Hey my friends, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And if you're not from the Mountain West, what I'm about to tell you here might come as a little bit of a surprise. But did you know there's a product called bear spray? It's amazing, really, when you live in grizzly country, particularly, I don't know if black bears pose quite the same degree of threat, but grizzly bears, I mean, this is nature's killing factory. There's nothing you can do. Humans in their raw form have no valid defense. You got no move that you can use against a grizzly. They're gigantic and they're terrifying. And if you've never seen one, you can't really fathom how gigantic and terrifying they are if they're grouchy. And so bear spray is a way to keep bears at bay. All you do is you take the can, you shake it up just a little bit, you apply a little bit to your arms and hands, and then you make sure to get it around the places that bears like to go for, like your nose and your eyes and your mouth and your ears and like all around your neck. And it does a pretty good job of keeping them away. Do not actually do that. I'm totally messing with you. Every year people come to Yellowstone and Western Wyoming, and you hear stories about some family being like, hmm, bear spray. Well, we wouldn't want to get bears on us. Let's just put a little bit of this on youngster junior here. And of course, the kid starts vomiting and shrieking because it really is just mace, like ultra-high-powered mace. But one of the things that I've noticed over the last, I don't know, 10-ish years or whatever is that they're starting to rent out bear spray. Because you usually don't use it and you don't usually run into a grizzly bear that is grouchy and have to blast it with this stuff. It's just something that you carry around as a precaution and it's nice to have if stuff gets weird. But even the notion of bear spray is epistemologically telling. That means something, right? Because if you have something that fends off grizzly bears, it means that we all know going into this thing that grizzly bears are very, very dangerous and very, very impressive. But it also means that it's totally worth it. Like, yeah, this thing could murder you and you want to be where the wild things are. There are things about yourself and the world that you just can't discover if you're somewhere safe, but that you can discover where the wild things are. So you want to go out there and you want to be there, but you want to be equipped. Likewise, in Matthew chapter 10, Jesus is sending out his raw disciples on this first big open world quest, and he doesn't hold anything back in terms of what they're up against. In the last several episodes or whatever, we've been talking about the warning that Jesus puts in front of them. This is going to get weird. And in verse 16, what I think is the pivotal verse of this whole great big discourse that is Matthew chapter 10, the missional discourse, Jesus says, I'm sending you out like sheep among wolves, therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. That's a pretty freaky warning right there at the beginning. It's like the old man standing by the gate and says, like, there be death here, and he's just there to warn passers by, like, no, really, there be death there. It's pretty freaky. It's pretty scary, but maybe the old man also has some kind of talisman or sword or some other relic that you can take with you because you totally have to go on this quest. But also, it really is very, very dangerous, and it's totally worth it, and it's exactly where you need to go. So, by drawing on the mental images that come with these two pairs of animals, sheep versus wolves, snakes versus, or in conjunction with doves, Jesus is saying, Yeah, you gotta go out and you gotta do this thing. It's where you want to be, but you gotta be alert, you gotta be clever, you gotta understand the objective and have a good sense of what's going on here and exactly what perils await you so that you can be well equipped, anticipate these things, and be effective instead of just going out and getting devoured and unseamed by some giant grizzly bear and maimed and left for dead, or more likely eaten all the way down to the bone. But what were the disciples actually supposed to do? What is this supposed to look like? How are they supposed to read that kind of a warning and advisement from the king? Well, well, in answer to that, I think you and I can say with relative certainty, looking back over the past few chapters, that they're supposed to go out and demonstrate the values of this kingdom they're associated with and that they represent, and to proclaim the reality of the king, the arrival of the king, to, at least at this point in history, people who should see it coming. Anything else, now that their king just told them to do it and they bent the knee to their king already, would be disobedient. And much like that bear spray has got a real nasty sting to it, so the snakiness part of Jesus' instructions for how to avoid getting maimed and dismembered feels like it's got a little bit of a sting to it too. But you know, he tempers it with moral innocence. It feels like that's the right play. But you might be thinking, Jesus doesn't do snaky things. It doesn't sound like Jesus shrewd isn't a word we associate with him. What we associate with Jesus is incredible niceness and obviously offendedness at sex stuff and beer, but some wine is okay, and definitely not with the swears, and just generally being really friendly, except for that one time that he broke tables, and other than that, he's like the nicest guy ever. But I would submit that that might be a bit more of a cultural assumption than a reflection of what we're actually seeing in the text. So is Jesus snaky? Well, okay, let's just game it out a little bit. You got the pearls before swine thing that we went over in Matthew chapter seven. You remember that? That's pretty shrewd. That was Jesus saying, look, you got to be smart about identifying who you're dealing with. And we went very carefully through the offensiveness level of calling people dogs and pigs, but Jesus seems to be telling his people, like, hey, you're gonna shipwreck yourself and not be effective at all if you aren't very shrewd and accurate in sizing up who you're dealing with, because most people of all different positions are of goodwill, but some people are not. Some people who are theoretically on your team are not actually of goodwill. Some people who theoretically are on some other team are not actually of goodwill. And if you're not clever and quick in identifying those things, you can get wrecked really quickly. But there's also the innocent as doves thing that tempers that because right before it, you get to judge not lest ye be judged. And so they're the ideas, but you know, you were giving people the benefit of the doubt, and it's not the job of the kingdom citizen to go around figuring out who's going to heaven and who's going to hell. Knew the good guys and bad guys are. And so even in that passage that we looked at very, very closely, you see this balance between the shrewdness and the innocence thing. Additionally, you get the parable