Hey, my name's Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And if this is your first time here, first of all, thank you for hanging out and giving this thing a shot. Second of all, you don't have to go back to the beginning, which would now be 160 episodes ago, to figure out what's going on. You can just jump in right here. If you're enjoying it, you can jump back to the beginning and it'll fill in a lot of gaps as well. But we try to do this in a way where you can just pick it up. So thanks to everybody for being here, new people, people who are just jumping in. Those of you who have hung out with me for a while know that a while back I was on the road and I had to do a couple of episodes at my friend Aaron's house. And so I made a little fort out of sleeping bags and blankets and stuff, and it sounded awful. Well, this might be my second worst setup ever. I'm at my buddy Adam's house sitting out in front of his place in Fort Collins, Colorado, in my truck. This is gonna be a little echoey, there's gonna be a little bit of cars, but hey, I'm on the road. What can I do, right? Here's the thing, though, this place is really interesting because I actually grew up just two, no, three houses down from my friend Adam, who got this house from his parents, so he still lives here. So it's really reminiscent whenever I come back to this particular place. And I remember when Adam and I, when we were in fifth grade, we got walkie-talkies because, you know, phones were the kind of thing that just one person in the house could use at a time. And as we've discussed before, parents could get a little grumpy if you didn't honor the phone rules. So we got these walkie-talkies from the pick and save. They were like $2, and they didn't have a great range or anything. But if we stood in just the right part of the houses and we made a phone call first to make sure the other one had their walkie-talkie on and was standing in the proper place, we could transcend distance together. We could speak as though we were in the same room, talking into a pillow with static, unable to hear each other with earplugs in, but as if we were in the same room otherwise, all the way from four houses apart, and it was mind-boggling that we were able to achieve this. This might seem like a ridiculous thing for a couple of kids in fifth grade to celebrate, but think about how you were when you got your first cell phone. You'd be like out and around with this thing and you'd flip it open and you'd look at your yellow screen with the little black alarm clock style numbers on it, and you would carefully dial your friend's numbers, all of which you had memorized. And then you call and you'd be like, Hey, Tabitha, guess where I am? I I don't I don't know, your house? Uh-uh, a car. And then you'd imagine a bass drop in the background and her brain leaking out of her ear at the utter shock of being able to talk to a human. Wow, they're in a car. At one point or another in the age of technology, every single one of us had this awe-inspired moment like Adam and I had when we figured out the walkie-talkies. So you can no longer act like you're better than me. It's an amazing thing to transcend distance. Distance is like one of the handful of things that limits humanity, right? Like we got time, which ages us out, and you got distance, and then you got sickness and health, then you have the social limitations imposed on us by others, and that we help to impose on others by being participatory in whatever social system we engage in. What am I forgetting? And then just basic physics, like the stuff that you can and can't do, like flying or uh bending the rules to create matter out of non-matter. I don't know. There are probably more limitations, but uh, those are the big five, aren't they? Well, let's just say that you were God in the flesh, but you weren't wearing like a giant t-shirt that was like, Sup, I'm God, so that everybody would know that you're obviously God. And all you really had was the ability to communicate things in a way that's brilliant and transcendent and makes everybody think about things in a completely different way, and the ability to break the laws of time and space when need be. What would you do? Well, I can tell you what Jesus did. He laid out this incredible speech in the Sermon on the Mount after doing just enough to gather a big crowd so people would be curious about what's going on. Crowd shows up, it's made up of three parts people who are super into it already, the disciples, people who are not quite sure what to make of all of this, the crowds, and people who are already pretty upset by the thing and very firmly against it. Those would be the religious leaders. And then he gives this speech that has a totally different tone than anything anybody's ever heard before. It's not like an opinion, it's not like a description of how he wishes things might be. He speaks as one who has authority, like, hey, this is actually how the things are. And then if you don't see it that this is how the things are, it's kind of on you because this is actually how the things are, and I'm in charge of how the things are, and you're invited to be a part of the truer, real or thing that is how the things are. And then strategically, the thing he does next is he walks off that hillside after giving that great speech, and a whole bunch of people follow him, and now it's time to prove it. Can he actually wield the kind of authority that it looks like he was just trying to wield in that speech? Or is this just the most gifted orator ever? And we got taken in for a minute, but as soon as the rubber of reality meets the road of that speech, stuff is gonna break and be exposed for what it is. So Jesus comes off the hill, the crowd follows him, and then what we looked at in the last, I don't know what it was, three conversations or whatever, was him coming off the hill and talking to that leper. And in that, he overcomes one of the big five things that limit all people, that being social stuff. And he just blows right past it. Now, additionally, obviously he blows right past another one of the big five things, which is disease, health, the laws of time and space, whatever you want to call it. And so that's awesome and amazing and fascinating. But before anybody can fully even internalize what's going on there, we're on to the next anecdote that is going to demonstrate his authority again over time, space, health, but also specifically over distance, transcending the thing that even 2,000 years later, in all of our infinite wisdom and genius, every single one of us participating in this conversation was dazzled by the first time we used digital technology, or in my case, simple radio frequencies, to overcome distance. And the generation before that was dazzled by cans attached to strings. So if you're older and listening to this, you don't get a pass on it either. Everybody, when they really stop and think about it, realizes that transcending distance is pretty cool. So here's a passage. When he had entered Capernaum, a centurion came forward to him, appealing to him. Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly. And he said to him, I'll come heal him. But the centurion replied, Lord, I'm not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word and my servant will be healed, for I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me, and I say to this one, go and he goes, and to another one, come, and he comes, and to my servant, do this, and he does it. When Jesus heard this, he marvelled and said to those who followed him, Truly I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from the east and the west and recline at the table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there'll be weeping and gnashing of teeth. And to the centurion, Jesus said, Go, let it be done for you as you've believed. And the servant was healed at that very moment. There are obviously a lot of details to process through here, and a lot of theology to process through here, but hey, if you've been doing this with me for a while, you know the drill. So we'll get through what we can and then we'll pick up the rest tomorrow. So he's coming back into Capernaum, and this distance between the two locations is actually a pretty important detail to understanding the picture. Now I'm sure there are a bunch of you listening to this who've actually been to Israel and you've gone and looked at this stuff. I've done that, and it's the kind of thing that I find really interesting and fun. And I actually made a video about it that I will try to remember to link in the description down below, trying to reconcile Mark's account of what gets called the Sermon on the Plain with Matthew's account of what gets called the Sermon on the Mount. The details surrounding them can cause some confusion. But the traditional site of the Sermon on the Mount is just a little ways away from Capernaum. You can see it from Capernaum and Capernaum from it. A Capernaum, very clearly, because you're up on a hill, you're overlooking the whole Sea of Galilee. There's a great big church or shrine up there called the Shrine of the Beatitudes, a Church of the Beatitudes, I think. And it's a beautiful place. This garden in the middle of sort of a wildernessy area up on that hillside. And it's very easy when you're up there to picture how that sound would carry with Jesus standing uphill, maybe people going downhill, or even Jesus kind of looking up or off to the side. There are a lot of natural amphitheaters, is the point. And it looks like the kind of spot that just travel-wise checks out. So I'm inclined on this one to believe the historical traditional location on the Sermon on the Mount Location, which means that Jesus then comes down the hill. He would have hit the same path that you drive in and out on today. That road is hyper ancient. And he would have been walking east-northeast along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. So the shore of the Sea of Galilee is to your right, the Mount of the Beatitudes is to your left and up the hill, and Capernaum is ahead of you. This walk, I did most of it. I don't know, maybe half an hour is what it would take to get this thing done. With a crowd, maybe it would move a little more slowly. So we come off the hill, we have the encounter with the leper, which probably happened on that same road. And then he makes his way back to Capernaum, and according to the Matthew account, he gets into Capernaum. Now we've talked about this town before. It is not a big town. The basic layout of the streets is still visible. I'm sure there's still a bit more to be excavated, but we know where the walls or boundaries are from Jesus' era, and there wasn't a lot of Capernaum after Jesus era. The town did go defunct. So this isn't a significant town. It is where Peter is from. It is a fishing village. And if you go there now, you can get a pretty good sense of how not difficult it would be to know where everybody was at in the whole community. What's interesting though is that the barracks where a centurion would have been stationed overseeing a cohort of, I don't know, theoretically it's a hundred men, but that number had evolved over time, so it probably would have been more men than this that were stationed at Capernaum. And again, these barracks are maybe several hundred yards east of Capernaum. I mean, it would make sense that the Jewish people, and we'll see this when we look at the Luke account later on, wouldn't be super crazy about having the Gentiles in their village or vice versa. And it seems like they kind of understood and honored that gap and that distance. But we also get the impression from the Luke account, which we'll look at later, that the centurion was a pretty decent guy and he had a good reputation amongst the people he oversaw. Maybe you could even use the word occupied. So this is really a convergence, right? So just, you know, if you put your hands up in front of you, your left hand can be raised above your shoulder, and now that's about where the Sermon on the Mount would be, right? And then we come down the hill, lowering the left hand, and the Sea of Galilee is like where your body is, and the hillside is like out in front of you, and Jesus is walking along a road now, moving between your left hand and your right hand toward Capernaum, and he gets over to Capernaum, which is your right hand, and then further past your right hand is where these barracks are, which means that seeing all of this commotion from a long ways off and having heard a whole bunch of stuff about what was going on, the centurion, either himself or dispatching an emissary speaking with the full authority of the centurion, is gonna meet Jesus in Capernaum, and the whole village is gonna have this immediate follow-up moment where we're gonna get more answers about the credibility of Jesus regarding his power over time and space, as well as regarding his power over disease. And what we're gonna get is further evidence about really three of the big limitations that Jesus faces. One, the social thing, because the centurion's an occupier and a gentile, two, the physical thing, because the request is going to be for health, and three, the distance thing that you and me were trying to overcome when we bought our first cell phone and gawked about how amazing it was that I'm literally calling you from a car. So we'll dive deeper into how that unfolds and all the little wrinkles that the original audience would have caught. But that maybe you and I have to think and look a little bit harder in order to understand for ourselves as a modern audience. Much more to come on this, including some pretty interesting Bible controversy that we're going to unpack. I'll tell you what isn't controversial though, is all of the really nice things that you write in those podcast reviews. Every now and then I just cruise over there and check them out. And I'm always like, oh, I wonder what I did wrong. If people are going to tell me I'm dumb, I have a dumb head, and I say stupid words. And then I go and look, and everybody's just really stinking nice. So thank you. I've read now every single one of the reviews that you wrote, and they're hyper encouraging. So thanks for that. And also they help to get the podcast in front of other people. So if you feel like leaving a review on whatever podcast app you use, high five, that's awesome. If you don't, also high five, that's awesome. Let's do more of this tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. We'll catch you soon.