Hey everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And thanks for hanging out with me. I know you got lots of things to do, and there are bajillion podcasts now. Like there were only like a gajillion when I started, but now they're a bajillion jillion because everybody started a podcast, and lots of them are really good. And so there's just a lot of things for you to spend your time on, and there's a lot of things that you got to do in life, and yet here you are. So I just never want it to be lost on you or for you to think that's lost on me, how cool it is that you make the time and that we get to do this. I really genuinely appreciate it. Also, I appreciate how patient you are with me talking about things that have nothing to do with the Bible, seemingly at first, but then surprise I ninja you into the thing actually having to do something with the Bible. And this time around, the thing I'm gonna talk about that seems like it doesn't have anything to do with the Bible, but it actually does is the Incredibles 2. Did you see this one? I really like the first one. It's my favorite animated movie ever, maybe my favorite movie movie ever. It's right up there. I really love the show. Incredibles 2 was just fine as well, but maybe not quite at that elite level. But one of the things that I really did like about Incredibles 2 was how they wrestled with the concept of how people would actually respond to actual superheroes. And I saw that get wrestled with in Captain America Civil War. Oh, these superheroes are too powerful. We need to get them under control with the government. I saw how that got wrestled with in The Watchmen. Ah, these superheroes, they're so much better than everybody else. They just don't care, they become detached. But I really liked most of all the way it was handled in Incredibles 2, which was we just need to ban this. It's dangerous and it's other, and we need to pass legislation decisively that prohibits superheroism. That's just too much power. And that makes for an interesting movie, but it also makes for an interesting parallel when we get into Matthew chapter 8. Because if you can understand the psychology, even in a hypothetical world, that would cause people to say, that's just too much power. It has to be limited, it has to be controlled, it has to be shut down, then you can understand the not hypothetical psychology of a bunch of people who see this incredible outlay of power that we're getting from Jesus: power over distance, disease, physics, time, the weather, spiritual forces of evil, social forces that seem immovable, all of the things that people can't change. They see this exercise of power and they're like, yeah, yep, I'm gonna take my chances with the mundane things. That's just too much. It's beyond control, it's beyond understanding, it's intimidating, it's weird, and I just want that to go somewhere else. And I, for one, think that when we get into Matthew chapter 8, and Jesus has just crossed the Sea of Galilee with his disciples, he calmed the storm. They ask the question, who is this guy? Who can do that? And they get to the other side near this region of the Gadarenes, and there's these two demoniacs who come out and they're crazy and they're powerful, and they run right up to Jesus and confront him, and then they're so intimidated by him that they start nervously negotiating against themselves. And finally they're like, just don't torture us, just put us in those pigs. And Jesus says, go. And that's his only word that he speaks to them, and they go and they run into all of these pigs, and then the demons make them crash over the edge of the sea into the Sea of Galilee and they drown and they die. And if all of that sounds crazy, that's okay. We're just gonna roll with it, even though it is very difficult for us to picture with our 21st century minds. And then we get to a place where the people who have not heard about or seen all the things that Jesus have necessarily been doing, maybe just vague rumors, they see it firsthand or get word of it very close to firsthand. And what are they gonna do? Are they gonna be like, wow, we want superheroes over here, we want that kind of power, we want that kind of stuff that we can't control, that isn't even really from our version of religion. That'd be awesome. Or are they going to behave more like the citizens of whatever the town is, capital city or whatever it is in the Incredibles and be like, no, that's too much that freaks us out. You're just gonna need to go away. And I'm gonna give you the spoiler right now. It's to the second one they say you need to go away. So here's what happens. Uh he said to them, we're just gonna pick it up in verse 32 with Jesus saying one word to the demons. He said to them, Go. So they came out and went into the pigs, and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water. Those tending the pigs ran off, went into the town and reported all of this, including what had happened to the demon-possessed men. Then the whole town went out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him, they pleaded with him to leave their region. This is all so calm. And I think part of what we're experiencing here is the limitation of the length of a scroll in the