Hey, this week of the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast is sponsored by Dwell Audio Bible App. You can click on the link down in the show notes below or go to Dwellapp.io slash TmbH Christmas for gigantic discounts on annual and even lifetime memberships. 50% off a lifetime subscription to this thing right now. So go and check that out. Thanks to everybody who already has. All right, let's get after it. The summer of my ninth grade year, I was playing baseball in the City League in Fort Collins, Colorado. I played for the Yankees, and there was this team that we played against, and they were just obnoxious, and I could not stand them. And they would always heckle me while I was pitching. And I mean, I wasn't terrible. There's nothing to heckle me about. I was competitive at least, but they just would not back off. And so in my brain, in between pitches, I'm thinking all these really smart things that I'm gonna say to them to just show them. And they're riding me and they're riding me, and the bases are loaded, and there are two outs. And this guy hits this rocket ball right back at me, one hop, and I scoop the thing, and I trot over to first base and I flip the ball to the first baseman. And I'm like, all right, here's my big moment. I'm gonna stick it to these guys. And I decided to go with a phrase I'd heard in a couple of scandalous PG-13 movies I'd watched lately at friends' houses. So I was like, kiss my but I couldn't bring myself to say it because it's a good Christian boy. And also my dad was over there assistant coaching. He definitely would not approve of such language. But I was already committed because I was already to kiss my. So then, real nervously, I was like, but my voice cracked horribly. And you can imagine how they all felt so sad and just broke down crying because they'd been told off. No, they've mocked me relentlessly and deservedly forever because of my absolutely weak stick attempt to tell somebody off. I'm just not good at that. But some people are good at that. They just know what to say and they know what to say it, and they never have this thing after the fact where they're like, oh, I should have said this. I think John might be one of those people who was super good at the old verbal takedown because John the Baptist has these religious leaders show up in Matthew chapter three. There's this gigantic religious revival thing going on. It's weird. We don't really even know at this point in Matthew 3 where it's pointed or what this is all going to mean or what it's going to accomplish, but it looks good. Ah, here come these guys to ruin the fun. And you can just imagine the scene as we pick it up in Matthew chapter 3 and verse 7. You got all these people lined up and getting baptized, and everybody's covered in dirt and muck, and they're eating old sack lunches because they had to hike way out into the wilderness to do this thing. And now here comes, shuffling down the hill, these people in incredibly fancy outfits. I mean, the Sadducees, as we talked about, were some of the richest people in the land at this time. And they're over there in this environment, kind of sizing it up. Hmm, no, we're not really here to be baptized. We're just gonna see what this is about. And verse 7 says, But when he, John the Baptist, saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them, You brood of vipers. And then it goes on from there, and we're gonna get into it. It goes right into this verbal beatdown mode. And this had to have been such a shocking moment for everybody, because I'm guessing that amongst these throngs of people who are out there, there are probably a bunch of them who are like, I'm kind of out on a limb here. I believe this is real and God is doing something, but we kind of have people who supervise the whole God thing for us, and they're the religious leaders, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. And it kind of isn't really official until they show up. And see how, like the old Mighty Ducks movies and stuff, they would indicate to you, the stupid audience member, that this was really, really important by having like ESPN show up to cover some 11-year-olds playing hockey. And this is what famously was mocked in the uh, what was the movie? Dodgeball, by having the Ocho, the ESPN 8, show up to cover a dodgeball tournament. Well, this would be the first century religious equivalent of that. If the Pharisees and the Sadducees showed up, you are legitimized. It is real. These guys are here. They're the people who make the thing the real thing. Now just imagine if you're watching Mighty Ducks and Dan Patrick shows up to interview the 11-year-old Knucklepuck hockey player, and he's like, Well, it gives you the hope that you can defeat the evil blonde-haired Swedes. And then Knucklepuck Kid is like, You brood of vipers, ESPN? You guys are clowns, you're rating mongers, and all you care about is exploiting people for money and advertising dollars. Be gone, and like shoot them out. It's like that's not how the script goes. You you lean into this authenticating factor, not run it off with a mean phrase like you brood of vipers, let alone the 10 mean phrases that come right after that. So this is so weird because again, we're seeing something that from a marketing perspective is just stupid and backwards. If you want people to sign up for your religion, you want to be real nice to them, and you want to sidle