Hey my friends, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible number podcast. Like you, I am holed up doing the social distancing thing right now. And I know some of you are probably out and still needing to go to work and provide services and things that everybody's depending on. And just no matter what your role in this is and what you're doing, thanks in advance, and thanks, I guess, after the fact as well for what you're contributing to making a tricky situation better. So uh high fives to everybody all around. We're gonna weather this coronavirus thing together. And while we do so, hey, we got a little bit of extra time to sit and think about this thing that the New Testament text holds out as being bigger and truer and realer than even the most frantic moments we might encounter in our lives. And so we're gonna take some time and think about it. So we're in Matthew chapter five. We have been since forever. This is the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus opens with a big block of beautiful thought. This here's all these awesome things about this truer, realer kingdom that I am bringing with me. Here's a little bit about the role that you play in it. And then as we've discussed, you know, surely a lot of people were like, that sounds awesome, but we already have a religion. How do these two things fit together, Jesus? And his answer starts in verse 17. Do not think that I've come to abolish the law or the prophets. I haven't come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. Now, in order to understand that and understand how it would have struck the original audience, we got to put ourselves in their heads. Let's go with an example to try and get into the psyche. The Cubs and the Red Sox lost at baseball for forever. I mean, I don't remember the Cubs, their last win until recently in terms of a championship was like 1912 or 1918 or 1908. It was something like that. It was forever ago. And the Red Sox hadn't won in forever either. Coming into the 2000s, they both had curses. One had to do with a goat, the other had to do with trading away Babe Ruth. And so what happened is the psyche of the fan bases of the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox for really like almost a century became one of lovable losing. We just lose, it's what we do, and we're cursed, and things are against us, and we're trying to move forward, but we have solidarity in our losing this. And I think it became part of the DNA of those fan bases. And then, well, within the last 20 years, they both started winning and actually won championships. And then Cubs and Red Sox fans kind of didn't know what to do identity-wise. Like who we are? Who are we now? This is confusing and weird. We're not used to winning. Well, likewise, I think the audience on the hill that's listening to Jesus talk about this stuff is used to a set of ground rules, a normal that they've adjusted to. And the idea of some kind of resolution or winning is maybe a little bit foreign here. So we go all the way back to the beginning of the psyche, the psychological process that these people would have embraced. And I suppose you can go back even earlier if you want, but I'm going to pick it up in Genesis chapter 12. I think these people would have been thinking, all right, we're children of Abraham. Our religion starts with Abraham when God picked him, when his name was still Abram, out of the land of Ur of the Chaldeans, and makes this strange, beautiful, cryptic, open-ended promise to him that goes like this: Genesis 12.1. The Lord had said to Abram, Leave your country, your people, and your father's household, and go to the land I'll show you. I'll make you into a great nation and I'll bless you. I'll make your name great, and you'll be a blessing. I'll bless those who bless you, and ever curses you, I will curse, and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you. So Abram left, and as the Lord told him, and he took people along, and then things happened. And that sort of sets the trajectory of the Old Testament, in that you've got the descendants of this guy who are going to be the main human characters, and you get the impression it's going to be a little bit up and down there, just based on what God said to him in that commissioning, in that covenant, rather. A few centuries pass, the descendants of Abraham end up in slavery in Egypt. Moses, of course, is the guy who leads them out of that, and it's it's too complex to read. I covered it in an earlier episode of the podcast, but spread out over a whole bunch of chapters of Old Testament is what we call the Mosaic covenant. And there, God makes a deal with Moses where he's like, all right, look, this is a conditional thing. The deal with Abraham, it was unconditional. No matter what, I was gonna do that stuff. This is conditional. I'm your God, you're my people, you're gonna obey me. If you do obey me, I'm gonna bless you. If you disobey me, I'm going to punish you. But either way, everybody's gonna come to the same conclusion that those people's God is the one true God. And there we get more clarity on the narrative trajectory of the history of the people represented by those who are sitting on the hill listening to Jesus. It's this up and down of we get stuff right, we get the blessing of God, we get stuff wrong, we get the punishment of God. And the relationship with the nations is gonna have a lot to do with that as well. Well, then we fast forward to 2nd Samuel 7. I should know this just off the top of my head. Thumbing, thumbing, thumbing. Yes, 2nd Samuel 7, and I don't remember where it starts. How about verse 11? Okay, so God now is gonna talk to David through the prophet Nathan, and David, who's the second king of Israel, you know, over a thousand years after Abraham, he's like, uh, it's time for God to live in a temple and a house among us. And the response seems to be, no, let's not worry about that right now. We'll get to that in a minute. Here's something better. The Lord declares to you, David, that the Lord himself will establish a house for you. When your days are over and you rest with your fathers, I'll raise up your offspring to succeed you, who will come from your own body, and I'll establish his kingdom. He's the one who will build a house for my name, and I'll establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I'll be his father, and he'll be my son, and when he does wrong, I'll punish him with the rod of men, with the floggings inflicted by men. But my love will never be taken away