Hey, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and thanks for making the time to hang out with me. I know you got a bajillion things to do in the world right now. And also I know the world is a very interesting place right now with a lot going on and a lot that demands our attention. And so I don't know. I just figured I'd start off the week by saying thanks again for doing this. I think it's really cool that we get to. I also think it's very unusual that I start a week or any episode with a hot take, but this time around, oh, we're going hot take. Get ready, because here it comes. You know who I think has lost a lot of credibility in the last five or ten years? Everyone. I can't think of any group whose credibility has gone up in that period of time. Let's just start close to home and break this thing down, right? Uh, church. I wouldn't say the church is more credible now than it was five or ten years ago. And you got scandalous stuff that happens from time to time. You've got the fact that different expressions of Christianity like to sidle up with different political parties and weaponize theology for the sake of power. Ick. That has caused a whole lot of hypocrisy and a whole lot of people who were outside the church looking in to be like, nah, that's just not as credible a societal institution as it used to be. Okay, next up, uh, not that these people ever had a ton of credibility, but advertisers. There was a time when I think we were so spellbound by television or the magic of radio that if somebody came on and said something, and they used that really credible sounding announcer voice, we'd all be like, oh, that seems legitimate. I mean, in a clinical study, it proved that this thing is good and not bad. But now, thanks to the magic of the internet, and we can pull back that curtain and be like, no, no, this is just a set of habitual lies that we allow into our life all the time. Advertisers and people who want our money, they don't have any credibility. How about the media? That's a fun one. Remember when you could go on TV or the internet and be like, I wonder how the things actually are. And I wonder what the baseline of facts actually is that I can operate off of. Not anymore. You just can't find that anywhere. And of course, this is the moment where everybody's, yeah, like yeah, because the other guys they screwed this up. No, as the other guys, like everybody participated, including me, in screwing this up. We traded clicks for truth and truth for clicks. And as a result, both media audience members and the media themselves have lost a ton of credibility, and there's nobody who can really speak with authority from that front anymore. I mean, really, name a journalist who's like, wow, that person is a bastion of reliability. And if they come on TV and try to calm the masses or say, this is how things are, that's how things are, we're gonna believe them. No way that person doesn't exist anymore. You might be like, I like it when we don't start with hot takes. This hot take is taking too long. Can we please be done with the hot take now? No, we can't quite be done with the hot take yet. How about politicians? Remember when there's a time when people are like, wow, we just elect the right politician, things are gonna get better. I saw a great headline from the Babylon Bee the other day. The literally the title of the headline was it was an op-ed. First we tried Democrats, then Republicans, then Democrats, then Republicans, then Democrats, then Republicans. Isn't it time we gave Democrats a try? That is so descriptive of this bizarre, abusive relationship we have with politicians right now. They come out every two or four or six years, depending on their term limit, and they beg us to empower them with their vote and tell us they're gonna change this or change that. They pander real hard, they kiss the babies, and then, well, does any of that stuff ever actually really happen? Unless I be tempted to sit here and point the finger at everybody else, how about me as someone or a part of a group of someones who has lost credibility in the last five or ten years? How about us? How about the way we tweet and the way we Facebook and the way we interact and the way we go hyperbolic and the way we melt down on each other and pursue power, even with the way we do our basic day-to-day interactions online and even in person? It's like we've all agreed at once that credibility just isn't going to be a thing that we do anymore, and that power will be a thing that we do now. Well, this isn't a new phenomenon. This is something that humanity has spiraled into again and again and again, cycle after cycle, throughout human history, because ultimately it really does come down to power, doesn't it? Now, at times it feels like there's power that can be gained by mobilizing a bunch of people behind good, rational, reasonable ideas and processing through that way. But ultimately, even that is usually a function of getting to a place where you've got a majority who thinks a thing that can make things be a certain way. And resultantly, as we age, I think a lot of us get to a place where we have this resigned acceptance, like Pontius Pilate, where we just shrug at all of the unknowability of truth and lack of credibility and say, what is truth really? When you're a kid and you're idealistic and you only know a very small percentage of the positions and the arguments and the reasons that different people think things, you might idealistically imagine that the right argument is about to win, and then everything is going to get better. And sometimes, thankfully, we do see good ideas win out, and we do see redemptive things happen, and we do see positive change. But overwhelmingly, we've got a bit of a crisis of credibility going on, not just in our world now, but in our experience as humanity. Who really has the lasting credibility to walk into a situation and to speak to it in a way that's efficacious? Who is the last person you heard talk where everyone who heard them talk, regardless of whether they agreed or not, said, dang, that person teaches like someone who has authority and not like all the other talking heads. Well, that's exactly what people said at the end of the Sermon on the Mount that you and I just worked our way through. They listened to a guy who was a rumor, a local legend, maybe a bit of an upstart messianic candidate who people didn't know quite what to do with. As he walked up onto that hill and brought his little band of disciples that he had with him up there in Matthew chapter 5, and the crowds began to follow. I'm sure part of this was entertainment, diversion. Like, what else do we have to do? Chase the latest messianic candidate. Let's see what this guy is gonna say. I'm sure others had seen Jesus do amazing things, and they wanted to know what was behind those actions. It looks like others were there to gather ammunition to oppose him if he ever rose to such prominence that he posed a threat. Well, regardless of whatever reason each person might have been on that hill, they all went up there and they heard the same thing. Jesus laying out the upside-down values of a strange, confusing, and very different