Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, where we are theoretically working our way up to the New Testament book of Philemon, but we're doing a history deep dive to set the stage for all of the different things that are behind the scenes applying pressure to the situation that makes the book of Philemon happen. All the things that make the pressure cooker go. I mean, we got Roman culture and Greek philosophy and Roman law and Jewish history and Jesus and the gospel and Jewish persecution of Christ. I mean, there's just so much stuff. I just wanted to take one day and process this intertestamental period that we've been looking at here. We've never really talked about it in depth on this podcast before. I've been spending a lot of time hanging out with the Maccabees and thinking about what they went through and what, I mean, this is an insane time. Crazy, violent, vile, awful people tried to destroy Judaism and the Jews and the whole thing. And what's almost worse is there were collaborators who wanted to go along with it. Surely there were people involved who are like, hey, let's not get political. Let's just be, you know, religious here. And other people were like, no, we have to do something about this before it's too late, is a pressure cooker. And I'm not going to get into drawing all kinds of parallels with different moments in history, including maybe our own, in this conversation. That's for you to read between the lines of and think about for yourself. But surely there have been other times we can agree in history where people have faced these kinds of pressures. And I just want to reflect on it a little bit. So here's a question I have: What would you do if there was a well-funded, violent governmental program to end, say, Christianity, the worship of God? This isn't a hypothetical. This kind of stuff happens. People in certain parts of the world right now are dealing with this. Christians in Nigeria are dealing with this at the tip of the sword, the machete, right now, as I'm recording this. What do you do? People under the thumb of I don't care who I offend, the most wicked ideology in recent centuries, communism, faced exactly this kind of situation. People under the thumb of communism's very near cousin, Nazi socialism, faced this exact question under the wicked reign of the evil Hitler in the 1930s and 40s. In the face of that horrible, violent persecution, some people with convictions like yours fled. Some people appeased and tried to wait it out. Some people acted like they were appeasing, but discreetly tried to undermine those wicked rulers. Others overtly and violently opposed it. It's hard, and I'm not going to solve that in the last few seconds of this little podcast. But as much as anything, I want to acknowledge it's hard. And it's really easy from a seat of great comfort that you know most of most of us in this conversation enjoy at this moment in history to say, well, everybody should have done this, or they shouldn't have done that, or that was too much, or that was too little. I'd like to think I'm not a coward. I've just never been tested like this. These people from these ancient stories went through something that is very difficult for me to understand. And when I set aside all of the brave heart-like romanticism and heroic youthful notions that I might inflict on a story like this, and I really think about what it would be like to be a dad with those precious kids I have, with that beautiful wife I have, with this little home that we've carved out for ourselves, this little life that we've carved out for ourselves here in the Black Hills of South Dakota. What would I do if this came knocking on my door? It's easy to bluster, right? Like, I got guns. Yep, I don't know. Maybe. Or maybe I'd run for the hills. Or maybe I'd wait to see how things work out and try to decide where to cast my lot. I only have one life. I want to use it shrewdly. I don't know. It is hard. This is an imperfect story of very imperfect things. And in a lot of ways, even though it's not Bible per se, it is Bible adjacent and it tells a story of things very related to the Bible. And it kind of feels like one more last gasp before Jesus shows up to try one more human solution to the human problem. Okay, you know, we tried waiting things out when we were oppressed. God promised through the prophet Jeremiah that he'd remember us and restore us, and he did when the Persians defeated the Babylonians and came to town and let us go back and rebuild Jerusalem in the late 500s and into the 400s BC. And God delivered and we lived as a peaceful subject people group under a temperate empire whose hearts somehow God softened to us. And that worked for a while. But the breezes of history and politics blew in such a way that now that wasn't tenable. It wasn't the situation anymore by 170 BC. When Antiochus IV started his insane shenanigans, he pushed everything to the brink. There was every justification for war, for rebellion, for fighting back. And so in between the testaments, it's like we get one more swing at, well, what if this would solve the human problem? What if we did things like the great mega empires of old? We haven't tried that yet. What if we fashioned ourselves after the Persians or Alexander, or Alexander's generals, or the Romans, or any of these great men larger than life, military personalities, and played that game and then tried to build our own empire, but instead of building it on the flawed ideas of Alexander's Greek philosophy or Persia's false Zoroastrianism, what if we built it on the true foundation of the law of God in the style of an ancient empire? And despite so much bravery and good that came out of it, it absolutely fizzles. It doesn't work at all. If you're a Jewish person coming out of this moment in 45 BC, right before the assassination of Julius Caesar, and you're looking around, you're like, dang it, we're a subjugated state again. We're a client state of Rome. Our leaders were corrupt, our high priesthood became corrupt again. We couldn't keep it. We really have tried everything. Everything. We tried complete anarchy during the age of the judges. We tried having our own Bronze Age style kingdom when we couldn't get along. We tried having two kingdoms with different sets of convictions. We tried being a nice subject people. We tried rebellion. We tried fashioning ourselves after the great men and making a great ancient empire. Dang it, none of it worked. How do we get it right? How do we realize the vision we see from the prophets in the Old Testament? Where God is worshipped in spirit and in truth, and the kings of all the nations come and put down their crowns and they worship the one true God, and it happens in peace, and there's justice, and the nations are ruled with righteousness. How is this ever going to happen? If anything, my friends, this little rabbit trail that we've just gone down here over the last couple of weeks or whatever, it serves two purposes. One, it fills in a story that we want to fill in so we understand Philemon better. But hopefully, big picture, it helps us better get into the mindset that would have been present as the New Testament started, which is the one I just articulated. We need a Messiah. We tried every human solution. We need God's solution for the human problem. And there is a promise lingering out there still from the Old Testament that there's this great king who's going to have an eternal throne. He's going to reign on David's throne, and all of his judgments will be right, and there will be this eternal, unending age of peace and right judgment and justice and righteousness for all the nations to see, for bigger than just Israel. God haste the day that that comes. We've tried everything else. And earlier in our conversation about all this, I referenced people like Anna and Simeon, you know, old people at the time Jesus were born, who are like, oh, I can die now. I've seen the consolation of Israel. This, this baby, God in the flesh, the one who is promised, this is the one true king. This is the answer for what ails not just us politically, but for what ails humanity. As we inch our way forward into the New Testament and into Philemon now, it's all happening against the backdrop of a revolution that dwarfs the massive revolution we just spent all this time talking about with the Maccabeans. It dwarfs it in impact, and it the revolution is bloodless. There's no swords at all. The one time somebody tries to swing a sword as a part of this revolution, Jesus tells them to put it down and he heals the wound inflicted by the sword. No, Jesus is on the receiving end of the sword in this revolution that is to quickly follow the demise of the short-lived Tasmonian kingdom. And that sets in motion a revolution that is still going on to this day, that this podcast, that this conversation is still a part of, that would prompt even something as culturally and legally entrenched as slavery to be challenged, to be reimagined, for there to be a suggestion that there is something bigger than those temporal, worldly legal statuses. Indeed, the revolution that follows this disappointing, short-lived revolution of the Hasmonians, of the Maccabees is the big one. It's the one that God promised. And Philemon is going to be happening against the backdrop of that. This story raises tough questions when we put ourselves in the shoes of the Maccabeans and the characters who are part of this story, but knowing this story also completely tees up what is about to happen in the New Testament. And the New Testament is where we turn our attention next. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt, this is the 10 minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.