We're opening with a quiz. Who said the following famous historical line? A house divided against itself cannot stand. Don't bark out the answer. We're gonna count to three and we're gonna make it so you can look real, real cool and smart in front of everybody else. So we're gonna count to three. Three, two, one. I counted down from three, but it still counts. Can everybody say your answer? Okay, good. That's locked in. Everybody who said, Abraham Lincoln, raise your hand and accept my still smells a teeny tiny bit like fish and a lot like that antiviral antibacterial soap we bought from Ace Hardware, except my high five that smells like that. There you go. Good job. You were correct. But everybody who said Jesus of Nazareth, you also get a fishy high five because you are also correct. In fact, Jesus, much like my social distancing habits, was saying stuff like that before it was cool. Jesus could be argued and made it cool. He said it in Mark 3.25. But the context in which Jesus said the whole thing about a house divided against itself cannot stand is very different from the context in which Abraham Lincoln said it surrounding the American Civil War. And of course, the American Civil War is like the perfect imagery for the whole thing that Jesus was saying. And it makes a great deal of sense that Lincoln latched onto that and used it in that particular application. Well, here's the deal: Lincoln was the guy who was trying to keep the house together, right? And he was, I think, really good at that from a philosophical leadership perspective. He wasn't great at the military side. I think the North probably should have cleaned house a lot quicker than it did. No disrespect to my friends in the South. I don't think this is still a hot button issue. But yeah, the leadership in the North was just awful. And there went through a whole bunch of generals early on. Lincoln actually commanded the Union Army for a period of time, obviously not from horseback, but he was the guy in charge of moving the pieces around on the board. And it wasn't until very late in the game that the two guys you're thinking of, Grant and Sherman, came on the scene and they were effective military commanders and they got things moving. But the South, you know, they had clear leadership from the beginning. What the South didn't have, though, was a visionary leader of the caliber of Lincoln. And that one little quote is just a sample of his philosophy. Maybe it epitomizes his philosophy, which said, we got to put this thing back together. And not just this thing, though Lincoln obviously wanted the union, the federal government to persist and even grow. He seemed really concerned with the soul of America, with the relationships that would be so battered and bruised that no amount of law or force would ever be able to put this stuff back together. He felt that it was going to take, well, to use the Christian Jesus-y term, he felt it was going to take grace, a degree of forgiveness and overlooking the past sorrows and sins that hadn't just defined the last five years of fighting, but it had defined a hundred years. I mean, dating back all the way into the colonial era, this cultural divide and debate had existed. And it's funny because it just kept morphing. Once that division gets in the blood, it doesn't really go away. And you just find other things to be divided about. And it's funny because even at this point, you know, we're in a place where I think everybody would agree that slavery is a pretty bad idea. I think everybody's pretty vigorously against slavery at this point. But the seeds of division are something that just kind of shift. They always move around. There's this human impulse that says we do really like to fight with people and we like to have this kind of bipolar society where we do pick things to fall on one side or the other, one, zero, binary. But Lincoln was trying to draw people towards something very, very different. Instead of thinking about the tribes, let's think about this thing and what the future could look like together. And so he had a plan for how to put things back together. And his plan was sometimes referred to as the 10% plan. You get 10% of people in the South, either in this capacity or that capacity, to swear loyalty to the union and to putting things back together. And that's enough. That that state or that group can be readmitted and we can move forward. And the plan morphed a little bit over time, but 10% was the key component that Lincoln didn't want to wait around to move toward healing until he could get half or three-quarters of people to say they were ready to heal. He was like, no, we're going to start healing. While the radical Republicans in the legislature were like, nope, 50%. And they pitched this bill called the Wade Davis bill that would require a 50% agreement, not just an allegiance of loyalty, if I remember right, to the Union, but it was also like an oath that said, I never voluntarily renounced the Union and embraced the Confederacy. Like something just crazy that was never going to happen. And it looked like the idea there was to keep heaping punishment on their enemies to get them to either lie or swear to something they could never really swear to, or rather, not swear to something that they couldn't actually swear to, and thus to stretch out a punishment, period. Well, Lincoln knew nothing good was going to come of that. And ultimately, he vetoed the Wade Davis Act, which is so weird for me to say because Wade Davis is the closer, the guy who comes in in the ninth inning for the Colorado Rockies, and it did not go well last year with him. But the bill came before the pitcher. And so the deal is Lincoln actually vetoed that bill and continued to advocate for a more gracious acceptance of his enemies back into union with the North and then everybody else. Well, then along comes this guy named John Wilkes Booth, and he was loyal to the South. And he goes to this play called Our American Cousin. He sneaks up on the president and he puts a bullet in him and kills him. And I'm sure he felt very good about that. Like, ha ha, I have killed the tyrant. In fact, that's