Hey everybody, my name is Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And I know there are a bunch of you sitting here right now listening to this who have been with me from the very beginning on this thing. Thank you. Good to see you again in kind of the weird podcast medium way where I don't actually physically see. You get what I'm saying. But also I know there are a bunch of you hanging out here who have never listened to any of this, and this is your first time ever. And you are making a bold move because you're jumping in on something and you're like, well, I mean, it seems like they've been doing this for a while, and here I am jumping in in the middle. How is this gonna work? The answer is it's gonna work great, and I'm super glad that you are here. Thank you for jumping in. Here's the lightning fast version of what you missed, and then we're gonna get into what's next. So every day we go through the book of Matthew a little bit at a time. We have finished eight chapters together, and that only took a mere 175-ish conversations. So as you can see, we're cruising. And over that time, what we've seen is a document that was written by someone who claims to be a firsthand eyewitness of Jesus, or the text indicates that at any rate. And this Matthew fellow is very Jewish. He seems to be writing to a very informed, very Jewish audience who understood a lot of the inside baseball stuff culturally and religiously from the day, uh, the inside baseball stuff biblically from what we would call the Old Testament, what they at that time would have just called the scriptures. And what Matthew's very clearly trying to accomplish from the word go in this book is to point out that Jesus is the fulfillment of everything that happened in the Old Testament, that Jesus is the Messiah, the continuing next thing in this already existing long story of God and his work with his people. Clearly, what Matthew is also trying to point out is that this work that God is doing through Jesus is going to be for everybody, not the usual suspects, and that it's bigger than the religious ideas and the political ideas of the moment. So he starts out by laying out this big long list of names. And the long list of names, every one of those names has a story. It's a genealogy, and it would have reminded people of all of these different little stories and anecdotes and things that they believed God had done through the years and through their ancestors and even through some people that they might consider to be outsiders. And so it primes the pump for the whole thing, but it also prophetically points to Jesus, that there's a story, and that the completion of that story is Jesus. We always do this thing on the podcast when we talk about that completion of the story, where it's like the Old Testament does this dun dun dun dun dun. And then Matthew is saying Jesus is the dun dun, is just begging for a completion, and here it is. So we get Jesus' birth narrative. We see weird outsiders recognize Jesus for who he is, a king, an authority, a completion of something that's going on, the redemptive character, the redemptive moment in the history of humankind. But we see insiders who ought to get it not necessarily get it and even be combative toward Jesus. And one of those guys is the supposed king of the Jews, the pretty illegitimate king of the Jews, Herod. And Herod so doesn't get it that he lies about things. He's like, yeah, I'm probably just gonna kill anybody that fits that description because I don't want any rival kings. All of that unfolds. Jesus goes out into the wilderness where a movement was happening that everybody had heard of, that is the baptism of John the Baptist. And Matthew demonstrates how Jesus fits into this religious narrative that people had heard of and that they truly fit together. Jesus and John are cousins. John is confronting the religious authorities and saying there's a big important thing that's coming down the pike, and you're gonna know about that in just a minute, and people need to repent and return to God. And people are like, Well, what does repentance look like? And John spells it out for a whole bunch of different people. The religious leaders show up, and John even pushes back on them, which would have been baffling for the original audience. Like, these are the best religious people ever. And then Jesus shows up, and all three parts of the Trinity show up too, according to Matthew. God the Father shows up and says, This is my son. The spirit shows up and lights on Jesus' shoulder as a dove, and then Jesus is there and he's the other part of the Trinity. And the baptism happens, and then Jesus goes right into this moment of testing where he's out in the wilderness for 40 days, and all of these numbers, 40 days, and all of these images out into the wilderness, out into the desert, being tested, all of this stuff would have really smacked of Moses and stories that people knew from the Old Testament, all hinting at the idea that Jesus is the newer and greater Moses, that where the patriarchs and Moses built this new family of faith that God called out of non-existence. So now Jesus is creating an even greater family of faith in this new nebulous kingdom thing that he's hinting at. Jesus endures the showdown in the desert. He doesn't get things wrong, he gets things right, he goes around and does a little bit of recruiting, he's got his first round of disciples. Everybody wants to know who is Jesus, what is he doing, because he's developed a bit of a reputation. And then Jesus begins to answer those questions starting in chapter five with what we call the Sermon on the Mount. He takes his disciples up on the hill to teach them things. And over the next three chapters, he lays out the idea that there is a greater kingdom than the one that people see, that there is a greater king than the one that people see, that he is this great king, and that this kingdom that he's initiating has better values than the world kingdom. That these values seem upside down and backwards and weird and confusing, but they're good. They're the stuff that everybody wants. When you strip away religion and politics and all the things that people fight about, like at the core, people might disagree in terms of how they want to achieve these things, but the kingdom is what everybody wants. And then he goes on to lay out how he is the fulfillment of everything about the Old Testament, of everything about that story, all of that dot dot dot dot stuff. And how he, not in destroying everything that has happened before in the story, but in fulfilling everything that has happened before in the story, also makes it clear that God wants your heart, that to be right in the kingdom is not to be earned by ethnicity, but is something that is initiated by a relationship with Jesus, by merit of Jesus' authority, and by merit of an individual bending the knee to Jesus as king. And