Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And today we're going to open with a participatory exercise. The rules of participatory exercise around here are as follows. One, I ask you a question, and then rule number two is as soon as you think you know the answer, you have to shriek it as loud as you can, regardless of social circumstances. And this part's not a rule, it's more of a recommendation. You should shriek that loudly in a Muppet voice. Okay, we've established the rules. Here is the question. I'm gonna read you something, and I want to see if you can get what it is. Here we go. Once upon a midnight dreary, I'm gonna pause there. I'm hoping that maybe one-tenth of one percent of you just blurted out Runaround by Blues Traveler featuring John Popper. It is not that, but I think you're cool for getting- I mean, I guess it kind of is that. So far it is that, but I'm gonna keep reading and you're gonna see it's something a little bit older than that. All right, I'm gonna keep going. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. Tis some visitor, I muttered, tapping at my chamber door. Only this and nothing more. All right, do you have it? Then go ahead and shriek it. Great job. I heard your answer all the way over here. And also through time into the past when I'm recording this. It's The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. And I bet some of you had to memorize that when you were in school back in the day. But whether you had to memorize it or not, I bet there is one word that stands out to you from this poem. This word appears 11 times over the course of this poem, I think. I counted it up a while back. I think that's right. And the meaning of the poem hinges on how you understand this word, how you interpret this word. What is it? It's another, it's another participation thing. You gotta shriek it like a Muppet. That's right. It's never more, nevermore. Quoth the raven, nevermore, with such name as nevermore. Then the bird said, nevermore, of never, never more, menton croaking, nevermore. And it goes on and it goes on. And sometimes the best, richest, smartest, deepest water stuff is written that way, and it's worth taking the time and putting in the effort to try to really get to the bottom of what that one pivotal word means. Likewise, we're looking at something exactly like that at the beginning of John, except here the word isn't nevermore, the word is word. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him, all things were made. Without him, nothing was made that has been made. Now look, we cheated ahead yesterday, and I was like, look, it's Jesus. You know, in case you don't listen to any more episodes of this podcast, in case you're like, this is dumb. I hate participation exercises and poetry and yelling and Muppets and blues traveler. And I'm never listening to this program again. Well, just in case that's you, I just want you to know, hey, on your way out the door, the word is Jesus. I didn't want you to not know. So I cheated ahead on that yesterday. I cheated ahead on that now, but it feels like there's this very large meaning here behind the word word. And there's gotta be some reason that John doesn't open by just saying in the beginning was Jesus, and Jesus was with God, and Jesus was God. Jesus was with God in the beginning. The Holy Spirit, Christians believe, inspired the authors of the Bible to communicate exactly what God wanted to communicate. John knew who was going to read this. He surely had some idea of who his audience was going to be. Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and being somebody who had walked with Jesus and lived to a very old age, John decided not to say in the beginning was Jesus, and Jesus was with God, and Jesus was God. He chose to say in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Can you tell him repeating it so much that I'm trying to make it so that you accidentally memorize it if you don't have it memorized yet? There are going to be memory verses in this season. You won't have to do them. I can't make you do things. But I'm still going to try to trick you into memorizing them, even if you don't do the memory verses. So John knew who he was talking to. He had them in mind, and he decided that this should be the pivotal word. They're going to get this. This is going to pique their interest. This is going to make it make sense. The same way Poe was like, nevermore. That's the ticket. That's what's going to make this intrigue and enchant my audience. This is going to take them down the rabbit hole. And this is what's going to hold the whole thing together and make this poem work. It looks like Poe was right because we're still reading The Raven. It even more so looks like John calculated right under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Because here we are 2,000 years later, and I'm saying this is like the best thing that's ever been written ever. So who was John writing to? And why wouldn't we just imagine that all the Bible is written to, you know, everybody? Well, in the biggest sense, yeah, every book of the Bible is written to everybody. But also, the Bible is an anthology. Christians believe it's a God-guided anthology, a God-collated anthology. But Christians rightly also believe that clearly every book of the Bible was written to someone in the first place. The last season of this podcast was on the book of Philemon. Well, Philemon was clearly written by a guy named Paul with the help of a protege named Timothy to a guy named Philemon, who had a slave named Onesimus who ran away, and so Paul wrote Philemon, a Christian, a letter to say, hey, you need to receive him back, not just as a slave, but as more than a slave, as a brother. So in that sense, that little letter, that little Bible book of Philemon that we just got done studying around here, was clearly written from Paul to Philemon. But also it was written to us. We're supposed to read it. We're supposed to learn things about God from it. It's in the Bible. Well, the first four books of the second half of the Bible, called the Christian New Testament or just the New Testament, are called the Gospels. And I know that's old hat to a lot of you, but for some of you, that's probably new information. So the first half of the