Hey everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. And maybe you saw this in the title up there, but this is episode 200. This is the 200th time that you and I have sat down together, if you've been with me since the beginning, and talked about the book of Matthew. That's really cool. Whether you are here for the first time, or you've been hanging out with me for a little while now, or you've been here since the very beginning, I just think it's awesome that you're the kind of person that wants to make the kind of time to talk about something like this, the way we talk about it. Thank you for being like that. Thank you for hanging out with me. Let's do another hundred and then another hundred after that. Also, maybe some of you are like, well, wait a minute. Okay, so that's episode 200, and I think we're in Matthew chapter nine. I'm gonna be like 200 when this is over. And maybe, yeah, it's I mean, I don't know. I'll try and do it a little faster than that. But I think one of the great things about this format, and I'm still growing into it and figuring out all of the possibilities here, is that we aren't constrained by time. We can talk about this chunk or that chunk as much as we need to, and then we just got the next day to keep chipping away at it to try and cover this thing from all the angles. And like I said, all the way back in episode one, the big objective in all of this is not to get all of you to think my things. I mean, all of this stuff, I don't even know what my things are. I'm honestly processing this along with you every day. I enjoy doing that, but the big goal that I'm hoping that we all have in common is to have Matthew, this very important formative book of the Bible that tells the story of the most important, compelling character in all of history, regardless of where you land on theism or not theism. I want to have this book of Matthew in our hip pockets. I want to get done and feel like, man, there is a chunk of Bible that we have thought about a whole bunch, that we've looked at really closely, that at times we've looked at different opinions on it, but we've just tried to game it out together. And, you know, maybe we don't own it, but I want you to feel like you own it. Like we've got it dialed, and it can be a familiar touch point to come back to as we go and poke around at other ideas and other parts of the Bible or whatever later on as we get after it. So, getting into what we're talking about today, you got two schools of thought historically. You might remember this from day one of philosophy class if you took that in high school or college. It's the debate about how we know stuff. Do we know stuff through our five senses? And we gather that data through those different appendages and then we put it in our brain and we work it through, or do we know stuff through our five senses, plus some abstract capacity for reason that happens beyond the five senses? Well, here's the thing. We're not gonna sort that out today, we're not even gonna think about that that much today. But what both sides in that age-old debate agree on is that at least the five senses are part of the way that we gather data from the world, that we come to an understanding of knowledge and truth. Everybody of all persuasions agrees that our five senses bring information into us. And because they are a gateway to knowledge and understanding and communication and truth in just about every culture and every society for all of time, those five senses become a metaphor for different expressions of truth or knowledge or not truth and not knowledge. So in this case, we're in Matthew chapter 9, and we're starting to see the metaphor develop here. In verses 27 through 31, Jesus heals a couple of blind guys, and if this was the end of the book of Matthew, maybe there's nothing more to it, but we're going to see a whole theme that starts to unpack in the coming chapters about this blind thing and the juxtaposition between the blind guys who can see other things actually are, and the people who have perfectly clear vision and are supposed to be experts in knowledge and truth, they can't see things very clearly. This juxtaposition, this comparison, is very, very intentional on the part of Matthew. And Jesus is going to develop the theme more as he talks as we move forward. So, what we got here is the blind guys get healed, and that feels like the beginnings of a metaphor about sight and understanding and truth and recognizing truth when it's right in front of you. But now we're going to run into a metaphor about another one of those five senses. And even though what we're talking about here is people who can't speak, I suppose it's really a metaphor about hearing and understanding and communication and receiving truth that way. And so again, we get the impression that this is chronologically linked to what happened before, because in verse 32 we get this cue. While they were going out, okay, so theoretically, the blind guys leave, the house that they just busted into to be like, hey, heal a son of David. And now I guess a man who was demon-possessed and could not talk was brought to Jesus. So Jesus is just getting bombarded. He goes from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next. And every one of these situations demands attention. And if you remember last time around, or was it two times around ago, I don't know, whatever it is, that we were starting to notice this theme of Jesus saying, don't tell people, well, here might be one of the reasons that he wants to keep things a little bit under