All right, my friends, here's the score. We have a rainstorm right now on my uninsulated roof. And I've got a bunch of guys out here who are working on fixing up all the things that got damaged at my house. And this is just the time I have to jump on a mic. So enjoy the ambient soundscape of my house in the summer as we work on it and try to fix things. And that little portable construction radio plays z top in the background. I don't know if you get to hear the z-z-top, but it sounds real good to me and it's inspiring. You know, sometimes there are test court cases in our system where there'll be something going on, like a law that people don't really like, or they have some pretty serious questions about the constitutionality of that. But the law gets passed, and then you'll hear sometimes in the news or you know, the opinion people or whatever, they'll say something like, wow, that that is going to face a court test very early on in the game. And what happens then is that an interested party looks at a law and they're like, all right, well, let's just break the law. And then the courts will have to figure out whether that law actually passes muster with the actual ground rules that we work with here with the Constitution. And there was some pretty big drama about this right after Lincoln got assassinated. That's maybe one of the most famous examples I can think of, where there was a law, what was it called, the Tenure of Office Act, that was meant to be a power play between Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's vice president who took over after him, and the Republican Congress. And that got pretty clumsy and weird. And there was a test case there of a firing to be like, what are you going to do about it? And that ultimately resulted in Johnson's impeachment. And I think he avoided being removed from office by like one vote. In modern times, and I know you're already completely getting the example here, it might be a law that looks maybe a little bit discriminatory, and so we just do something that pushes back on that and see if the courts respond to it in a way that makes sense. Likewise, what we've been looking at here for the last couple of days is effectively a test case to probe the boundaries and the effectiveness of this Sermon on the Mount Kingdom manifesto. How much did you actually mean that, Jesus? Is this actually real? So this leper, who, as we discussed yesterday, looking at Leviticus 13 and 14, is forbidden from participating in society. He's got to dress ugly, he's got to yell unclean when people are around. Much like someone who is behind when skiing downhill, it is his responsibility to make sure that the traffic in front of him is warned and taken care of, and that he doesn't get in their way. And so he avoids the Sermon on the Mount. Maybe he can hear it from a distance. Maybe God miraculously reveals to him, as in the terms of Matthew 16 with Peter, that Jesus is the Son of God, that he is this king and authority figure, and that Jesus might be able to do something about his leprosy, and further, that Jesus might be able to do something about everything that goes along with that medical condition, socially and religiously. And the rain picks up and we persist. So again, just enjoy the soundscape. So Jesus comes off the hill from the Sermon on the Mount. People are amazed at his authority. And then the following thing happens. When he came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. Makes sense. Let's see what he does next. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, Lord, if you're willing, you can make me clean. This is a tremendous gesture, not just of faith, to say you could break the laws of time and space right now if you felt like it, and fix this thing that is medically wrong with me and incurable, but it's also a tremendously bold gesture of walking into a situation that honestly he could be terribly punished for. He's not just violating a rule that has no consequences, that people are like, well, that is a social norm. He's violating something that people would say, your presence here puts me at risk. And who knows, the crowd might turn against this guy. Everything so far has been crazy, and that's what we've spent the last two days on, but now it gets off the charts crazy. There would have been gasps and shock and horror and revulsion. Some people probably threw up in their mouths a tiny little bit when this happened, but here's what went down. Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. I am willing, he said. Be clean. Immediately he was cured of his leprosy. Then Jesus said to him, See that you don't tell anyone, but go show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded as a testimony to them. We're going to break down that last stuff about go to the priest in just a second. It's not actually all that complicated. But the billion-dollar moment here is that Jesus was not only cool with the dude breaking quarantine, but he was also willing and able to fix something. Now look, I know there are a lot of miraculous claims that happen in modern times, and I'm sure that there are a lot of you who are like, yep, and most of those are really valid. Okay, we see that differently. I don't think most of those are very valid. I think most miraculous claims recorded really since the early church aren't very credible. Now, that doesn't mean that I read the Bible and say that nothing miraculous is ever going to happen again. I just think it's incredibly rare, and frankly, I'm usually pretty skeptical because the data around it is shady. The claims are shady, and usually it sounds more to me like some people who would really like their version of Christianity to be advanced, or people who maybe very sincerely just want a miracle to be real so badly that they're willing to compromise some of their otherwise skeptical integrity that would keep them from being taken in by something. Not saying everybody's a giant liar. I am saying I'm very skeptical of the nature of miraculous claims that happen anymore. And one of the reasons that I'm skeptical is because it seems like most of the miraculous claims I hear about anymore are things that you could not test. My back hurts. Be healed. I blow on you, I hit you with my coat. That's amazing. My back feels better. Does it? Because that's not tangible. Maybe it feels better, but I can't test that in any way. What we're going to see is that there's a real testability factor to the miracles that we're talking about with Jesus. And in this place, the dude had the kind of lesions, sores, pustules, whatever boils that we read about in Leviticus 13 yesterday, and all of a sudden he doesn't. They just went away. There's a crowd there. People who like what's going on, people who don't like what's going on. They all saw this happen. And while any such claim, even in the Bible, as much as I hate to admit it, does ping my skeptical nerve, I cannot get around the fact that this was witnessed by tons of people from all different perspectives, from all different persuasions and agendas. And that when Matthew is writing this, even at the most radically late dates of possible authorship that people are still trying to propose, you would still have living memory of these events and you could go and talk with people who saw it, or people who talk to people who saw it. That's a lot closer than you and me get to this. And yet, Matthew held up, written to the people in the environment, in the place geographically where it went down. And I'm sorry, that's just compelling to me. Is it the smoking gun final thing that makes me say, okay, I should be a Christian, Jesus is definitely real? No, for the way I'm wired, I gotta see this in the larger context of what's going on in Matthew. But think about let's just grant that what is described here is what happened. What would that do to your brain? For me, I would pretty much sign up for anything. If if somebody said the stuff that Jesus just said and then immediately backed it up the way he just backed it up, uh, I'm in. But look more closely at what Jesus did. For you and me in a modern mindset, we're gonna see this and be like, wow, the amazing thing here is that Jesus fixed somebody's physical problem and a physical material change to physical matter happened with a touch and a word. That's incredible. But that's because we're modern slash postmodern minded empiricists who strongly and rightly believe in the scientific method. So I'm sure that was very impressive to the people at the time as well. But I wonder if maybe even more impressive is that Jesus is acting as though he has authority over cultural norms. That he just has the ability to walk in, like, say, as one who has authority and not like all the other talking heads, and just say, this is clean, this is fixed, that's how the things are now. Accept that. So which is harder, really, to lay a hand on somebody whose skin is absolutely wrecked and see it just immediately clear up? Or to have a whole crowd of people, decades, generations, centuries of societal expectations, of revulsion, of taboos, of all the stuff that Jonathan Haidt talks about in his book The Righteous Mind, that I know a lot of people have been reading lately and that I loved. It's almost impossible to unprogram that stuff and authoritatively speak into it. So which is harder? To miraculously heal somebody's gross skin sickness, or to with a word and an action, how many words? One, two, three, four, five, with five words and an action, declare something that societally there's total agreement is unclean and disgusting to be clean and beautiful. Which would have been harder? To walk into the lunchroom where we were all sitting, eating with my stinky wrestling partner, and to lay a hand on the table and make uh something appear out of thin air, or to walk in and say, the smell of that is actually beautiful. Everyone, it's beautiful now. Enjoy that and accept it. I don't know. Like it's at least closer than you figure. They're both pretty tough, is the point. I'm doing the thing again where I'm gonna cut it off abruptly so that we can pick it up abruptly tomorrow. There's just too much here to fit into this time frame. So here is your abrupt transition. Don't worry, there will still be drills and air compressors just like that when we pick it up in the morning. I'm Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do it again soon.