Hey everybody, I'm Matt, and this week of the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast is brought to you by Dwell. It's an audio Bible app that I think you're gonna love. You can check it out down in the show notes. Okay. When you hear the phrase God with us, I'm guessing that conjures one of two things. Number one, warm Christmas feelings, and number two, just general warm feelings of a God that cares about you and wants to be around you. Maybe a little bit the more the therapeutic side of faith, which is okay. I'm not trying to in any way mock that. I just realized that word might have sounded loaded. But you know what? I don't think the original Jewish audience Matthew was writing to would have thought about any of that stuff. I think for them, it would have conjured the pain of realizing that, frankly, it had been a long time since they could say, God with us. I think they would have pictured God as this parent who maybe back in the day they kind of resented because in their cultural, ethnic memory, they recall a God who reached out and made a deal with their forefather Abraham. And the deal was that God was going to make a new people out of Abraham and that this people would bless all the nations. And no matter how stupid Abraham was or dumb stuff that he did, God was still going to complete his redemptive plan or carry out this promise to create this great nation and to bless all the other nations through it. Well, and stuff goes well and stuff goes bad, and God is very present and hands-on all the time, nurturing them in the early days of their youth as a people. Then centuries later, along comes Moses. Things have been kind of up and down there as well. But there's a new deal with Moses or an extension of the old deal or another deal to go along with it. It doesn't eliminate the old one. And the new deal is you're going to be my people, I'm going to be your God. And when you disobey me, I'm going to punish you. And when you obey me, I'm going to reward you. You'll know I'm God because of that. The nations will know I'm God because of that. And so even though adolescent Israel may not have been crazy about this version of their spiritual father, they still had to admit, like any kid who appreciates having a good hands-on parent, like you gotta admit, it's more fun when you're getting rewarded for being awesome. And it's easy to kind of feel a little resentful when you're getting rightly corrected. But come on, even if we don't appreciate it when we're young, we appreciate it later looking back. Like we needed that kind of parent. And I'm so glad that my parents were that way. And if you had parents like that, maybe you're glad for it too. And I think the original audience for Matthew's gospel, this is what it would have conjured. They would have pictured a God who was like that. This parent who was with them in the right ways as they grew and who dished out rewards and punishment the right way. And they would have remembered what it was like to live in very close proximity to their God and to see him working all the time. In fact, God actually took up an address by his people after a third covenant was put in place between he and David. David's the second king of this monarchy that is coming out of the other promises he made to Abraham and to Moses. And David one day is like, wow, God, you've been so gracious with me, and I want to do something for you. I'm going to build you a house to live in right here in the middle of your people, and it's going to be great. And God's like, Yeah, cool. Actually, I'm going to have your kid build me the house. But what we're going to do right now is I'm going to give you something, David. And it's an unconditional covenant, a promise that a great line of kings is going to come out of your name, that an eternal throne is going to be established, and that the great king of kings is going to sit on this throne. And then that's a big time paraphrase, and it kind of includes a lot of the language from the prophets and other parts of the Old Testament as well. But that's the gist of it. And David's like, okie dokie, I accept. And sure enough, David dies, his son Solomon takes over, and Solomon builds a temple, a place for God to live among his people. And 1 Kings chapters like five, six, and seven all talk about the elaborate preparation that went into pulling this whole temple thing together. And this is where, oh, I didn't mention this before. This week is sponsored by Dwell Audio Bible app. And one of the things that I absolutely love about Dwell is what it does as a companion for this program, because I can send you over to your Dwell app right now. If you're already doing this, you can get it on your iPhone or your Android or whatever. And you can just listen to a beautiful audio rendering of all of this description of how the temple came about in 1 Kings chapter 6, 7, and into the beginning of 8, and then bounce back over here, do it after or whatever. Bottom line goes like this: in 1 Kings chapter 8, Solomon does this elaborate dedication for the temple. I mean, the masses turn out for this thing. And they've been watching this thing go up for who knows how long. Master craftsmen, crazy money going into it. And Solomon, in one of his shining moments, maybe the shining moment of Solomon's career, he gets up and prays this prayer of dedication in front of everybody that absolutely knocks it out of the park. And he understands all of the deals God has made. He seems to understand where he and this event fit in the grand scheme of God's redemptive history. And there's even language in here that he acknowledges that a lot of people in the time of Jesus didn't even remember or get. Verse 41 of 1 Kings 8, part of Solomon's prayer of dedication, says, As for the foreigner who does not belong to your people Israel, but has come from a distant land because of your name, for men will hear of your great name and your mighty hand and your outstretched arm. When he comes and prays toward this temple, then hear from heaven your dwelling place, and do whatever the foreigner asks of you, so that all the people of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your own people, Israel, and may know this house I have built bears