Look, you and I need to get one thing straight right now. I did not choose to see all of the Twilight movies in theaters. It just kind of happened to me. And the way that it happened to me is that all those movies came out in an era when I went to all the movies that came out because get this. There was a new theater that went into the town that I lived in, and it was beautiful. And the whole thing was fresh and minty and clean and it looked great and sounded great. The dew of Eden was still upon it, not yet replaced by the spilled sodas of humanity that put that disgusting, sticky film all over everything in movie theaters. And so I was like, hey, this theater is cheap. They have good popcorn, and the movies in this era are good enough. I'm just gonna go to everything. So I went to all the movies. That's how I accidentally saw Twilight. Well, all the Twilights. While I was in that phase, though, Gran Torino came out. I didn't know anything about it. I saw it at Clint Eastwood or whatever. So I went to the movie theater and I was just kind of eating the popcorn. I'm gonna sit in this comfortable, clean seat. It's air conditioned. I'm having a nice time. It's cheap. But the movie was mind-blowingly good. And about halfway through, it occurred to me this might be the most perfect movie I've ever seen in my entire life. And before the movie was even over, I had decided in my soul I had made a blood oath covenant with myself and Clint Eastwood that I was gonna tell everybody I know about this incredible experience I had going to this incredible movie and how everybody should go see this movie. Now look, all the Twilight stuff aside here, I think every single one of us can relate to that story. We've seen something that was so amazing, so incredible, so beautiful, so moving, so perfect a fit, lock and key for who we are and what it is that we had to tell other people about it because we wanted to give away the thing that we had received for ourselves. It's human nature, it's what we do. Likewise, we just got done the last three days of you and I hanging out, looking at a story cold that has been around for a real long time. It's the story of Jesus. We looked at the story of what happened when he showed up and he lived life the way he lived life, and he taught the things he taught, and he broke the laws of time and space, and he demonstrated himself, God demonstrated him, to be the promised king who will reign on the throne of David forever over this kingdom that has all the values that all stupid politics aside, all dumb church hurt and weird things said in the name of God aside, all of it aside, he advocated for a kingdom that has all the values that you and I, at the deepest level of who we are and what we were built for, want. And there were 12 dudes who had a front row seat for that. One of those dudes ended up hanging himself and he went away after he sold Jesus out. That was Judas. But the other eleven, they watched Jesus walk into the hive of scum and villainy of Jerusalem, voluntarily lay down his life by going to the cross after a sham of a trial. He could have pulled himself off of the cross. The guy already demonstrated he can break all the laws of time and space. He can break the wood of a cross with his brain. He can interrupt a crucifixion if he wants to, but he didn't. He stayed up there just like he said he was gonna do. And then they saw him come back to life also just like he said he was gonna do. And then they hung out with him for a tremendous amount of time after that, before they watched him physically ascend into heaven. Now, on his way out the door, Jesus said that it wasn't for them to know the day or the hour when all things were gonna get sorted out and history was gonna get resolved and there's gonna be a big reckoning. But it was up to them to be Jesus' witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Now that sounds very intimidating on the surface, right? Like you're one of these eleven guys, your leader just got executed by the most powerful empire in the history of the world. You're not really well educated. Like, this is gonna be pretty freaky and pretty intimidating, but go back to that impulse about Gran Torino and why I had to tell everybody about it, including you. If you think about it, I also had to tell you about it. You really should go see Gran Torino. Think back to that impulse when you felt it. It's a very powerful impulse. And like the stuff we're talking about, we're talking about like, you know, a great movie. These guys saw something that turned their entire understanding, everybody's understanding of reality, of life, death, time, age, guilt, atonement, forgiveness, God, what happens when you die? It turned all of that on its head, and they had physical, tangible proof put in front of them again and again and again and again and again. Look, if I'm gonna go to the mat for a Clint Eastwood movie named after a car that was a measly two-hour experience, how much more so? Were these guys gonna go to the mat for the Jesus thing? Were these guys gonna say, who cares if we're not the most well-educated people in the world? Who cares if we don't know how everything is exactly gonna work out in the short term? Who cares if people are gonna get mad? We have to tell everybody about this thing, both because Jesus said to do it and because it's the truest, realist thing ever. Everything else is faking it, everything else is claiming to be true and real, everything else is an advertisement, everything else is a sales pitch with a little bit of truth mingled with a whole lot of gamesmanship, but not this Jesus thing. They saw it with their own eyes. That is real, real, real, truly real, the truest and the realest. And so, yeah, Jesus told them to do it, but also I don't think they could help but do it. So the plot of the next part of this story is you and I imagine that we're just being dropped into this for the first time and we're journeying from the end of the Old Testament up to Galatians. The plot of the next part is the disciples of Jesus with all of their flaws going out with a message that is unflawed, backed by God, who is unflawed, to go and tell the whole world, anybody who will listen, and some people who didn't want to listen, this amazing, true, real thing that they couldn't help but tell them. And basically, everything that I just told you about right there is the book of Acts, chapter one. Now, once again, I know some of you have been around the Bible for a long time, some of you are picking this up right now for the first time. So let me just lay out how this thing works structurally. In the Bible, you got the Old Testament, which are basically the Jewish, the ancient Hebrew scriptures. There are prophecies in there, there's poetry and art in there, there's wisdom literature like Proverbs in there, there's a whole bunch of history and narrative stuff in there, there's recitation of ancient laws in there. All of it fits together