A couple episodes ago, I mentioned the TV show Breaking Bad in passing. And fully acknowledging that I know that's not for everybody, I also have to say I think that's some of the best storytelling I've ever seen in the history of TV. I the plot seemed completely not interesting to me at all. And then you pick the thing up and you realize the characters are just so perfectly written. And frankly, it's enormously biblical in terms of its understanding of how the human mind works and good and evil and all of that stuff. I appreciated it. I know not everybody appreciated it, and that's totally cool. We can agree to disagree on what stuff we like to watch on the TVs and on the movies is. So here's the deal. In that show, in the relatively early going, to help the viewer understand the stakes of crossing a certain enemy, we see that certain enemy deal with a lesser character who crosses them. And we realize, oh my, these stakes are high. And you kind of start to think, oh, I think our main characters, our point of view characters, might encounter something like this, unless they find a better way to deal with this than the character who suffered that tragic fate when they had the run-in with this bad guy. I think that's the storytelling technique that Matthew is employing in Matthew 4 and verse 12, when we get this little doozy of an aside. When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he returned to Galilee. Two reasons this matters. One, John is a very important person. I argued in a recent video on the 10-minute Bible hour YouTube channel that I think he's the second most theologically important character in Christianity. And lots of people disagreed with me, and they all made really good points, and maybe they're right and I'm wrong, but that's what I made the video about. So, one, the fate of John the Baptist is at stake. I mean, this is Jesus' cousin, this is his wingman, his hype man, this is the guy who just baptized Jesus, and that baptism was affirmed by all three members of the Trinity. He's a gigantic deal. And frankly, who else is Jesus' ally at this point in the text? I mean, he's out there fighting the devil alone in the desert and the cliffs of insanity. Uh, uh, Mary, we're not really hearing from her much more right now. Joseph doesn't come back up in the story at all. I'm gonna tell you, we got nothing. Jesus is solo right now, and now John the Baptist, we find out, is out of commission. Now, look, I don't want to do this normally. I don't want to make a habit of this because I want to work our way kind of directly through the text. But this time around, I'm gonna make an exception because I am, and we're gonna jump ahead to Matthew 14. I'm not gonna explain all of this stuff now, but I just want to read to you what that arrest was about. So it says, at that time Herod the Tetrarch heard the reports about Jesus, and he said to his attendants, This is John the Baptist. He's risen from the dead. That's why miraculous powers are at work in him. So, wait, John the Baptist is dead? I mean, he was just alive a couple chapters back, and I don't know, whatever it was, like I think 11 he sends. Yeah, in chapter 11, John the Baptist is in prison, and he sends some people to go and ask Jesus questions. So, what's going on, Matthew? You're telling the story out of order. So, oh, now we get the details in verse 14 and verse 3 of chapter 14. It says, Now Herod had arrested John and bound him and put him in prison because of Herodias, his brother Philip's wife. For John had been saying to him, It's not lawful for you to have her. Herod wanted to kill John, but he was afraid of the people because they considered him a prophet. And then we'll break down what gave Herod the ultimate courage or forced Herod to ultimately go ahead and kill John the Baptist. So the original audience would have known about John the Baptist. He had a huge following before Jesus. He had a huge following after Jesus. And even though our kind of point of view character who we follow follow closely is Jesus, John the Baptist would have been the bigger name for a lot of people in the original audience, at least up through a good chunk of this story. So people would have known that somewhere in here, John is out of commission and arrested. Now Matthew's kind of placing that in the timeline a little bit, and he's connecting it to Jesus' game plan. Maybe we're going to get a little more sense of what his Alexander the Great like strategy, his flanking tactic is all about. So when Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, again, more on that later, he returned to Galilee. Okay, is this causal? I think it is. Well, one, I think Jesus knows all the things because he's unlimited in every way, and he's God in the flesh, and this plan was all mapped out totally in advance. Setting that aside and acknowledging that's what I believe, let's look at this from a little more human logistical point of view. Jesus goes to Galilee because it's very far away from Jerusalem, and the center of power that could develop enough momentum to carry out some kind of mob rule killing or something like what happened to John is less likely the further you get away from the capital. Remember, in those days, it was just very inconvenient to go and arrest someone that far north. And also, there's a garrison in Capernaum to keep order. So if the religious leaders want to come up north, they're gonna have a tough time because the streets of the town he operates out of are totally patrolled by the Romans. Now you might be like, well, but yeah, John, uh, he couldn't avoid that fate, you know. Well, one, he was in a very exposed area, clear out in the desert, but also much closer as the crow flies to Jerusalem and under the jurisdiction of Herod and his family. But as you get further away from the epicenter of power, the Herod who had John arrested isn't going to wield the same influence. And it would take quite a bit of political capital on his part to make this very deliberate, very public arrest happen. So Jesus is being strategic in going up north. He's gonna die