Hey everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and I have been on this enormous road trip with my family. We posed the dirt off the 2004 Lincoln Navigator and put the dog in the car. Went drove around the country and met with some people and made some videos for the YouTube channel and saw some old friends. And it's been a nice time, but let me tell you, finding places to record this podcast has been a little bit tricky. I made a pillow fort in a hotel room. I talked into a fleece tent, which sounded like trash. And everyone who pointed that out, you are right, and I cannot argue with you. I tried a closet a couple of times at one stop. And uh the most familiar setting where I've done most of this has been the front seat of said disgusting family road trip 2004 Lincoln Navigator with 201,000 miles. It's working out really, really nicely. Thank you, old trusty vehicle. So, whatever the case, I'm pretty excited because I'm gonna get home tonight and then I can set up shop in my little cubby hole in the back room of the house and work on this stuff some more. So thank you for not necessarily knowing it, but unwittingly going on this giant road trip with me and for being interested in the Bible and therefore by proxy making me think about things and stay on task and work on this stuff every single day, which I really enjoy doing and it's much easier to do because I know that you hang out with me. All right, that was a lot more front-end personal stuff than I normally like to do. So let's get cooking on Matthew chapter five, and we are gonna be looking at the last in the neat, tidy structure of the Beatitudes today, and that's the one that is about the persecuting. And this one's weird because it's kind of a compound beatitude that rolls on into a longer explanation. I don't know, I can tell you we're gonna get to it today, but why would he even say things like that? We're not gonna get to it today, we'll get to it tomorrow or whatever. So, verse 10, again, is the last of this little formula, and it says, Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And of course, this one comes on the heels of blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Now, at some point, we're gonna go back through this and we're gonna look at the structure and think through why they go in that order and why they're all built grammatically the way they're built. I think there's some pretty important meaning hiding in there. And interesting thing structurally, I think, about this one though, is that it does come on the heels of the thing about the peacemakers. So you think about it, what a peacemaker does. I mean, in the context of what we talked about in the last episode, it's somebody who's jumping into the middle of a gigantic mess and trying to straighten things out. Remember, it doesn't say peacekeepers. This isn't somebody who is just trying to band-aid the symptoms. The peacemaker is trying to address the root causes and actually make it better. And when we're talking about a situation that involves a contrast between the fallen, broken world kingdom, which has some things that are temporary and beautiful about it, but really they're just bittersweet and point to the truer, larger contrasting thing, which is the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom that Jesus is king over, the kingdom that is the truest, realist thing ever. When you contrast those two things, well, what you're gonna run into is a situation where they're not always entirely compatible. But people love their kingdoms. We love our kingdoms. We love normal. I mean, you've seen the human capacity to fall in love with an awful situation. You've seen the person who's in a horrible, abusive relationship emotionally or even physically, and there are a lot of reasons that somebody might not leave, but one of the biggest reasons I think is just fear of the unknown. Rather deal with the devil I know than something else. I think we like our little mental prisons. I think we like the things that hurt us, and I think we've learned to make lemonade out of the lemons of the world kingdom, and if somebody comes and pushes back on that, I think it freaks us out. I'm saying this in a confusing way, but it's not a confusing principle. It's real simple. When a peacemaker steps into my life and pushes back on the root causes of what's really wrong, it goes all the way down to where my treasure is, my heart is, my mindset is, what my priorities are, what my assumptions are. And so even if things are really, really hurting and messy, it's still just very unsettling to have somebody push back on all of that stuff. In the age of the internet, you've figured out if you go and wade out into the internet and you're like, whoa, we're being awful to each other, but you do so in a way that isn't partisan, uh, people are gonna get really upset about that because what you're really saying is the entire game y'all are playing, this is what's causing all the hurt and the yuck. The game is what needs to be criticized. Well, the one thing that the right and left end of the distribution of all the spectrums can agree on is that the game is the truest, realist thing, and we absolutely need to fight over the game. And having an arch enemy intellectually, uh a political or social or religious or philosophical joker to our Batman, having that bad guy out there kind of creates this mutual affirmation that this unending, eternal game of