Has everybody noticed a thing where you're just casually having a conversation with somebody and you're like, oh man, the thing that I was thinking about doing is buying some new snowshoes one of these days. I love snowshoeing, but I I lost my pair of snowshoes in a tragic bass fishing accident. And then like five minutes later, you're pooping and you're looking at your phone, and what's right there is the advertisement on the bottom, whatever app you have open. Snowshoes. And maybe a replacement for your bass boat. You're like, well, I didn't ever say anything to my phone about snowshoes and it searched for any snowshoes. How didn't know that I wanted the snowshoes? And it's because it's listening all the time now. It's listening to the questions you ask and the things you talk about, and it's trying to sell you that stuff. And if I had told you this five years ago, you would have been like tinfoil hat weirdo, but now we know this is completely true. And it's actually kind of fun to test the system and talk about things that are utterly ridiculous and see what they can find for a link to try to promote that thing to you. Increasingly, we're becoming accustomed to the idea of asking a question and then immediately getting the answer to the question. And likewise, when we get into Matthew chapter 8, there's this cliffhanger of a question, this mid-season finale that happens in the passage we just looked at in Matthew chapter 8, verses 23 through 27, last two episodes around. And the question that gets asked is: who is this guy? Because Jesus just did really impressive things in curing a leper, in healing a person by distance who is sick with we don't know exactly what, healing Peter's mother-in-law and her house. And then people are like, wow, we want more of that. And so he heals a whole bunch of other stuff and he does a whole bunch of other miracles. And as promised the other day, we're gonna get to that in just a minute here, right now. And then he goes out in the middle of an ocean, and just in case anybody was like, Oh, he's a traveling healer, he has some kind of psychological power where you can look deep into people's eyes, like that one dude from the Leftovers show, and he can just make people feel healed and better, and they convince themselves that they're better. And maybe you could apply that narrative to the whole Jesus thing, but you can't apply the narrative anymore when there's a great big giant storm with seven foot waves, and they go and wake Jesus up and he's like, What? What are we doing? Seriously, why are you guys being like this? Just a minute. Hey, storm, you have to stop now because I said so, because I made you, and I'm God, and you just have to. And then it just stops immediately. Like at that point, the next logical question is what just happened? Who is this? Everything that I had in the back of my head that could explain what I've been seeing now no longer works because you can't just do like mind tricks on a gigantic thrashing body of water and make it settle down. This is some crazy authority, this is some crazy power, this is some kind of crazy other that we're dealing with. And we're out here in the middle of the lake and he's on this boat with us. To be honest, it's kind of freaky. So, again, just like you asking about the snowshoes and then going to poop and see an advertisement for snowshoes on your phone. So these guys ask the question, who is this guy? And then the very next thing that happens is we get the answer. And before we get into the actual text, quick side note here. This is one of those moments where we get a glimpse inside the genius mind of Matthew, who has brilliantly structured his book to lead the reader from question to answer to the next logical question to answer, which raises the next logical question to the next answer. And so, in a way, it's not Jesus who's your point of view character, it's the disciples who are your point of view character. They seem to have the same amount of knowledge and limits to their knowledge that you do as a reader. And so, as they go through the process of figuring out what is going on here, you as the reader should also theoretically be going through the process and asking the same questions. So they ask, Who is this guy? And the answer comes right here. When he arrived at the other side in the region of the Gatarenes, and the other side means the other side of the Sea of Galilee, he left Capernaum and he sailed across the water, and then the storm happened, he calmed the storm and he lands. Says, then two demon-possessed men coming from the tombs met him. They were so violent that no one could pass that way. So I told you the other day that the Sea of Galilee, the Sea of Tiberius, is not that big, but takeaway motorized travel and not that big becomes pretty big. And you're gonna have different people groups, different ideas and ethnicities at different points around this lake. And now we're into a place that is a lot different than Capernaum, and we're gonna see evidence in just a minute that this is clearly Gentile territory. So they get out of the boat, and the tombs in this town, as was the case in all ancient cities, are obviously away from town, unless you have catacombs like