anyway, right? So if you're Jesus and you gotta go to the cross anyway, like why not just get this thing done? Let's go down south, say some stuff about Herod's marriage or something. Let's get arrested, let's get executed, let's have all the sins for all of people for all time get forgiven, and let's quit beating around the bush clear up here in the north. I mean, it seems to make sense on paper, but there are a few problems with that. One, setting aside everything that you know from cheating, and that is reading ahead in the Bible or going to church or hearing stuff about Jesus, setting all of that aside, what do we actually know that Jesus thinks or is teaching or can do at this point in the game from just what we've seen in Matthew? The answer is nothing. Well, no, that's not true. Uh, we know that he's very conversant in the book of Deuteronomy. We also know that he ticks a lot of boxes, you know, prophetically, that is kind of no fault of his own from a human perspective. And we know that there's this legend about God and the Holy Spirit showing up at his baptism and him being very, very important. That's what we know. What's his plan? Do we know that yet? Come on, we do not know that yet. What are his values? What are his ethics? We don't know that yet. What does it look like to be a follower of him? Who are his disciples? I don't see any of those yet. He doesn't have any. The only person who's on his team is locked up. We don't really have any sense of who Jesus is or what he's about or what he's calling people to. He just fits in the right place to be the one who will sit on the throne of this kingdom forever. So Jesus has work to do, and it's really important work. If Jesus goes right to Jerusalem right now, right at Darius with a big cavalry charge, Alexander the Great style, he'll get his wish. I mean, he'll die on the cross, and maybe that would work, but nobody would know what to do with it. It would just be a cosmic gesture unto himself. So I guess he could go back to heaven and have an awesome triple high five with the Holy Spirit and with God, but tough luck for us. So he's got to recruit people because he knows he's gonna die. And he needs to be able to hand this thing off to them and be like, all right, you know, it's up to you now. And here's my Holy Spirit to run with that. He's got to explain stuff publicly. He's got to do things that set him apart from other people who make big bold claims about religious things and who they are and why everyone ought to follow them. Also, I don't think he wants to draw a crushingly large crowd yet, because what we're gonna see as we get through Matthew is his gig changes as it goes along. It becomes a different thing. We see that Jesus, whose thing takes off in a way that I can't even imagine. And so he, you know, later on in his time up in the north in his ministry, he starts taking more and more time to pull away into the mountains, to even go on a big ridiculous road trip up and around the north and into the decapolis and far off into the wilds, far, far away from Jerusalem. There is a chronological issue here that Jesus needs time to flesh these things out. There's a right people to hear the message issue here, that he needs to collect the right people to hear it, to have the right people see it and respond and really deeply get it. And as we work through Matthew, you're gonna see, even though they see the miraculous hall of fish, and even though they drop their nets, and even though they leave their tax collector booth, they don't just don't get it. Kind of like I don't get it. It really takes a lot of time to understand something so otherworldly as the kingdom of God as presented by Jesus, that it's gonna take time. We need all three of those years. And you know, frankly, if God needed more than that, he would have given himself more than that. But to me, it feels like it came in right under the gun in terms of having these guys ready. I mean, remember, this whole thing is gonna get handed off to the disciples, and the one who's like, I'll never leave you, I'll be with you forever. You mean like cut some people's ears off for you or something? I mean, Peter, he says all of that stuff, and then like two seconds later, he pretends he doesn't even know Jesus and lies through his teeth. I mean, this is touch and go, even with the amount of time that Jesus does take. So John gets arrested strategically. Jesus takes a page out of the Alexander the Great playbook. Maybe that's blasphemy, but you know what I'm saying. And rather than running right at the target to see if I can crush you right now, he takes this circuitous route and chooses to engage on this fringe flank, the edge of the battlefield, and eventually there's going to be an opening in the line. And eventually, Jesus is going to exploit that opening in the line after everything that needs to be accomplished in this initial phase of the battle is accomplished. It's kind of that fullness of time principle that we see described in the scriptures, that all of these things, not just in their end result, but in their process and in their unfolding, are providentially ordered by a God who operates outside of time and outside of history with mastery and control over all of this stuff so that it plays out the way it needs to play out to accomplish his purposes, even as if as a finite being, I'm just not capable of totally wrapping my brain around all of it. But guess what? I'm still gonna try, and I'm really glad you're along for the ride to give it a try as well. So, John's situation prompts Jesus to go into this tactical maneuver, get used to it, because we're gonna be in this phase of the battle. We're gonna be in this phase of Jesus' tactical approach for quite a while, and eventually you'll see it too. This is gonna start pointing more and more to that final confrontation that has to happen in Jerusalem with the obvious people he'll have his showdown with. I'm doing it again, it's getting a little bit too long here. I'm Matt. This is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast. I'll catch up with you tomorrow.