your name. Wow! Listen to the theology here. That's exactly what Jesus came to complete, that this isn't just for the Jewish people, that this is for everybody, that Jesus will be the culmination of all of this. So just tuck that away in the back of your brain, that that moment in God's interaction with the Old Testament version of the Jewish people, the Hebrew people, the Israelites. So then what happens is this dedication gets done. Everybody's like, Yep, we think that. This is wonderful. So long story short, God shows up and says to Solomon, Yep, I heard your prayer and your plea, and I will put my name and my eyes and my heart in this temple, and I'm here. I I live among you in this place. And there's all kinds of crazy stuff, miraculous stuff that backs up God's claim that he lives in that building now. So God is with us. That's what the original audience to Matthew would have remembered was that God literally lived in the temple amongst his people, but then some stuff gets weird. Yeah, civil war, two countries, they both get ultimately defeated. Nobody lives in Jerusalem for a while at a certain point. And as Ezekiel the prophet is being hauled off into captivity in chapter 10 in a just bizarre, difficult to read passage, and he sees the glory of the Lord leave the temple as he's taken away. Well, eventually the Persians, of course, come along under Cyrus the Great and they conquer the Babylonians, you know, uh Nebuchadnezzar and his descendants, and Cyrus, as predicted by the prophet Isaiah, lets the people go back and rebuild Jerusalem. And when they go to do so, they finally get a temple built. Then they do a great big elaborate celebration. They're like, okay, how'd we do this again? Okay, and we stood here, and we put our hands like this, and we said these kind of words, and then they wait for God to show up and be God with us again, and very conspicuously, nothing happens. God doesn't show up. He doesn't reoccupy the second temple. In the book of Esther, God doesn't show up. He's not even mentioned. All of those Jewish people who are still back east in Persepolis and Susa and the Persian Empire, there's a gigantic crisis. It looks like they're gonna get wiped out and slaughtered. Now Esther makes it clear that the providence of God was in play, but his name doesn't even come up. He doesn't miraculously smite the oppressors. Alexander the Great shows up in the late fourth century BC and bloodlessly conquers Jerusalem, but no, God doesn't go out before his people and say, Don't mess with my temple. Alexander rolls right in and they get conquered and remain conquered for a couple hundred years after that. Eventually the Maccabee family throws off the descendants of those Greek overlords with a whole lot of violence and a big rebellion, and they purify the temple, and they're like, Okay, God, we got all the gross stuff out, and they tried to sacrifice pigs and stuff in here that's all wrong and against everything, and all right, we did it. But God doesn't show up. There is no God with us. Then Pompeii shows up, the member of the Triumvirate, along with Julius Caesar, he conquers Jerusalem. He's like, I've heard that you can't walk into their temple. I want to walk into their temple. And so he goes into the Holy of Holies and then walks out unscathed. Why didn't God smite Pompeii? Well, the biblical theology behind it is because God didn't live in there at that point. Or that's at least the way it looks. Then Herod makes a deal with the new Roman overlords to have he and his family govern things and he makes the temple way awesomer, expands Herod's temple, and God doesn't show up. Nothing. So in light of all this history, you gotta figure that a Jewish person picking up the Gospel of Matthew and reading the first chapter that we've just looked at over the last couple of weeks, they would remember what it was like when God was present and their father, when they were a baby brand new little people, and how he worked with them and how he was always right there and hands-on. They would remember what it was like when they were an adolescent punk people that did puke stupid stuff and God smacked them down when they needed it and put an arm around them and rewarded them when they needed it. They would remember what it was like when they were like, forget you, God, I don't need you, and went stomping out and did their own thing and suffered badly because of it. And then they would remember what it was like to have God not be present after that. And then they tried everything by their own effort to fix it, like, well, what if we do this, God, what if we do that? Then could we be back together? Could it be okay then? It doesn't happen, and it doesn't happen. And now here Matthew is claiming that after all of this heartache and all of this estrangement, this little baby, born to these obscure people in one of the boringestest, lamest parts of all of Israel, is actually God with us all over again. Once again, this week of the podcast is brought to you by Dwell. It's an audio Bible app that I think is fantastic. The best way for you to figure out whether or not an audio thing is fantastic, is to just go check it out. So you can search that on any app store, iPhone, Android, whatever. Just search Dwell. And if you decide that you like it and you want to do an annual membership or even a lifetime membership, you can get 33% off of that by going to dwellapp.io slash tmbh. Or guess what? This is going to be much easier. Just click on the link down below. There's more to flesh out on this whole virgin birth God with us thing. I know we've been lingering here for a long time, but this really is kind of the centerpiece of theology, right? I mean, if there's just a God who is far, far away and very impressive, and that has nothing to do with us, uh big deal. I mean, maybe that's interesting to muse about or theorize about, but the God of the New Testament, the God of the Bible, is choosing the name God with us. Why? Well, because this isn't a God who's distant and abstract and out of the picture. This is a God who is intentionally present, and there are all kinds of implications to that. More about that tomorrow. I'm Matt, this is the 10 minute Bible Hour Podcast. We'll catch you soon.