We've got this pizza place by us that is spectacular. Local ownership, and the owner will come out if it's your birthday, and apparently he's an accordion aficionado. He'll get out his old school accordion and play like the chicken dance or some other bohemian birthday hits. It's really fun. So my family likes it for that and for the food, but we also like it because they have an old school, like 90s style arcade. And they've got Street Fighter 2 with like the original eight fighters, and most of the buttons work. You can't do the hard kick. And then they've got the X-Men double screen action side-scroller game, and I think you can use all the characters except Dazzler, so that's pretty good. Nobody wanted to use Dazzler anyway. And my son, he's nine, he loves this place. And I always act like I'm not gonna let him play any video games because we're flushing money down the toilet. But I'm always gonna let him play video games eventually. But still, when we get there and we get our food thing figured out, and he goes over and he peers underneath all of the video game cabinets and looks everywhere, and inevitably he will find that one of the game systems already had a quarter in it, and so there's a free credit on there, or he'll just find a quarter, and then because he's a little saint, he will go back up to the front and be like, um, excuse me, I found this quarter underneath your X-Men game, and I wanted to give it to you in case someone lost it. And they're always like, You can go play a video game with that kid. And so then he's delighted and he scurries over there and he plays and he loses right away and he has a happy time with it. Now, the interesting thing here, for the purposes of our whole Bible conversation, is that quarter. He didn't earn the quarter, he got the quarter, he's playing on somebody else's credits. And that's what we were talking about yesterday with the whole Matthew chapter five thing, and this language in the opening foray of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter five, Jesus' big opening speech about who he is and what he's going for and how reality actually is. He opens it with this series of statements called the Beatitudes that go like this: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they'll be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they'll inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. We broke that down and teased it out a little bit yesterday, but we only had so much time. And so what I was saying is that this one phrase really gets us into some deep water Christian theology about the nature of righteousness and how good do you have to be in order to gain access to this really desirable sounding kingdom? And the big conclusion from all of that is that Jesus is setting up a paradox by which you got this thing that you really, really, really want, because it's the truest, realest, bestest thing ever, that is a perfect kingdom with perfect justice and perfect mercy and a perfect king. But there's nothing you can do to be good enough to gain admittance to this kingdom or to participate in the thing. Now I know as we talk about that, a lot of you are picturing heaven, like just heaven, heaven, like pearly gates, Saint Peter, the stuff that you picture from cartoons and things like that, and that's really not totally what Jesus seems to have in view here. He's not just talking about some kind of paradise after death, though I suppose in a way that's a part and parcel with this. We'll have to break that down more later on. What he's talking about here, clearly from the language surrounding it, is a kingdom that is initiated with his arrival at this moment in history. So the kingdom, to quote about a hundred really famous people who thought of this way before I ever did, is a reality that is both right now and not yet. It is here, but it is also unfolding and will unfold more completely with time. So right now, you got a situation where the kingdom apparently is growing up alongside the world kingdom, which has its own competing set of values and currency and all of this stuff. So once again, you got a situation where you got this thing that we really want to be a part of, but you can't gain access to it unless, according to Matthew 5.20, your righteousness exceeds that of the most righteous imaginable people. So what are you supposed to do? This conundrum isn't a result of a debacle in the planning phase of Jesus' scheme to take over the world. This is an intentional thing to put every single person who hears it in the position of my nine-year-old kid at the arcade. We want to play the game, but we don't have the credit. But a credit could be provided to us even though we don't have a way to earn it ourselves. In this situation, the credit is from God, and that righteousness, that perfection that is required to participate in this kingdom, is imparted by God. This is not some weird stretch that we're reading into the text. This is all over the New Testament. For example, again, next chapter over, Matthew 6, the Lord's Prayer is all about how God is the provider of all the stuff in the kingdom. He's the one who's in charge of everything, and whatever we have, be it justice, be it mercy, be it practical needs being met, being protection from our enemies, he's the one who provides, puts the quarter in our hand. We don't go out and earn the quarter. Then the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter three, you've probably heard this one before, it's pretty famous. He writes, But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. So there's a lot of context there. I don't have time to break it all down, but Paul's in the middle of a big argument here where he's saying the law, which is representative of your own attempt to earn the quarter to play the video game, your own attempt to earn enough righteousness and good behavior points to