If all people on their 13th birthday were given three time travel tokens, you only got to time travel three times, it's a return trip. You know, you get to go there and then you gotta come back. What would you use your three on? I've thought it through, but I'm gonna give you one of my three right now. I would use it to go and see the famed white city that happened at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. It was this city of largely fake marble that was like the advent of the modern world. It was this beautiful, incredible, majestic human accomplishment that was in an age of elegance and romance, and more people than lived in America at the time went to this World's Fair. It's not like you think of World's Fairs now. It was an unbelievable moment, and I would have loved to have seen the values and the ethics and the productivity and the language and the style and the feel of that moment to walk those streets, to walk under electric street lamps for one of the first times in American history to see this Greek Roman style city rising in front of Lake Michigan with this beautiful, elaborate lagoon and all of these various buildings that pay homage to the great cultures around the world. It is magical to me and enchanting. I feel a nostalgia and a sadness for a time I never saw and never experienced. So it'd be cool if the time travel tokens happened, but you know, I'm not holding my breath. Here's the deal. When we get to the beginning of Matthew chapter 5, we are hearing about a kingdom that takes my breath away in the same way. I'm hearing about something that solves every problem and fixes everything that stresses me out and that's hard about the world. And even though I don't have time travel tokens, this is one that the text holds out as being accessible. You can go to there. And there can come to you. But it's a little bit tricky to see and it's a little bit tricky to understand. And the question of what this kingdom is is a central theme of the Gospel of Matthew. So again, we pick it up with Jesus' opening words. It says, Now when Jesus saw the crowds, or he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and he sat down, that's why we call it the Sermon on the Mount, and sat down, and his disciples came to him and he began to teach them, saying, The key thing to note as we move on into the rest of this text, that his original directed key audience here is the disciples. So he's teaching people who he's already called, who have already bought in, who would want to know what this kingdom is about. The crowds are there and they're listening in, but you gotta understand that. If I'm talking to my three kids, even though I know a bunch of other people are listening, I'm still framing that all up for the kids. If a graduation speaker is talking to the graduates, he might be aware that there's a whole room full of people, but he's still talking to the graduates, and you have to get those multiple layers of audience to properly interpret what's going on with a passage like this. So first and foremost, teaching his disciples, who no doubt would really like to understand what all this is about, he starts by saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. That is the worst opening line to starting a new religion I have ever heard. In fact, there are a whole lot of people today who agree with me that that's the worst way to start a religion ever, and they've just had terrible luck trying to imitate it. And so instead, they have found ways to just flip around the whole message of Jesus and the Bible to be blessed are the rich in spirit and just the straight up rich, because they will get richer because that richness is a result of the blessing of God and a demonstration of how much they donated to my personal private ministry thing. This prosperity gospel thing it it's a plague, my friends. It is, I'm not gonna call out any names, I don't want to pick any fights with anybody, but look, it's the opposite of the kingdom values that we're reading about here. I'm not saying that Jesus' plan for everybody is eternal poverty. In fact, life abundantly is what Jesus describes. But the idea that somehow the kingdom of God is a cosmic transaction where we put in a certain amount, and then there are just ludicrous interest payouts that happen, and so like you tithe or donate to something, and then God gives you more stuff. It's nonsense. It's not what we're gonna see here at all. And the opening line shoots that down. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Well, poor in spirit means more than just being in a position of physical need, though I certainly think that is encapsulated in Jesus' meaning here. Poor in spirit would have had the same connotations of the original audiences that I just threw out. You're poor in spirit, you're probably poor in money, you're rich in spirit, it's because you're getting something right. But it's also kind of a state of being. And as we get a little bit more sense as to what the kingdom is about, where a central value is that Jesus is king and everyone else assumes a right posture of submission to that king and dependence on that king, something that we really see spelled out when we get into the Lord's Prayer. You know, our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, and you provide