is going to be toward their situation. In retrospect, it might have been easier just to not open the thing, but even though you don't want to open the letter from the IRS, you probably better open the letter. They opened the letter, and well, we're gonna do the same tomorrow. Action ahead. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.