be admitted to this kingdom, the law was only meant to point out that you can't earn the quarter. The law was only meant to point out that you can't earn your way into the kingdom and that only God's righteousness is good enough. It's it's meant to make you needy and want to go to someone who could provide you with the quarter, in this case, God. 2 Corinthians 5 21, this one's super famous as well. I think I memorized this one to score some Jesus bucks, so try to buy that box lunch from Amber. For our sake, he, God, made him, Jesus, to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. That's a lot of pronouns and stuff that could be a little bit confusing. But again, the language of Paul in 2 Corinthians is very simply that God ordained the conundrum, that God knew the solution to the conundrum would be his own righteousness, and that that righteousness, the quarter, would be handed off to us by the work of Jesus. And then in Romans chapter 4, this whole God is the one who credits to people the quarter or the righteousness to be able to be in the kingdom theme, that is spelled out in painstaking detail. Because of time and complexity, frankly, I can't read all of Romans chapter 4 right now. I hope you go just check that out on your own, because it's pretty important complement to what we're talking about today. But here are a couple of samples of this credited language. What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather, according to the flesh, discovered in this matter? If in fact Abraham was justified by works, that is, he earned it, he had something to boast about, but not before God. What does Scripture say? Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. There's that language again. Now, to the one who works, wages are not credited as a gift, but as an obligation. However, to the one who doesn't work but trusts God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as righteousness. David says the same thing when he speaks of the blessedness of the one to whom God credits righteousness apart from works. Blessed are those whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered, blessed is the one whose sin the Lord will not count against them. And the thing that's incredible here is we see Paul following the same kind of logical structure that Matthew does at the beginning of the book of Matthew with the whole genealogy thing. Here's Abraham, look, Abraham points to Jesus. Here's David, look, David points to Jesus. Likewise here, Abraham and David pointing to this idea that through Christ, that quarter, that credit, that admission that we cannot earn by our own merit as a wage is handed off. And then I don't know how many more times does the word credited appear in this thing. It's all over the place through Romans chapter 4. The end of the chapter says, this is why it was credited to him as righteousness, unquote. The words, quote, it was credited to him, unquote, were written not for him alone, but also for us to whom God will credit righteousness. For us who believe in him, who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, he was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification. So what looks like this simple little item in this list of beatitudes and blessed R statements is actually a pretty pivotal one and a pretty important interpretive one for understanding the rest of the list. Jesus is saying that there is a unique blessing to being in a position where you realize your need. You realize that you really want to play that game, but you really have no ability to come up with a quarter on your own. When you are in that position, you are in a right posture to receive from God, the only one who can give you that quarter, access to that quarter, God's own quarter to participate in the game. Or said in a more impressive church theology-sounding way. God imputes to us the necessary righteousness to be viewed as sinless and perfect in the eyes of God and to participate in his kingdom in this life and in the next. My friends, if that feels a little bit overwhelming, don't panic. We're literally six verses into the teaching of Jesus. We have got a long way to go for him to flesh this stuff out. Sometimes I jump around a little bit out of order like this because I want you to have your antenna out, and I don't want you to have to listen to this whole thing twice to try to wrap your brain around some of the nuances on the front end. So I'm gonna skip ahead and try and give you some stuff to keep an eye out for, and it also gives you the ability to keep an eye out for whether or not I might be scamming. I promise you I'm not on purpose. I promise I am doing my very, very best to just read the text, understand it, and get it right. I can't promise you that I'm right. I can promise that I'm honestly trying my hardest. But if we skip ahead a little bit and you know what themes to look for, then you can get further along and be like, no, that's confirmation bias, Matt. You're reading stuff into it that may not actually be there. In which case, awesome, because I'm not in charge of the Bible. But I really think in this place, this whole you really want to play this game, but you need a quarter, but you can't earn a quarter, but God credits to you the quarter. I think that thing is true. And I think it's an accurate read on this whole equation of Jesus and salvation and forgiveness and the values of the kingdom and all of that. But again, but again, ultimately that's gonna be up to you to wrestle through and we'll just game it out together and see where we all land in the end. For my money, what we're dealing with right now in the Beatitudes is like top 10 most important teachings of Jesus in the whole Bible. So I hope you're enjoying digging in deep. I know I am. We'll catch up with you tomorrow and we'll do some more of it. I'm Matt, this is a 10 minute Bible hour. Catch you soon.