SPEAKER_00 0:19

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Probably a lot of you have been listening to this program for the last couple of weeks are like, well, surely you're not sick anymore because of how long you've been sick and had a cough, but you're wrong. I'm still sick and consuming cough drops. And now on top of that, I'm popping steroids, which is kind of exciting. I've only been doing it for a day, but I think I've already got some back knee going and a little extra male pattern baldness, which is disappointing. Speaking of that male pattern baldness, I was watching this heady drama show the other day on HBO, and they made fun of Matt's who were bald. What the heck? I'm a meme. There's a bunch of dudes who were all like in their 40s or something, and they weren't being portrayed in a particularly flattering light. They were all insecure and stuff. Every single one of them was a bald dude with a beard, and the joke was somebody was like, watch this. Hey Matt, and they all looked over at once. That ain't good. Great. Now I can't be differentiated from other Matt's anymore because we're apparently all the same thing, and now it's a great big joke. Speaking of moments in history when there was a glut on one particular name, and a whole bunch of people with the same name were right by each other, and it might have been a little bit confusing. How about the first century AD and Bible times when apparently a lot of people were named John, which can be terribly confusing because the only two names that we've seen so far in the Gospel of John are John and John, but they're not the same guy. Now, in fairness, John, the author of the Gospel of John, wouldn't have thought this was confusing because he didn't sign his gospel. This is not a vanity project to him. All the evidence inside the Gospel of John says that this book was written by John, the beloved disciple of Jesus, and the John who was a leader in the early church and the only original disciple of Jesus, to not be martyred. John lived out his days and lived to old age. Sometimes he's called John the Evangelist. So it's kind of confusing when we're saying John, John, John, John, John, John, John all the time, talking about the guy who wrote the thing. But then the only human character whose name is straight up given in the first uh 15 or so verses here is also John. But this is John the Baptist. And like I've been telling you, that's why, even though it's not in the text, I keep saying the Baptist after I read John anywhere here in John chapter one. John the Baptist, we started talking about him yesterday. He was a huge deal, probably more famous than Jesus, at least for a little while. And John the Gospel writer is feeling some pressure to make it make sense to the audience how these two guys fit together. John the Baptist is a really big deal, but he is not the Logos, he's not the Word, he's not God in the flesh, he's not the one you need to put your faith in. He himself was not the light. He, John the Baptist, came only as a witness to the light. Now, the true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. That's Jesus. So if John the Evangelist thought John the Baptist was a big enough deal to be the first named human character in his book, then we should probably pay attention to John as well and bring ourselves up to speed on what the deal is with him. To do that, we're gonna turn back one book of the Bible to the Gospel of Luke. Say this often, but I'm gonna say it again. I know a lot of you have been around the Bible for a very long time. I know others of you are newer to this, and I want to keep everybody in mind. So we're all moving forward together. So there are four gospel accounts in the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They all tell the story of the life, death, resurrection teachings of Jesus. They all exhort the audience, though they are written to different audiences, to believe in Jesus. And Luke stands out among the Gospels because he took a very workmanlike, academic, almost journalistic approach to telling the story of Jesus. Luke opens his gospel with an explanation of his methodology and then he gets into the story. And what do you know? Just like John, Luke doesn't open his story right on Jesus of Nazareth. He starts with John the Baptist as well. Here in verse 5, he gets going. In the time of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah. His wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron. There's a lot of inside baseball going on in that verse, and I've been told that the phrase inside baseball is inside baseball, so I probably need to stop using it. Inside baseball just means insider knowledge. So let's see if we can break this all down real quick. Herod, king of Judea, is a non-Jewish king who ruled in Judea for the Romans. He and his dad found favor in the Roman court during the turmoil at the end of the time of Julius Caesar and Pompey, and during the time of the civil war that came after Caesar's assassination in 44 BC, that eventually led to Caesar Augustus being on the throne as the first emperor of the Roman Empire. In all of that mess, the Herod family figured out that chaos is a ladder and they climbed to the top. They ended up in charge of Judea and some surrounding provinces as well. But Luke isn't really getting into Herod here, it just kind of sets this in time. So we're probably talking, Herod died, I think, in 4 BC. So we're probably talking like four, five, six BC somewhere in here. Don't worry about the dates, by the way. The whole ADBC division was flung together in the Middle Ages. They didn't have the internet back then. The people who worked on this, the academics, yeah, they did their best, but Jesus was almost surely born BC before Christ. So it's kind of weird. It's not a Bible error, it's a medieval counting error. So we got this King Herod, and then we've got this priest named Zechariah. And this Zechariah guy belongs to