Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast, and I tell you what, I have been enjoying sporting documentaries lately. And you know, obviously the big appeal of sports is that two teams meet on the field of metaphorical battle at a scheduled time, and there will be a result, and history will be made, and nobody knows what's gonna happen. It's drama in real time. I'm a sucker for that. It kind of tickles the same part of my brain as history stuff does. But it all looks so simple when you watch those games. They played, there was a score, somebody won, somebody lost, somebody got hurt, oh no, and then it's over and you move on. But what I like about these documentaries, like The Last to Dance, that told the story of the Chicago Bulls run of dominance in the 1990s, or this new one that just came out with my childhood football hero John Elway, or one I watched about the rivalry between the Colorado Avalanche and the Detroit Red Wings. What I like about these is they show you the massive complexity of what is going on behind the scenes. And when you just look in a box score, when you look in the internet, you're like, who won that game that day? It is all so simple. This is how much points everybody scored from quarter to quarter. This was the final score, these were the records, the end. But of course, so much more is going on. And these documentaries capture that. Likewise, I feel like the last couple of weeks of working our way up to the time of the letter of Philemon in the New Testament has been another one of those lessons in reality of just how complicated stuff is. If you were one of the ones who were lucky enough to have a world sie or a Western Civ class in high school or college, and you think back to the part about basically Alexander the Great up to the New Testament, it is probably kind of a blur because sort of how it gets treated. 333, Alexander the Great whips the Persians, and then a bunch of Greek stuff happens or something in there somewhere, and then Julius Caesar got stabbed in 44 BC. It's like 300 years later, and then there was a Roman Empire after that. And then you just you gotta hurry on because the professor's already behind, and that's it. But what we found, digging into it just a little bit together, is that this is a very complex thing that was going on from the arrival of Alexander to the writing of the book of Philemon. That 400 years saw the map shaken up and rewritten a gajillion times over. And we just focused on one little town, Colossae. We found, depending on how you count it, six, seven, eight, if you count Pergamemnon, the one we talked about yesterday, flags that flew over just this one little town. Who are these poor people gonna be when we encounter them in the New Testament? I mean, these poor Colossians are made of a little bit Hittite, a little bit sea people, a little bit Phrygians, a little bit Sumerians, a little bit Lydian, they're a little bit Persian, they're a little bit Alexander the Gradian, they're a little bit Seleucid, they're a little bit Ptolemaic, they're a little bit Pergamemnonish, Atolitish, they're a little bit Roman. Heck, they're a little bit Jewish because a whole bunch of Jews got relocated there. I mean, it's just so much more dramatic than the box score, is the point. The box score version of this story would be there is a town called Colossae. It is very, very old. It was sort of its own thing. Then there were Persians, then there were Greeks, then there were Romans, then there was the Christian era, and Paul wrote some letters to them. No, it is way more dynamic than that. So right now we're doing our best to hold all of that in mind. We're trying to treat this more like a an in-depth behind the scenes sports documentary than just a quick glance at a box score. And with all of that in mind, as you'll recall, around 130 BC, the puppet kingdom of Pergamemnon is done. It's lost all of its political power. And their last king reads the writing on the wall. Pun, not really intended, but also kind of intended. I mean, reads the writing on the wall is always an appropriate thing to ascribe to somebody who's the last king of an empire before it goes away. The last king of Pergamemnon in 130-ish BC reads the writing on the wall and is like, we're not even a real kingdom. We're basically already Roman. We can't keep this thing. I don't want bloodshed. I'm just gonna donate my kingdom to Rome. And that's what he does. Nobody kills anybody in order for Rome to take control of Colossae and this oft-forgotten kingdom of Pergamemnon. It just gets donated, and then that's the end of that. Well, Rome is still a republic in 130 BC, but it's a republic that isn't going real well. There's a couple of brothers who come along, they're collectively called the Gracci, Gaius, and Tiberius Gracchus are their names. And they're like, look, Rome used to it used to work. There used to be a lot of mineral resources for everybody, gold and silver. If you served in the army, that used to mean land. But something happened here in the 100s BC. And now if you serve in the army, you finish up and you're poor and you don't own land anymore. And all of a sudden, gangs were popping up in Rome of all of these old veterans from the legions, and the local Roman police couldn't do anything about that. So you basically had these job of the hut style gangsters running Rome effectively, and the Senate was like, please cooperate. At times, the Senate is bribing these gangs to help keep order in Rome. It really was a horrible situation. And so, wave after wave of reformers come along. Usually these are people from the lower classes in the late 100s, and they're like, hey, we got to change the rules or people are going to rise up, it's all going to break. And the upper crust senatorial class are like, no, we're not going to do that. And further, we're going to hire assassins to kill people who propose this, which they do. Eventually, it leads to a situation where one Roman commander, Sulla, leads troops against Rome and another Roman commander, Marius, and the rivalry between Marius and Sulla spills all the way over into the first century BC. Ultimately, Sulla is given a dictatorship for a little while in order to try to bring about his old republican reforms. He wants to make things look Roman again, like before stuff went wrong. But the problem is the infrastructure isn't there. The reforms that the Gracci were proposing really actually did need to happen. The Roman Republic was kind of breaking from the ground up, even as it was expanding. So Sola tries to make everything old school Republican-y again, and then he just quits and gives back power and goes and retires and lives to a ripe old age in his villa. But it doesn't fix things. That leaves a power vacuum, and there's an informal arrangement between three big players you've heard of, that being Crassus, Pompeii, or Pompey, as some people put it, and Julius Caesar. This informal alliance keeps things afloat in Rome for a while, but eventually Caesar becomes too popular. Crassus dies in the East. The legend is he got gold dumped down his throat. I mean, if you gotta go, at least you get a bunch of free gold in the process. Pompey starts to view Caesar as a threat, and so Pompeii and the Senate are like, hey, Caesar, you gotta come back to Rome. Uh make sure to leave your armies behind. We just need to talk about some stuff. And Caesar's like, no, I'm gonna bring my army because I think you're gonna kill me. And so then he does that. He crosses the Rubicon with his army, which is a big no-no, and then Pompey and the Senate have to run away. They barely escape Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar ends up being named the dictator for life, but that only lasts for about a year. And then in 44 BC, of course, famously, Julius Caesar gets stabbed to death by Marcus Junius Brutus and his buddies. And then we get two phases of a civil war after that that ultimately ends at the Battle of Actium, where Julius Caesar's godson Octavian defeats the forces of Antony and the queen of the old Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt. Her name was Cleopatra, and then Antony and Cleopatra go and commit suicide by Cobra. That all happens in 31 and 30 BC. And then in 27 BC, the Senate gives Octavian the title of Augustus. And by giving him this all-encompassing, all-powerful title, that effectively ends the Roman Republic. Those aren't the rules anymore. Now an emperor is going to have supreme power and make decisions about how the things are going to work. If this sounds like the Star Wars prequels, it's supposed to. George Lucas was trying to channel a lot of the late Roman Republic, Julius Caesar, values of the Republic, crushing evil of the Empire stuff. He's kind of trying to half-tell that story and half-tell a story about, I think, the American Empire and the invasion of Iraq and stuff. But there's some Roman undertones there, if you happen to catch those along the way. All Star Wars theorizing aside, we have now arrived. This is a big moment for us. With the crowning of Augustus and the establishment of the Roman Empire, you and I have now completed a journey through history, a journey through the multiple flags that flew over Colossae, a journey through the buildup of time to this moment, which the Bible describes as the fullness of time. There was something special about this. Maybe not because of Augustus, maybe not because of this assassination or that assassination, but somehow the Bible holds out the way history unfolded as God working to orchestrate all of those things, all the stuff we've talked about that seem chaotic into this moment that isn't chaotic, that was designed and planned all along for Jesus to come into the world born of a woman, just like it talks about in Galatians 4. So we've earned it. We've done the work to try to understand all of this. Tomorrow is our last day on this 10 flags over colossa conversation that we're having, or our trying to understand the fullness of time conversation that we're having that leads us up to the moment in the 60s A.D. under the reign of the Emperor Nero, where the letter of Philemon is going to be written. Looking forward to rounding that out with you, Manana. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.