Hey, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast where we take a little bit of time every weekday morning to process through a book of the Bible. In this case, we're working on the book of Matthew. And as we get rolling here, this is a quick aside that I think is pretty awesome. This episode is actually sponsored by a new partner called Dwell. They've got an audio Bible app that is the best I've ever heard. I'll tell you more about that later. One of the things that we do here is have a discussion that's always running over on Reddit.com. If you're not familiar with Reddit, it's a place where people talk about things and post things. And it's a very, very, very big, diverse community with a whole bunch of different ideas and stuff going on. And we have one little tiny corner of Reddit carved out. It is R slash TMBH podcast. But there's one really great question that came in from the lump peanut. And the question is, hey Matt, why are we talking about Mary more? And we're talking about this whole birth narrative, and Mary's awesome. And she goes on to make this great case for how awesome Mary is. And every single thing she says is right. So obviously that's a really fair question, and it kind of lobs me a softball for what I wanted to talk about anyway, which is why does Mary show up so much in the Gospel of Luke and show up so little in the Gospel of Matthew? Well, the reason for this is actually very, very simple. In the Gospel of Luke, Mary is the point of view character for Jesus' birth narrative. Luke 1 26 says, In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, Greetings, you who are highly favored, the Lord is with you. And then Mary's troubled at these words, and they have the conversation, and then Mary bursts forth with this amazing song, My soul praises the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God, my Savior, for he's been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on, all generations will call me blessed, and maybe even sing that song. There are a couple versions of that set to music. There is no arguing that Luke heaps all kinds of honor and richly deserved honor on Mary in his description, and that she is the point of view character. Matthew doesn't do that, not because he doesn't think Mary is cool, but because Joseph is the point of view character in Matthew. Now it makes sense that Mary would be the point of view character in Luke, because Luke is writing to a general audience that goes way beyond the boundaries of Judaism. He's talking to people who are walking in cold to this thing, and they don't know how any of this stuff would work. Yet this whole virgin birth thing is very important to his theme that Jesus is God and that Jesus was not guilty and is vindicated, and that people who are subjects of Roman law should believe in Jesus as God and as Savior, whether they're Jewish or not. So he's going to highlight this Mary thing. His genealogy is going to be different, and he's not going to be so worried about answering Jewish questions about kings and succession. I just realized that was accidentally the line from Scar's song in The Lion King. I guess that's apparently that's just deeply latent in my subconscious there, but whatever the case. Matthew, on the other hand, is talking to that Jewish audience, and he's trying to demonstrate a legal chain of lineage back to David so that they can understand Jesus as king, the promised king, the Messiah. Luke's audience, not interested in that, telling the story from the perspective of a vulnerable Mary who herself is an outsider, much like the audience he's writing to, is going to gain a lot more currency. Matthew, on the other hand, telling the story from the perspective of Joseph, that is going to both resonate in the genealogical way I just mentioned, but also with the honor culture of the Jewish people at the time who would have been astonished and appalled by the rumor of a pregnancy outside of marriage and this marriage going through anyway. And we've got to understand Joseph's actions to quell some of the rumors that might be going on here. Two different purposes, two different audiences, two different point of view characters. And so naturally, as we're throwing effort at trying to understand Matthew's reasoning and argumentation and storytelling about Jesus to get to his themes, we're going to follow the path that he lays out and pay more attention to the point of view character there. But I've got a little bit more that I want to get in here in this particular conversation before we get on in order to set things up for tomorrow. I'm nowhere near done talking about this birth narrative stuff. And in fact, next I want to zoom in on this verse 23 that is a quote from Isaiah 7.14. This is the one that says, the virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God with us. Now, last week we talked a little bit about the nuts and bolts of the virginity thing. How does that work? We even looked at some kooky scientific theories about maybe what happened there, and that was really entertaining to me because even if by some freak chance this one in a gazillion crazy, almost break the laws of biology and physics type of pregnancy occurred, it still happened in exactly the right place at exactly the right time with exactly the right person. And the coincidence is just so shockingly great that even if you could postulate a scientific explanation, it still points to the divine and the fulfillment of what God is doing in his redemptive plan. So we talked about some of those really detail-oriented things, but now I want to step back and talk about more of the theology things that are going on here. And I think there are two big ones. One is how is a virgin birth a sign? What was going on in Isaiah chapter seven, what was happening historically there that points us to this event happening. And who was that for? Was that a question for the people of Old Testament times? Or was that something people would have known when they read that passage in Isaiah to be looking out for it in the future? So we're going to tackle that tomorrow. And also, I want to dive much deeper into this question of the meaning of the name Emmanuel. God with us. So once again, this episode is brought to you by Dwell. It's an audio Bible app that's hyper customizable. They've got a variety of voices, a variety of background music. I've really enjoyed using it. I hope you'll check it out. I think it's a great companion for what we're doing here. And it's the best audio Bible I've ever heard. You can get 33% off an annual membership. So that's 20 bucks instead of 30 by going to dwellapp.io slash tmbh. Again, that's dwellapp.io slash tmbh. Or if you're doing other stuff and that's a lot to remember right now, you can just hit the link in the show notes. So once again, tomorrow, Emmanuel God with us. And in particular, we're going to look at how much it would have felt to the original audience like God hadn't been with them for a long time, thus making the uttering of the name Emmanuel, meaning God with us, a much bigger deal than we might realize. All right, you guys are awesome. Thanks for being here. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Catch you, Munana.