Bible, you get a whole bunch of stuff that follows the Jewish people, the descendants of Abraham. And it follows them all the way from when God first calls Abraham early on in Genesis, particularly in Genesis 12, right on through the centuries, all the way up through all the different empires, the Egyptians and the Assyrians and the ancient Babylonians, and then the ancient Persians, and then the Bible leaves off a few hundred years before the birth of Jesus, just a bit before Alexander the Great comes on the scene. So the Old Testament goes quiet, Alexander the Great comes on the scene, the whole world turns Greek, then the whole world turns Roman. The Roman Empire is this brand new thing, and then Jesus is born in one of these little client king states, one of these little outlier provinces of the Roman Empire, and he's born in a remarkable way that fulfills a whole bunch of prophecies and predictions and story arcs from the old half of the Bible, the Old Testament or the Jewish scriptures. And he lives and he teaches in such a way that is compelling, like nobody else on earth had ever been, full stop, nobody even close. He didn't teach like all the other religious teachers that have come and gone. He taught as one who had actual authority, and people who knew what authority looked like and knew what the just the squawking and the noise, like you can tell what the squawking and the noise is today. They could tell that Jesus was different. What he was teaching had teeth. It was otherworldly, but it made sense in this world. And you probably know, and if you didn't, you could probably deduce that that was very threatening to the religious establishment of the day. And eventually they found a way to have him killed. Three days later, just like he predicted, he comes back to life and hangs out and spends a whole bunch of time with the inner circle of disciples that he called and a whole bunch of other people. People see him, touch him, eat with him, hang out with him, listen to him, talk with him. And then after not too long, he ascends to the right hand of the Father and imparts God the Holy Spirit to his followers. And the Holy Spirit miraculously builds up the church and empowers Christians, and Christianity goes all over the world, and that's basically the story of the New Testament. Well, people were pretty curious about exactly how that went down because the Jesus thing, the word thing, was gigantic. No doubt lots of people knew, well, the Romans put him to death, and the Jewish religious leadership did not like him very much. But normal people, outsiders, even a whole bunch of smart people, even discreetly, some of the religious leaders who were supposed to technically not like him, they all did like him. They thought there was really something to him. And his disciples and all these other people who saw him, they're saying he's not dead. They're saying he's alive, and they can back it up with these miracles being performed by the Holy Spirit. All over the Roman Empire, people wanted to know who is Jesus, what actually happened here, and further, people wanted to know, where do I fit? Is the Jesus thing for me? They had heard rumors it might be. Heck, I imagine that there's probably a whole bunch of us involved in this conversation who were here for exactly the same reason. This wasn't just a phenomenon that lasted for a few months or years after the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It's still going. We're still living in this story. So, understandably, there was a lot of demand for people to write down accurate accounts of what exactly happened. And it's no surprise that the first four books of the New Testament all tell the story of Jesus, his teaching is life, his death, his resurrection, his ascension, all of that stuff. And at first glance, going through the Bible, one might be like, well, why do we need four of these? It seems like you could just have one mega book by one guy, and that would be good enough. But it makes sense to have four because I mean, think about it. If somebody was claiming something really dramatic that kind of defies the laws of time and space, would you be more compelled by four separate, very different people approaching that story with very different methodology but telling you the same story? Or would you be more compelled by one person telling you that story, even if they were really good at it? Well, I think you would take the four with four different methodologies. If somebody came along making such claims, would you be more compelled by one person from one ethnic background who speaks one language and lives life a certain way, being like, yeah, the god of everything showed up, and it makes perfect sense to people exactly like me? Or would you be more compelled if there were four articulations of that story from four very different people articulated to four very different audiences that would kind of encompass pretty much everybody? Well, I think you'd be more interested by the more global version of the articulation of this story. How does all of this relate to nevermore and the word word that we're trying to get to the bottom of to understand what's going on with John? Here's how. I would contend that if we want to get all the way to the bottom of what the word word means and why John chose it in these first few verses instead of just saying Jesus, and I do think it's pretty important that we do that to understand what he's doing here. I would contend that if we want to do that, we need to know who John is talking to, who he imagines is listening to this thing, in contrast with, say, maybe who the other three Gospel writers are imagining would be reading the accounts of Jesus they wrote. So tomorrow, what we're gonna do is quickly consider who the first three gospel writers were writing to. That's Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And then we're gonna try to nail down who John was imagining would be reading his book, because I think that's gonna help us get to the bottom of why he's using the word word so much and why so much of this early going of his book hinges on that word and that concept. All right, that's plenty for now. You know what we're doing tomorrow. I'll see you then. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.