Hey, I'm Matt. This is a 10 minute Bible Hour Podcast. And guess what, my friends? I have got some fresh, crispy, minty new Bible for you today. We have been on the temptation of Jesus in Matthew chapter 4, verses 1 through 11 since the dawn of time. For those of you who don't know, we are incrementally inching our way through the book of Matthew every weekday morning in tiny little chunks. And we just finished a super deep dive into the temptation of Jesus, which is very, very important, both because, well, Jesus needed to overcome this test and demonstrate that he could pass all of the tests of his character and his ability, that literally every human ever other than him had utterly failed. They needed to demonstrate that he could handle that stuff so that he could be all the things that were predicted and pointed to in chapters one, two, and three, with this great big long genealogy that harkens back to all of these stories that aren't completed. And where are they all going to end? Well, it's starting to look like they all end and wrap up and conclude in the person and work of Jesus. So that's exciting. And then we go through and he ticks a bunch more of the boxes that are supposed to be in place for this great king that is prophesied to come and sit on the throne of David and resolve everything that's broken and screwed up and stupid about the world and complete all of the historical and prophetic and narrative arcs that are floating around out there. And so it really looks like Jesus could be the real deal. Then the baptism of Jesus happens at the end of chapter three, and Jesus gets up out of the water, and what does he do next? He goes out into the desert to get tempted. He passes the tests, and now really the whole preparation for ministry and his public life thing is complete, and we're ready to make the flip into verse 12, which is a really interesting pivot point for the original audience. I mean, think about this. Probably most of the people who would have picked up Matthew and read it for the first time were definitely aware there's a guy named Jesus. I mean, remember a few years ago when nobody had heard of Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad or something like that, and everybody's talking about it. You're like, oh, what is the big deal? I keep hearing about this. And maybe eventually you watched it or at least Googled one of these mega shows to just know what everybody was talking about. And you had some familiarity with it on the front end. Same thing would have been the case with Jesus. Everybody's like, Jesus this, Jesus that. And there would have been a lot of people who are like, yeah, I'm an early adopter. I'm really excited about the whole Jesus thing. I saw him perform one time in Galilee and it was sweet. There would have been other people who are like, Yeah, my mom just will not shut up about Jesus. He's like, he's she's a huge fan. And there would have been other people who were like, Yeah, I've heard the name. I've heard the name. He does religious stuff, or it's something with the religious thing. Is that the guy that got executed? But everybody would have had a little bit of a context. However, that context would have started at the content we encounter at verse 12. So you gotta understand, the original audience would have received everything up through 411 as backstory that wasn't really public knowledge. People wouldn't have had this part down. Where'd he come from? What did he do? How do we know that everything else about his life before he became famous kind of points to this. Verse 12, people start being like, oh yeah, I'd heard that one a little bit. Okay, well, now I kind of know where that fits into the story. So that's a big deal. But additionally, this is a big deal because we're about to get our first look at the actual logistics of Jesus' plan. And remember, he is here to do something, and he didn't do it in the first 29 or 30 years of his life. He's been growing in wisdom and stature and favor with God and men. That's a reference over to the end of the birth narrative in Luke chapter 2, I think verse 52. And so I guess the question everybody would have is, well, what does he have to do? Yeah, take the ring to the volcano and throw it in there. You gotta go find out what your true identity is and figure out what the government did to you to turn you into a super spy, super soldier, assassin. You gotta, I mean, there's always an arc, right, for the main character, the an evil they have to defeat, a question they have to answer. What is it for Jesus? Well, I think the natural assumption for everybody reading would be it's gotta be those characters who showed up for part, well, at least part, or maybe even more than just a bit of the baptism sequence with John the Baptist in chapter three. We got our first look at some bad guys. Herod is dead, so we're not really worried about him. There's no inevitable showdown there. That showdown kind of happened off-screen and God kind of won it because Herod got old and crazy and just died. But yeah, chapter three. Remember these guys? But when he saw, this is John, but when John saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them, You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit and keeping with repentance, and don't think that you can say to yourselves, We have Abraham as our five. I mean, he goes on, we've covered this whole thing. So he just lectures them, and these guys sit around and pout, and maybe they were even still hanging around at the time that Jesus got baptized. Maybe they were filtering in and out. I tend to think there was probably at least some