Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and I have some bad news today. If you listen there, you can hear that sound. That is a cough drop wrapper. And now, sad cough drop is in my mouth. I know that a bunch of you really hate it when I have things in my mouth when I'm recording the podcast. I don't blame you. I totally get it. I would prefer to avoid that as well. I mean, every now and then I have to, in service of learning about the Bible together, like I had to have that pop-tart a couple weeks ago, not just because it's delicious, but because it illustrated a very important point that couldn't be illustrated without it. But normally I wouldn't want to have something in my mouth while I'm talking into a microphone either. I don't blame you for being irritated by that. I wouldn't want to listen to a guy with a cough drop in his mouth either, but I cannot get well. It's been two weeks. Cough drop is in. Now we can actually talk about Bible things. And here's how we're going to get to that question, two-part question rather, for you. Part one, who's the most famous person you ever met in the wild? Just down about, not like a meet and greet or anything, not at their event. You're just at a thing and you're like, oh, I know that person. They're famous. And question number two, how did that go? I mean, if you ever tell somebody, I met somebody famous, what's the natural follow-up question? What were they like? That's what we all want to know, right? Because we're all normal people who live in, unless you're famous and you're listening to this, in which case this has got to feel really weird for you. But for all of us who are normal people, it's kind of crazy when we run into somebody from the upper, upper, upper, upper echelon of fame and wealth and influence and power. Then the thing I think we all want to know is what does that do to a person? Do they continue to be normal and relatable? Especially if you've seen that person and stuff. And you're like, I think I'd like them. Well then you hope if you meet them, they'd be relatable. I hope if I ever run into John Krasinski, we're as good a friend as it seems to me in my brain like we probably ought to be. Also, because I think that of John Krasinski, I'm sure if I ever do run into him, I'll be weird and off-putting, and we'll never be the kind of friends that obviously we should be. So you want to hope that people who've been touched by fame will still be relatable and normal. We even have a phrase that we use for this. It's one of the highest compliments you can give a famous person when describing an interaction with them. You say, they were really down to earth. Well, that means they're still a human, means they're not arrogant. Cool, they can relate. I know somebody, for example, who ran into Anthony Hopkins at an empty diner on Route 66 out in the wilds in Arizona. And they sat together and they just had a lovely chat. They didn't become best friends, but it was a great dinner. On the other hand, my niece's and nephew ran into a Marvel superhero actor, and he was just rude and unnecessarily gruff and impatient, and he could have done better. You know, of course, people are busy and they have things going on, and you're probably, you know, it would be tough to be famous, I'm sure. But everybody wants to know were they down to earth? Could they relate? And likewise, in John chapter one, we're kind of running that exact same equation, but with God, because we have these four movements in the prologue of John chapter one that talk about the awesomeness and the glory and the light and the life and the power of God. And it is all very impressive. Movement number one in the prologue is about the the word, the Lagos character, who is Jesus, being God Himself, timeless, eternal. Movement number two in the prologue is about the word, the Lagos, Jesus, being fully participatory in creation, making everything that has been made out of nothing. That's pretty impressive. Then movement number three in the prologue is about how the word, the Lagos, Jesus, is the revelation of light and truth and life to humankind, to the whole world. So as we're getting toward the home stretch of the prologue in the Gospel of John, we've got three movements in the prologue that really scale up the grandiosity of Jesus, of the word of God. I mean, he's so very impressive and powerful and other, so much further above us than the most famous person you've ever met. And whether somebody's met someone very famous or not, I mean, your brain, understandably, after this big pump up, oh, he's God, he made everything, he's the light of the world, the revelation of truth. You'd be like, yeah, and obviously very different from me, and not the kind of being that I would exactly have a relationship with or who I would expect to be down to earth. We're not going to hit it off. We're not going to know each other. This isn't somebody who's going to remember my name. A Caesar, an emperor wouldn't remember my name, and they're just a man. Here we're talking about God. But then the fourth movement of the prologue kicks in, and it's shocking because the fourth movement is about how absolutely relatable this character is. Despite all that power, despite all those accomplishments, despite being truth and life embodied, the word, Jesus, God Himself, became flesh and made his dwelling among us. That's actually me basically quoting Bible to you. Why don't I just read it to you exactly? John 1, 14. Here's the beginning of the fourth and final movement of the prologue. The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We've seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. John the Baptist testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, This is the one I spoke about when I said, He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me. Out of his fullness we've all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known. Let's just pause for a minute and think about how backwards this is from the way the world typically works. All right, I want you to picture a medieval fantasy show or something about the Middle Ages or an age of emperors or kings or something like that. And think of those titles, those honorifics that are given a lot of times to great conquerors or emperors or something. And so you picture this little snivelling court announcer herald guy who comes in and is like, Yeah, hear yeah, yeah, your attention, please.
SPEAKER_00Rise and honor the great and noble liberator of men, protector of women and children, conqueror of the frozen north.
SPEAKER_01And they go through like this whole dumb list of all the things, and the whole time, Mr. Fancy Pants with his fancy robe and his fancy hat is just standing there, nose in the air, listening to this little peon run through all of his great accomplishments, and then finally you may bask in the glory. The reason in that environment that you go through all of the titles and accomplishments and displays of power for the one who is being introduced is so that everyone will know you don't have access to him. Whatever tiny whiff of being in the same room you get is pure luck on your part, and you could never aspire to be in relationship with this glorious one who is on the throne. But then you look at John. What's going on here? The first three movements in the prologue totally rightly, without bragging, boasting, or exaggerating, pump up the power and character and fame of God, of Jesus. But then in the final movement of the prologue, we're told this God who is so powerful and so famous and all of these amazing things is stepping down, is stooping into your world. Rather than keeping himself as separate and aloof as possible, he is making himself known. And further, he seems to be doing so for our benefit. It doesn't look like he has to do this. The word, the logos, Jesus, God himself became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, he's making himself knowable, he's making himself close enough and recognizable enough to be known. He's making it possible for us to see the glory of God up close in our context, in our world. Again, think about how jarring and shocking it is when we run into a famous person. And we might think to ourselves that famous people are way different or way better than us, but they're not. They eat food, they convert it into waste, they get stressed out about stuff, they have relationship problems, maybe more than you and I do, even. Fame tends to make one a slave to holding on to that fame. So there's a degree of sadness and pitiability that goes along with such a human position, and they're just not that much better than us. I mean, stuff worked out different. Maybe they're enormously talented, but they're still people who are subject to the same laws of the world and laws of nature. They're still gonna have roughly the same lifespan as you and me. They can get all the same diseases and afflictions and infirmities as you and me. Famous people might have accomplished cool stuff, but they're still just us. But then you think about how gaga normal people can go over famous people and how gaga famous people can go over themselves, and the whole thing really feels pretty laughable considering really how very similar normal people and famous people are. This is not the case in John 1. What is being described here for the through the first three movements of this prologue is a being that is other. Nobody can do this stuff, nobody can claim this stuff, nobody can make things out of nothing. No one is the owner of life and light and truth and revelation and can just transcend casually the laws of time and space. We're talking about the God of all of history, the God of all things here. And then in movement number four, the obvious reader question is like, so John, you met this God. What was he like? Was he super uppity or was he down to earth? And John's like, let me tell you about down to earth. Speaking of that, tomorrow we're gonna think through from a big picture biblical point of view, how wild it is and how important it is to the story that God, here in John 1, is making his presence with people again. There's a whole history here and a lot more going on than just the, oh, he's famous and he stooped down. There's that, like we talked about today, but there's so much more going on in the Bible tomorrow. We're gonna zip around and see if we can get all of that covered all at once. I really do want to know your famous person story. There's some conversation that goes on on the podcast YouTube channel. That's not the same as my main YouTube channel where I post a lot of videos and stuff. There's a YouTube channel just dedicated to the audio only version of this podcast. There's no videos on there or anything, but a few hundred people listen to it over there, which is enough to get a little conversation going. That's been cool. I've seen your comments over there. Thank you for chiming in. Also, people are starting to weigh in from time to time on Spotify. Their comment curation is getting to be a lot better over there. So a discussion is starting to form attached to each episode on Spotify. But still, the biggest conversation happens at patreon.com/slash the TMBH podcast. That's the website where people who want to support the podcast go and do that. Thank you again, as always, by the way. You all are the reason this exists. But you can sign up over there for free and participate fully in the discussions if you want. So I really do look forward to hearing your stories of meeting famous people and how that went. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.