Hey everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and I super appreciate you making the time to hang out with me and talk about the Bible. So we're theoretically wrapping up Matthew chapter 2 today, but surprise, as usual, I'm going to come at this from kind of a weird tangent. It's going to make sense in a minute, I promise. So in the Old Testament, you've got this series of contrasts between the God kings of the world who are masters of their domain and ordained by pagan deities to occupy such a position, and little old God, who was there in the background and maybe wasn't ordained by any pagan deity to be king of everything, but the contrast plays out in such a way that we constantly see the impotence and weakness and insecurity of human kings and the steadiness and providence and enormous power and control and patience and long view of the true king of everything who is God. One of the first examples we see of this is, of course, the Moses versus Pharaoh episode in Exodus, which could probably be better described, really, it's God versus Pharaoh. But the way it works is Pharaoh is neurotic and controlling and insecure, and he presents himself as master of everything. But the joke is that he's not master of everything. And just in case he thought that, he's disabused of these illusions by things like frogs raining from the sky, and rivers turning to blood, and swarms of locusts, and eventually by the thing that even if none of us encounter crazy frog phenomena, the thing that affects all of us is death. And in the end, he's impotent to do anything about this greatest of the human problems, which is loss and the expiring of our physical bodies. God instead is rightly held out as being the arbiter of life and death. And so Pharaoh behaves even more erratically, up, down, all over the place, violent. God's deliverance happens for his people, and we even get this crazy language about how Pharaoh isn't even truly master of his own heart, but that God has the ability to soften or harden the hearts of kings. We get the language specifically in Proverbs 21, verse 1, and this is one of those that I had to memorize in camp in Old King James, but that's all right because it has an awesome word in it. It says the king's heart is in the hand of the Lord as the rivers of water. He turneth it whithersoevereth he will. Whithersoevereth or whithersoever. That's disappointing. Maybe I don't deserve the Jesus bucks that I got for memorizing that verse back in Bible camp, but I'm close and you get the gist. God is in charge of the hearts of kings. Kings imagine they're in charge of things, but they're not even really in charge of themselves. And then in addition to all of the incidents with lesser kings that come and go in Kings and Chronicles, the big glaring example is obviously Xerxes in Esther. I mean, he's this God king appointed by the Persian deities, and his job is to go and bring all of the outlying people groups who are starting to rebel against the Persians to heal. This is where he overlaps with the Greeks and the Spartans and 300 and all of that stuff. And it isn't totally working out, and he's insecure and he's embarrassed, and we open with a big war council, and everybody's liquored up and planning his next great big offensive, and he wants his wife to come out and I'm making air quotes, entertain the guests. Sexy dancing time. And she's like, no, that's stupid and demeaning. That paraphrases mine. And so she won't do it. He's like, fine, you're fired as queen, but it's kind of even at the suggestion of other people because he doesn't really make his own decisions. And this leaves the door open for Esther. Not that I'm sure that this whole scheme was even necessarily Esther's idea. It kind of looks like Mordecai's the one who schemed it up. But whatever the case, throughout the book, the king makes big, bold statements, but everybody knows they can just go to him and weasel and weaponize his authority and power to do whatever stupid thing they want to do, like purge the Jews or hold up the reflective defense spell mirror of anti-purging and cause the purger to be the one who gets purged after all. Even Esther knows that if she catches him in the right mood, everything's gonna work out. And if I catch him in the wrong mood, if I perish, I perish. And of course, they understand that behind the scenes God has a hand in all of this, but the real contrast is that God is Lord of history. He's the master of all that's going on behind the scenes providentially, not the guy who's blustering and boasting and beating his chest about his tremendous authority. Why am I telling you all of this when we're talking about Matthew chapter two? Well, because there's a big blustering, loudmouth king in Matthew chapter two, right? You've got Herod the Great, whose madness and insecurity and evil we have painstakingly accounted for in the previous episodes. Herod is doing the same kind of stuff. He imagines he's terribly important and king of all the things. He's even willing to murder a bunch of innocent babies to prove it or to hold on to that authority. Well, here's the deal: Matthew is presenting Jesus as the true king. And I think what we're seeing here is a continuation of that Old