from him. For as I took it away, as I took it away from Saul, whom I removed before you, your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me, your throne will be established forever. And then Nathan reported to David all the words of this entire revelation. So obviously there's two things going on there. One is that we're talking about Solomon, the son of David, who would actually go on to build the temple, and the worldly lineage that comes out of Solomon, and again, this third covenant gives us that sense that there's gonna be some up and down, some positive and negative interactions with the nations around him, but that ultimately the bigger promise is that there's going to be this eternal kingdom and that it's gonna last forever, and that a descendant of David is gonna sit on that throne forever. And then that gets clarified as we move ahead into Isaiah. There's so many passages that we could look at from the prophets, but trying to kind of hit the same ones again and again so they get drilled into our brain. You know, it looks like the kingdoms of Israel have fallen, Israel and Judah, they're away in captivity. Will the promises of God work out? And then you get to Isaiah 11 and you see a shoot will come from the stump of Jesse. Jesse was David's dad. From his roots, a branch will bear fruit. The spirit of the Lord will rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the spirit of counsel and of power, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord, and he will delight in the fear of the Lord. And then it goes on and says a whole bunch more. Isaiah chapter 9 talks about it, Isaiah chapter 53 talks about it, all of these ideas about this promised one who will ultimately be the descendant of Jesse, the descendant of David, who will sit on the throne forever. But then after all of this prophecy happens, of course, Alexander the Great comes along, the Romans come along, and it's just not going well. So the people, again, sitting on that hillside would have said, we have what we call the law, and the law, again, doesn't just mean the rules of the Old Testament. It's the whole narrative and narrative thrust and theological narrative thrust of the Old Testament. They would have had that in their head. We lose and we've been losing for a really long time. And we can imagine that winning is a thing that sort of happens or maybe happens to other people, but we can't picture it for ourselves. So when Jesus says to this audience that he's going to be the fulfillment of the law, what he is suggesting is that he's going to be the bump bump. He's going to be the completion not just of their theology, not just of their rules, not just of their religious system, but of their history and everything about who they are. So he's making it very clear, all that stuff about Abraham and Moses and David and the promises made to them, that stuff is not going away. They would have understood that in this one sentence that Jesus is saying. I'm not wrecking all of that. I'm not wadding that up and throwing it over my shoulder and starting a new religion. All of that stuff that God did through the stories and the narrative, all of the loose ends that haven't been tied up. Yet we're not just wadding that up like season eight of Game of Thrones and just punting on it all. No, no, no. All of it's going to be resolved to completion in a perfectly satisfactory way, better than any of you could imagine. This is going to be fulfilled. So now that we understand the psyche of the people on the hill, we're used to losing. I wouldn't even know what to do if we suddenly won, much like Red Sox or Cubs fans. Now that we understand their psyche, we are better positioned to go back and look at the specifics of the details of their law to be able to think through what is Jesus alluding to? How does he actually fulfill what they would have understood to be the law? Now we've looked at part of that. Already Matthew's addressed that in the prophetic sense, right? I mean, the the stuff that we did in the first 20 episodes where there's just all of that and thus was fulfilled what was written by the prophet when he said, da-da-da-da-da. So he's the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, the whole story, because of that that we've already looked at closely. We see that he's the beginning of the fulfillment of the law from a narrative sense already. That's why we opened with a genealogy in the book of Matthew. So we get that sense of how every one of those names conjures in the minds of the original audience's story. And gradually we come to see how Jesus is the completion of all of those stories. But what we need to look at next is the specific elements of the actual written revealed law. Here's how you do business in a community, here's how you worship, here's how you do Old Testament Jewish Hebrew Israelite church, here's how you do the sacrificial system, and how is Jesus the fulfillment of that? Those other two elements, prophetic and narrative, those are becoming more clear. But next time around, we're going to look at the actual law and sacrificial system elements to see how Jesus is the fulfillment of those. And that might take a little while. So that could be the rest of our week. We'll see what happens. Whatever the case, hey, thanks again for hanging out with me. Thanks again for being people who care about what's right and the bigger picture during a tricky time. And thanks for being people who are willing to take the long, patient road to trying to really understand what, well, at least what this holds out as being, you know, the God who made everything has in mind for what people can do when they face the difficult things of this world and what the greater reality is and what role we might play in all of that. I understand that we could try to cut a bunch of corners and be like, hey, just do these things, think these things, but I'm not in charge of that. And I don't really know how to or want to dictate that to anybody. But what we can do together with this little exercise is slowly and carefully think it through together so that wherever you or I might land, we land there because we did the work and we think it with eyes wide open and with careful thought behind it so that we can think it with conviction and then act on that and live that out and take hope and confidence in those things that we come to understand as being truer and realer. All right, that was a lot. I'm Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. I appreciate you. Let's do it again soon.