Do you ever watch those congressional hearings? Sometimes they're on cable news, but they're always on C SPAN. And they get spicy and they're usually boring. Nothing really happens. If if you're not familiar with United States politics, the way this works is our Congress has the power to subpoena people. That means you can make them come and appear before Congress and they have to answer questions and they get grilled by representatives of our two main thought blobs. And it's real simple. The way it works is if you got a witness who is favorable to one of the thought blobs, then all the people from that thought blob are really nice to them and they try to protect them. But then the other thought blob yells at them and stuff. And sometimes it's fruitful. Occasionally, it seems like you get to the bottom of something here or there. And maybe I sound cynical, maybe it's merited, but most of the time I don't think these congressional hearings are very useful. They don't have a lot of teeth. It comes off more as an opportunity for grandstanding on the parts of congressmen. And they always use the stuff they say in these congressional hearings to fundraise, to try to rally their base and get money for their next election. We we just have structural political problems in my country. I really like the United States. There's a lot of great things about being here and about being an American. The people and the land are fantastic. There's even some pretty cool ideas that we still have floating around from the good old days with how we do government and justice. But yeah, we're kind of going through something right now, trying to figure out who we want to be and if we're going to do integrity or if we're just going to go the way of corruption. It's it's been hard to watch for a long time. And I think that congressional hearings are kind of a symptom of that. And really what I just said isn't partisan. There are tons of you kind of think one way and you're nodding your head and you're like, yeah, that's that's true. And there are a bunch of you who kind of tend to vote or think the other way, and you're like, yeah, that's that's true. That's where we're at. But if you can picture how congressional hearings go, and you can picture how there really isn't a lot of forthrightness or goodwill involved in that, that it's kind of a fake conversation, then I think it's going to be pretty easy for you to picture what's going on here in John chapter one. So uh opening verse goes like this John 1, 19. Now, this was John the Baptist's testimony when the Jews of Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. Yesterday we talked about the thought blobs. And these guys are representative of one of the thought blobs. They always say the same stuff, they advocate for the same stuff. It's not real conversation. You just load it up with your like 15 facts or points, and you just say them and then you part ways, and it's not really fruitful. This interaction between John the Baptist and this particular thought blob, the religious establishment. The reason I think this one is meaningful, though, is because you get the impression they don't totally know what they're dealing with. John the Baptist is so weird and so other and has a burgeoning reputation as maybe even being one who was predicted, prophesied, even in the scriptures from the distant past. They just don't know somebody's got to go put eyes on the situation. And so the religious leadership from the the priestly side of what's going on in Judea, that's who takes the first crack at John the Baptist. And what we're really getting here is kind of a congressional hearing. But before we move forward, there's a term here, and we got to talk about it for a second. The term is Jews or Jews of Jerusalem. And throughout the Gospels, this term overwhelmingly is in reference to the Jewish religious leadership and establishment of the day, and they're sycophants, their fans, the people who are a part of their thought blob and who just go along with whatever they say back here in New Testament times. However, there are other times in the Gospels in the New Testament when you know he was Jewish or he was a Jew, or Jews doesn't refer to that religious establishment. It just refers to people who were religiously and ethnically Jewish, and that's who they were, and they were standing there, and they were a part of a story. It is not hard at all to tell which of those two groups is being talked about as you read through the New Testament. The basic 101 level capacity to read a book is all a person needs to tell the difference, but there are people of bad will now and through the centuries who try to muddy the water on this and obfuscate because they want to get into weird race stuff. They want to make sweeping generalizations, they want to score political or social media points today. We're not going to play that game here as we go through John at all. It's real simple. We're going to be able to tell as we go through the text that a multitude of these references to the Jews or the Jewish leadership or the Jews of Jerusalem is talking about the establishment. It's talking about people who are a part of this thought blob and who are not looking at Jesus with eyes wide open. They've already got all their presuppositions and they're going to be the antithesis of Jesus. They're the ones who are supposed