Anytime stuff turns totally crazy in a relationship or politically, there's always a couple of moments there that I think are common to any stuff went crazy kind of narrative. One of those moments is going to be a moment where things with one action flip from how they've always been with norms and taboos in place, and life is kind of as you expect it. And then something happens in that moment, and now everybody realizes at once, dang, things are never going to be the same. Maybe in my country in recent memory, this would be 9-11. Maybe your country has something like that as well. Maybe in a relationship or on a smaller scale, somebody says words that can't be unsaid. They violate trust in a way that it can't really be unviolated. Anytime stuff goes just bonkers, though, there is that moment where you realize, oh, it's on. Somebody crossed a line, and that is not something that we can uncross. That's one of the moments that always happens when stuff goes crazy. The second moment that always happens when stuff goes crazy, if you really get deep into it, is the moment where you start to lose track of how many atrocities have occurred. And I don't just mean literal atrocities. You know, it can be the kind of thing where it's a big fight at work or church or on a team and a circle of friends, and you get that initiating moment where tension built up and somebody abandoned the norms and crossed a line. But then after that, unless it's immediately stemmed, everybody starts crossing lines and eventually you reach that second point in the crazy times where nobody can even remember how many horrible things have now been done. Nobody can keep track of the number of times that a vile thing that none of us ever would have done even once ever before the initiating incident. Now they just happen left and right. So there's the moment where everything flips to crazy, and then there's the moment where you realize that wow, we are really deep in the crazy here because crazy now feels like the normal. I think that's the moment we're getting to in Acts chapter 12. You know, you go back through the story of Jesus and the Gospels, and there really isn't a lot of violence until the end. There's saber rattling, there's escalating tensions. I mean, the tensions ratchet up and ratchet up and ratchet up. You can feel it coming from a mile away. And Jesus says that there's going to be violence. He's going to get killed. It's going to happen. But then finally, when the dam breaks and the crazy event occurs, which is Jesus gets arrested in the garden, and then there's a kangaroo court trial for him under cover of darkness with illegitimate witnesses violating all of the legal norms of the day, so that out of desperation, even if it does require breaking all the rules to do it, we can get this guy executed. And then you get the trial with Pilate, and you got all of the people out in the crowd saying, Yeah, give us the insurrectionist murderer guy, kill Jesus. And off Jesus goes to the cross and in just a blink of an eye, such a tiny little amount of time. And in that one violent whirlwind incident, everything changes. But even after Jesus is crucified and buried and risen from the dead, and we're into the book of Acts, it still feels like that is the outlier. That might not be the new normal, this violence, this persecution. Maybe things will settle down, and early on in the book of Acts, everybody's just signing up to follow Jesus, and there are miracles, and everything's great. And sure, tensions ratchet back up a little bit here and there with some light flogging, but it's all good. Everybody comes away smiling and laughing and high fiving about it anyway. But then the Stephen thing happens. He kind of gets the Jesus treatment, gets a kangaroo court trial. But this time around, the religious leaders don't even bother to go to the Romans to ask permission. They just kill him themselves. So, no, that really does indicate an increase in madness, an increase in moral insanity. Okay. Feels like we're maybe moving toward that dangerous second point where you kind of forget how many atrocities have occurred because there's too many. You can't even remember it. We don't get all the details of what happens after the martyrdom of Stephen, but we know that Saul is going out and around building a reputation for himself. He's got a full-fledged reputation by the time that he has his experience on the road to Damascus, which means that a lot of time had passed from the moment where he held coats to accommodate the public murder of Stephen up until the time he had the Damascus Road incident. Who knows how much more bloodshed had occurred in that period of time? But it feels like we're getting to that second moment now as we get to about the one-third mark, almost the halfway mark of the book of Acts, where it's like, dang, so much violence, so much killing, so much persecution. I guess maybe this is just the new normal. But to me, the thing that I want to read to you about here in Acts chapter 12, this is the one where as a reader, I feel deflation vicariously on behalf of the disciples, because in just two sentences, something that maybe would have occupied two chapters if it had happened earlier in the Bible gets described. This is it, and this is all the screen time it gets. Ready? Acts chapter 12, verse 1. It was about this time that King Herod arrested some who belonged to the church, intending to persecute them. He had James, the brother of John, put to death with the sword. And that's it. Nothing more about James. This is John's brother. This is one of the first two disciples who got called all the way back in Matthew chapter 4 when Jesus is putting together the team. That is crazy. I absolutely nailed that page turn. I went to grab it, I just grabbed a handful of pages from the corner