the priestly division of Abijah. Okay, priestly divisions. This was something put in place by King David a thousand years before the time of Jesus. David is the rock star king of the Old Testament. Solomon was the wealthiest, but David is the golden age of the monarchy of Israel. And it's really easy to remember because give or take, it 1000 BC, so like exactly a thousand years before Jesus is when David was in charge. A bunch of the most cherished institutions and traditions throughout the Bible and in New Testament times all hail from the time of King David and the decisions that King David made, despite him being a deeply flawed and imperfect ruler. And one of those traditions is the divisions of the priesthood. These were put in place by King David, again, about a thousand years before the time of Jesus in 1 Chronicles 24. Now, when David did this, the institution of the priesthood was already very ancient. It had been in place for centuries and centuries. You might recall that there are 12 tribes of Israel, or roughly 12. We say 12. And when Canaan got conquered in the book of Joshua, all but one of those tribes were given a region in which to live. One was excluded, though, and that was the tribe of Levi. The Levites didn't get land to work in order to provide for themselves. Instead, they were to live off the tithes and offerings of the other eleven tribes. Their job was to carry out the religious duties of the people. All the priests would come from the line of Levi. All the people who work alongside them to make all the religious life of everything go, the temple life go, they would all be descended from Levi as well. Levi had some very famous descendants, most notably Moses and his brother Aaron. Moses effectively was a priest, but he also more played the role of leader and prophet. Aaron, in the lifetime of Moses, really played the hands-on role of priest along with his sons. But then hundreds of years pass between the time of Aaron and the time of David. Aaron dies, but he's got gajillions of descendants by this point. And David wants to give some clarity and structure as to which branches of the Levite family tree, which specifically which branches of the Aaron family tree, are going to handle the priestly duties moving forward. So David names 24 families, 24 of these Levite descendants, and for all of time, David designates the descendants of these 24 Levites, these 24 priests, they are going to share the duties of the temple on a rotation, you know, forever. So right in the middle of 1 Chronicles 24, we get a list of the actual names of these guys. And right here in verse 10, we get the relevant one. The seventh lot fell to Hekaz, the eighth to Abijah. There it is, right there. Abijah's descendants would serve in the temple, then for all of time, roughly two weeks every year. And the way the rotation worked is the descendants of Abijah, two weeks a year, would go hard for seven days. They would start at noon on the Sabbath and work all week, and then they would hand it off to descendants of the next priestly division that was up at noon a week later. And then some other time in the year they would get another one. And I assume, just because of math, there's a few leftover weeks in there that some years they would end up having to do this three times. And we can tell that there's continuity with this system all the way through the Old Testament. David sets this up in 1 Chronicles 24, roughly a thousand years before Jesus. And then in Nehemiah 12, which is going to be set in around the mid-440s BC, so 550 years later, we see that it's still working. We got Nehemiah ensuring that all the priests are in their rotation and doing the right thing. And Nehemiah 12, 17 says, of Abijah's priestly division, and then it lists some guys who were alive, descended from Abijah at that time, who were doing priestly things. And then we turn the page over to Luke 1, and what do you know? The priestly divisions are still in place. In the time of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah. His wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron. So now that we've done the work to understand what the priestly divisions are and who Abijah is and all of that, this is a much bigger deal. Zechariah hails from a very important family. He has a very important job. And even though we haven't got to this part of the text yet, I can tell you, Zechariah and Elizabeth are going to be the parents of John the Baptist. Meaning, John the Baptist is a priest, or he would have been if he hadn't instead been John the Baptist. He's descended from Levi. He's descended from Aaron. He's descended from Abijah. He is a part of a 1500, 1800, 1900-year-old priestly tradition at this point. And what do the priests do? They're mediators. They go between, they pave the way to connect the people with God. What is John the Baptist gonna do? Well, in a way, even though he's not gonna be the one conducting the sacrifices, he's going to be the mediator who points people to the true light, the true Lagos, the true Word who is Jesus, maybe more than any priest in all of history, particularly to the original Jewish audience, who John the Baptist was and who he hailed from, and what his role in society and his family's role was all about. These details would have really popped for them. And when they would have read further about John the Baptist and figured out who he was and what he was doing, there's a whole lot of people in that original audience who would have been like, oh wow, I see it. That is some incredible symmetry. We made it through literally one verse of talking about John the Baptist today, but uh there was a lot of right. I mean, we needed to chase all that down. It was important, there are payoffs here. We're nowhere near done with John the Baptist, and we'll keep working on him and his story next time around. I'm Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon, and then we're gonna be able