wrap, because he's not gonna get his disciples trained. He's not gonna get everything accomplished that needs to be accomplished before he goes to Jerusalem and inevitably gets crucified. If there's an unending line of people waiting outside the door and everything moves at the pace that we're seeing in Matthew chapter 9, you know, that is going to be difficult for his schedule. So maybe in addition to some bigger spiritual political reasons that keep things under wraps a deal is just a practical concern about getting stuff done. So they're going out, and the demon-possessed man who could not talk was brought to Jesus. And when the demon was driven out, the man who had been mute spoke. It's really a very simple story again. Matthew does not get into all of the juicy details about how the person felt or what they said. In fairness, he doesn't even give himself that much screen time when he undergoes his amazing conversion here just a little while back in this same chapter. Now, very simply, at this point, we've seen enough demonstrations of power that the original audience, the you and me audience, we get to this and we're like, well, look, whether you think this stuff actually happened or not, you still know where the narrative's going. I mean, you got a sense of the beats of this thing. The guy's gonna get healed, and he does get healed. How? I don't know, does he just do something or he touches him or puts some mud on him? Or I don't know, we don't get any account of that at all. But what we do see is that he spoke. Now, how many movies or stories, but especially movies, have you seen where there's a mute character who's there and you sense that there's something sophisticated going on at the surface, that they're registering things, that they're thinking about things, and then in maybe the pivotal moment of the narrative, they're like, I have a thing to say, and everybody looks over like, What? It's astonishing. Even though we know the motif, and you kind of know it's coming when you have a mute character in a film or a book, but how much more so would this have been compelling to the original audience? Like, I mean the like eyewitness audience who lived in this town, and like there's the weird demon-possessed mute guy who hasn't spoken since he was five, or I mean, we don't know, like however long it was. And then all of a sudden, dude is not dysfunctional anymore, and further he speaks at that moment. It's just not a coincidence. That's going to be very compelling for people, and unsurprisingly, it is. The crowd says, nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel. They're blown away. But the Pharisees said, nah, it's by the Prince of Demons that he drives out demons. Now, we're gonna break down that response probably tomorrow, maybe two conversations from now. But what I want to draw our attention to right now is the two groups of people are looking at the exact same data set, and they're coming to wildly different conclusions. Now, this is not a thing that happens anymore. This was a phenomenon that was unique to the first century A.D. in Galilee, because now people are enlightened, and our eyes are opened and our ears are open, and we're fair to the data, governed by science and unbiased by our presuppositions. Sorry, I couldn't keep going. No, no, no, we're horrible about this. This is one of the trademarks of being a human. This is that we look at stuff and we already got all this business rattling around in our head, and we're like, I need that to mean that. And even though it obviously means this other thing, I don't care, I don't give a crap about that, I declare you to mean this thing. And further, I am so sure that that's the thing that it means that even though it defies logic, I'm gonna go tweet that. And half the people who see my tweet are gonna love that tweet and agree that I have read the data properly, and the other half of people are gonna be furious because I've read the data improperly. What is the correct read on the data? I don't know. Any more? Have you ever felt more cynical about people reading data honestly than you feel right now? I I haven't. I'm at an all-time low in my optimism at people's ability to have eyes open and ears open, and heck, maybe in my own ability to have eyes open and ears open, to look at an anecdote, at an incident, at a thing that we see with our eyes wide open at a data set and be honest about it. Do we intentionally lie about the things that we see? Uh clearly sometimes. I see a whole lot of that going on. I can think of some times that I've done that, not super proud of it, but I think we've decided we're just going to be honest with each other here. So uh gross, I know what it is to willfully lie in the face of data that points in a different direction. But I also know what it is in my own life looking back and in the lives of others to realize, no, the confirmation bias is just so dang thick on this one that we can't cut back through it. And we can't see things for what they actually are. Everything is compromised, and a bunch of decisions we made about how we were going to see the world five years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago, whenever we made those decisions, they're just going to govern how we interpret data moving forward all too often. And think about the people that you really admire. They don't do that, do they? The people you respect the most, you trust the most. Uh, to use a metaphor from earlier in the week, the rope that you would grab for that you know is trustworthy, even if you're not crazy