first century AD, which is the medium on which this stuff would have been written. I mean, at some point you just gotta cut details and be like, all right, what's the theological thrust of this moment? What do people need to know? What do people need to see here? And we're gonna condense this down into something tight. Because I got a ton of questions. I want to know what happened to the demon-possessed guys. We talked about that last time around. I mean, were they better? Were they happy now? Did they miss the demons? Did they try to follow Jesus? We have a corresponding account that gives us the impression that these are those guys and that that is what they did, but we don't know for sure. And also, I want to know what did the people who were tending the pigs go and tell the people in town? I mean, how'd you say it? Did you say it dumb in a way that would make them not like Jesus? Because you should have said it smart. Like you should have let me say it, because that was awesome. Look at what happened. And also, I have a question: like, what were the people so been out of shape about? We don't really get an answer to any of that stuff. But what we do get is one of Matthew's many pump the breaks moments in his gospel. Every time it starts to seem like the Jesus thing is gonna be this snowball rolling downhill, it's going to become unstoppable, everybody's gonna sign up. I mean, he's fixing demon-possessed people, he's curing people, stuff that's gonna kill him, he's conquering nature. I mean, for crying out loud, who wouldn't sign up? Every time it starts to feel like this is inevitable, along comes an incident that proves to us that no, it's not. Actually, this is not automatic, and humanity will find a way to reject its rightful king because I don't know, it's hard, and there's just a lot that gets in the way, and there are a lot of concerns that we have. Maybe some of them are fair, maybe some of them aren't very fair, but people are frail and it's super obvious and easy for us when we're reading the text to imagine that everybody should just sign up. But the reality of the world and our own experience in it says it's not actually usually so cut and dried. So here's your pump the break moment. They're out on Jesus, they don't want anything to do with him. Why? Well, I got theories. Okay, theory number one is just economics. Do you know that pigs cost money now? They're charging for them, they don't just give them away. Like if you go to the pig store, they're like, no, it's gonna be $10. I'm sorry, we don't give away our pigs anymore. And I did some research on this, and it turns out that even if you do the most humble, modest, recycle your trash and your mulch and feed the pigs terribly, raise pigs to six months on your own strategy, you're still looking at like three to four hundred bucks on the absolute cheapest end to raise a pig in today's money over the course of a summer. And if you try to raise a pig for a longer period of time to get it up to a bigger weight, like 300 pounds, like a crazy big pig that you can get a lot more money for, and that means you have to raise it in part over the winter, that takes the cost up to like 800 to 1,000 bucks, even if you're doing it on the cheap. Now, when we picture money back in the day and money now, of course, our brains are conditioned to think, oh, yeah, you got to adjust for inflation, and this is true, but you also have to adjust for the poverty level of the two places you're looking at. Some poor couple that wants to try to raise their own pigs out in the woods in the United States of America are still crazy rich compared to these herdsmen living outside of the riches of Jewish territory on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee in the first century. So, why did they want Jesus to go away? Well, it could be that he just ran a herd of 50, 100, several hundred pigs that would have been the entire savings account of the entire community off a cliff to their death. Now, Jesus didn't actually do it, demons did it, but this is one of those places where we have to admit Jesus could have prevented that, but did not. So, theory number one for why these people wanted Jesus gone could just be that this was a very expensive proposition, and they were afraid of what might get run into the sea next, and they'd be completely belly up and broke before too long if Jesus keeps doing miraculous things there. We can't afford your miracles. Please go away, sir. Reason number two would be racism. Things were not great in terms of ethnic tension between Jewish people and not Jewish people, and there are some pretty smart people I've read who theorize that the people on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee would have been part Jewish, which created enormous ethnic tension. We see a little bit later on in the narrative over in the Gospel of Luke that Jesus approaches a Samaritan village and they send emissaries out in advance to be like, uh, yeah, no, we're gonna pass. We don't really want anything to do with you. And remember, the Sons of Thunder, James and John, in that incident are like, oh, we should burn them with fire. Jesus, you have fire, right? Like some kind of fire thing that you can call down from heaven or fire