You know what movie horrifies me maybe more than any movie ever? It's not one where people get stabbed repeatedly or where they're monsters or chainsaws or anything like that. I mean, those things are just ridiculous, and you kind of take them for what they are. The movies that scare me are the dystopian ones that demonstrate a tremendous understanding of human nature and what happens when the relationship with your neighbors and with the state goes wrong, and we start weaponizing the force of consensus against people to do horrible Orwellian things to each other. Those freak me out because they don't feel that fake. And one of them that freaked me out was called Minority Report. What was horrifying about Minority Report is they cooked up this weird system where they enslaved some precognizant humans who could sort of see the future vaguely. And then these officers would go out and arrest people for crimes they hadn't committed yet, but that fate determined they were definitely going to commit later. But as the movie unfolds, you realize really quickly, wow, that sounded nice at first, but now it sounds horrifying. And at some point, I wonder what it'd be like if that thing got turned around on you, and then it does get turned around on the point of view character. And you're like, yeah, yep, I thought so. I would hate it. This is bad, and it just should be abolished, and this definitely should not be happening. Well, we run into a situation that is kind of minority reporty when we get to Matthew 7 and verse 6. So once again, Matthew 7, 6 comes on the heels of Jesus giving that very famous teaching about don't judge or you too will be judged. The measure that you use, that's the one that's going to get used on you, which kind of speaks to the minority report principle as well. But then we roll into this don't give to dogs what's sacred. Don't throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet and then turn and tear you to pieces. Well, part of the reason we got to take this one seriously is because it ends with you getting dismembered and maimed. So it's one of those where it's like, well, I hate dismemberment and maiming, especially when it's me. I should probably pay attention to what this is about. And what we've talked about the last couple episodes, and if you haven't caught those, I'd encourage you to go catch them because this one will make a lot more sense, is the idea that it looks like this is the second of two parallel warnings that Jesus is giving people who would like to sign up to be a part of his kingdom and follow Jesus because he seems cool and this seems great. There are two parallel warnings. The first of which is, hey, you'll be enormously ineffective as a follower of me if you go around worrying about everybody else's problems and judging them and poking at nitpicking at things other people get wrong. Why don't you worry about your own stuff and not be a hypocrite? God will do the judging in the kingdom. You don't need to worry about it. You actually all prayed that in the Lord's Prayer when you signed up. So let's just move forward like that. Okay, so there's one way to wreck yourself if you want to be a kingdom citizen. Now here's another way to wreck yourself. Don't do any judging at all. Don't do any discerning at all. View all people as equally of goodwill and equally friendly. Look at all of their actions as equally moral and predictable and helpful. And in doing so, you'll be a naive idiot that gets absolutely shipwrecked and accomplishes nothing. So we come to this difficult question of what do we do with the passage? And that's where the minority report thing really comes in, because it feels like there are two ways that we could proceed. One would be the minority report approach, which I don't think Jesus is saying here. And that would be to say we are going to take up our metaphorical torches and pitchforks, and we are going to go out and we are going to find those dogs and pigs who would do damage to us if we allowed them to, and we are going to crush them and expose them and arrest them for the pre-crimes that they probably would commit if we gave them our pearls. Hey, dog, hey pig, you are under arrest for the pre-crime dismemberment of me. Should I have given you my pearls? If we do that, I think we would be in violation of the previous teachings of Jesus, because that would be hyper judgy and not just like mean catty judgy. That would be like actually going out and having consequences judgy. Now, I don't think this is a seek and destroy instruction from Jesus. Instead, I think it is a passive, not active instruction. And so instead of minority reporting people that we think might be destructive, instead, if you're sizing up what somebody else is doing and it looks like it could be very destructive and a vortex of ruin, a person who just wants to watch the world burn, then what you do is you just give them a wide berth. You don't hurt them. You don't go out to Applebee's with your friends and have a bunch of margaritas and get liquored up and tell your elaborate, heartfelt story about how mean and bad those dogs and pig people were to you and get everybody on your side and rallied and angry, and then go charging out of that Applebee's together, avoiding the DUI checkpoints to go all gas on on the beast that you got everybody worked up about. That's also wrong and gross and gossipy and horrible. Instead, again, just wide berth. That seems to be the command. So first we identify what is precious. We process that through a little bit last time around. Beautiful stuff, ugly stuff, secret stuff, the stuff that is your pearls that puts you in a position of vulnerability. You give those to people who want to help you. You give those to people who love you. You give those to people who want to accomplish the same goals with their lives. You don't give those things to people who have a track record of being enormously cunning and destructive. You just keep the two apart for good. So again, the instruction here is not a seek and destroy minority report pre-crime kind of approach. It is really something you probably wouldn't even notice someone doing if they were obeying this command. Wouldn't put certain people in positions of leadership or positions to affect things. Instead, obeying the command would look like just subtly keeping these people a little bit at arm's length. While you do this other thing that is proactive, that is implicit in this teaching, and also implicit throughout the life of Christ, the example of Christ, the values of the kingdom and the whole Bible, and what we would hope for ourselves. And that is go strategic. To obey this command does not mean that you give up on someone you identify as a dog and a pig. And I feel really weird using that language. You understand what I'm doing there, right? Please, you understand? Like I'm just borrowing Jesus' language for the sake of efficiency, and in my panic over how awful it sounds for me to say dogs and pigs, I just made things very inefficient. So understanding, so understanding the language I'm drawing on, so understanding the language I'm drawing on here, and understanding that I'm very uncomfortable describing anyone this way specifically, so understanding the language that I'm drawing on here, and understanding that I'm very uncomfortable using those kind of words to describe anyone specifically, it