Hey everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And as always, I'm talking to everybody right now, but I'm especially talking to you, Mike. No, you'd think I'm talking to the other Mike, but I'm talking to you, Mike, in the black pickup truck driving to work. Yeah, you. Hey, Mike, question. Have you ever had a Runza? You heard of these things? Is the cabbage burgers that people in Nebraska like? You get them in a restaurant called Runza. Yes, maybe something? No? I wouldn't recommend it, but people in Nebraska think they're phenomenal. It's this local chain. Well, I would say a regional chain that when people leave Nebraska, they can't wait to get back home so they can pound one of those things. I never understood what they see in it. And I understand that right now there's some Nebraskans who are very upset, and that's something we're just going to have to endure together, Mike. By the way, have a great day at work today. You are a champion and you can handle this thing. But probably most of you, Mike included, have some kind of regional fast food or restaurant chain that is distinctive to your area. Taco John's is a Wyoming thing that has since expanded beyond that. I don't know. You can fill in the blank here. And we all understand how that came about, right? First of all, there was the original place and they caught on locally and they made some unique things and they figured out how to franchise it and take it out to the regional level. And then some of those go super-regional, like a whole giant chunk of the country, and then some of them go national, and then some of them go global. You can get a McDonald's burger anywhere, and it tastes weirdly almost the same. So when we talk about religion, we really do see a similar phenomenon in terms of how these things unfold. Of course, you've got local religions that never catch on at all. I mean, a local religion could just be one guy. Like your Uncle Roy, who posts the things on Facebook about the signs of the times that he's watching for, and he's like, if you look at the numbers and count backwards from this and look at the blood moon and the red heifer and the fish that appeared near the Dead Sea, and you add all of that up and look at Obama and Trump and how things are going down, that means the Antichrist is almost here. No one else thinks the exact same permutation of stuff as Uncle Roy. And so, in a way, it's kind of like its own individual local religion. But we also all understand that there are ethnic expressions of religion that are more local and maybe never take off for everybody, but you could find this flavor of religion or this sub-flavor of Christianity in this country, or you know, the northern plains in North Dakota or Minnesota or whatever. We all understand this as well. But we also understand that some religions have gone completely global. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, you know the list. Well, in the ancient world, there really wasn't any kind of equivalent of a global religion today. It just wasn't a thing. I mean, deities belonged to a local ethnic group, to a region, and the fates of those deities rose and fell on the military success of whatever local community or regional ethnic communities celebrated that deity. And at times, we even see one group of people cycle through deities as they experience losses. And in this regard, I suppose those regional patron deities being disposable is kind of a good thing. It's kind of a way to be like, hey, we used to hang out with Dagon, but then we lost a bunch of stuff. We now understand what went wrong. It was not our leadership or our taxation or other domestic policies. It was just Dagon. He was busy, he's not as good a god as he originally held himself out as being. So now we're going to try a different god and it's going to be great. And so we see all of these gods that come and go. Most of them we know nothing about. No, very few of them we know anything about. Most of them we've never even heard of because they are momentary, they're flash in the pan, they're an ancient deity that served a purpose and then it went away. But every now and then in the ancient world, we see some of these catch on in a more regional sense. Canaanite deities, for example. These are the gods of all the different little city-states that pockmarked what we now call the Holy Land that got conquered, or almost all of them got conquered, when Joshua and his people crossed the Jordan and came in after the wandering in the desert after the Exodus. Well, that's a lot of different people. Ethnically, there's some diversity there, but they're all worshiping similar gods and things like that. We pull back a little bit further, and you know, you think about the Egyptians or the Greeks and the Romans, who really kind of borrowed from the Greeks, but there you see a whole cosmology of gods. And these deities each represent a different human trait or a different cycle of the calendar or the seasons, and you might have a patron deity if you're an Egyptian who you get excited about. I don't know whether they sacrificed to all of the Egyptian deities or how exactly they did it. I know that in later times the Greek and Roman expressions of the Greek gods, you know, some people would really latch on to these deities and they would have temples and sacrifices. I think of the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus as a local patron deity that people got excited about. But here's the thing: even with the spread of Hellenism, of Greekism under Alexander the Great, you don't really see a lot of Artemis worship in India or the far reaches of Persia, even though Alexander went that far and spread culture that far. The Greek cosmology of gods probably spread the most and was the most super-regional, almost even global religion that we had seen up until the time of Jesus. But even then, it was all kind of tongue-in-cheek. Most people didn't think there was actually a lightning bolt bearded Zeus