they did in Rome. And well, even then, you really try to bury people way away from living people because you know death is contagious and you don't want to be around that stuff. So at the edge of town here, this crazy thing, this demon-possessed man, comes rushing out of the tombs. And apparently, this guy has served the purpose of being like a mini-boss in a role-play game or something who guards this passageway and makes it so that until you level up a whole bunch, you can't go anywhere near the tombs to get the master sword or whatever it is that's hidden in the tombs. And so Jesus is there, and this guy does what mini bosses do on open world video games everywhere. Just if you get near them, they run up to you and I don't know, menace you, yell at you, fight you. I don't know what he wanted to do to Jesus, but he is the one who initiates this confrontation. And this is a huge problem for these people because they can't go and honor their dead with this guy making it impossible for them to pass. I mean, it says that he was so violent that people couldn't even go that way. So, this dude who is out of his mind, if you want to adopt the skeptical position about the text and assume that people back then were just ignorant of psychological disorders and that what's really going on here is some kind of psychosis that caused this person to behave this way, or if you want to go with what the text says, which is that literally there was a spiritual element to what was going on in this man's life. Either way, the result is the same. He's got crazy person strength, and he's violent and he's angry, and he's greatly disrupting the really important rhythms of life and death and belief and transcendent things for these people. So now this is where it gets really cooking here. Verse 29. What do you want with us, son of God? They shouted. Boom! And there's your answer. I want some snowshoes. What snowshoes? Who is this guy who's in the boat with us? What do you want with us, son of God? What? Son of God, that's it. There's the proclamation. But you know what's crazy? This is the third time we have heard this kind of language as we've been going through the book of Matthew, and all three times so far, this correct identification of Jesus has come from a negative or an evil source. Okay, let's just flip back through the thing. It's right in here. Just a minute. I know where it is. It's a big book, and the pages are real skinny. Okay, well, I can't find it right now. Yeah, there it is. Uh, chapter two, it's Herod, is the first one, and he calls together all the people's chief priests and teachers of the law, and he asks them where the Christ was to be born. And they say, in Bethlehem. And he calls the Magi in later and he's like, I want to go and worship this child, so tell me where he is. So Herod sees him correctly. This is the Christ, the promised one, the Messiah, worthy of worship. And then in chapter four, of course, during the temptation, the devil rightly identifies him. At one point he says, If you're the son of God, tell these stones to become bread. And then later he says, If you're the son of God, throw yourself down from the top of this great big giant thing. And there again, we see that the devil has a pretty good idea of who he's dealing with, but still nobody who seems like a good guy gets it. Well, then we get this crazy miracle with the calming of the storm and all of that, but still nobody on the team of the good guys is willing to just admit what they think they're actually seeing. They're still kind of lying to themselves, or maybe they are too afraid to even utter it for risk of being accused of blasphemy. But this crazy, demon-possessed, psychotic, violent guy, he's not afraid to call Jesus what he thinks he is. What do you want with us, son of God? Well, I mean, that's pretty freaky on two levels. One, there's your answer to where this power is coming from, as we've been discussing. But two, us? Yikes. This is like the moment in the horror film where you suspect that there's something off about that guy, and then his head rotates 360 degrees, and he's got like bleeding teeth and stuff, and he grows claws or like bones come out of his shoulder or something horrifying like that. I don't know if any of this happened. I think if that happened, it might have actually said that in the text. It's more fun to imagine that it was like that. And then this chorus of voices says, What do you want with us? But it's just coming from one guy's face. And he says, What do you want with us? I mean, that's that's that's freaky, that's horrifying. And I could say that seems like a horror movie cliche, but I think the horror movies got the idea from this passage. So they shout that, what do you want with us, Son of God? And they say, Have you come to torture us before the appointed time? Uh, what's the appointed time? And how do they know what Jesus can do? And how are we already out of time? Speaking of appointed times, all right. We're pausing there. We'll just pick it up tomorrow and we'll talk about what the appointed time is, what goes down next, and then we got to talk about the response of the people. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Thanks for hanging out with me.