Hey, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And all right, this is it, my friends. We are finally going to land the plane on the first part of Matthew chapter 4, verses 1 through 11. It is all about Jesus' temptation in the wilderness with the devil. And well, I've just got a couple of things that I neatly and in an orderly fashion want to touch on. So get ready for some structure. The narrative significance of this passage, after drinking the whole thing in, I don't think is that hard to wrap our brains around. Very simply, all hope for redemption is at stake in this showdown, in this duel. And if the devil somehow wins here, which I theorize was not ever actually a possibility, but if the devil were to win here, it would wreck everything. And by everything, I don't mean like, oh no, we'd have to wait till next season. No, I mean everything. Like all the hope and promise of redemption. It's not coming from anybody else. Yeah, either there's something that operates outside the system that can resolve what's going on inside the system, or there's nothing and you're just out of luck. So if there is any hope for the reconciliation of all the things that are broken, all of the things that hurt and are wounded about us as individuals that have happened to us as individuals that we've inflicted on others that facelessly go wrong in the larger world, it is in the balance during this little chit-chat out in the desert. So the narrative significance is, well, if you're paying attention, all of that thick giant chunk of Bible to your left right now, assuming you're not reading in Hebrew, is at stake. All of the setup, all of the plan, all of the everything. I know I've hinted at this example before, but I'm gonna throw it out anyway. And I know this is like some of the stuff that I talk about culturally. Some of you are like, that is very offensive, and I don't like it. I totally respect your opinion, and you're right. I watch things that are offensive and I'm untroubled by it, and I can talk about why some other time. I also respect those of you who uh like things a little tamer. Here's the deal: Game of Thrones had a chance to be absolutely legendary. It's an amazing story that is all the juiciest bits of basically the history of the West, the Bible, Christian Europe, all of that stuff. And there's some pretty redemptive themes in this story. And everybody gets excited about it. There's an opportunity to like shape culture that comes with this. This transcended television and storytelling. It had a chance to be the legend, the myth of an entire generation. And then something went wrong. Maybe you heard about this, maybe you didn't. But the whole phenomenon came crashing down in the final season, season eight. The themes fizzled, the strength of the story fizzled, the characters quit making any sense. And then you look at it and you're like, well, what would it take to get back to a place where that could even happen again? And the answer is, I don't know, decades? Untold amounts of wealth and money and talent that would have to be rounded up behind a good idea to accomplish something incredible, legendary story-wise. The point is, it wasn't just, oh, bummer, there's a bad season of TV. It was a squandering of an incredible, once-in-a-generation storytelling opportunity. If you get that and you multiply it by a zillion, then you get how big the stakes are here. If this goes wrong, it's not like, ah, let's dust ourselves off and start over. If this goes wrong, everything. Persia, Babylon, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the conquest, the covenants, creation, everything is just wadded up and thrown in the trash. And where do we go from here? There is no redemptive plan B. It's all at stake, and Jesus just cruises through it. A second thing that's significant here narratively, in addition to the idea that really all hope for everything was in play here, is that Satan had been waiting a long time for this opportunity. It really is kind of an exciting moment narratively, because the hero and the villain are finally on screen at the same time. Think about the stories you love. The hero and the villain are usually doing their own thing in very different places. And they are dominating in their different realms, in the dark, evil castle over here, and the white glistening castle with the shiny parapets over here. You know, they're each in command of their domain, and they're building up to this conflict. And finally, all of that power and all of that force inevitably has to work itself out. And well, that's where the rub happens, is where the action happens. And so there's a huge buildup from all of the Old Testament to get God and Satan in the same room at the same time, having this thing out. And again, we see just how absolutely gigantic the distance between these two characters is in terms of power, authority, wits, agenda, all of it. Third, from a narrative perspective, and we discussed this on the front end, so we'll just skim it, is well, we learn something about God here, that God is the one who orchestrated this. The spirit led Jesus into the desert. Because even though I once again believed that Jesus was never in any actual threat of losing here, there was still value to this thing going on. And God approved of this activity, which leads us to the next question here in this summary, which is well, if it if this wasn't about like a real temptation and the stakes weren't really that high because Jesus could not, by nature of his essence, have failed, then why do we do it? Well, what's the point of the whole Bible? It's not for God's health that he did all of this stuff. It's clearly about his glory and his redemptive plan. And we, according to the Bible, as beings created in his image, we occupy a very prominent place. I don't think that's just a physical created in his image. I think mentally, spiritually, structurally, in our invisible guts, we're created in the image of God, which means we're kind of uniquely qualified and made to be uniquely qualified to observe God's glory, to be daughters, sons, heirs of his kingdom, to participate in God's glory and God's redemption. So that's why