god in the heavens. I mean, it was more like pop culture to most, rather than something that most people really deeply believed in and was an object of worship. Maybe if you're feeling really superstitious or really under the gun. But the heyday of Greek religion was hundreds of years, maybe even more like a thousand years before the time of Jesus. So when we get to the pivot between Matthew chapter 9 and Matthew chapter 10, we're seeing the beginning of something really revolutionary that's starting to unfold here. Jesus is taking this locally very successful religious startup that he's put together, and now he's exporting it out to the larger region. And you remember at the end of Matthew chapter 8 that we looked at a little while ago, where he calms the storm, and the disciples are like, whoa, who is this guy? And then he goes into maybe hybrid Jewish Gentile territory. I mean, we know it's not purely Jewish because there are pigs over there, and you didn't have pigs in Jewish territory, and he casts out some demons, and the people over there are like, I don't, I don't really know what we're doing. We kind of have a religion, uh, it's weird. We'd like our pigs back. Just uh, could you get back in your boat and go away? And he's like, Yeah, okie dokie, I'll go away, and he goes away. So we've seen one little foray into the regional, but we've also got some hints prophetically, stuff we've looked at a few episodes back that give us the indication that maybe if this thing really is the fulfillment and the completion of Judaism, of the worship of Yahweh that dates back to the beginning of the Old Testament, then well, maybe this thing is meant to go super-regional or maybe even global, which would be unprecedented. There had been no global religions disassociated from one ethnic group at this point, save maybe moments of Greek pop culture religion that people adopted as a source of fun more than a source of actual worship. So the reason we're doing this little aside today as we get into Matthew chapter 10 is because I don't want you to come into this thing and be like, oh, it's like a mission trip that we're about to talk about in Matthew 10. Like everybody does, you go and do some miming and you give up some candy, and maybe you pose for some Instagram photos with some orphans or something, and then be like, okay, bye, Chad or Derek. I don't remember the kid's name, but he looks really good in my Instagram picture and makes me seem like I'm mission-minded and globally minded. And I'm gonna go to the campfire at the last night and talk about how I didn't want to come at first, but now I'm really glad I came because it really changed me and I'm kind of the point of the support. We all know some of the stuff that goes along with kind of the cheese ball kid mission trip thing. And maybe some of those are great and transcendent, but I don't want us to picture that here. I don't want us to picture these 12 guys who we talked about over the last couple of conversations going out on a kid mission trip to find themselves and experience a different culture. That might be fine. That isn't what's happening here. When we send the youngsters out to go and do that with the youth group, I we hope something really cool will happen. Maybe sometimes. But generally speaking, like we're hoping they get back safe and they learn some stuff, and maybe they have some good conversations and maybe they build a couple walls and a house for some people who are in need, which would be a win. Here the stakes are much, much higher. Jesus is sending these guys out as, in effect, the next step in the redemptive plan, the answer to the prayer to do something about the problem that Jesus and the disciples have observed. The world is full of people who are harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. Everything is broken. But Jesus believes firmly, and the disciples, I think, strongly suspect that this message they're going out with that they don't really understand yet, could be the thing that actually fixes what's wrong with humanity and the world and the brokenness of everything. But how would these guys even know what to do on their trip when they get sent out? There's ever been a trip like this before. There's always been a pretty local thing. So we're going outside beyond our own boundaries. I mean, how do we talk to people who aren't like us? Are people going to buy into the message? Is miraculous stuff gonna happen that's gonna convince them? And beyond whether or not they're gonna buy into this message, will they even buy into the concept of a larger than local ethnic religion as a general idea? There's a lot of question marks here. So the stakes are very high. This is very unprecedented, the instructions have not yet been given. And to understand what we're about to look at here in Matthew chapter 10, we should try to come at this thing. More like the original audience did, going, I I just this is not familiar territory to me. I don't even know what it looks like to have a religion that even has an ambition of going beyond the Runza phase and into the Burger King or McDonald's phase where it goes everywhere. And is this just a business franchise thing that these guys are taking out because they had a really neat experience? Or is this the transcendent thing? And what we're gonna get through the rest of Matthew chapter 10 is Jesus laying out exactly what this is going to be like and laying out a trajectory for where the kingdom goes from here. We've had a nice opening. Jesus seems really cool, he's done some really neat stuff, and he's demonstrated tremendous authority. There could be something to this, but what do we do? Just sit around and like watch Jesus do cool stuff forever? Or what's the plan? Well, we get the answer to that very logical next question as we work our way through the rest of Matthew chapter 10. More on that tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour. I appreciate you. Let's do this again soon.