Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And as you and I have discussed on more than one occasion, the best bad guys are bad guys that make sense. Stupid bad guys in movies that you don't like and that don't hold up are inevitably bad guys who are just Snidley Whiplash. Does that reference? Does that make any sense to you? I realize just right now that I constantly use the term Snidley Whiplash, which is a hip reference from probably like 150 years ago or something. I think, I don't even actually know this. I think Snidley Whiplash is some vaudevillian old Western style bad guy, maybe. I'm making all of this up. I I don't even know. I think he has a curly mustache that goes up at the edges. I think he's real skinny and he's got kind of a hunch back, and he wears a suit, and I think he has long spindly fingers that he taps together as he makes evil plans, and I think he probably has a top hat, maybe? And I think he possibly ties women to railroad tracks to derail the train and rob it. Again, I don't know. These are just my associations, and it occurs to me that if I don't know, it's probably unreasonable to ask you to know what I'm talking about. Now you can picture what I mean when I say Snidley whiplash. I mean a dumb bad guy whose motives are not terribly interesting or provocative. He's just bad for being bad. Like um all the bad guys in the DC movies, they're just dumb cartoons with horns, and they want to be awakened from an ancient slumber to be bad. I want to destroy beautiful things. Why? Because And it's just not compelling or interesting at all. But you think about the stories that stick with you, the ones that mean something, the ones that make you think and really reflect on who you are and what you believe and that are formative to you, the bad guys always make a degree of sense. I'm not a big Thanos fan because like ever since the hair started to thin out and I shaved my head, now people constantly are like, hey, you kind of look like him, and that is not a compliment to me. But what I will tell you is the guy had a motive that made you pause for a second and think in those Marvel movies, because you'd be like, Well, you know, his strategy's stupid, but he thinks he's the good guy. He thinks that this difficult sacrifice that he alone is willing to make is what is going to save the universe, save the people, and make everything go. Yesterday, in our pursuit of trying to figure out what the setup is for the book of Galatians, that's what this whole season is about. We started looking at the story of Jesus. He's a pretty big character in the Bible, but we're acting like we don't even know who he is, and we're getting the story for the first time here. And as we looked at the story of Jesus, the first half of the story of Jesus is a whole lot of stuff about the good guy. Spoiler alert, Jesus is the good guy in the story of Jesus. And he hails from the right place, he ticks all the right boxes from ancient prophecies of yore that point to him being the Messiah, the one who can do all the things we need to do. You leave off the Old Testament, you're just begging for a character just like who it looks like Jesus is going to be. It's all very exciting as you start to read the story of Jesus in the New Testament. But then a bad guy gets introduced just about the time that you're discovering that you really like Jesus' ideas and what he seems to be going for. And the bad guy, much like Thanos and much not like Snidley Whiplash as I imagine Snidley Whiplash to be, the bad guy in the Jesus story is a really good bad guy, really effective, really smart, with motives that if you treat them fairly and you really think about it, the motives are actually pretty believable. Here's the deal. From about the one-third mark of the story of Jesus' life and public ministry and everything that he did in front of everybody, from about the one-third mark to the end, the religious leadership are the bad guys of the story, and specifically one group of the religious leaders called the Pharisees. The Pharisees were a really conservative group who do not appear in the Old Testament. They sort of evolved out of the Ezra and Nehemiah reforms of the Old Testament, and they really came to power during the age of the Hasmonean dynasty that we talked about the other day. That was that hundred-year kingdom from about 160 BC to roughly 60-ish BC, where corrupt Jewish family sort of sloppily governed, and eventually the whole thing collapsed and they had to call in Rome to help them out. The Pharisees during this time became very powerful in their influence to try to give them the most charitable read possible. They believed that they needed to protect the people from themselves. They needed to protect the Jewish people from their dark impulses to go and do bad things and violate the law of God. So they were instrumental in generating bonus laws that go beyond the laws that are in the Old Testament to try to protect people. If you won't violate the bonus law, then you can't even get close to violating the actual law. Well, this weird religiosity and controllingness starts to evolve over the generations of this. When we encounter Jesus and we start to get out of sight of Jesus' little bubble and we start to see what the larger religious landscape is of his time, we find out that these people are very powerful. They're very influential. And there's some other religious sects as well who come up in the story, but primarily it's the Pharisees who are always nipping at Jesus' heels and badgering him. Jesus does something redemptive. The Pharisees are right there to be like, well, but you didn't do it our way and you didn't do it in our style, and this violates one of our bonus rules, or could be interpreted as violating one of the real rules. What are you, some kind of lawbreaker? But as the story goes along, we see that the Pharisees, they're vacuous. All of their religion hasn't built anything meaningful into them, even though they maybe had the script at the beginning, even though at the beginning they were a pretty sympathetic character who just wanted to obey God. I mean, it's the Bible, right? Don't we want to obey God? That sounds good, but their obedience to God becomes their idol. It becomes their point. Their own behavior seems to become their deity, and it's only ostensibly that they actually care about actual God and actual obedience to God. Well, most people during the time of Jesus aren't sophisticated in such a way or clear on their mission and purpose in such a way that they would be willing to call that out. They don't have the language for it. But you recall yesterday we got to the end of the part of the Bible called the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus goes up and teaches his