Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast. And I think at some point in our grand massive history of talking about things and all the things and everything together, I have talked with you about twin movies. I don't even know if that's actually the right term for these, but over the course of my lifetime, I've observed that somebody at a studio, some executive maybe goes and does some homework on what people want to watch and what they'd be interested. Would you like to see a movie about George Wendt eating beans? And then they're like, oh, everybody wants to see this movie. And two studios at once go and develop basically the same film. The quick run of some of these that I have recently thought of. You got Armageddon and Deep Impact, basically the same movie came out basically the same year. Um I wrote these down, but I can't read my notes now. I don't even know what that one is, but I'm sure it was very, very interesting. Oh, yeah, the Attack the White House movies that came out like 10 years ago, Olympus has Fallen and White House Down. Why does anybody want either of those movies? I don't know. An executive did a demographic study and thought we would. We didn't. But those are twin movies. You got Wyatt Herp and Tombstone. You got Finding Nemo and the Vastly Inferior Shark's Tale. You have got um, oh, Iron Eagle and Top Gun are kind of twin movies. Mega Mind, Despicable Me. I'm throwing out a lot of these because I want one of them to ring a bell, or else the whole likewise thing I'm about to do isn't gonna make sense, and you're gonna be disappointed in the episode. So, probably one of those you've noticed along the journey of your movie viewing. Probably one of those you were like, hey, I feel like this one pairs really closely with this other one, even though it's not technically the same movie. Likewise, there's a bunch of books of the Bible that also really twin up nicely with other books, but not so much like the twin movies I'm throwing out where I mean the twin movies are just kind of knockoffs of each other and one is better than the other. I thought of the one. I thought of the one I couldn't read. It's Illusionist and The Prestige. Those are maybe the best twin movies ever because they were both really good. But in the Bible, you've got these twin books that really deeply complement each other or round out an idea, or one is sort of a crucial interpretive cipher for the other. And surprise, I have also written down some examples of these. Number one, Jonah and Nahum. Because in the book of Jonah, everybody knows about the book of Jonah. Like even if you're brand new to Bible stuff and this season on Philemon is your first time ever, you still heard of Jonah, because it's the one with the whale, the giant fish, and he gets swallowed. And in that four-chapter book, it ends with Jonah finally reluctantly going to the great Assyrian city of Nineveh, and he half-heartedly preaches the most minimal message that he could be expected to preach, because he wants God to judge them. But then they do a surprising thing. They all repent, and the wicked Assyrians seem like they're let off the hook by a gracious God, and the book ends with Jonah pouting and looking like a chump. Well, that kind of, you know, you want some resolution there. What happened? Because we know Assyria didn't just turn good, they turned bad again shortly after that. The repentance didn't stick. Well, the book of Nahum is the twin book with Jonah that resolves that. Nahum is a Catharsis book, a minor prophet that celebrates that the Assyrians finally got what was coming to them because they really were horrible, and some kind of ancient justice needed to be done by God. I can't take this long on all of my twin books, but I do have a few more. Here we go. Matthew, Galatians, and Hebrews all cooperate really well. Obviously, we've done two of those on this podcast over the years. Maybe someday we'll get to the third. Hebrews is a lot to bite off in this format, but I'm still tempted. All of them deal, they're all connective tissue with the Old Testament. They're all working through how the Old Testament brings us to Jesus and how even characters like Abraham in the Old Testament and all the everything that's happening theologically there. It's not like we start over in the New Testament. This is Jesus is a completion of all that stuff from the Old Testament. So those books twin up or triplet up nicely. Then here's a surprise one: twin books from the Old Testament, Job and Ecclesiastes. And I know at first glance you're like, well, those don't seem the same at all, because in Job, you have a guy who goes through incredible suffering and it's very long. And in Ecclesiastes, you have a guy who is enjoying incredible success, and then it's very short. But when you think about it, they twin up nicely because Job is a book about where is God in the face of terrible suffering when everything has gone wrong? But then Ecclesiastes is about the other end of the human experience. Where is God and what is the point when everything keeps going right and there's unbelievable success and comfort? Both bring you back around to the same question. What is the point? What is the cosmic force behind all of this? What is God doing here? So those are twin books. Esther and Ruth are both little asides that come out of larger historical stories in the Old Testament to pinch zoom in on a character that might otherwise be overlooked, but who God used in a really significant way? And then Jeremiah and Habakkuk, I think, twin up really nicely. Jeremiah has a whole bunch of oracles of God's judgment against his people, as well as some nice stuff. You know, God's not going to forget you. But Habakkuk is the twin book that asks the obvious question. Well, God, how come you judge the way you do? How come you didn't stop us from getting so bad that you needed to judge us? And why are you judging us with a people group who are even worse than us? Those are reasonable questions a person might ask God in light of what Jeremiah is about. Here's the point the Bible is massively symmetrical. And I've been over this thing and over this thing and over this thing a jillion times. And the more I do it, the more I come away feeling like if you took any part of this thing out, you would really be depriving yourself. At first glance, it seems like, well, you got 66 books, and they all seem nice in their own way. You can make a case for why each one is in there. But when you do your second pass at it and you start thinking about how one book, seemingly disconnected from another book, really props it up and fills in a lot of the gaps or answers the next logical question. Well, then the symmetry of the whole thing starts to come together even more. And well, we have a twin book here that is