of the Bible like that, and I went right to Matthew 4. That was rad. Going on from there, Jesus saw two other brothers, James, son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with their father, Zebedee, preparing their nets. Jesus called them and immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him. Man, wonder that feels for Zebedee. I bet he didn't imagine that this would be the fate of his son when they saw that guy out in the boat, and his two sons got up out of the boat and followed Jesus. Zebedee saw him go. I mean, there was some tradition of rabbis, teachers calling apprentices, disciples, students to come and be schooled by them. Maybe Zebedee thought it was a great honor. Maybe he thought it was pretty weird. But in that moment, I bet he wasn't like, hmm, I have a bad feeling about this. I bet this ends with one of my sons on the other end of an executioner's sword, as ordered by Herod the Great's grandson. No, I bet that outcome was a pretty bitter surprise for Zebedee. That said, I don't think it was probably much of a surprise for James himself, or for John, or for Peter, or for any of these guys. They knew that they were deep into the age of insanity, and they knew that the Herod family was crazy volatile without getting into all of it again. The whole Herod family tree goes back to the age of the late Republic in Rome. The Herods were really connected politically in Rome. They were part of the court life there. And Herod Agrippa, Herod Agrippa is the guy who isn't just killed James in this passage. His name, even, is a name descended from the big characters in Roman politics during the age of Julius Caesar and shortly thereafter. In fact, probably he's named after Marcus Agrippa. If you go and look at the Pantheon in Rome, even now, you see the name Agrippa engraved right across the top, dating all the way back to then. So the Herod family, they weren't Jewish. They were vaguely ethnic cousins of the Jewish people from kind of the same neck of the woods. And they kind of held themselves out as being devout Jews, especially Herod Agrippa tried to pull off that shtick. But it was all sort of an act in order to get the client kingship granted by Rome so that they could have some sort of rulership and authority and make money off of the historic Jewish homeland. So these guys were deeply politically in bed with Caligula, but even more so with Caligula's predecessors. They're kind of at this point in history, right here in Acts chapter 12, they're sort of skating on old reputation and legacy intermarriage and business agreements made with famous Roman politicians and generals who are no longer even alive. So that kind of explains why Herod Agrippa is trying to curry favor with his people here, and he gets the impression that persecuting Christians is fashionable with the same mob of people who were yelling for Barabbas at Jesus' trial under Pontius Pilate. So the more Herod Agrippa licks his finger and puts it to the wind, the more he's like, hey, I should just pick on Christians more. This seems to be a huge hit. And so after this, he has Peter arrested, and then there's a miraculous deliverance of Peter, and after that deliverance, all of this is happening in Jerusalem, the disciples get pushed out even further to go fulfill the Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria to the ends of the earth plot arc of the book of Acts. And then right after that, Herod Agrippa gets eaten by worms and dies. I don't know exactly what that means, but that's what the Bible says, and Josephus confirms that while Herod was up wearing this shiny silver armor, as described in the Bible, that he's up given this big speech, and he's struck down right there, and he dies a few days later. So Bible and extra biblical history agree. Surprise, once again, right there. Anyways, that's basically Acts chapter 12. And then over the next several chapters of Acts, there's a few more things that happen in Jerusalem, but the action is starting to really move out and away from Jerusalem at this point, which again connects closely with what we're talking about with the book of Galatians. Remember, that letter that is going to be the focal point of this whole season, and we're almost to the actual letter itself, that letter is written to people who live far, far from Jerusalem. It's written to people who aren't even Jewish but are Christians. Yet there's confusion about how much old Judaism is supposed to come with the Jesus thing, and how is it to be applied to people who were never Jewish ethnically or religiously in any way in the first place? The situation with the Galatian churches that Paul is writing about in the book of Galatians is going to be kind of a test case to sort through what we do with all of these tensions that have been building through the 12 chapters of Acts that we've looked at so far. Maybe the execution of James was the moment where everybody lost track of how many atrocities and violations of norms there had been. Maybe it's a later persecution where that happened, but whatever the case, at some point, persecution, violent, lethal persecution of the church became the new norm for Christians, and it's going to stay the new norm for a very long time. Yet all we see throughout the whole Bible is just faithfulness, faithfulness, faithfulness on the part of the people who could not help but believe in Jesus, even though it was very costly to them. Final thought, thanks to everybody who went and watched the new Genesis video that we published over on the YouTube side. My goodness, the encouragement and the positivity over there. I read every single one of your comments. That is so kind and so generous of you. Thank you. Even the helpful critical feedback, I really value. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.