that comes from your eye. You should burn them totally. And Jesus is like, we're not burning anybody. You got to stop with the burning stuff. So we see this kind of rejection happen more than once from people who were on the fringes ethnically of the people who you know culturally Jesus was speaking the language of. So reason number one that maybe they rejected Jesus was the economics of the thing. Reason number two is maybe just the racial tension. Reason number three could just be Messiah exhaustion. It's at almost exactly this moment in history that Josephus tells us that Pontius Pilate dispatched some guys to go and put down a Messiah thing that was happening in Samaritan territory, which is in this neck of the woods, and that they decided that they were going to go and climb a mountain and find some stuff that Moses had hidden up there. None of this makes any sense, I understand that. And then the Roman troops that Pilate dispatched ran into them, and they were just supposed to like rough them up and push them into some dumpsters and break some of their stuff, but instead they stabbed them with spears and stuff. And then Pilate got in trouble, and the region got in trouble, and it was a disaster for everybody. Like this might have been in the newspaper the very day this is going on. And this wasn't, by any means, the only recent messianic claim that had come upon the ears of the people of the North. They've been hearing this for ages, and it always seemed to end badly. Maybe these guys just had messiah exhaustion, and they're like, just no, like we've had enough of these. It's always a bad thing for us, just go away. We don't want anything to do with messiahs. Or the fourth reason, and this is the one that is maybe most interesting to me, and you can tell that because it's how I set up the opening comparison for this whole thing, but that is that power is scary. Like governmental power is scary, military power is scary, but the gravity and authority that Jesus commanded here is other scary. It was scary to his buddies who were in the boat and who he just saved from drowning and death. Surely it's going to be scary to these people who just don't really know what to do with a superhero, let alone a Jewish superhero, let alone one who's making these messianic claims, let alone one who just cost them a whole bunch of money in their eyes because their savings account ran off a cliff. You know what? I think I just talked myself into believing that all four of those reasons why might have factored into it. But the bigger point, as we put a bow on all of this, is twofold. One, narratively, this reminds us that right now Jesus is talking with Jewish people. This is not going out to Gentiles yet. Is it for them? Yeah, it's been for them from the beginning. Remember, we looked at the Abrahamic covenant. This was always meant for everybody. It was always going to go out to everybody. But right now, Jesus seems to be focused on doing this local thing and going to his own people. This is going to expand as we get further along into it. So narratively, this serves as kind of a bumper that bounces us right back into Jewish territory and Jewish culture. The second reason it matters is something that I think is going to be clarified as we get more toward chapter 13 and the kingdom parables about the nature of how people respond to the message of the kingdom. There are going to be people who are really enthusiastic about it early on, and then it just doesn't pan out. Other people who out and out reject it, and other people who are like, hmm, seems like a good idea, and I'm in, and then they're actually in. This tempers expectations. This gives us a clearer picture of how people will respond or negatively respond. And it provides a bumper, kind of like an open world RPG, where you get to the edge of the map and you get bounced back into where the story is happening. And I think those are the purposes that this serves, in addition to what we talked about the last two days, which is another demonstration of awe-inspiring authority on the part of Jesus. Hey, before we're done here, did you hear that sound? Because I mean, I heard it. I just don't know if it came through on the microphone. That was the sound of you and me and all of us finishing another chapter of Bible. That is eight down and only took like 175 episodes. Look at us. High five. Both of those hands were mine, but I would like to, in my heart, imagine that one of them was yours. So great job. Next time around, we're into chapter nine. The reason we got to cover eight chapters of the Bible together and have fun with this and do this is because some people support the program at patreon.com/slash the TMBH podcast. I don't know why you do that other than to just be cool and awesome, because this is free and you can have it for free, but still, thank you. It does make this happen. And to those of you who can't do that, or it's just not your thing to do stuff like that, I'm still so glad you're here. You don't have to do that in order to listen to this thing. Glad we could do this together. This is fun. I'm ready for chapter nine. I hope you are too. We'll catch you next week. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do it again soon.