Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And if this is your first time ever here, welcome. Thank you for giving this a try. I really am honored. There's a lot of things you can do with your internet time. And to even come by and give this thing a look is uh that's a big deal to me. Thank you. I hope you like it. I hope you end up hanging around for a long time. Like those of you who have been here for a long time. Good to see you again. For those of you who are new, what we do on this program is in each season we pick a book of the Bible and then we just chip away at it a little bit each day. Every thing that raises a question or connects to other parts of history or the Bible or whatever, we can just go there and learn about it together in real time. So my hope is that those of you who are new to this will like it and at minimum press forward with us from this moment on. This is a great episode to pick up on. You'll be able to pick up on what we're doing and get up to speed really quickly here. Or maybe you'll like it so much that you'll pick an old season and go back and power through that as well on your own schedule and at your own pace. Whatever the case, welcome. Here's the great big grand reset coming into the book of Philemon. We say book, but really Philemon in its original form is a letter. It's a very short letter. It's only 25 verses long, is a tiny little book that even people who've been around the Bible for a long time sometimes maybe kind of forget, is in there. It's right at the end of the Bible. If you haven't been around this much before, the early part of the New Testament tells the story of Jesus and what his disciples did after that. But then the rest of the New Testament is made up of mostly letters of varying sizes that give us a sense of what happened with those early Christians when they formed churches. And those letters tell the story of really meaningful tensions that existed between the assumptions people had before they became Christians and the assumptions that they're now starting to embrace as they adopt Christian faith and try to emulate Jesus and the teachings of Christ. And understandably, there's some friction there because the, I mean, you're talking about thousands of years of history at this point that people could remember or had some sort of, yeah, there was cultural gravity there. It's pretty tough to just slam on the brakes and run in the different direction. You would expect these tensions to exist, and indeed they do. Philemon is a letter about the tension between the long-standing view of humans and their value and how much we should or shouldn't be defined by social or economic status, and this new Christian view of what makes a person a person and how valuable a person is and social standing and all of that stuff. And the friction here is intense because of the scenario that's in play. Philemon is a letter from the Apostle Paul to a Christian, a wealthy Christian named Philemon, who, like most people who had any money during the Roman Empire, owned at least one slave. What we figure out really early on is that Philemon had a slave named Onesimus, and Onesimus, very understandably, decided to run away. I guess good for that guy. I mean, I would like to think that's what I would do if I were a slave. And so Onesimus stole some stuff on the way out the door, it looks like, and he fled. And somewhere in his escape, he runs into the Apostle Paul, who is in prison, and Onesimus becomes a Christian. Well, then Paul and Onesimus decide that the best thing to do is for Onesimus to go back to Philemon, carrying a letter in hand from Paul that is going to urge Philemon to receive Onesimus back, quote, no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. The implications of this letter on the big grand gargantuan scale are huge. Slavery, it was such a deeply rooted institution, nobody was even thinking about slavery reform or maybe we should get rid of it. That wasn't on anybody's radar. Yet this little tiny letter of Philemon indicates that, oh man, if we follow the teachings of Christ out to the nth degree, that doesn't square real well with this institution on which sort of all of society is based. This letter is short, but it is a huge deal. Well, if we take it down from the gigantic level to the just human level with the characters involved, it's also a really big deal because the existence of this letter is setting up a reunion, a possible reconciliation between two parties that I don't think normally would be patching things up, that being a slave owner and a runaway slave. Yet that is exactly the assumption of the that's the scenario the letter sets up. Onesimus is going back to his former master's household with this letter in hand, voluntarily. I mean, death is one of the possible outcomes that could exist here, but maybe he'll be freed. Manumission is the fancy term for when a slave got freed in this context. What's going to happen? Well, we're going to unpack that as the season goes along. But for those of you who are brand new here, I want to tell you you know, what you've missed is just that, that set up right there to the point of you know, the friction of the reconciliation. We've kind of walked it right up to the point where verse one of Philemon starts with Onesimus knocking at the door with this letter in his hand. But the other thing that you've missed, and you might want to go back and catch it, maybe it's not for you. Either way, that's cool, is a big history run-up where basically we looked at the three biggest