Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast, and today is the last day of a big giant history run-up in preparation for working through each verse of the little late New Testament book of Philemon. But it hasn't really just been a history run-up. It's not just a story for the sake of the story. I mean, really, the New Testament claims there is something special about the moment in which the New Testament happened. In Galatians 4, 4, it says, But when the time had fully come, or in the fullness of time, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law that we might receive the full rights of sons. Now, in the last season on Galatians, we unpacked a whole bunch of that theology about what God did in sending his son and all of that. If you didn't listen to that season, go catch it and you'll hear us work through some of the big obvious questions there. But so far in this season, we've been fixated on that first phrase. But when the fullness of time had come, the assertion here is that God owns time, God owns history, somehow, his sovereignty and what looks like human decision making, the will of nations and kings, the outcome on battlefields, all of these things are under his purview. And a verse like that in Galatians 4 sure gives us the impression that none of the stuff that happened in the ancient world was a surprise to God. Somehow he was moving history where he wanted it to go, and that there was a moment that was unique in history, not like all the other moments, but a perfect moment for that great event to happen, the event that bridges the gap between the eternal and the temporal, that bridges the gap between God and man, that bridges the gap between death and life. That is the incarnation of Jesus Himself. So the assertion of the Bible is that the stuff we've been looking at the last few weeks in this history run up to Philemon, it's not just history, it's God superintending his plan and picking his spot perfectly. You and I have put in a lot of effort toward understanding that spot and that moment. In particular for this season, we've been focused on one little town, our favorite town this season, that being Colossae, because that is the town to whom the letter of Philemon is addressed. And so we've broken it down into all the different seemingly chaotic, haphazard eras that have happened to the Colossians up to the time of Philemon, the era when the flag of the ancients flew over it, the era from 1200 to 676 BC, when the flag of Phrygia flew over it, the brief flag of the Sumerians flew over it from 676 to 620 BC, the proud, rich flag of the Lydians flew over it from 620 to 540, the Persian flag flew over it from 540 to 333, various Greek flags flew over Colossae from 333 to around 130, and then the whole kingdom was bequeathed by the last of those Greekish kingdoms to Rome around 130 BC. But again, as you're taking stock of all of these different eras that seem so chaotic, remember that the Bible holds all of this out as not being chaotic in the eyes of God, but as being somehow ordered and somehow all moving toward a unique point in history. So with all of that said, yesterday, we left off with Octavian, who will later be known as Caesar Augustus, winning the battle of Actium against his rivals Antony and Cleopatra. And then just a few years later, in 27 BC, the Senate grants Octavian the title of Augustus. He's the big winner. He has this whole giant empire that's his to do with as he pleases now. Well, what would you do if you got something that big? I suppose you'd want to know what you had. And so maybe it would make sense to call a whole bunch of censuses to figure out who lives in your new empire, who the people are that serve you, and who theoretically you're supposed to be serving and taking care of. And so he does just that. He calls a series of censuses. Perhaps the most famous of which is described thusly. In those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria, and everyone went to his own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem, the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. That's Luke chapter 2. You know how that story works out. Caesar Augustus is a really good leader. He runs things until AD 14. Bread and games, keep the people fed, keep the people entertained, was kind of his strategy for making the capital city of Rome work. He built a great administrative state that would function for a couple hundred years. I mean, really, he bought almost 200 years of peace with his victory in 31 BC at the Battle of Actium and establishing himself and then building out the state the way he built it. What he did is he kind of eliminated Rome as this giant, unpredictable, crazy wild card where the inner workings of the Roman court would have this chaotic ripple effect all across the world. And really for the first time since uh man, how far back do we go? 500, 600, 700, 800 BC? For the first time since the cruel Assyrians, or maybe even earlier, we have a situation where we have a powerful empire that dictates a whole lot of the ancient Near East, but there's not just chaos. I mean, this is maybe the most stable period in the history of the ancient world at such a scale. This era is called the Pax Romana, the Roman peace, and the entirety of the New Testament happens within the context of the Pax Romana. Now, when we use the term Pax Romana, that is not to say that there was only peace and no war during this time. I mean, there's still bloodshed, there were rebellions that needed to be put down. There is, of course, most famously the destruction of the second temple in 70 A.D. in Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans. But compared to the rest of Forever, this Pax Romana era really is remarkable and it runs all the way until the late 100s A.D. And again, the whole New Testament happens in the context of that. Augustus dies in 14 AD, so Jesus is born during the reign of Caesar Augustus. The next guy is Tiberius. Famously, you might remember that the Sea of Galilee was renamed the Sea of Tiberius in honor of him. He was a pretty good emperor early on, and then a pretty lazy, inattentive emperor toward the end. It is under the reign of Tiberius, 14 AD to 37 AD, that Pontius Pilate was appointed, and that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and resurrected. The day of Pentecost happened under the reign of Tiberius. Then after him, you get the very short-lived, like three and a half-year reign of Caligula. He was insane and crazy. And then from 41 to 54, we have Claudius. Claudius was a competent administrator, probably not real dashing. It sounds like he had some sort of physical ailment that held him back. Nobody thought he was going to be emperor, so they all trampled on him, and then he just emerged from the chaos after Caligula was assassinated. And what do you know? You get an okay reign. He was a no-nonsense kind of guy. He is mentioned in the New Testament. Let me see. Augustus is definitely mentioned in