of the shrewd manager. That is over in Luke 16, and I don't have time to read the whole thing. But this is a weird parable. It's the one where the guy's like, oh, I can't manage this dude's household, and I'm about to get canned. I know I'm about to get canned. I don't have anything else I can do. What am I going to do? And so he takes all of the books that he manages and he starts going to clients of his master. And he's like, hey, what if we cut your debt by this much? And the clients are like, uh, uh, yeah, I accept. And he goes and he does that a few times. And then the master is fixing to finally go about the canning. And he looks at the shrewd survey. He's like, oh, what did you do here? Oh, I see what you did. Well, like implicitly, like, you're still fired for sure. But that was clever because I can't go back now and still, you know, save face and reassign those debts. You used resources you only had access to for a very limited time to set yourself up to be in a better place for an extended period of time where you'll no longer have access to those resources. And surprisingly, the twist on the parable is that the manager has to do the I see what you did, uh, you got me there, and he acknowledges, at least on some level, the cleverness and how admirably shrewd that move was, although he doesn't seem to ever endorse the not so innocent part of it. And then, of course, the take-home from Jesus there in Luke 16 is like, hey, like if this clown knew to do that, how much more so should those of you who trade in world currency stuff right now think about swapping that stuff out for kingdom currency stuff that lasts forever in terms of how you manage your time, your resources, your relationships. That is a lot to cover in what was that, 60 seconds? All right, you're still with me though. So is Jesus snakey? Well, there's a couple of examples of him being kind of snakey. And further, there's that example over in Matthew 25 of the 10 talents. You might remember this story. This is the one about the master gives three different servants three different amounts of money to theoretically invest, and the one with 10 does great, the one with five does great, the one with one is like, uh, you're pretty shrewd. You reap where you don't sow, and so I decided to play it real cool and I buried this coin, but don't worry, I still have the coin. Here it is back. And the master is unimpressed because he expected not what the servant understood shrewdness to be, but like actual shrewdness, where he'd figure out a clever way to do something with that resource he had momentary access to to make it into something better for the glory and the benefit of his master. And then again, the snakiness is on display in Luke chapter 20, where you get the three questions that the Pharisees and Sadducees pepper Jesus with. The first one is the one about where do you get the authority to do this stuff? Where do you get off, sir? And then the second one is, of course, the should we pay taxes to Caesars? And the third is the goofy question about the lady who keeps marrying people and they keep dying and who she's going to be married to after the resurrection. And Jesus navigates all of them beautifully and not with direct through-the-front door naivete. He plays ball with the stuff that they are doing. And by their own ground rules, he puts the most clever, theoretically shrewd people in their place. And speaking of shrewd and calculating and reading the playing field the right way, how about the whole redemptive plan in general? Whether you think there's actually a God behind that plan and it's a real thing or not, as it is presented to us in the text, it's pretty stink and compelling. You get this infiltration idea where you go into the physical world, really the enemy kingdom, and you take on the physical body of somebody who participates in the world kingdom, but surprise, you're actually God in the flesh and you're undermining death itself, and you've successfully invaded this thing, and you are defeating death from the inside out and establishing a truer, greater, real or kingdom from the inside of the broken world kingdom. And that in itself is pretty clever, pretty crafty, pretty calculating, pretty shrewd. And look, in fairness to the disciples, I get if they don't totally understand what shrewd as serpents, innocent as doves looks like at this point. I'm not sure I totally understand it right now. And yet I still thought it would be a good idea to record this podcast. I mean, it's a complicated idea. I get that, but as time unfolds around Jesus, they're going to get a front row seat to what it looks like to be completely innocent and also very aware of what's going on and very calculating in terms of representing the king well. Representing the king in a way that's effective, not a moral victory where they can say, like, ah, well, I did the right thing and it was horribly ineffective. And yet I feel justified because of some ground rules I made up for myself about taking the high road. No, the idea here is like there's supposed to actually be a return on this stuff. If Jesus is imparting to them the actual values and even in their situation, power of the kingdom, there should be a return. And as a master, he clearly believes that it is reasonable of him to expect there to be a return from the work he commissions his servants to do. But he knows they're just going to get chewed up and spit out and wrecked if they go out unequipped and unaware of the very dangerous situation they're walking into. And so he gives them the warning and the metaphorical bear spray so that they will be ready for what they're walking into and so that they can come back with actual results instead of just coming back in a box because they got eaten by a metaphorical bear. If at this point you are like, that still doesn't cover it, this is a very complicated idea, and you're only getting through like one chunk of thought per day, then you are exactly right. So I'm still not done with Matthew 1016. We're going to talk more about these implications tomorrow, and I think we're going to have a lovely time doing it. In the meantime, thank you so much to everybody who supports the program at patreon.com/slash the TMBH podcast. It's why we get to do this, and I just cannot express properly the degree of appreciation I feel to all of you who are here, and I'll be honest, especially to those of you who are able to help out with what we have going on. Thanks to everybody. In addition, I know a bunch of you have done me the enormous honor of recommending this to a friend. That's a bold move, because I could just humiliate you at some point, but I'm going to try not to. And it means a lot to me to hear back from a lot of you who are like, hey, my friend turned me onto this thing. Thank you for passing that along to other people. That's about the highest compliment you could pay a person. And it's nice to have more people hanging out with us and to expand the circle. I think that's just a good idea in general and the right way to think about the world and treat other people. So thanks for helping me do that. You all are awesome. Matt is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.