You know how when you watch enough movies, you figure out that there are like 15 components that are familiar amongst all heroes journey movies. There's always this character, there's always that test, there's always this kind of enemy that you have to overcome, there's always this internal thing that you wrestle with. And really, most movies that we just love and cherish are rearrangements of those 15-ish elements. But likewise, I think if you sit and talk with people and you really listen and you really get to the honest place, you'll figure out that people's big stories have maybe 10 or 15-ish familiar elements as well. They're not the same as the hero's journey. And as an aside, frankly, when we try to cram the 15 elements of the hero's journey into an actual human life story, we get kind of weird and twisted around and depressed. That's not a healthy thing. No, the human story is more nuanced and complex and weird than that. But one of the elements that I noticed that almost everybody has is the trial, the difficult period, the desert period in their life. And everybody can kind of point to a different one. Maybe it's a geographical thing, maybe it's a job, maybe it's a relationship, maybe it's uh an era of personal struggle or even failure. But for me, that moment in time is actually something that literally physically occurred in a desert. I lived in Las Vegas, Nevada for about a year after seminary. And at this point in life, I had been raised a pastor's kid. I had done my undergraduate work in history, philosophy with a minor in biblical studies. I behaved very, very well, married to another pastor's kid. I went and did church ministry for several years. And then I went to seminary at a nice seminary where I was the dumbest person in the room, unfortunately, but I learned a ton, great experience. I go and get my first job at a seminary, and guess what? Everybody was just kind of in a bad place. I don't blame anybody for it. I was proud and knew everything there was to know about everything because I just finished seminary and I just wasn't in my best place and probably had unrealistic expectations, and we were lonely a lot, and good things came out of it too. We made friends, we learned stuff. Our firstborn daughter is from there. But it was tough. And it was so tough that it rattled my faith and we left there, and that period of life where effectively, and yeah, it's painful to admit this, but I've told you before. That period of life where effectively I was an atheist, it happened there, or right after there, at any rate. And that was a that was a very difficult time in my life, not just in terms of faith and gaming things out, but also just in terms of who the heck am I? What am I doing here? I'm a dad all of a sudden. What does that even mean? And so I guess there's my desert testing place. And so between my wife and I, even though there are a ton of great things about Las Vegas, Nevada, and the people we knew there, and again, I put that difficult time on no one but me, even though that's the case for us in our relationship, that is our metaphor for the desert time, the testing time. And likewise in the Bible, there is a place that becomes a metaphor in the mind of the original audience to whom the Gospel of Matthew was written that that symbolizes that desert time, very literally and very figuratively. And that's the Judean wilderness. It's a place where people go to figure stuff out, it's a place where people go to run away from difficult things, it's a place where people go to face down difficult things. David, under tremendous threat from his predecessor Saul, fled out into the desert. This is where the whole poop cave incident happened, where he was hiding at Engedi in this kind of cool oasis cut into the rock walls that bordered the Judean wilderness on the western side of this area. Now he's hiding out there. How's his life going to turn out? Is he going to be a brigand whose name is lost to history because he got killed by a king? Or is he going to turn out to be what the prophet said he was going to be when he was anointed? Well, that's all very much in flux. What kind of person will he be? Either way. Is he going to honor God or is he going to do crazy stuff to pursue his own interests? Additionally, we see, oh, um patriarchs who make their way out into the wilderness, maybe not exactly this wilderness, but again, out in the desert, figuring stuff out, seeing visions, wrestling with the most difficult questions, wrestling with God, even. We see John the Baptist drawing people out here to this place just a chapter earlier. As people go out to frankly participate in this pilgrimage to this barren, difficult place where you process things out. John is calling them out there. What for? Remember? He was saying to them, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near. Well, what is repent, if not think about how you're living and who you are and what you're doing and take stock of life? The place where John went to do this, the Judean wilderness, is perfectly in keeping with what this place meant, both to the people who experienced this stuff in the first place, as well as those people who are reading this document in the original audience. So the crazy thing is Jesus gets dragged out here. And not by some evil force. It isn't like Satan or Lucifer or the religious leaders trick him into going somewhere dangerous where he's out of his element. The text in Matthew chapter 4, 1 specifically says God took him out there. Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. It's only one verse. There are three questions here. And obviously, we're tackling the one about place first. But additionally, why would God do that? We'll have to talk about that next time around. And additionally, what's the deal with the devil? I alluded to that last time around. Is this an actual character? Is this a metaphor for something? We'll get to that in a bit. But this location is roughly 500-ish square miles, I'm told. It's more of a north to south orientation. It's east of Jerusalem and west of modern-day Jordan. It is what's the word I'm looking for? It's bisected north to south long ways by the Jordan River, and it kind of peters out as desert and transforms into something more green and arable up toward the Sea of Galilee in the north and turns even nastier and lower in elevation and hotter and rougher as you get down toward the Dead Sea in the south. I guess theoretically you could say that this Judean wilderness, Judean desert area kind of just morphs into the Negev, the Negev Desert as you go even further south than the Dead Sea. To the east again is the Jordan River and Jordan itself, which is still pretty rough terrain today. And to the west are the highlands that take you up from being below sea level in the Jordan Rift Valley and up toward the more plateau area where Hebron, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, all of that stuff is hanging out. And that transitional area, transitional, transitionary, transitioned area between the lowlands and the highlands is just amazing in terms of a geographic feature. It's like this gigantic 40, 50, 60 mile-long cliff wall. This place is hot. This place is barren. This place looks like uh southern Utah, but without the arches, the Red Rock area west of Las Vegas, maybe a little bit no, no, north of Phoenix, Arizona is a little bit too lush for what this is like. It is rough land. It really is the kind of place where you go, you sit down in this bucket surrounded on all sides by just absolutely miserable terrain, and it would get you thinking about stuff, especially if you didn't have the luxury of hopping in a car and driving away. We stayed there for a while in a fenced settlement. We did an Airbnb there one time, and it was beautiful. But I remember sitting out there one night on a port swing with my wife thinking about how all of these things went down and thinking, man, if we stay here much longer, I'm going to go through a trial and a test here. Now, there is a mountain here that I guess tradition associates with the place where this temptation occurred. And I can't remember the name of it, but it's not quaranta, but it's like quarantania or something like that. So it looks like the word for quarantine, and it also looks like the word for 40, and there's a reason because those words overlap as well. So I think the mountain is named in honor of the 40 days that Jesus was out there, and there are a bunch of Byzantine monasteries out there, like I guess early versions of what flows out of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. My understanding is that a bunch of those got wrecked over the years with earthquakes, but there's still uh some remnants, I think, of monasteries dating all the way back to maybe the fourth, fifth century uh A.D., where people have done the same liturgy, the same rhythm of life for all of that time. Why would you build a monastery out there? Well, one, to honor what happened here, the temptation, but two, to try and duplicate the the results of the temptation, right? I want to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. I want to go out into the desert and I want to face the the devil myself. I want to be challenged by these things. I want to be found to be able to pass these tests in the same way Jesus did. And I think that's maybe the bigger part of the reason this is built where this stuff is built. So, whatever the case, the original audience would have known dang well what's going on here as soon as they hear where Jesus is being led out to be tempted. They would have associated this with all kinds of stuff from their history, and they would have seen that Jesus is setting up to go through an examination. And there's a lot of different ways that we can look at exactly what the temptation was about, why it's there theologically. I'm gonna throw out a whole bunch of different explanations for why this is here, but to me I think one of the most obvious ones is we want to figure out if Jesus is the real deal or not. Can he withstand the place that is the forge of souls historically in the mind of the original audience? If he can't, uh don't even bother writing the book or reading any further. If he can, well, that that would be pretty exceptional in both uh an immediate and in an historical sense. So, like I said, this one's gonna take a while because we've got a ton to break down, but I thought getting the setting under our belt would be really important to understanding and picturing what's going on here. Hey, I uh I want to just say again on the way out the door, it's been a while since I've mentioned it. Those of you who are supporting this program, yeah, I just thank you. I I I'm trying to think of clever ways to do this where I say it better or whatever. I just sent out a whole bunch of pins. I hope you guys got those and put a little picture of our family in there. That picture that I sent you is from the Blue River in Breckenridge, Colorado. We sneaked away for a few days as a family and we went and fished. There were rainbow trout that I got out of that water, and it made us all very, very happy. At any rate, that's my family. They're grateful to you too. That little enamel pin, I know it's a very small thing, but hopefully it communicates what I'm trying to communicate now. That being that I just I really appreciate you letting me do this because I love doing it, and I couldn't without you. All right, let's talk more about this temptation stuff, Man Yana. I'm Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour podcast. Let's do it again soon.