would seem that the objective with someone who is identified as being very destructive is for the kingdom citizen to strategically show mercy and care toward them, the same way God showed mercy and care toward the kingdom citizen, when the kingdom citizen was still not a kingdom citizen. Jesus expands on this idea in Matthew chapter 10 of being innocent as doves and shrewd as serpents. Now, the shrewd as serpents part doesn't mean like go and be horrible to people and bite them and poison them. It's a reference to the cunning and the cleverness of the serpent, the strategy of the serpent and how it hunts and survives, but not compromising just what's good and right and noble and true that's the innocent as doves. So if the kingdom citizens sees somebody who is just wholesale destructive, yeah, you don't give them the pearls, but there's another thing that you need to do then based on the rest of the Bible, and that is go into help mode. Maybe even if help isn't wanted. Forgiveness, restoration, reconciliation, support, help, clever nudges in directions toward things that are good and that'll make things better and not worse in that person's life. I don't know what this stuff is. If this is something that you're into and you want to do the kingdom citizen thing, I guess you're just gonna have to be smart and strategic. And if it all goes horribly, you have to depend on God for forgiveness and known some stuff. The idea here is that when somebody's in a bad way, you try. As much as it's up to you, you try to make these things reconciled. So the kingdom citizen lives in a constant state of forgiveness. We see that in Matthew chapter six coming out of the Lord's Prayer. Jesus said that very clearly. You may not be able to be fully reconciled to a place of complete and total trust with the person who is behaving destructively, but theoretically there could at least be some kind of effort toward redemption, unless I would assume the person has gone into complete impossibility mode and they pose uh physical danger, or there just is no way to move forward at all. And again, it's the internet. Then I'm some guy on the internet. I'm literally in a room right now with moving blankets taped to the wall so that it won't echo that much. That is not that credible, which means you just gonna have to think about this for yourself and you're really smart and you'll figure out what to do with it if you want to do stuff with it. Last thing on all of this dogs and pigs and pearls business, though, is back to the big picture strategically of what's going on in the narrative. Who is Jesus talking about? Who does he have in view when he says this? And I don't think he has the disciples in view. I mean, maybe Judas is around at this point. I don't know. I'd have to look at a harmony to see if he's here by now. I I couldn't say. Maybe all the disciples are here, so maybe you could say, well, the dog and the pig is Judas. But then Jesus gives to Judas some pretty precious stuff, like money, well, all of it, and access to the people on whom he's going to build his church, and access to like himself. I think it goes beyond that. And I do think Jesus has some specific people in view. For example, in Luke, I'm gonna say 13-ish. You know what? Let's just turn over there. I think it is 13. Yeah, it's 13 in the middle, 1332. Some Pharisees come up to Jesus and they're like, hey, leave this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill you. And then Jesus replies, Go tell that fox, I will drive out demons and heal people today and tomorrow, and on the third day, I will reach my goal. And he goes on to say, you know, I'm I'm making this trip, I'm doing these things, and we'll have to cover that some other time. So fox, I mean, that's pretty dog-like. And if you look at the context carefully, which we don't have time for, it's not a compliment, like, oh, he's a sly, clever one. You'll hear people say, and I've got this wrong as well several times, so I just recently looked more closely at it, that Jesus is using an effeminate form of fox to even further slander Herod, but that's in Greek, and he wouldn't have said this in Greek, he would have said it in Aramaic. So uh I think the basic form of fox in Greek is effeminate. So I don't know that that added bonus dig counts. Sorry to everybody I told that to at some other point. I I'm no longer as certain of that. But it's most basic, but at the most basic level, fox, dog, not a compliment. Herod is being threatening, Jesus pushes back. So it seems like one example of somebody Jesus would view as being entirely destructive and not on board would be this political figure who is responsible for killing John the Baptist. This isn't the same Herod that killed all the babies at the beginning of Matthew. Further, I think you can flip ahead to Matthew 20 something, 22, 22, nope, 23, where Jesus gives that long, excoriating speech against the Pharisees. And in it, pretty much everything that's a value of the kingdom, everything that he taught proactively in the stuff we've been looking at, he points out that they do the exact opposite. And it seems like he has them in view as maybe the dogs and pigs who are destructive. Whatever the case, that'll be something that we can process through a little bit more as we go along. I would just leave it here. The instruction is a passive instruction, not an active instruction. It is not a call for kingdom citizens to go minority report, find and expose the bad people and crush them. Rather, it would seem it's a passive instruction to say don't put them in a position to do damage to you or to kingdom things, which is kind of one and the same. But the rest of Jesus' actions and teachings suggest that if you identify that someone is in that spot, you're not done. You just gotta wash your hands of them right off the bat. Then instead, you care about that person. Remember? Love your enemy. Yeah, so that's your enemy. So you you invest, you're you're generous. You try to find ways to make a dent and to get through that armor and make something better. That's how the kingdom citizen, who is light and salt and a preservative, that is how they act. In terms of the bigger picture of the narrative, it looks like these are not throwaway lines for Jesus and just a casual warning in a general sense. It looks like that warning is gonna get some flesh as we start to run into the enemies of the kingdom who we meet as we go further through the book of Matthew. Last thing as we wrap up, I went and read some more of your recent reviews on the podcast that some of you have left on your various podcast apps lately. That is so encouraging and so nice and so thank you. You don't have to do stuff like that, but it's kind of a weird medium, right? Like I talk at you a lot and I don't hear back from you a ton. I mean, you shoot me messages and stuff, and we have a little bit of a chance to interact, but it's cool to see those. It means a lot. It's encouraging. Thanks for doing it. If you don't do it, that's also cool and just fine. I just wanted to mention how much I've appreciated those that I've read lately, and thank you for putting in the extra effort to do that. We are gonna put in extra effort on finishing out the Sermon on the Mount and the rest of Matthew 7 over the next few days. I'll catch you tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour. Let's do it again soon.