historical threads that are in play from beyond the Bible for the people of Colossae. That's where Philemon lived. It's a little town in Turkey and Asia Minor. We looked at the three big threads historically that make that all go, and we tracked that down over several episodes. So the first thread we worked through was the Judaism and Christianity historical thread. We looked at some Old Testament stuff. We spent a bunch of time on the oft-overlooked period between the Old and New Testament. And then we got into the age of Christianity, which obviously we're going to get into a lot more moving forward now. Then we went and followed the thread of the rise of Rome from the super ancient times when it was a republic all the way up to the time of being this flourishing brand new empire. That's the situation when the New Testament and the Book of Philemon is written. Then I wasn't sure I was going to do it, but I'm really glad we did in retrospect. We went and chased down the thread of all of the different eras of the little town of Colossae itself, where Philemon and Onesimus were from. And we looked at all the different eras of history there, all the different flags that flew over Colossae over the centuries and millennia, going all the way back to time immemorial and the age of legends, to the kingdoms of Phrygia, Samaria, Lydia, to the arrival of the Persian Empire in the 500s BC, to the arrival of Alexander the Great and his successive generals, and then the rise of Rome, which takes us all the way back to the other thread that we were following. If you don't know what all those things mean and there are some names in there you've never heard of, that's okay. For our purposes, the goal of the first part of this season was to take those three threads and pull on all of them, explore them, get them all kind of straightened out and nicely groomed into three separate chords of history. And then as the podcast goes along, we'll be able to weave those together, to braid those together into a single historical chord that is the history and the people and the culture of Colossae, which again includes Feinemann and Onesimus, the two main characters in view in this letter. So there we are. Those of you who are walking in for the first time ever to this podcast, you are up to speed sufficiently on this season. Those of you who just don't like the history run-up stuff are like, ah, let me know when we get into the part where we go verse by verse. Hey, we have arrived at that part and you are now reset and caught up with us. Those of you who did the deep dive into history with me and the culture stuff and all the background, thank you for doing that. I absolutely love that part of what we get to do together. But now, regardless of how we got here, regardless of how long we've been here, here we all are together. We understand a little bit about who this Philemon character is, we understand a little bit about who this Onesimus character is, we understand a little bit about this town and this culture and the history surrounding it. And now we're standing right alongside Onesimus, who's just knocked on that door. The initial shock of recognition on Philemon's face has come and gone. And I imagine as we're metaphorically standing here with Onesimus watching this reunion unfold, I imagine that Philemon is trying to formulate very carefully what he wants to say next. But Onesimus is like, Philemon, or maybe he even still calls him master. He gives him the pointer finger of gimme wait a minute, before you say anything, would you read this? And he hands Philemon this letter that he has in his left hand, the letter that we're about to explore together. And Philemon maybe looks a little nervously at Onesimus. He breaks the seal, and he unrolls the letter and he starts to scroll through it with his eyes. Every now and then Philemon glances up from the letter to meet Onesimus' eyes, who's just quietly and confidently waiting for Philemon to get through the whole thing so they can talk about what happens next in light of what Paul has written to Philemon. And now I want you to imagine the thing that happens in movies sometimes where time gets suspended or slowed down. And now Philemon is reading very slowly. And the insects in the yard are flying by very slowly. And while that pivotal moment of this tense reunion scene in the Bible is unfolding in slow motion, we're going to have time to jump back and look at a couple of the other most remarkable, memorable reunion scenes in the Bible, including one that I think is particularly analogous and relevant to the reunion you and I are witnessing between Philemon and his runaway slave Onesimus. And tomorrow we will leave Philemon's letter reading in slow motion while we go and dip back into earlier parts of the Bible to consider a couple of other famous reunion scenes. All right, we're all set up. I'm excited about it. I want to plant this in your brain on the way out the door, though. If you like to share this podcast with other people, but you have a friend and you're like, they don't like history. It was the boringest class in school. They wouldn't like the history stuff. Hey, you can have them jump in right here. And this episode right here, moving forward through season six on Philemon, could serve as a great launch point invitation point to pick up folks who you think might like to journey through the text itself together with us. All right, that's good for now. So glad you're all here. So excited for what we have tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.