in the shadows in the background this season. And we've been talking about it a lot. So it's not like I didn't do the drum roll here or anything. You know exactly where this is going. This season is on Philemon. And what is our favorite town for the purposes of this season? It is the formerly great but now starting to fail town of Colossae. It is the former regional Colossus town of Colossae that is now being overshadowed by a couple of new up-and-coming Colossus towns of Hieropolis and Laodicea. But Colossae, it gets its own letter, right? Colossians is written to the Church of Colossae. Philemon was a leader in that church, and it sure looks like both letters got delivered at the same time. It doesn't look like it, I can just say with confidence, both letters got delivered at the same time. And Onesimus, who is the letter deliverer and the subject of the book of Philemon, comes up by name in Philemon's twin book of Colossians. Now, if we just had Philemon in the Bible and we didn't have Colossae, we'd be left guessing at a lot more of these details about what's going on here. We'd have a tougher time reconstructing the scene and imagining the pressures beyond the 25 verses we get in Philemon. But we do have Colossians and we are able to cobble together the larger story. We're able to cobble together some relational connections. There's a lot of names, especially at the end of Colossians, again, including specifically Onesimus, who Paul specifically says is going to bring you all up to speed, which just as a side note, I think is so fascinating. Let me just read this to you. I think I've read it to you before, but here it is again. The part that mentions Onesimus in Colossians says, Tychicus will tell you all the news about me. He's a dear brother, a faithful minister, and a fellow servant of the Lord. I'm sending him to you for the express purpose that you may know about our circumstances and that he may encourage your hearts. He is coming with Onesimus, our faithful and dear brother, who is one of you. They will tell you everything that is happening here. Isn't that interesting? Paul has chosen as a messenger to bring everybody up to speed about very important news. A runaway slave who he is sending back with a second letter in his hand, which is a letter urging some sort of reconciliation and reframing of his relationship with his former master, Philemon. I think that's fascinating. And then we get further into it, and some of Philemon's household are going to get mentioned as we get deeper into Colossians, but also Colossians serves as a beautiful twin book, not just logistically, but thematically. Colossians, like every book in the New Testament, was written for a reason. You don't have to be some sort of Bible genius. I mean, you shouldn't be intimidated by this stuff. You can do all of this yourself. You don't have to be a degree holder in this kind of subject matter, able to read it in the ancient languages, to be able to just skim through the books of the New Testament, and pretty much you can get to the end of every one on your first pass and be like, all right, well, that's why that one was written. Well, that's why that one was written. Remember how easy it was to figure out why Galatians was written? It's so easy to figure out why Philemon was written. Well, same deal with Colossians. There was a serious theological issue as we look through Colossians and see what Paul is trying to address with this fledgling church of Colossae. What we figure out is that it probably would have been weird and tacky and not that effective for Paul to have just tagged on the Philemon bit at the end. So, anyways, guys, I know you're having trouble with liking other gods and kind of trying to make a fusion of like a Greek, Phrygian, Lydian, Sumerian, Persian, Alexandrian, Ptolemaic, mishmash, Roman religion that sort of includes Jesus a little bit. Well, you can't do that because Christ is supreme over all of creations, maker and sustainer of all things. So Jesus is the only one and the only way. Also, uh Philemon, you gotta free your slave, the whole deal with Onesimus. Let's just do this in front of everybody. I mean, it'd be weird. It would be tacky to write Colossians, which is meant to deal with a certain set of theological questions, and then at the end, after writing a really nice, really effective letter, just call out one of the leaders of the church for something should be happening discreetly, just as a matter of respect, but also for something that is just far more likely to have a successful outcome if it is handled in a separate letter. So what we need to do over the next few days is get a little better sense of this twin book that goes alongside Philemon, get a little better sense of how Paul knew these people, how much he didn't know these people, what he was trying to speak to. And then at the end of that, I don't think it'll take much more explaining than we've already done, to see why Philemon needed to be its own letter, separate from Colossians, but how the themes of Colossians, if they were still ringing in the ears of Philemon when he got his letter, how Colossians wouldn't just be a complimenting book to Philemon for you and I as we read it after the fact, but how Colossians would be a complimentary book for Philemon, and how what Paul wrote in the larger letter to the bigger church would make Paul's appeal in Philemon more likely to be well received. I'd be interested to hear what you've come across in terms of twin movies. I know I'm forgetting a bajillion of them. I like these kinds of little coincidences along the way. So we have an ongoing conversation at patreon.com slash the T Mbh podcast. It's always linked down below. You don't have to support this program to be a part of that conversation. You can sign up for free. I mean, it's there's not really much to it at all. And then, I mean, there's just nothing other than, hey, you're over there and you can be a part of the conversation with people who are deeply invested in this program and who are really fun to talk to. We do a new discussion thread each week. We try to update that so that you're getting linked to it in the show notes every time. But Patreon is really easy to navigate as a free user or as a supporter. Thanks everybody who does support, by the way. That's why this thing exists. But either way, it's really easy to navigate. And we just have a discussion thread that runs for five days of podcasts, and then we start a new one. So it's kind of easy to stay current and relevant with what we're talking about. So if you do happen to make your way over there, oh, I'm all kinds of interested to see what you come up with in terms of twin movies. I forgot. More on Colossians next time around. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this in easy.