the New Testament, Tiberius is mentioned, and Claudius is mentioned as well. Claudius kicked the Jews out of Rome because he was like, we're just doing a complete expulsion of all these immigrants. I don't understand why y'all are the problem, but Claudius thought that the Jews were agitators in Rome. So he expelled them, and that is recorded both outside and inside the Bible. In 54 A.D., Claudius got poisoned and he died to death from that. And then Nero became emperor and he was goofball. He was a kid emperor starting at age 16, and he reigned from 54 to 68 A.D. It is under the reign of Nero that both Peter and Paul are executed. It is under the reign of Nero that Rome burns and Christians are blamed. And it is during the reign of Nero, this era when we're kind of settling into the idea of flamboyant, unpredictable, weird, larger-than-life, bombastic, goofball, bloody emperors. It is during this time that the book of Philemon is written. And I think for the sake of understanding Philemon, it is very important that you feel that last thing I said. During the reign of Augustus, remember, that's what we're talking about at the beginning of the New Testament. There's a lot of optimism. Oh, finally, peace. This instability has been going on for more than a hundred years with the reforms of the Graci, Sulla versus Marius, the chaos of the first triumvirate, oh, the assassination of Julius Caesar, and then two giant civil wars, the Battle of Actium, it's Rome versus Rome, the boundaries of the old world, including stuff like the Ptolemaic Empire and all the things you and I talked about in Asia Minor, Turkey, Phrygia, all of that. All the lines are getting redrawn, kingdoms are coming and going, it's just too much. My head is spinning. And then along comes Augustus. And he settles everything down. There's just going to be one guy now. I'm going to give you clear laws. Are you hungry? I'm going to make sure people get food. Are you bored? I'm going to make sure people are entertained. We have clear parameters. There's this massive show of strength. We're not going to be doing crap like this anymore. Tranquila. Everybody be calm. And I think people loved it. That was the vibe around the time of the birth of Christ. Then we saw the horror show of what can happen when all the power and goodwill earned by a good emperor like Augustus gets handed off to a complete fool like Caligula. Claudius stabilizes the ship a little bit from 41 to 54 AD, but then Nero takes over and he's a complete mess, a violent, bombastic goofball. So the change in mentality from the time where the New Testament starts to this new, very nervous moment that people are feeling now that we've had an insane emperor briefly in Caligula, and now it looks like we're going to have a long-term insane emperor under the reign of Nero. These are different worlds. The mindset between the time of Augustus and the time of Nero is as different as the mindset at the time of we're going to go whip the Nazis. Allied forces have landed. Newsreels from you know whatever that was 80 years ago and right now and the social issues that we deal with today, that I won't even bother to say in a microphone because I just don't want to get people mad. If you can picture how different the public brain of the world and attitudes about authority and international politics and everything was 80 years ago versus right now, then you can picture how dramatically the mindset of people had shifted from the beginning of the New Testament to the end of the New Testament. It isn't static, it isn't just the same thing. And Philemon is happening at the end of the New Testament against the backdrop of a mad king who, by his actions and words, is destabilizing things again and who is sort of bastardizing the idea of societal norms and the rule of law. I cannot overstate how long the shadow that Nero cast over the mind of people in the 60s AD was. Because there is an underlying legal and societal issue at the heart of the question of the book of Philemon. When these books of the Bible were written matters in terms of our ability to understand what's going on in the head space of the people who received the letter. This is intuitive to us when we think about stuff that happened in 2024 versus 2019 versus 2012 versus 1997. Within Living Memory, you just feel all of these different moments, all of these different little micro-eras in your lifetime. We can get there and we can apply that same logic. We can develop that same sense and intuition with a little bit of work, even as we look at the different eras and moments in the history of the New Testament. And with that said, I have a declaration. We are now historied up. For those of you who like that kind of thing, and it's kind of why you're here, high five. Thank you for caring about it. It's fun to find like-minded people whose brains come at this the same way I do. But to those of you who are not wired by me and you're like, I don't actually need that much history. I'm good. Hey, thank you for trusting me and just hanging with me either way. The payoffs are going to keep coming. And right now, just in general, the biggest payoff is that concept I brought up the other day from Galatians 4, the fullness of time, bro. Look at how all of this worked together. You go and you think about any of those other moments that we've studied along the way for Jesus to drop into, for Paul to drop into, for the early church to drop into, for the letter of Philemon on such a sensitive topic to drop into. I don't think it works as well if that happens during the March of Alexander. I don't think that works as well if it happens during the mad scramble for power of the diadochi. I don't think the New Testament works as well against the backdrop of the Punic Wars or the gigantic social upheaval and political upheaval of the late Republic and all of the drama with Caesar and Pompeii and Marius and Sola and the Graci. I don't think it's the right moment. The whole Old Testament, the whole new, a whole Bible paints this picture of a God who maneuvers the pieces around and who somehow superintends all of this incredibly complex story, all of this drama to accomplish his purposes. And he spikes the football in the letter of Galatians with that phrase, the fullness of time, as a way of saying, saying an accident, when this happened was on purpose. It would not have been the same if it had happened somewhere else. So God ordained that it was going to happen here. If God ordained all this history and he wanted it to happen at this time after all this other stuff had come and gone for his purposes, well, then whether history's your bag or not, it seems like it'd be really valuable to try to understand that moment that is called the fullness of time as best as we can. And I think it's going to be really fruitful as we read the first verse of Philemon together, Manyana. Y'all are great. I'm so thankful for all of you. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.