conflict between light and dark, my good team and your bad team is the truest, realist thing, and we just have to keep battling this way. And what is it really over effectively? Pride, rightness, and power. Well, we're reading these Beatitudes, and those are not the end game of this other kingdom. So the peacemaker that Jesus is talking about is someone who wades out into the situation with something that is truer and realer, and proposes that the whole world system game that we've been duped into playing is actually enormously inferior, and that there is something, that something is redemptive and good and beautiful and lasting, and that it's for everybody, not just the Batman tribe or the Joker tribe, but just straight up everybody. Some people are probably gonna hear that and be like, I've just had enough of the fighting. I don't care that I've painted myself myself into corners, uh, I don't care that I've verbally shed blood or maybe even actually shed blood. I'm taking the off-ramp. I want peace, and they will respond to that peacemaker in a way that is good. I have not always been that person. But there are gonna be some people who are like, no. No, I got too much into this thing, and you are threatening my Batman Joker, good guy, bad guy narrative that makes sense of my life, and they will burn you down, my friend. Maybe you will burn them down. I've been on the giving and the receiving end of this myself. I think it's entirely intentional on Jesus' part that peacemakers comes right before this concept of being persecuted for righteousness' sake. Now, what is righteousness in this equation? Your personal exemplary behavior. Well, again, we've kind of processed through this idea. Contextually, I think we can dismiss that based on what Jesus is saying in the of in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount here. Righteousness in this context is the values of the kingdom, the truth and the reality of the kingdom. Again, remember this is the idea of the quarter at the arcade. It's not our credit, it's not our quarter. We're playing on somebody else's money. In this case, that righteousness, or is the the rightness of God, the currency of the kingdom imparted to people by the king. So we're not blessed when we're persecuted for our impeccable good behavior and letting everybody else know how right we are and how good we are. That's gross, that's bringing it upon ourselves, and we'll explore that more in the next passage. What we're talking about here is righteousness' sake. This is the kingdom righteousness of God that is humble, that is modest, that is gracious, that is loving, that is merciful, that is meek, that is pure in heart, that is making of peace. That kind of righteousness is what we're talking about here contextually. And as beautiful as I think that is, I have to admit that there have also been versions of me who didn't find that very beautiful. Versions of me that just wanted to win. Versions of me that just wanted to be told that I was right and that my enemies were wrong and dumb. Versions of me that wanted vindication and revenge. And frankly, those things might all feel good to pursue. They might be very cathartic and satisfying to get at times. But if I'm understanding Chesha's right, what he's saying in this text is that those things are a dead end. There's no life at the end of those pursuits. It ends up kind of working out like true grit, where everybody gets bit by snakes or shot by bullets and revenge and pursuing world kingdom ends really leaves us with a whole bunch of poison and a whole bunch of lead and a whole bunch of wreckage and a whole bunch of dead. And frankly, as destructive as those ends might be, we still got this weird thing about us that likes to chase after them. It might be a dumpster fire, but doggone it, it's my dumpster fire. And the person who steps into my life and says, like, well, what if we didn't do the dumpster fire thing? What if we did this other thing that's truer and realer and beautiful? That person could be someone who I view as beautiful and a bearer of good news. I might also view that someone as a person who is criticizing the only system I understand and the only thing that allows me to make sense of the world, because it's too hard for me to immediately picture what this other kingdom thing would look like. Maybe that's part of the genius of how Jesus has set this up, is that he he really is bringing us into this kingdom thing in a much more philosophical, thoughtful, paced way than just hammering us with a religious pitch. Well, whatever the case, we've got a lot more to explore on this whole. If you embrace the kingdom values thing, it's gonna get weird when you're around world values thing. That concept is much more complicated than I think I imagined on the front end of putting this together, and we're gonna wrestle that through in the coming conversations. Thank you for tolerating my cold. Thank you for tolerating my 2004 Lincoln Navigator. Thank you, even those of you who gave me feedback on my awful audio on the last go-round. Even in giving me healthy criticism, you were very kind and very gentle with me. Thanks to everybody who supports the program at patreon.com slash the tmbh podcast. Just appreciate you all excited to wrap up this Beatitudes thing and get on to the next stuff Jesus is saying in the Sermon on the Mount. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do it again soon.