The books, the movies, the stories that you have loved the absolute most, the stuff that has straight up affected you. Where you watch it and you think about it and you wrestle with it, maybe you come back to it later. I promise you that whatever you're picturing right now is the kind of storytelling that is loaded with thematic material, subtext, things that you have to grapple with and really reflect on. You think about the legendary stories of the last hundred years, your Chronicles of Narnia, your Lord of the Rings stuff, the big trilogies and quadrilogies and octologies that have come and gone in movie theaters. You think about the long-form TV shows that people have really latched onto, like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, or even the BBC Sherlock program, which was excellent. All of these things are trying to do more than just amuse you with violence and gratuitous stuff and vaudeville level good guy, bad guy drama. It's nuanced and it's thoughtful. And as you get connected with these stories, you start to see these little patterns emerge. We're like, yeah, you know, whoever is writing this series, they really care about this stuff. I watched the Americans, uh, what was that on? FX? I don't know. It's a Cold War show set in the 1980s where these Soviet spies are in the United States and they're carrying out all kinds of like James Bond 007 missions, except it's against Americans and it's unsettling and powerful, but you could tell a ways in, they're really intrigued by this whole idea of the willful state-driven atheism of communism versus the occasional sugary, sacrine, lightweight, popular Christianity of Americanism. And they really teased out that theme and at times said and did some stuff that really affected me in terms of my faith and forced me to think about things. That's good writing. The Bible is good writing. Nah, I'm underselling it. The Bible is a gem. Matthew is a gem. It's a phenomenally beautifully crafted book that, well, at least from my perspective, I look at it and I say, I see the humanity of this, and I can also clearly see the fingerprints of the Holy Spirit, who I believe inspired this book to be as incredible as it is. One of the things that you notice in this level of storytelling is that there are more than one theme, and those themes are recurring so as to drive home a point. So, what we're going to be looking out for as we process through the book of Matthew are a handful of these key themes. I'll give you some now. I'll point some more out as we actually go along. The biggest one is the idea that Jesus is the king. Jesus is the Messiah. There was this long-awaited, this uh expectant mindset within the Jewish people in the first century. Things had gone so badly that that expectation took on different forms and looked a little different in different pockets of society, but everybody still held to this belief, maybe some just barely, that God was not done with their people, and that there was some kind of redemption or completion that was still promised and that was still coming down the pike. I think it was very hard for that audience to imagine that redemption and that completion coming through any other means than an independent Jewish state. So a lot of people, their messianic outlook was a very political one, maybe even a violent one. Some others looked more closely at the equation and said, nah, this is a this is a spiritual completion that God has promised, and that redemption will come about in some way, even if it might be a bit tricky to recognize, and they were holding out hope in that manner. What Matthew is very clearly trying to do is to demonstrate that Jesus is the completion, that he is the culminating event of a God who is still interested and is carrying out a very long game redemptive plan. You will see that Matthew casts Jesus as a new Moses and that the parallels are thick. And again, I'm not going to spoil all of this, we'll get into it as we go along. But very intentionally, Matthew puts Jesus or highlights the moments where Jesus was in parallel situations to Moses' situation. And the idea is to stitch these two stories together. Surely, as we discussed in the last conversation, some folks were, you know, 30 years after the time of Jesus saying, well, this Christianity thing looks like it was an afterthought, that is an appendage, fan fiction built over the top of our existing religion, and Matthew is clearly trying to say, no, no, no, no, no. This is the completion. This was what was promised in the Old Testament, or what you would call the existing scriptures at that time. And this doesn't require us to take some gigantic new leap. All it does is require us to look closely at what's already there, and you'll see it all points to Jesus. So there's that theme of connecting the old and the new, of completion of Jesus as the new Moses and the greater Moses. And there's also this theme, as I mentioned, of Jesus as king, king and kingdom. Jesus is not just the next prophet to come along to communicate information. Jesus is the culminating event. Jesus is the king, and he is establishing the long-awaited kingdom of God. When Jesus shows up and gives the Sermon on the Mount, he is laying out the values of the kingdom of God and inviting people to participate in the kingdom of God. That's all there right on the front end of the book of Matthew. Jesus is Messiah, Jesus is king. To get it right with God is to follow Jesus. The next theme that's developed is what you do after you get it right with God by following Jesus and embracing these kingdom values, and