Hey everybody, thanks for being here. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Congratulations! We just finished Matthew chapter one. We took a long time on it because it's worth thinking hard about it. But because I want us to have this stuff in our hip pockets and on lockdown, we're gonna look at the big picture of everything that we're taking away from this as we move into chapter two, right now. Okay, Matthew chapter one. When people picked up the book of Matthew and were greeted with this genealogy that it opens with, they would have been reminded of all the stories, no matter what they made of those stories from their ethnic and religious past, they would have remembered them all. They would have remembered the theme of God's promises and God's faithfulness. And some would have said, Ah, that warms my heart because that's the same God who's still gonna come through. And others would have looked at that with cynicism and said, uh, yeah, where is that God? It's been a real long time. But they're still reading, and when they get to verse 18, they've already heard about Jesus because, and by the time they're reading this, he's already come and gone. They've heard some of the rumors about his birth and all of this stuff, but we keep seeing boxes getting ticked in terms of who the Messiah is supposed to be. Jesus does seem to fit the bill. Then Jesus is born, and he's born to a virgin. And then Matthew expertly connects this with a passing line in Isaiah chapter 7 about this being assigned to you, that God really is active and that God is initiating and taking the next step, because that's what God was doing in that situation in Isaiah 7. He was taking the step, even though Ahaz was a jaded, disoriented king who wasn't really doing anything or lifting a finger to do right by God. God was like, fine, I'll do it myself. This will be assigned to you. The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they'll call him Emmanuel, God with us. And then this whole God with us idea would have resonated with the people. And this baby that ticks all the boxes is commanded from on high to bear the name Jesus or Joshua or Yeshua, which a whole lot of members of the original audience would have known meant the Lord saves. So we have Jesus set up as this God man character. Now, looking back at the Old Testament, you know, hindsight's 2020, we can we can look at that and be like, well, you know, clearly Jesus is the Messiah, he's the fulfillment of all of that stuff, and he is the one who's going to reign on the throne of David forever. But at this point, I mean, come on, if you were alive in the first century, in a Jewish context or any other kind of context, you probably wouldn't have caught this. I mean, odds are you would have missed it, and I would have missed it too. But it becomes more evident as we work our way through the book of Matthew that Matthew is taking us by the hand and walking us through this to kind of simulate the experience he had of doing the math on who Jesus was. He's trying to go back and get his brothers and sisters and be like, okay, check this out. Now understand this, now understand this, now understand this. And the ultimate conclusion is that what we have here is the God man. We have God in the flesh. He is fully man, born of this virgin, but untouched by the original sin of the world. Now, different groups resolve the question of how Jesus doesn't have sin handed down to him in different ways. Catholics and some Orthodox types will say that Mary didn't have any sin either, which, as we've talked about before, is tricky for me because, well, what about her parents? At some point, somebody just had to not have sin, and that had to have been a miraculous work of God. Uh, Protestant types will tend to say, no, Mary was a normal person who had normal problems and everything else, but miraculously, Jesus is born without sin. He gets the nature of God through his paternal side, that is, from God himself, and he gets uh a human nature or a human body by merit of his maternal side of things. And so then what you have is somebody who is fully man in every physical way, someone who's subject to temptation, someone who has to deal with things in the world just like you or me, but who is fully God in terms of his spirit and his rightness with God and his power and his authority and his position. And so, what this sets up is for this fantastic go-between. Do you ever see the movie uh Simon Birch? It's okay if you didn't. There's a scene right there at the end where Simon is a very little person who has health problems, but you know, he sees the world differently, and there's this horrible accident, and nobody knows what to do, and the parents can't get the other kids on this bus that is in peril to respond because they're parents and they're adults, and the kids just they can't hear it from them. But Simon, well, he's older, but he looks like the kids, and so when he goes and gives guidance, he's able to save because he is in this go-between position. And the conclusion is just beautiful. I think you know, God made me like this so that I could accomplish those things because uh they they would listen to me. And that's kind of what we have setting up here the uh solution to the human problem, the completion of God's redemptive plan, the bop bop of the old testament's but dot da dot dot is not some glorious conqueror, it's not some muscle-bound king, it's not someone with wealth or celebrity. Instead, he's a very modest-looking man, born into a very modest-looking situation, but he's got a secret. He's God in the flesh, he's untouched by human failure, only person ever to live a life like this, yet he looks and sounds just like us, meaning that he's in a position to make the divine, the difficult, the arcane, the confusing stuff about interacting with an infinite being way more accessible to us, because he looks like us and he sounds like us, and he's like us, but he's also different from us in all the ways that he has to be to be God and to resolve the human problem. And the glory of God and the resolution of the human problem is what all of this is about. If you are feeling a touch overwhelmed at the end of chapter one and like, I just have so many questions, you're feeling exactly right. It's working. And we will already start to see some of those questions get answers as we work into chapter two. And hey, last thing on the way out the door here, I cannot stress enough how grateful I am to all of you who support the program at patreon.com/slash the TMBH podcast. You are the backbone of this thing, and I am so grateful that you do what you do. For those of you who don't support the podcast and you're here just taking this thing in, I'm also ridiculously grateful to you. You don't have to support this thing, it's free. So thank you for being here as well. And as we wrap up another week of this, I'm just reminded of how appreciative I am that we get to do this thing together, that we have a community of people who want to talk Bible and don't necessarily have to make each other think all the same stuff. And that's really liberating and makes this really fun. And also makes it possible to, I think, give this a fair shake and see where it honestly and genuinely takes each and every one of us as we consider something that really does have pretty gigantic implications for our lives. All right, I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour. We'll catch you again soon.