to tell this cohesive story of God's redemptive plan and of how humanity cannot redeem itself. By the time you get to the end of the Old Testament, everything you could ever dream up to solve the human problem of time and age and death and failure, and the fact that you can't go back and unmake mistakes that you've made in the past, all of that is begging for a solution, but none of that has been solved in the Old Testament. It looks like you're gonna need somebody who's exactly like Jesus to come along, who perfectly fits lock and key into the whole problem set up by the bigger part of the Bible, which is the Old Testament. And so the first four books of the New Testament are four accounts, so that line up very neatly, of Jesus' life and his role as the centerpiece, the chief cornerstone of God's redemptive plan. Now each of those books is written to a different audience because remember, like we've been saying all along, the Old Testament is pretty much just a Jewish thing. There were a lot of people groups back then in the ancient world who had their own sacred texts or scriptures or traditions that were ethnically isolated to just that particular people group. Those haven't stood the test of time. But the one that was hitched to the Jewish people has stood the test of time. Well, I believe as somebody who thinks that they're the actual God of all things is behind the Bible. I think it stood the test of time because God has made it stand the test of time, because God has sustained his chosen people, the Jewish people, even through all of the ups and downs of that very long history. But also, I think that the Old Testament has stood the test of time because the whole thing has always pointed to it from the very beginning, being bigger than just a local ethnic religion with a local ethnic patron deity. The vision has always been bigger than that. The vision has always been dating all the way back to the book of Genesis and the very first formation of this people group, the plan has always been for God's blessing to go to all the nations, the whole world that is, through them. And so the fact that the first four books of the New Testament are all written to different people groups and all tell the story of Jesus, each emphasizing a different theological theme that would matter the most to answer the pertinent questions to each of those four groups. Even the structure of the first four books of the New Testament, we call them together the gospels, even that structure is communicating theology, is communicating something about what the Bible is doing and what God is doing. This is going beyond a local, ethnocentric, patron god, ancient Near Eastern religion, and it's going to the whole world. This is where the thing is going prime time, and it's being made abundantly clear. This isn't just another one of these little local gods that'll come and go and just gets a nickname for a while. When we're talking about the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament, who's the same God, we're talking about the God, the first cause, the sustainer of existence, the initiator of existence, the one who ultimately is in charge of things like justice and redemption, the one who ultimately writes all the rules of what is good and bad and what is moral and what is right and what is order and what is chaos. We're talking about the God. And Jesus, it gets made clear in those first four books of the New Testament, is the Son of God, the promised Messiah, the eternal King, God in the flesh. So this is all so much more exciting than seeing Gran Torino for the first time. Though again, that was very exciting. And I do recommend you seeing that film if you haven't seen it before. By the way, if you do go and see it, look for the parallels with the parable of the Good Samaritan. It's right there, I'm telling you, it's just a great movie. So this Jesus thing told over the course of the first four books of the New Testament, the Gospels, is amazing. So of course the disciples are gonna have to do something with that. They cannot help but tell people. But there is one problem telling people things is hard. And just because you want to make a movement out of something doesn't mean it's going to work. How many people have started businesses, podcasts, YouTube channels, clubs, institutions, started churches? I mean, everybody's got ambitions to do something and get people excited about it and get people on board, but it almost always fails, and even when it succeeds, not usually succeeding on a huge, gigantic grand scale, but the thing the disciples are trying to accomplish here in the early going of the book of Acts, Acts, by the way, is the next book of the New Testament. It's the sequel to the Gospels, it's what happened after. The thing that the disciples are trying to accomplish here is massive in scale. They've got a message that invites people to reimagine everything about how everything is. And frankly, I think it's going to be a really tough sell because no matter how sure they are of what they saw, it's still a lot to ask a bunch of people from all over the world who didn't see it to buy into the thing and believe in it. How are you gonna pull that off? So as we get into the book of Acts and we're getting closer to the beginning of the book of Galatians, which this whole season is on, there is a giant conundrum. These followers of Jesus cannot help but go and tell people about what they've seen and to invite them to see it too. They are compelled by what they saw, they are compelled by the command of Jesus himself, but it looks like it's going to be a tough sell because it looks like it's just gonna be 11 guys trying to accomplish something that, if they succeeded, would change the world. But this is gonna be a really uphill slog. Unless the same God who was behind the story of Jesus as recorded in the four gospels, turns out to also be behind what is happening next. If you see something even pretty good, you feel like you've got to tell everybody. If you see those one or two things over the course of a lifetime that you view as being awe-inspiring and truly artistically perfect, you really have to tell everyone. But if you happen to be there at the right time in the right place in the history of this ball spinning through the cosmos, and you saw the pivot point of human history, the centerpiece of God's redemptive plan and God in the flesh himself, well, then it's going to be more than a feeling of I should probably tell some people, they'd probably enjoy this. You would be compelled beyond any other action. This would be your sole purpose in life. And indeed, that is what happened to these 11 guys who followed Jesus and are now standing at the threshold, standing at the starting line of this enormous task that is before them. Can they pull it off? How are they gonna pull it off? What is God gonna do? Fun, fun, fun. More of this next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.