that is to engage in mission, to go out and represent and communicate this. The idea is that Jesus is creating this new family of faith that is larger than just an ethnic family of faith, and that is larger than just the socially acceptable family of faith that was rooted in the social propriety of the first century. Now, everybody, rich people, poor people, slaves, free people, kids, adults, men, women, Greek, Jew, circumcised, uncircumcised, fist bump, we'll talk about circumcision later. All of that is all part of this new family of faith. It's not just our father was Abraham and that's that. You all are welcome too, but God is doing something more and further, you should be able to look back into the scriptures and see that this was coming all along and that this was the plan. So if you're a part of that family of faith that Jesus is building, then you have a dual role here as a subject citizen of the king, who is an agent of the kingdom, who goes out and does stuff that is in keeping with the values of the king. And the second part of that dual role is that you are made a daughter or a son of the king. You are an heir to this kingdom, a participant in this kingdom. And so all of these themes, the old, the new, Jesus as the new Moses, the completion of the redemptive plan, Jesus as king of a kingdom, Messiah, the fulfillment, and Jesus as one who lays out the values of the kingdom, invites everyone to become agents of the kingdom, heirs of the kingdom, as daughters and sons of the king, and to be on mission for the king. Those are the big themes that we're gonna see pronounced throughout the book of Matthew. In the next conversation, no, you know what? Hold on, we're like eight minutes. No, I'm doing this right now. We're gonna talk about the structure right now and how it relates to those themes. So here's the deal. Very simply, Matthew and Mark are almost the same book. Clearly, Matthew and Peter, who stood behind the Gospel of Mark and was Mark's source on most of that stuff, they saw the same events. They saw the same things, they wrote down the same things. Probably Matthew referenced Peter's records and recollection. Probably Peter touched base with Matthew as well. I mean, these people were on the same task and on the same team. Unfortunately, Mark and Matthew are often pitted against each other when we talk about what's called Mark and priority and the idea that Mark came first and everybody else just kind of plagiarized his stuff. Well, come on, that doesn't make any sense. It was huge tradition supporting Peter's involvement in Mark, and therefore every reason in the world to believe that this was a collaborative thing that all of these people who are on the same team were doing together in one form or another. There need be no threat that Matthew may have drawn on Peter's resources or vice versa. But the difference between Mark and Matthew is that action-wise, they contain about the same amount of stuff. Matthew, however, includes five gigantic discourses of Jesus, and these kind of punctuate and divide up and pace out the book. And we will be highlighting these all the time to the point where you will get sick of having them highlighted, and you'll be like, I know already, I get it. Quit saying the same thing. So here's what we're going to look for in that structure. The first great discourse is the Sermon on the Mount, and that is in Matthew 5 through 7. The second great discourse is the, oh, what are we at? That would be the missional discourse. That's chapter 10. The third great discourse, I'm doing this without notes. I really should know these off the top of my head really cleanly. The third great discourse is the kingdom discourse. That's chapter 13. The fourth big discourse is the whatever you want to call it, like the church life discourse, that's chapter 18. And then the last one is called the Olivet Discourse, and it's kind of a whopper. People sometimes divide it up a little bit differently, but effectively uh that comes in the closing chapters of Jesus' life before his arrest. And it deals with how all of this is going to play out, as well as some really big picture stuff about what's coming down the pike for Christians and where they fit. It's a wider ranging talk. All of these end with the same key turn of a phrase, which is something like after Jesus had finished saying these things. And then we go on into the next thing that both reflects back on the discourse we just heard and points forward to whatever is coming next. So the Sermon on the Mount, for example, we get Jesus laying out his kingdom values. We get Jesus inviting people to participate with what I really believe effectively is a sinner's prayer to come and follow Jesus in the Lord's Prayer, and he gets done. All of this stuff sounds great, but what authority do you have to say stuff like that, dude? And then he demonstrates his authority in the ensuing chapters over everything. So you get the discourse, you get after Jesus had finished saying these things, and then immediately you get, here's why all of that stuff is legit, and here's what we're doing next. So that structure is going to be something that we come back to again and again, and that structure also um really fleshes out those key themes of Matthew we were talking about earlier. There, I'm glad we got that in as well. What that means is next time around, we can get into historical context and have a ton of fun with that. All right, I'm Matt, 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. We're getting through this thing. This is pretty fun. Let's do this again soon.