basically, I think, what he said, maybe in Latin. And upon declaring this, you know, he feels like he's won this great victory for the South, but he didn't get it. Then the South, your best friend was Abe Lincoln. He was the guy who was looking out for you. He was the guy who was sticking up for you when everybody else wanted blood. Because the one thing that I think is the biggest credit to the legacy of Abraham Lincoln is that even after all of that bloodshed, what was it, 600,000 dead as a result of this thing? Even after half of the country advocated for buying and owning and breeding humans, I mean, that level of evil and ugliness, here comes Lincoln. He's like, we can't do that stuff anymore, but let's put this thing back together. And as a side note, one of the most disappointing things about what the Southern Loyalists, John Wilkes Booth, and the Northern Loyalists, the Radical Republicans, inadvertently conspired to achieve is that they set the whole thing on a path for greater adversarial tension than was needed. You had a leader who could lead and was positioned right and was prepared to show grace toward his enemies, but people who wanted blood, in a way, prevailed. And I would argue they did prevail because I think the whole civil rights thing would have happened a lot sooner. Because I think the history of the American people and the West looks a lot different if Lincoln is around to see this thing through to the gracious conclusions he was pursuing. And I do think that it was a pivotal moment that shifted us in a direction that was not nearly as good as it could have been. And the reason I spent so much time talking about that story is because I think it beautifully exemplifies the very difficult to pull off spirit of Matthew chapter five and verse 43. And what we're seeing as we go through the the you have heard it said, but I tell you that statements where Jesus is fulfilling specific elements of the behavioral law, the moral law, is that each one ramps up in difficulty. And we're going to look more closely at how difficult this one is, but for now let's just let the text speak for itself. It says this You've heard that it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his son to rise on evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Don't even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect. And if that reading made you uncomfortable and raised a ton of questions, then I think I must have pronounced everything correctly because it is supposed to. Okay, so loving your enemy is hard, obviously. The stuff Jesus says after that is hard, obviously, but let's frame this thing up the way we framed up the others so that we can try to interpret this thing properly on Jesus' terms. It looks like three things are happening here. One, he's again articulating a value of the kingdom. It's upside down and inside out and weird and backwards from world values. And we're starting to predict and expect that pattern the more Jesus talks now. Two, he is calling for kingdom citizens, participants in this kingdom, to obey at the level of the heart, to be truly vested in what this kingdom is about, and not just to go through the obligatory paces. The king said I have to do this, so I'm going to do it to the absolute minimum. And he better give me a reward because I technically did all the things that he's like, he's blowing up that mentality. And the call is, I want your heart. I want you to obey because you love me. I want you to obey because you love what's right and what's good and because you love other people. I don't want cold, external obedience that seems like something but is only a thin veneer over the top of hateful, spiteful, selfish pride. I want actual change at the level of the heart. I want fulfillment of the law in the lives, the priorities, and the mindset of my kingdom citizens. So you got the values of the kingdom, you got the call for kingdom citizens to obey at the level of the heart. And the third thing we see in this passage, as well as all the other you've heard it said, but I tell you that statements is that our spiritual poverty, the impossibility of our perfection, the impossibility of us being so in control of our impulses and our weaknesses and our pride at the level of the heart, causes us to realize we can never really actually totally obey all of this stuff. And therefore, the only way to gain access to the kingdom of heaven, per Jesus' words, between Matthew 5, 17, and 20, is to have a righteousness that surpasses that of the Pharisees. And where does that come from? Oh, only from God. So all I have accomplished here is a very lengthy introduction, a little bit of food for thought, a reading of the passage, and a reminder of what the three points of each of these chunks of thought seems to be. But I'm actually really happy with that because from the get-go, I think you might get discouraged with this one. I am tempted to get discouraged with this one. It feels like this is the one that's too much. And we're going to talk more about that. But if we frame it the right way before we really delve into this passage, we're more likely to come away understanding Jesus, what he's into, what he's up to, and where we might fit into this thing. Some of you are supporting this program at patreon.com/slash the TMBH podcast. And that's pretty cool of you. Thank you a lot for doing that. It means a lot. And uh anybody who feels like jumping in, you're welcome to. Anybody who feels like not, you're also welcome to do that. I love that we get to do this. I love that we hang out. I love that you are patient enough that when we get into the really difficult stuff like this, we can break it down slowly. When we're on the stuff that's a little more straightforward and easy, we can kind of roll through that a bit quicker. I think that's a pretty good rhythm for trying to tackle a document that has this level of implications. All right, we're gonna be in Leviticus 19 tomorrow and looking at what Jesus is quoting from and trying to understand what he actually means by all of this. Matt is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do it again soon.