about that person, it's gonna be somebody who tells the truth, right? It's gonna be somebody who will give you honest feedback, who will give you an honest take, and who can see another perspective or another side. So, what I'm saying is I'm pretty sure that every single one of us in this conversation knows what willful or accidental intellectual dishonesty looks like. And I think every single one of us in this conversation has had some pretty cool encounters with intellectual honesty, even when it's devastating to my case. Telling the truth is a beautiful thing. Here, we see two takes on this situation that cannot both be true. I am overwhelmingly a relativist. I know that's a dirty word in Christianity, but I think tons of things are relative. I'm not sure everything is relative. I think some stuff is as simple as a one or a zero law of binary oppositions, but I mean, come on, there are a lot of things that you put this in a different environment or that in a different environment, it's gonna play different, it's gonna read different. There's some degree of relativity in the world, socially, intellectually, whatever, but this is a one and a zero. Both cannot be true. He cannot be the prince of demons who is summoning the powers of darkness, and he cannot also be what the crowds are starting to assume him to be, and we'll see from the larger context that I think we're reading this right and saying they're starting to suspect that he's from God and that he's the Messiah. And we'll break that down a little more in the next time around or the time after. But for our purposes as we land the plane on this one for today, you have a thing that happens. People could see it, people could hear it, people could probably touch it. I don't know. It starts to get creepy if we get into the touch thing. But the five senses could measure the reliability of the miraculous claim that is being held out. You got a demon-possessed guy to just say, Oh, he's demon-possessed, and now he's not. That's one thing, but you got the mute thing that goes along with that. That's a little bit more measurable. There's a data set in front of people. Some angrily read it one way. We'll talk about that more later. Some are pretty honestly smitten by it and don't know what to do with it, but they think it's a big deal, and they say, we've never seen anything like this before, which I'm the original language, everybody who does this for a living agrees, it's an expression of awe and wonder and excitement, not just an emotionless statement about this is not like other things we have seen in Israel before. What's happening here is Matthew is using clear language to suggest that the original audience, the original witnesses, are moving from, ah, another messianic claimant, interesting, to this guy is not like the other messianic claimants. There's something happening here that we have not seen before from any side of the religious equation. So which one is it? You got two pretty reliable eyewitnesses reading it completely differently. Well, Jesus is not surprised, nor is the whole of the Bible surprised by these differing reads. In fact, we're gonna see as we move along that Jesus goes out of his way to clarify that, like, hey, some people are gonna come at it like this, some people are gonna look at this stuff, and it's just not gonna take. Other people are gonna look at this stuff, and it's going to be incredibly fruitful in their lives. And we'll see how he unpacks that idea as we go along. But what I want to get into next time around is this whole motif of the five senses. This motif of having eyes to see and ears to hear, and I don't know, he doesn't say like the fingers to touch and stuff because it starts to sound creepy. But the implication is having five senses that are receptive to truth and the ability to receive spiritual truth, actual truth, and to recognize Jesus for who he is. That is the pivotal question of the gospel. Is Jesus the king, the descendant of David, the son of God, the king of this kingdom, the one who will fulfill all the prophecies that we've looked at all throughout the Old Testament, or is he another also random fraud who is an enemy of the people and needed to be dealt with by execution on a cross? Matthew's trying to lead you through that. Jesus acknowledges that people are gonna land in different places on that, but he is pretty high on the people who see it, and he pushes back pretty firmly on the people who don't. I know this one has gone a little long, but I want to gush just a tiny bit more on the way out the door. To those of you who jumped in, whatever it was, a year ago almost now, and decided that you were gonna make this a part of what you do every day. Thank you so much. And thank you also to those of you who've jumped in since then. I know a lot more people are here now than there were when we started, which means that a bunch of you have decided to pass this along to your friends and invite them to come and hang out too. Thank you, all of you. It's humbling and it means a lot. And like I said, if nobody was here, it'd be kind of hard for me to keep the motivation up to stay after this. And so because you exist and because you care about things like this, uh, you put me in a position where I feel very, very motivated to do something I probably shouldn't have to feel so motivated to do on my own. But it makes a big difference to have you here. So hi five, my friends. 200 episodes. Imagine this is your hand. There it is. I'm Matt. This is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon it