Hey everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast. We're working our way through the book of Matthew a little bit every weekday, and we're just about to get into Matthew chapter five. Before we get to that, let me ask you a question here. Have you ever been in a social situation where you knew that the ask was coming, but you weren't quite sure when it was going to arrive. And so you had your antenna up for exactly what technique was going to be employed. Now, if you go and you do a timeshare tour, you know that the ask is coming because you traded two or three free nights of lodging for having to sit through a miserable one to three hour timeshare presentation. And you know that somewhere along the way, they're gonna be like, hey, what would it take for us to get this done? Or if you go to buy a car, you know, at some point you're likely to get the ridiculous, what's it gonna take for me to get you in this automobile? And sometimes socially, you're like, Why are we having this lunch? It's gonna be something. How are you gonna frame it? And some people are more clever with how they frame the ask. Some people are less clever with it. And sometimes the ask, frankly, is completely reasonable. It's equitable, it's a good deal, and it's a good thing to be asked. And other times is kind of skeezy and weird and gross. So here's a situation as it pertains to the ask and when it's coming in the book of Matthew. We're through four chapters. Jesus has gone from obscure guy who a few people have taken note of all the way up to someone who has passed the most dramatic of human testing, of supernatural testing, who's had this miraculous baptism thing that everybody could see, who has become the beginnings of a threat to the religious establishment, who has now gone out and is starting to do miraculous stuff that is melting the brains of his contemporaries. Nobody knows what to do with them. They are, however, familiar with the concept of claimants to the role of Messiah. They've seen these kind of guys come and go before. I keep banging into the microphone wall. I'm gonna do better, I promise. It's the last time I'm hitting that after this one. There. That was the last time. And so these rival claimants, one of the reasons that they didn't really stick around is because uh they got like stabbed or something, and then everybody just left, or they couldn't actually do anything. I suppose that was probably true of all them. They couldn't do miraculous stuff. So there was no reason to believe any of the claims. They didn't tick the boxes, they didn't really sound all that smart. They just sounded somebody who wanted like all the women and money that probably came with the Messiah gig. But Jesus is weirdly, frustratingly different. Yet by the time we get to the end of chapter four, which is all about Jesus going out and doing all of this ministry in Galilee, as predicted by the prophet Isaiah, which is referenced back in chapter four, verses 15 and 16. That's the stuff of land of Zebulun and Naphtali, the way to the sea along the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles, the people living in darkness have seen a great light on those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned. So he's in the right place, he's doing the right stuff, but this couldn't have been cheese ball, lowbrow business, or the crowds wouldn't have shown up to the degree that they did. And the indications as we move forward in the book of Matthew is that we're not talking about a couple of people coming out or a little ragtag band. We're talking about people from all classes, all parts of the world, and people are traveling, not all parts of the world, but all parts of this part of the world. People are traveling a long way on foot to hear him speak. And that's understandable because we just got done reading about how he's preaching the good news of the kingdom. So that sounds like he's connecting himself to all the stuff in the Old Testament that everybody was excited about. He's healing every disease. Now, in case that wasn't clear, Matthew is gonna walk us through Jesus' power over everything a little bit later in his book and disease and sickness and all the people, and he's casting out demons. We're gonna break down exactly what to make of that a little bit later on. And of course, large crowds start showing up. The large crowds are interesting. Very last verse of Matthew chapter 4. Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and the region across the Jordan followed him. The interesting thing here is that already Jesus is becoming something that the other messianic also rans of this era did not achieve. He's already transcended the ethnic boundaries of his local region. Most of these upstart groups are about power for this group or money or writing an ancient wrong for this group. Or again, just I mean, the power and dough and everything else that comes with being a messiah for a little while. But this, this is weird. It's reaching across all the demographic boundaries, and people are hiking a long ways. I mean, the decapolis, you can tell, that's a Greek word. I mean, 10 cities, Polis, Indianapolis, Minneapolis. So you got something that's very Greekish and that historically, not that long historically, but for the last few decades, has been under the divided rule of another member of the Herod family. You have people from Galilee itself, which is a unique province at this point. You have people from all the way down in the big city of Jerusalem. This would be like a little upstart movement happening in rural North Dakota. And then people from Chicago and LA and New York are making the trip all the way out and hanging around and following this person around. That in and of itself says, whoa, this has gone viral. This is a little bit bigger deal. And to say it's gone viral isn't even a good description because viral burns out fast. These people have traveled a long way, they are heavily invested, and they're following Jesus around. Why? Well, come on, this isn't hard. I mean, maybe we're so far into this and so far used to our cynicism that we're not thinking straight about it anymore. But there were people who believed, and the text holds the reality out as being, and I am one of the people who yet today even believes that miraculous things were happening here. And well, that sure makes you think. Hey, what if you saw just inarguable, conclusive, empirical proof that the physical