everything. You're in charge of justice and mercy, you're in charge of protecting us and basic provision. Whatever you want, it be done. I mean, this is this is face down on the ground kind of stuff that we're being told is a right position before a king, this good and this holy. And well, you know what, in the values of the kingdom, that poorness and spirit, that humility, that realizing that we're in this position of need, and that the king is enormously effective and powerful and and in charge of everything. Well, I guess that would be a blessing as we get to understand this kingdom better. And apparently this means that somehow that poorness is associated with inheriting uh this kingdom of heaven. So I don't know. I mean, the the natural place my brain goes is to that third Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think we talked about that a while back when I was talking about Jordan and the city of Petra. But in that third one, remember, he has to figure out how he's gonna pass that one test. Like what does he say? Like the penitent man will pass. It figures out, like, oh, I have to hit my knees, and then like some giant axe or something comes swinging through that would have taken off his head. I'm not sure that's exactly what this is driving at, but I thought it was cool that they were referencing this concept that really to enter into the kingdom is an act of humility. I think of Jesus' teachings on wealth, this idea that it's it's harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to go through the eye of the needle, break all of that stuff down another time. Or even in the history of church architecture, I picture the tiny little door on the I think it's the church in Nativity, isn't it? I think it's the church of the Nativity in in Bethlehem in Palestine. They got this little tiny door, and it's like the humble door or something they call it, and you gotta squish all down to get through there. You must assume a penitent posture before the king incarnate. So the simple idea here, right up front, is that value number one in the kingdom is you're not the king in the kingdom. Your agenda isn't the agenda of the kingdom. What you want doesn't set the pace of the kingdom. And on its face, that sounds awful. Yeah, I want stuff where I set the agenda, but the problem is everybody has a different agenda. And it's kind of like I made a video way back when when I took the risk of talking about things like this still on my YouTube channel, where I was like, hey, uh, what if everybody got to make just one law? And the idea here is that it sounds great, like everybody being like, hey, I think everybody should be free or whatever. But you know, there's just this one thing that I don't like. I don't like it when the people drink this or eat that or take this or do this or make these kind of contracts or have these kind of relationships. And it sounds really open-minded to be like, I believe in freedom except this one thing. But when you add that up, and you got like 300 plus million people in my country who all just want one thing that they get to make a a law that's enforced through, you know, imprisonment or fines over well, and you have a horrifying fascist police state if you do that. And at some point, you gotta let go this impulse, this imagined right to control other people. That's what I was arguing. You can think I'm wrong on that if you want to, you may have a point. But here the same thing applies. If everybody comes to the kingdom with just one thing that we're rich in spirit about, and we're like, I want to set just this one part of the agenda, well, it's not gonna work. And everybody gets one of those things. You're gonna have a cluttered mess. No, there's one agenda as we see this kingdom being laid out, and I think the original audience would have got it, and I think we're capable of getting it, and that is the agenda of the king. Full stop, he says how it is, and then we participate in that. And in that state of poorness and spirit, rejecting our imagined right to be in charge, accepting the idea of the true king and the true kingdom, accepting a posture of humility and being aware of our state of enormous need that is more thoroughly fleshed out once again by the the language of the the Lord's Prayer coming up in the next chapter. If you assume that posture, not only you are a lot more likable around other people, but at that point, it would seem that you are now prepared to embrace the rest of this upside-down kingdom and weird currency that we see described moving forward in the document. Last thing, I've been telling you about my buddy Shane. We live in the same neck of the woods, we met through some school stuff, and he's doing this Psalms project. It's just all the Psalms put to music. It's really good. And I realize I've been describing it to you, but it's music. I could just play some of it for you. So I'm gonna play some of his stuff on the way out the door. You can get it in the show notes, Spotify, Google it, whatever. Just go look it up. You'll love it. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. More on these Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount coming up next time.
SPEAKER_01And in your starting journey, find his joy, for you, Molly has two for you. Well done tomorrow with your favours.