Testament motif of the Joker king versus the real king. Jesus is this tiny little baby, and the all-powerful Herod the Great, who even has the great in his name, can't handle little baby Jesus. Why? Well, because God is guiding history providentially. How can your spies get a hold of an all-seeing, all-knowing God who's warning Joseph in dreams and the magi in dreams? You can't get ahead of that business. God is true king, and Jesus is the king who was promised, who is going to sit on the throne of David forever. So Herod blusters and yells, but the opening phrase of Matthew chapter 1, a record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, and he, not Herod, is the true King of Israel. That's a big deal, because remember, Herod was a foreigner who basically used political mechanisms and violence to gain the throne of a place that isn't even his to be king over. So what we're seeing is a contrast between the fakest king in the history of Israel and the one true king who is promised who will reign forever. And that is a very important point in all of this. Now, look, it's no secret, I am not the world's biggest fan of the track record of governments. I'm not an anarchist. I just think that governments tend to have a little bit of an inflated view of themselves and tend to get a little drunk on power and imagine that killing people left and right is entirely their business. I get you might want to pump the brakes a little bit here and be like, what? No, that's not how things are, but just look at the 20th century, my friend. Governments are responsible for killing 200 million, give or take 50 million, of their own citizens. That doesn't even count war. Look, there is a God complex that comes with unchecked power. Now, ideally, the best form of government, I think, is the one that Plato describes, right? It's the philosopher king, the one who has stepped outside of the darkness and into the light and sees how things actually are and comes back into the darkness to say, whoa, you're living in illusions, and because I have this added wisdom, I can guide society and individuals in a way that is maximum good for everybody. But of course, such a philosopher king dies. And even if you say, Wow, this is the best ruler ever, we should heap authority on them and just give them the keys to everything and let them run things, like that'll work great for one lifetime, but you always got to be on the lookout for who comes after that lifetime. Because kings die. Well, most kings die. Because the promise that comes with Jesus as God in the flesh, as Son of God, as the king who's going to reign on the throne of David forever, it's not just the promise of really, really, really, really good government. It's not just the promise of all the messed up stuff being straightened out. It's not just the promise of justice for the oppressed and a healing of all the things that are broken and wrecked about life. It's the promise that this is going to go on forever. So, with all due respect to my friend Plato, I think he's right, but I think he also knew that you'd have to account for regime change. And the beautiful thing about the kingship of God is that not only is it perfect, not only does it transcend time, not only is it patient, not only is it benevolent, but it doesn't change, and that authority will not be given away to the next clown who sits on the throne, but instead will rest forever in the hands of this king, who we're getting to know through the first two chapters of Matthew. And as we get into chapter three and four, and then into five through seven in the Sermon on the Mount, we're gonna start to see: whoa, that is so much better than any kingdom ever. Whether you are religious or not, that is the kingdom in which you want to live. What Jesus is describing scratches every itch, left, right, crazy left, crazy right. It deals with all of the things that deep down drive all the different political mechanisms and points of view that we have and solves that in peace and grace and mercy and forgiveness and provision and justice forever. That's what we have to look forward to getting a sense of as we move forward. And of course, I don't expect anybody to be like, oh, you just said a bunch of words into a microphone, therefore Jesus is real and this is all true. Nah, Matthew didn't expect that either. But as we read on, I think we're gonna see that this idea of this perfect king and this perfect government and this perfect kingdom with perfect values isn't just something we wish could be true, but there's credible reason to believe that it is true in Christ. Okay, I didn't get through everything I wanted to in wrapping up chapter two, so no high five yet for concluding chapter two. We gotta talk more about that tomorrow. Thank you so much for hanging out with me. A huge thank you to the patrons of this program. You're the driving force behind this, you're the reason this can have the tone that it has, and I cannot thank you enough. Patreon.com slash the TMBH podcast is where you can support the show if you want to jump in with that. If not, no sweat. Either way, just super glad everybody's here. All right, more on this tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Catch you soon.