up alongside the people who have so much that they could give you: their influence, their money, their power, their blessing. The last thing you'd want to do is put all this throng of people who've come to hang out with you in a position where they feel like they are in somehow opposition to this crowd, but that is what is so incredible about John the Baptist's bravery. I remember the other day we were talking about how the super brave things in the face of insurmountable odds sort of makes me feel emotional. Well, I weirdly feel it right here, just with these black and white words on the page. This guy was taking an enormous risk and he knew exactly what he was doing. And the much easier path would have been to do some kind of thing where they come in and do a religious corporate buyout and they swap influence and he's made in the shade for the rest of his life. But he's there for something much truer and much realer than that, and he is not going to cheapen it or sell it out to accommodate these people who, frankly, he clearly views as being the opposite of what he is trying to accomplish, of being his actual enemies toward the ends of the advent of the kingdom of God. So, what do you say? Well, first of all, he calls them a brood of vipers. You could read that to mean he's saying as you know, brood, this is like a litter of snakes, that they're descended from like Satan or something. It could be, but to suggest that they're descended from anyone other than Abraham would be the insult of insults, especially to these two groups of people. Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? This smacks a little bit of, and I marked it here, Jeremiah forty seven. Oh, I meant to write. Here it is, forty-six, uh, verse twenty-two. Egypt will hiss like a fleeing serpent as the enemy advances in force. They will come against her with axes like men who cut down trees. They will chop down her forest, declares the Lord, and then go on to say some more stuff that is shocking and very Jeremiah-like. So it's possible that John is even drawing on this familiar language of God punishing the enemies of him, of God punishing the enemies of Israel and what God is doing. Is he suggesting in back-to-back phrases that the Pharisees and Sadducees, the religious leaders of the Jewish people, are not descended truly and spiritually from Abraham, and that they are now at odds and the enemies of God? It kind of sounds like it. He says, Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And don't think that you can say to yourselves, we have Abraham as our father. And so the language here that he throws out at the Pharisees and Sadducees would have been doubly, triply, quadruply, we're up to now, shocking at this point, because I mean the common people were being told to repent, right? I mean, what was John's message? Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near. So all these normal people came out for that, but like Pharisees and Sadducees, they don't need to repent. I don't know if there's a first century prosperity gospel, but I mean, clearly God is blessing those people. Look at their outfits. You know, if you're looking at the Sadducees, the richest people around. And the Pharisees, these are the holiest people around. They don't do bad things. They not only obey all the rules, but they're so holy they write the rules to a certain extent. But John's message is exactly the same to the religious leaders as it is to the people who were right there getting baptized, as it was to Matthew's original audience, as it is to anybody who reads it after the fact, as it is to us. The kingdom of heaven is unfolding throughout history, it's unfolding with the arrival of Jesus and throughout the age of the church. There is something coming, it's imminent, it's a big deal, and the correct response is to step away from the values and the trajectory of the world and embrace the values and the trajectory of the king and the true kingdom that comes along with him. And these guys are no exception, they're subject to the same call. And now John the Baptist is going to swing right back around to this thing that the religious leaders are clinging to that is their punched ticket, their validation that says we don't need to repent of anything. We're right about stuff, and that is their relationship with Abraham, probably both ethnically and religiously. But guess what? Unlike my humiliating voice cracking, embarrassing, utterly fall on my face failure to properly beat somebody down verbally on the baseball diamond all those years ago, John is actually really, really good at it. And I cannot properly break down his entire verbal rampage in just one 10-minute chunk. So it's gonna take us actually two episodes to fully unpack everything he's saying here, and I think that makes it all the better. So we're just gonna pick it up right where we left off tomorrow and look at the second half, or maybe the second of three-thirds. We might really get deep into this one of this verbal beatdown and try to understand what's going on here theologically and better understand the tension that's going to develop as we go through the book of Matthew between the values of the kingdom and the trajectory of the kingdom and the values of the world and the religious leaders, which are constantly presented by Matthew as being in conflict. All right, fun. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do it again soon.