of them there monitoring the whole time because this thing is a threat. Ah. So it looks like they're not really on board with what John the Baptist is doing, but we've got enough to know that John the Baptist is on board with what Jesus is doing, and Jesus is on board with what John the Baptist is doing. I bet those are the bad guys. Where do they live and hang out? Jerusalem. So it would seem to the original audience, logically, that the flow of this story geographically has got to move south to Jerusalem. It is like, I don't know, pick a story, like one where there's some college girls and they are a bunch of misfits, but they are going to become the greatest dance squad ever. And there's some arrogant jerk dance squad people that are from New York City, which is, you know, the big time, Times Square, and all of that. And you can just sense once they have their first little run-in and the snotty, snooty plastic girls from New York tell the lovable, likable, misfit girl team that we appreciate that they're no good at anything and they'll never mount to anything. You just know the geographic trajectory of the story is they're gonna go to New York and they're gonna have to beat the snotty girl prideful team on their own turf. Is this actually a movie? Maybe this is actually a movie, I don't even know for sure. But you get the picture. Likewise, by the time we get to 412, we should know that the trajectory of this story is that Jesus is going to have to confront the religious establishment that somehow his version of what he's doing is gonna come into conflict with their version of the same thing. And only one of the two can be right, and we know it's supposed to be Jesus, and the place geographically where that's gonna happen is Jerusalem. Now, Jerusalem is way down south. You remember your map of the Holy Land, right? Like some of you probably have been there, some of you probably taken a class or something. Uh, it really isn't very tricky, so I'll just explain the geography because you can totally picture this. All right. Imagine that you were looking at an eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper that's just right in front of you. Picture it. Close your eyes. Not if you're driving, don't close your eyes. Open your eyes. Okay, everybody's got their eyes open. Eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper. Now, in the middle top of that sheet of paper, we're just gonna draw a little circle about the size of a quarter. We're gonna call that the Sea of Galilee. This is the North Country. Then we're just gonna draw a line from the bottom of the Sea of Galilee, like at 6 30 o'clock, straight south, and it's gonna go most of the way down your paper, and it's gonna run into the very top of a vertical oval, and that's gonna be the Dead Sea. So the top circle is the Sea of Galilee, the middle line is the Jordan River, and the Jordan Rift Valley is on either side, bad lands, tough territory, and then the big vertical oval at the bottom that the Jordan River runs into is the Dead Sea. It's a primitive map, but it works. If you go right or east from those three bodies of water, you run into Jordan, uh, tough terrain, desert with some exceptions. If you go left or west from those things, you run into the high country of Judea, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, they're situated right in there. And then gradually that tapers off into several miles of this green, arable coastal plain before you smoothly run out into the Mediterranean Sea. There, we're oriented. Just coming off the very tippy top of the Dead Sea and a little bit west is Jerusalem. This is where everything happens. It's Times Square, it's New York City, all the way up north at the Sea of Galilee is Hickville. It's, I don't know, rural North Dakota, Nebraska, the sticks of Wyoming, where I've lived for so long. It's something like that, somewhere you would not associate with power or impressive people, though I have found the people of the Northern Plains and Midwest and Nebraska to be very impressive and enormously underrated. It's it's two very distinct regions in terms of where action happens and where the original audience would imagine that the stakes of something that really matters would play out. It's not gonna play out up north, it has to play up down south. So when we read this, we run into an interesting record scratch moment. When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, and we're gonna have to talk about that soon, he returned to Galilee. Leaving Nazareth, he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali to fulfill what was said through the prophet Isaiah. And you're gonna recognize some Christmas stuff there when we get to that. So this is weird. Instead of going where the action is, Jesus moves in the opposite direction. Which begs the question, but why? That's the opposite direction of the action. And guess what? If you look at the timestamp on this podcast right now, you'll understand that I'm about to tell you. We're gonna answer that question tomorrow, and then we're gonna get into several more details about this very important pivotal passage as we go from stuff nobody would have really known about Jesus into the stuff that now is starting to float around in the consciousness of the audience and is being stitched together into a coherent narrative with some familiar details and some brand new stuff. More on the geography of Jesus' next move and trying to figure out what he's doing strategically next time around. I'm Matt, this is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast. You are awesome, and I will catch you tomorrow.