Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and I am hoping you can help me out with something here. I'm trying to figure out if I might have been the victim of an elaborate repeated prank, or if this thing is real. So here's what has happened to me in the past. I am a smartphone user. I'm thinking about not being a smartphone user anymore. I've got a little turquoise over there on my desk that is all set up and that I've made a little bit of use of, and I rather like it. I think that a lot of the things that make me feel bad would quickly go away if I just hurled this smartphone in my right hand into a lake, and indeed I am taking steps in that direction. It's harder than I thought. I kind of feel like Isledir at the beginning of Lord of the Rings during the prologue. Throw it into the fire. No. I really like my smartphone. I like it a lot. It makes me feel bad, but it also makes me feel good. Why should I get rid of it? At any rate, that's not the thing I need your help with. Here's what I need your help with. Several times, uh not recently, but maybe like, you know, eight or ten years ago, I would get a really big update on my smartphone. You know, like an hour that it would be offline downloading this new software and putting in like a whole new operating system or something, right? A huge update. And then it would come back online and I would have to recalibrate my GPS. Now, to me, this sounds like what we call a fool's errand, which is like a prank you play on somebody. Like, hey, run downstairs and get me the electric hammer, or go and get me the left-handed crescent wrench, like you know, stuff like that. Where give me the run in there and grab the blinker fluid, kiddo. I need uh about a liter of blinker fluid. I have to take this call. Yeah, just run in there. Dad, there's no such thing as blinker fluid. Hmm, you know, fool's errand. So maybe this is a fool's errand where I would get this memo and it would say, you have to recalibrate your GPS. And then a picture would pop up of like a dude and he's holding the phone at arm's length, and then some arrows to guide you would appear on the screen, and it would be like, you have to make a big giant figure eight with your phone to recalibrate because of this new operating system or this new software update we put in. Do it, and I'd do it, and it'd be like, do it harder. And I'd be like, I'm doing it pretty hard. And the machine would be like, harder. I'd be like, I don't, I can't make bigger loops, make make your loops bigger, move your hips and stuff. Like it maybe didn't say exactly that, but that's how I felt because those arrows blinked really hard at me. And then finally, you know, I'm wiggling this thing around, like my butt and my hips and my back and all of this stuff. Like maybe if I go outside and do this, you know, and I'm like, yeah, I'm shirtless because you know it's getting ready to take a shower, so I should have put on a shirt. Now I'm out there in the cul de sac and I'm doing all of these gyrations, people start laughing at me, and then eventually the phone's like, okay, you're calibrated, you're fine. Is that real? Because it feels like that might not be real, and it feels like I might have got pranked a lot, or maybe it was real. I don't know. I could talk myself into it. I like the idea of you got this phone, it had one set of operating commands. It just was the thing that informed everything about how the phone works, and then we swapped it out with new software. Maybe you'd have to recalibrate to the new software. I don't know. I can tell you what does make sense to me, though, is that in the first half of the book of Colossians, you've got a software update. It's a very massive update that Paul dumps into the brains of the Colossians. And the software update is as follows: it replaces an old iteration of the Colossian brain that was a fusion brain built of a whole bunch of different assumptions all mushed together into a thing that was kind of incoherent. It replaced that with a supremacy of Christ operating system. That's the first half of Colossians. Then the second half of Colossians is the recalibration process. So I kind of picture as the Colossians were reading the last two chapters of this book. Maybe they're like hips are moving around and their waist and they're like doing the figure eight. Maybe not. The point is this it is a pretty significant software update to embrace the idea that Christ is supreme over everything, and it's going to take a minute to recalibrate. We've been talking about that recalibration section of Colossians for a couple of days, but now we're getting to the part here at the very end that is the recalibration that hits really close to home, and that the book of Philemon is an extension of. And that is, well, it hits, I mean, it hits close to home because it is the stuff about literally the home. And well, here's how hard it hits. I'm about to read a verse that some people find really irritating. I would invite you not to listen to this little passage I'm about to read from Colossians 3. With recent social fighting in mind, I would invite you to just think about this passage and think, well, if everybody on this list did everything on this list that they were told to do with purity of heart and they did it with excellence, would that be better or worse than how things are currently? Here we go. This passage is a recalibration for everyone. So if it makes you uncomfortable, no, it should be having that effect on everybody else too. Wives. Submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and don't be harsh with them. Children obey your parents and everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they'll become discouraged. I think it's interesting that on that list the the the dudes get two call-outs, the ladies get one, and the kids get one. Yeah, I am not entirely culturally unaware. I have heard rumors that this passage has ruffled some feathers, and that this is one of those where you know, often there's a bit of a playbook here where people when they're frustrated with parts of the Bible, you will hear people deploy the following kind of construct of a phrase. It'll be like, Well, yeah, that passage is in the Bible, but that passage has been used to inflict so much hurt. And it's very passive language. Like, who is the one using this? What is the hurt? How has that been done? It's kind of the sort of thing that you can't really disprove because it, I mean, at some level, it is true. But also, such thinking is very captive in the moment and is not super productive for actually thinking about what the text says. So, again, I would invite us in this recalibration passage to just think about what would happen if everybody did this. Would it be better than how things currently are? Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and don't be harsh with them. Well, if both parties are doing that really well, everybody is gonna get what they want, assuming that that, I mean, really what's being described is mutual submission. Ephesians 5 spells that out a little bit more clearly. Yeah, I'm not gonna go read it. You can read it. It's not too tough, it's right over there. I use that exact passage in most of my weddings. Children, obey your parents. Oh, I think things would be better if more of that happened. Fathers, be good dads. Don't embitter your children, or they'll become discouraged. Okay, in general, under ideal circumstances, as is the case with most of these types of proverbial teachings in the Bible, there is some assumption of under ideal circumstances. That actually sounds like a pretty good list. And that concept of husbands loving their wives, like Christ laid himself down for the church, that's the Ephesians 5 language, and wives submitting to your husband, that picture of mutual submission and marriage, I think that's kind of what actually healthy marriage looks like. So I kind of dig it. I'm not turned off or troubled at all by the recalibration so far. So I don't know. Like if households are weird, if you've seen difficult stuff modeled, if you've been on the receiving end of somebody who wasn't doing these things well, I hurt scrambles our radar. It makes us read the text in weird ways and what hits closer to home than home, right? So look, yeah, earlier I understand my tone was a little bit dismissive of people who don't like this passage. Now I want to take a bit of a conciliatory tone and say, I'm sorry for things that have hurt. I don't like that. I've seen a lot of it, I get it. I still think this is right, true, from God, and an ideal model for how everybody most gets what they want, most thrives, and most is set up to be supported by the people they love and live a life honoring to God. I'm not going to flesh it out much more than that because Colossians isn't really the book we're working on. But this next passage gets into something that it's trickier for us to relate to at this point in history because the pretty much nobody listening to this has ever owned a slave or been a slave, acknowledging there are some dark corners of things that might have touched your lives that go on in the world today. But for the most part, this is going to feel really foreign. Let me read this next part of the calibration. Colossians 3, 22. Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, and do it not only when their eye is on you and to win their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you'll receive an inheritance from the Lord as your reward. It's the Lord Christ you're serving. Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for his wrong, and there is no favoritism. Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a master in heaven. Okay, let's run the same mental exercise we did on the home stuff a second ago. Would it be better than things currently are if everyone involved in slave master relationships did what is described in the passage I just read to you? Well, gosh, that's harder to answer. Because I mean, the answer I want to give is wrong question, bro. Like, what if we just don't have slavery instead? That would be better. And to that I would say, good job, alternate me. I totally agree. Yeah, the natural place for your brain to go in reading this passage is well, okay. Whereas in the previous passage, I don't really want the dissolution of the institutions talked about there. I just want them to work really well. I don't want the dissolution of marriage. I don't want the dissolution of men and women being things that are separate and different. I don't want the dissolution of wives and motherhood. I don't want the dissolution of parenthood. I don't want the dissolution of households. I don't want the dissolution of the relationship between kids and parents. We want all the institutions that are outlined in that previous passage to persist. We just want them to go well. And in the context of Colossians and the Christian life, we want them to be honoring to God, who is the one who ordained all of those institutions. But now that same interpretive thought process doesn't work as smoothly when we try to carry it over to this next passage. Because I don't want the institution of slavery to persist. In other words, we're looking at two aspects of the typical life of the home at the time that this letter was written, one of which transcends time and is positively ordained by and affirmed by God, and the other of which has not aged well, has existed in a lot of different contexts on a sliding scale of ugliness, and that we see hints, even in this same book of Colossians, but in other parts of the Bible, we see hints suggesting this isn't an ideal institution. This isn't the ultimate vision for the kingdom of God. So then what are we getting here with this whole slaves and masters thing? Should we read this as the Bible tacitly affirming that slavery is a good idea? And it's just, you know, here to offer a few tweaks on how to do it well? Should we read between the lines here and say, oh, wow, the tone kind of shifts from the home relationships to the slave relationship thing? And here, there's only so much ground you can take against this cultural backdrop. We should view this as being very progressive in light of the time that it was being written, and see this as the first steps towards something that would work better? Or should we read this as simply a practical acknowledgement of an institution that was inescapable at this time in history? And if this institution is going to exist, and we're not going to live in a fantasy land where we imagine we could just wad it up and throw it away with wishes and good feelings. Well, then what does it look like for people who are in this situation, all morality of it aside, what does it look like to get it right if you are in this inescapable proposition? And I will try to indelicately unpack more of that stuff, mana. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.