world as you know it is not the end-all be-all of things? I know I always hearken back to this, but it's like that moment in science when you see the alien in the alley in Brazil on that scrubby videotape footage, and it just takes your breath away because you're so into the show that at that moment you feel the same thing that Mel Gibson and everybody else does, just whoa! And you have to recalibrate everything about how you think of life and death and people and philosophy and ethics and everything all in that one moment. Now, maybe it's not even possible to recalibrate all of that stuff in one moment. People had had the alien in the alley moment while following Jesus around. He didn't just do one or two miraculous things. He's doing them left and right. And that is a pretty good explanation for why the crowd showed up. Because there's no promise of food, there's no promise of money, there's no promise of political power. And if there were some kind of promise of political power, well, for whom? Because we're attracting people from regions associated with all kinds of deli uh different political points of view. So it'd be hard to know which one is gonna get their political thing or their revolution. People have had their assumptions about existence properly challenged. And Jesus gets to a point now where it looks like it's finally time to speak to all of this. Now says that he'd been teaching the good news of the kingdom, but as outsiders looking in on this in the book of Matthew, we don't know what that is yet. We're still unclear as to what this is all actually about. And that brings me back to that opening point about the big ask. An idiot at this point would be like, all right, it's time to cash in on this thing. I have gathered together my horde. And now, okay, well, here's actually what God wants you to do. He wants you to give me money and to be a participant in this kingdom, I will need money and probably, I don't know, like 30 or 40 of your women to be my wives. A lot of other people have pulled that kind of stunt, haven't they? And look, if you're someone who's from a religious tradition where that kind of stunt was pulled, I'm not trying to pick a fight with you. I like you and I care about you. But when people are trying to be frauds, that's what they do. They finally show their hand that what they really just wanted was this kind of stuff. Well, Jesus doesn't make the idiot play, though, here. What we're going to see moving forward is that he doesn't come in and be like, okay, give me your women and your money. And maybe a more sophisticated person now that it's time for the big ask to finally manifest, would be like, um, well, now we start the long con, and he gradually starts grooming or maneuvering people around to eventually become these sycophantic pawns who will do whatever he wants for this grandiose vision for his own power and authority. And this is more the trick that real clever cult leaders pull off, the kind that make compounds and get people to engage in crazy mass suicide, violent, awful, tragic, horrible stuff. But Jesus, we're gonna find, doesn't start a long con either. So if he's not some idiot that's just trying to play people for their money, if he's not some very sophisticated cult leader who's engaged now in a long con, then it what are we doing here? When is the ask going to happen? And what is the ask going to be? If it's not money, I hit it again! I said I was gonna stop. I'm sorry. If it wasn't money and it wasn't women and it wasn't power, why else do you start a religion? Well, I guess the one thing that we need to at least consider as we get into the big ask or the big explanation of what's going on is that maybe it's true. And let me just ask you this what would it look like if in a sea of lies and manipulation and games played in the name of religion, what would it look like if something were actually real? How would that manifest? What would the chief prophet or spokesperson or founder or God with us who is trying to explain what the thing is about, what would they say or do if it were real? What would real look like to you? Well, I think the original audience would have pictured the prophets of old. John the Baptist fits that description. Jesus seems to vaguely fit that description at this point. I think they would have pictured something prophetic in the sense of pushing back on what's going on with them as a nation and as a people. Jesus will do some of that. I think they would have expected someone to be interested in the political landscape of the day as it pertains to the big national powers and war and all of that. Jesus, however, looks a little bit different when it comes to those political and kingdom questions. So before we get into stuff tomorrow, I want you to just honestly like think about that. What if a claimant came along today and what they were saying was actually true? What would it look like? What would be the marks of actual true? Or are we so jaded that any religious claim, any claim beyond the physical explainable world is just automatically nonsense and has to be written off? And if that's where you are, you are. I I can't criticize you or get after you for that because I've been there. I I I've thought that before after being a Christian. This is all a process. So I don't raise the question to say, I want you to land in this place or that. I mean, gross. What I want to do is think honestly together and I and I want to game out the question, what would it look like if it were real? And then I want to line up whatever you come up with against what Jesus actually did here, because I think it's pretty weirdly compelling in a way that uh I never would have expected. Okay, we're gonna get into this gigantic speech, the big ask, the here's what the point of the whole thing is, starting tomorrow. In the meantime, I want to mention again that my friend Shane, who lives in the same town as I do in the Black Hills, who's, you know, family hangs out with my family. I mean, this guy is my friend. I'm vouching for him, I know him. He does a thing called the Psalms Project. It's the Psalms, but put to really, really spectacularly good music. It's gonna take him forever. He's gonna be super old by the time he gets done with it. But he's made a bunch of headway. It's awesome. I'm gonna link it down below. I hope you'll check it out. All right, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and I will catch up with you tomorrow.