disciples. And do you remember what people said at the end of that? They said that he teaches like one who has actual authority, not like the teachers of the law, not like the religious leaders, not like the Pharisees. Jesus wasn't spouting a bunch of opinions. Jesus was playing a different game than everybody who was a part of this rhetorical debate about how religion ought to be and what to do with the Roman occupiers and everything else. Jesus is doing something totally different. Everybody could tell right off the bat, including his enemies, the Pharisees, who start to become more and more deranged and panicked as the Jesus message picks up momentum. And, you know, it kind of helps Jesus' message that he's able to back it up by breaking the laws of time and space whenever he wants to. I mean, bringing people back to life from being dead is gonna draw people to your side. It's a pretty attractive thing. And the Pharisees, they didn't do any of that, they couldn't do any miracles, they couldn't bring people back from the dead, but they could bicker endlessly and wear fancy outfits. So, in contrast to Jesus, as the story of Jesus' life goes along, and as he teaches more beautiful things about the kingdom, and as his message goes out beyond the social boundaries that it kind of limited talking about God in the past, the Pharisees get more and more panicked, more and more worked up, and eventually, about halfway through the story, their thoughts turn toward violence toward Jesus. This is where we go back to what I was talking about at the beginning, with a believable bad guy who does believable things being an interesting bad guy. A snidley whiplash bad guy at this point would be like, Jesus is beautiful and his teachings are beautiful. I hate beauty and want to destroy things. I hurt puppies and squash flowers and I destroy precious works of art because of I hate beauty. Not an interesting bad guy. An interesting bad guy at this point would craft some kind of self-justifying narrative for why the beautiful thing is actually dangerous. And we need to protect the people from this deceptive, dangerous, seemingly beautiful thing. And that's what the Pharisees do. They imagine themselves to be some sort of noble insulator against the darker impulses of the people to keep them from violating the commands of God and thus invoking the wrath of God and bringing it down upon them. They're trying to help the people get it right, even if they have to do it through manipulation and force and dishonesty and pride, even if they happen to get very rich on the side while they do it. Still, it's an act of humility and service in their minds. As they behave in ways that, I mean, if you pinch zoom out, you can see you're actually really screwed up. And you can see it when you pinch zoom out on Thanos' nice sounding language as well. But to them, they had a story that they could tell themselves that allowed them to say, oh, violence is very regrettable. And we certainly would not want to engage in violence. I mean, the Lord abhors violence. These people knew the scriptures, they knew that. But it is with a heavy heart that we have to consider violence in this situation because Jesus' teachings are just so disruptive and deceptive to the people. And if people go and chase after Jesus and his teachings, well, what might happen? It might destabilize society. It certainly would eliminate our position, but also it might cause us to spiral into a licentiousness and an evil and a bad behavior that would bring about God's wrath, and then God won't come back and throw off the Romans, which is our primary problem, so they resort to violence and they start developing a plan for how they might kill Jesus. Well, what does Jesus do in response? He's shrewd, he's strategic. He teaches in ways that if people's eyes are open to hearing what Jesus is saying and what God is doing, they're going to hear it. And if not, well, they're not going to hear it. They're not going to be able to see it. Further, he doesn't immediately charge right into the fray. The Pharisees follow him around and pick fights wherever they can, but Jesus is willing to withdraw through the middle chunk of the story. And he goes and invests more deeply in his disciples. And he tells his disciples, I'm going to get killed by these enemies. You know who they are. They're going to kill me, but I'm going to be raised back to life on the third day. It was hard for the disciples to believe, but they could kind of believe it because they had seen Jesus raise people to life already. And they were starting to think that Jesus is indeed the Messiah. And at one point, Jesus even like, who do you say that I am, or who do people say that I am? And they're like, well, some people say this, some people say that, you know, maybe some reincarnated Old Testament character. And Jesus is like, Yeah, but who do you say that I am? And one of them, Peter, who's kind of the point of view character for us as the reader for the whole Jesus story, he says, You're the Christ, you're the Messiah, you're the Son of God. Effectively, he just nails the identity of Christ. And Jesus is like, yeah, bingo. That's it. And then Peter goes on to immediately get a bunch of stuff wrong right after that. And, you know, it reminds you that the people, the normal human characters in the story, they all have flaws. Everybody has flaws on screen except for Jesus. Even the good guys have flaws, which is another characteristic of a great story. But Jesus makes it clear that despite that being his identity, his role here is to go to the hive of scum and villainy in Jerusalem and to face down his enemies and to die on a cross and be raised from the dead, and that something amazing in God's redemptive plan is going to happen as a result of that. The disciples don't really get it, but they're along for the ride. They go to Jerusalem. Jerusalem receives Jesus enthusiastically, at least the common people do. But the fancy people, the enemies, they've got their narrative completely spit-shined and polished up. Their swords are sharpened. Their moral rationale for the violence in which they are about to engage has been completely worked out in their minds. They don't view themselves as the bad guy. They don't view themselves as people who hate beauty and just want to randomly do awful things. They've got their story. And now that Jesus is in Jerusalem on their turf, it's time for them to act on that story. And tomorrow, we'll consider how all of this comes to a head, and we'll get to the big events in the final chapter of Jesus' earthly life that set the stage for the tension we encounter in the book of Galatians. All right, I think that's plenty for now. More Jesus tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.