he goes through and he demonstrates what it looks like to love God with your heart and to be kingdom-minded in relationship to a whole bunch of different rules and external obedience versus internal heart-level true religion kind of stuff. And then he talks about what it looks like to do religious things with the values of this kingdom in view. And it looks a little bit different than religious things with the values of the world kingdom in view. And he paints this very dramatic picture of these two completely different approaches to life and existence and religion and reality, and paints a picture of counting on our own authority as our own individual kings versus counting on the authority of him, the one true king. And he talks about how basically you're gonna want to pick because the destiny and the way things play out for the person who chooses themselves as king is folly, it's dangerous, it's bad. And the destiny, the trajectory, the responsibility, the meaning, the purpose, the goodness, the grace, the eternality of the person who bends the knee to Jesus as king. Well, that turns out really awesome. And in the middle of all of this, he has the very famous Lord's Prayer. Like, all right, well, here's what it looks like to pray in light of the values of the kingdom. And I think this prayer is the initiating moment for the person who's listening to Jesus and is like, I think I might want to sign up for this. What does that look like? Well, you look at the Lord's Prayer and it's all of this stuff about your king, I'm not. I want your kingdom, not my stuff. I want it done everywhere. You are in charge of provision, you are in charge of justice and forgiveness, you are in charge of protecting us from evil. Essentially, it's an oath of loyalty, an oath of fealty, like people used to take back in the day to a king that says, I am completely under your authority and I trust your provision entirely. So then we get done with the Sermon on the Mount, and no doubt the big question people would have been asking is can he back this stuff up? That is a beautiful speech with beautiful ideas about religion and God and the purpose of the human soul and redemption and forgiveness, and it sounds great. I'd love to do it. And he said it with tremendous authority, not like their teachers of the law said stuff. So in the Sermon on the Mount wraps up at the end of chapter seven, we get into the beginning of chapter eight and we come down the mountain to find out if you can back this stuff up. Three different groups of people are following him at this point for three different reasons. One, the disciples are with him because they're like, uh, we might not understand everything, but we're in. We're wherever you go, we are oath of loyalty to up. We are in on this kingdom. We're gonna sink or swim with you, and that becomes literal here in a few chapters. Then you got the crowds, the biggest group that's following him. They're like, I would love for there to be some truth to this thing. This is really curious, but I'm gonna need to see some more data and evidence, and I'll follow you to see if anything incredible happens. And then in addition, you've got people who didn't like what was going on following him, religious leaders, the establishment, who are like, now we need to figure out what's wrong with this so that we can burn it down because it sounds good, but just it can't be right, because if it was right, it would be coming from us. All three of these groups follow him down the mountain, and then immediately Jesus starts facing and passing tests of his own authority that reflect back on the stuff he said on the Sermon on the Mount. And it's like, well, okay, I guess maybe he can say this. He heals a guy of leprosy, including touching him, which blows through a social prohibition that was very strong at the time. He overcomes distance by healing an outsider's servant without even going into the guy's house. Important on two levels because the guy was an outsider, not ethnically Jewish, and because apparently Jesus doesn't even have to be there. Even time and distance appear to be under his authority. Then he heals Peter's mother-in-law, then a whole bunch of people sign up. They're like, all right, we want miracles too, that's enough. We believe that you can do the miraculous stuff. We might not believe in the whole king thing, but we believe in the miracle thing, and we are going to come out for that. So Jesus heals a bunch of people. Matthew doesn't give us all the details on that, but points to a connection from the book of Isaiah saying that the one who would come and be the Messiah effectively is said to have taken up our infirmities and carried our diseases. And then the crowd gets crazier, and Jesus is like, Yeah, we're taking a breather, gets on a boat, sails across the Sea of Galilee, calms a storm. His disciples are like, Okay, I don't know what kind of power we're dealing with. This is insane. He gets to the other side, he runs into some either Gentiles, non-Jews, or part Jew, part-Gentile crowds that are taking care of some pigs and some demon-possessed guys come out, and this is really head scratching and difficult to understand. But he moves the demons from the people whose lives are ruined into the pigs, the pigs run over the cliff, and the outsiders are like, okay, yeah, you can leave now. We're not ready to have that kind of stuff going on in our territory. Go back to Jew territory. So he gets back in the boat and goes back across the water, and that is where we are as we pick this thing up. So whether you have been with me for a long time and followed with that story perfectly, or whether you are new to this conversation and just jumped in, either way, we are now reset together. We are a club and a team and high five, we are ready to move forward. So I got one simple question that I want to ask you and have you think about before we pick it up in chapter nine, Man Yana. And that goes like this if you had, let's say, three time travel tokens, like little coins that you could just hold up, and then magically you could be like, I want to go to X place, and then you could go there and you could interact with things, you could see it, you could change stuff, you could alter your decisions, whatever. I want you to think about this. What would you use those three time travel tokens on? And I really do want you to kick that around in your brain because I don't think it's fair for me to just throw that out at the beginning of the conversation tomorrow and then give you like three seconds to consider it. So please think about that if you would, and then tomorrow we'll get into Matthew chapter nine together, all refreshed and ready to go on this thing, and we'll talk about why the time travel token thing matters. All right, I'm Matt. Thanks for hanging out with me. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour podcast, and let's do this again soon.