they're human characters to take this in. That's why you and I are involved. It's all about God's glory and him being the point of everything. So why do we get this story? Why did God do this if there were no real stakes? Well, it's simple. It's, I think, for our benefit. It's for us to see what's going on, to understand who the characters are, and to start to get a sense of where we fit. Then the fourth big narrative thing that's happening here is we're finally ready for Jesus to go public. Everything that he needed to do, every box that he needed to check, to be ready to just go and trot this thing out and do this in front of everybody. Now we're done. And so when we finish verse 11 and he gets attended to by the angels, and we get into verse 12 and he starts doing stuff, now we're in the full swing of things. We're into full adult ministry mind Jesus, who's completely ready to get traction and moving forward in this redemptive narrative. So we got all this narrative stuff going on. We got to take that with us from the temptation account. We've got the personal question of temptation and what really is the point of following Jesus? Is it first and foremost to resist temptation, or is that an additional question? But the larger point is not the negative, avoid doing naughty, but the proactive, follow in Jesus' footsteps as his servant, assuming a right posture before the king as a son, a daughter, an heir, etc. And obviously it is the latter. In addition to all of that stuff, there's also a priming of the pomp for really everything else Jesus is about to teach. And if if all of that just kind of washed over you, please, please be with me for this point, because it's very important moving forward. Jesus is holding himself out as a king. Matthew is holding Jesus out as a king. The Old Testament points to Jesus as a king. Kings have kingdoms. Kingdoms have a culture, they have laws, they have a sense of right, wrong, morality, ethics. They have a currency, they have things that have value for trade within that kingdom. We're about to learn a whole bunch about what all of those things are in God's kingdom. Now we have a really good sense of what those things are in world kingdoms. I mean, we're very used to buying and selling and trading. We know what has currency socially. We know what doesn't play. Jesus is about to lay out an upside-down kingdom where all the rules and all the currency and all the values, everything is upside down and backwards from what you and I are used to and what you and I experience in the world every single day. And so coming off of all of this business, the Jewish memory for the original audience would have included, frankly, lots of people who didn't pass the tests that Jesus passed, people who tried to build kingdoms, but the kingdoms were subject to the same laws of entropy that all kingdoms are subject to, the same laws of human selfishness and power that it's all subject to. And then they saw these kingdoms come and go. The first in the northern kingdom of Israel, all the way back in the Old Testament, it broke. Why? Because the kings were trash. They just, they're just awful at everything. And they didn't want to do the stuff that made God look awesome and that was on board with his redemptive plan. They wanted stuff that kings want: conscripts, taxes, wars, glory for themselves, and it broke. The Southern Kingdom, oh, that one broke too, but it lasted a little longer as there were more kings who are like, no, I really should not want world kingdom things. I want to try to understand God kingdom things and to try to do that and emulate it. Some of it got it more right than others, and it lasted for a while, but ultimately theirs broke for the exact same reason. Then, in between the testaments, remember? You got the Maccabean Revolution, you've got the Hasmonian dynasty that's set up, the short-lived dynasty that gets toppled by Pompeii the Great in the first part of the first century BC that leads to the Roman occupation and conquest that's going on when Jesus gets there and when we pick up the New Testament. Even this is an indictment of that most recent failure. The temptation to power, to pride, to satisfying human needs. That dynasty didn't just break because of Rome. The Asmoneian dynasty looked just like every other secular dynasty. It was a mess. What you have here is Matthew chapter four in the temptation pointing us toward a set of values that Jesus embraces, a set of ground rules, a set of priorities that he's operating off of that don't really look like anybody else in recent memory, maybe like nobody else ever. And we might not know exactly how to follow him yet. We might not know what it looks like exactly coming out of the temptations to know what it is to be on that team. Like, what do we do? Where do we go? Where do we stand? Do we like make some kind of gesture? Are there words we're supposed to say? We don't know that yet. But we're getting this little taste of a completely other way of conceiving about the world and people and morality and time and history and redemption in the example of Jesus and in the rest of chapter four and into chapter five. That's gonna flip from something that's abstract and a confusing example into something that we start to fit into. And so I'm very excited to get after that. Thank you so stinking much for patiently processing this passage. Now, look, we probably won't move at this space through the rest of the book of Matthew, but at times we're gonna grind it down real slow and process it just like this in these pivotal passages. Man, that's a lot of peas. Uh, you guys are awesome. The feedback has been incredible on this. Thank you so much for gaming it out with me, uh, disagreeing with me in ways that are fun and friendly. And as always, um, hey, I'm doing my best, but ultimately wrestling this thing through is is up to you. It's a challenging document, and ultimately the implications are gigantic. So I hope this is a good launching off point for you to raise questions and give you some resources to work on it for yourself. Okay, thank you again. I'm Matt. This is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast. On to the next junk.