kingdom, with very different currency, different stuff that is valued in this kingdom, as opposed to the normal basic world kingdom that we all live in most of the time. He then went on to say, you all have a role. People who are a part of this kingdom, you are agents of this kingdom. You have a job to do. It's not just a thing that you passively receive, it is something that you participate in. Then all those people on the hill from all those different persuasions probably started to wonder, well, what does that mean for the existing religion we have? And Jesus said, it doesn't go anywhere other than it gets fulfilled, and I am the fulfillment. Then people no doubt were standing there wondering, well, how do I get into this kingdom? Then I think I might like to sign up. And Jesus crushes their newfound hope by saying, your righteousness would have to be better than the maximum professional righteous people, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. And the people are confused now. They're like, well, how do we be righteous like that? And also you said you're the fulfillment of our religion. How does that work? Then he goes on to break down a bunch of very simple moral things: murder, adultery, divorce, oaths, keeping your word, how you treat your enemies. And in each of them, he explains the basic expectation of the world values. You've heard it said, don't kill people. Yeah, la-di-da. And I tell you. And then he goes on to say stuff about the level of the heart. Don't hate, don't lust, don't find cheap, clever ways to technically divorce your wife legally, but in a way that absolutely destroys her life. And further, people on the hill, if you're starting to think that you might be able to pull that stuff off, you got to love your enemies too. That is the fulfillment of the law, of the religion, of the teachings of what you and I would call the Old Testament. Then he goes on to talk about what it looks like to do religious activities in light of the values of this new kingdom, to give money away, to pray, to fast, to have your own money and hang on to it, and that all of that means that it doesn't really make sense in light of the kingdom to worry, because if you really can pray the prayer that is at the center point of the whole Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, it means that you're taking an oath of total submission to a king who can deliver on all the things that a king would need to be able to deliver on, and deliver on all of those things eternally, so that ascribing power to him would not be something that would be abused by his successor, because there will be no successor in this kingdom. You're looking at the king forever. And then he gets down to the home stretch, and maybe some people on that hill are like, hmm, okay, I think I could figure out a way to make some lemonade out of these lemons. I was pretty good at judging and policing other people's behavior in the last version of religion. I think I could probably fill the same niche in this new version. And Jesus is like, I don't need that person. The kingdom doesn't need that person at all. It already has a judge. I can handle the judging. There's a lot of paraphrasing there. Finally, all these people who came to hear Jesus and are used to a billion talking heads who just say an endless stream of words, all of which lack authority. Hear Jesus authoritatively speak in absolutes. They got two things. You can pick this thing or that thing. Wide, normal, boring, basic road, narrow road that leads somewhere cool. You got the truth and the good teachers, and you got the false teachers. You got the people who are real followers, agents of the kingdom, son, daughter, heir, and then you got the people who just claim it, but they're not, and they're fake. You got the true foundation, the rock, you got the fake foundation, the sand. In the most crystal clear, unquestionable terms, Jesus has authoritatively laid out what his kingdom is about, raised a whole lot of questions about what the specifics might look like, but he clearly believes he's put forward enough to be able to say, pick. The teaching itself was apparently a proof of credibility. That just doesn't happen anymore. Can you imagine if there was just one person who went on cable news or Twitter and was like, hey, here's how the things actually are, and what they said transcended everything and made people who hate one political tribe or another political tribe or this group or that group, made them all take pause and say, huh, that didn't sound like how the rest of us talk. What niche would that even be, my friends? I mean, what tone could somebody strike that would make people say something like that? I can't think of it. I feel like I'm in agreement with the bare naked ladies. It's all been done. Every tone you can strike has been struck. But what if not quite every tone you could strike has been struck? Because we've only struck the ones that make sense from the context, the foundation of knowing that deep down we're all flawed, and it is pretty hypocritical to go over the top in behaving like we're some kind of deity when we speak with this authority. But what if there was one type of communication that legitimately operated from a footing of, well, I'm saying this differently because I'm a deity. I made existence, I made you, I knew all of this was going to happen before it ever happened. I know what's going to happen next. I know what my fate in this world is going to be. I know what I'm going to do after that. I know exactly who I am. I have no existential questions about me or my place or my role in things. In fact, not only do I not have existential questions, I have utter and complete existential clarity, not just about the state of things, but about each and every one of you in the audience individually. Now that tonally would be something you and I have never heard before. And if Jesus is God in the flesh, I bet this speech came off a lot different than any other speech from any other human in the history of ever. And I think that's what prompts Matthew to write this observation about the crowd at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching because he taught as one who had authority and not as their teachers of the law. That Jesus was different than another screaming head. You might not think he was God. You might even think that he was wrong about all of this stuff. But it looks pretty apparent, both from the immediate record of history and what's happened over the last couple thousand years, that Jesus wasn't just winsome or interesting or a better speaker than most, but that he spoke with authority. The kind of authority that all the rest of us opinion mongers simply do not wield. And that's why I think the crowd doesn't disperse after the speech, but instead follows him down the hill to find out what's going to happen next and to see more of what it looks like when that kind of authority is on display. And they're not going to have to wait long to see something amazing that confirms some of their suspicions. And neither will you, because we're going to talk about it a whole bunch more tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Catch him on, Yana.