to show people the way toward God, but instead they're going to end up being the people who always obfuscate the reality of God. They're supposed to be the ones who have the keys to open the door, to open the gate, to let people in to encounter God, but instead they're going to hide the keys and make it difficult. Why? There's a whole plentitude of reasons Jesus unpacks a bunch of them, particularly in Matthew 23, when he calls out the religious leaders. But for our purposes, please note there will be times when we say Jews, and we mean Jewish people. We're ethnically Jewish. There's a lot of them in the Bible. There are going to be times when we say Jews, and what's meant by that is people who practiced Judaism. And then there are going to be other times where we talk about the Jews, the exact same way the Bible uses that expression. And we're going to be obviously contextually talking about the Jewish religious leadership at this time who went out of their way to reject Jesus and see him killed. There are moments of sincerity and goodwill here and there sprinkled throughout the gospels with the Jewish leadership, but for the most part, they're the bad guys. They don't come off very well. And in the end, it is them who see Jesus arrested, put through a kangaroo court trial, and then they go and beg Rome to execute Jesus. Okay, that said. Now this was John's testimony when the Jews of Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. Now that's kind of an interesting thing that we could just rush by, but basically these people are from the same part of the Jewish family tree as John. Remember, John is from a priestly family. What are the priestly families? Well, those are people who were descended directly from Abraham through Levi. I don't know how much relational, familial, collegiality existed amongst the priests and Levites. And I can only assume that these guys who were coming up to ask knew that John the Baptist was Zechariah's son. So I assume they know, like, hey, we're all from, you know, the same background. We all theoretically could have ended up having the same job. Maybe as the priests and Levites are walking up there and they're kind of observing John the Baptist from a distance before they get a chance to ask the questions. Maybe a couple of them had an honest musing here or there, and they're like, huh? Well, he could be me. I guess I could be him. But if such musings did occur, it doesn't come through in the conversation as it's recorded here. They get right down to business and they want to ask the questions to get him out of wildcard category and get him into figured out category so they can decide what to do with him. So they show up and the whole thing kind of has the tone of a congressional hearing. Not a lot of good faith or goodwill here. John the Baptist is pretty smart. I think he can sniff it out. The exchange goes like this: John 1.20. He, John the Baptist, did not fail to confess, but confessed freely. I am not the Christ. Okay, so the first question they must have wanted to know, that is, the religious leaders, was Are you the Christ? Are you the Messiah? And it would make sense that they would want to know this for a few different reasons. One, because, well, the Messiah figures came with a lot of implications. The best example of a Messiah that these guys could probably picture was Moses. What did Moses do? He was a prophet and he was a leader of the people and he spoke to God. He was a priest, but also he was a liberator. He threw off an oppressor. There's an oppressor right now in Rome. The people are not independent. About a hundred years earlier, they had lost their kingdom to the Romans. Be kind of nice to get that back. So I imagine they're picturing Moses, and I imagine they're wanting to know well, are you some kind of leader? Like, do you have a next act here to all of this, or is it just going to be with the baptizing? We've heard rumors you're the Christ. Are you the Messiah? And John apparently doesn't balk at that at all. I mean, John's crystal clear that he's not the Messiah from the word go. He's he never wavers on this point in any of the gospels. I am not the Christ, John the Baptist says. Oh, and I said there were probably two reasons they were curious about it. The other reason is because a lot of people had been saying that they were the Christ for a while. You had a guy named Judas the Galilean, who was a big deal maybe 20-ish years before the conversation that we're looking at right here. And he's kind of a forerunner of the zealot thought blob at this time. He led a full-on open revolt against the Romans. It didn't go very far. I don't think he called himself a messiah, but later on, even in the Bible, we see people kind of took it that way. There's a guy named Theodus, and he might have already been started as a Messiah figure, or maybe he got started a few years after that. But sometime in the 30s or 40s A.D., he tried to lead a rebellion against Rome and they crushed it. There's some character named the Egyptian who led a bunch of people up to the Mount of Olives and made apocalyptic predictions about the end of time. There was a guy named Simon of Perea during the time of Herod the Great. He put a crown on his head and led a revolt, and that looked very messianic. Obviously, it got crushed as well. And there are also others, some with names, some with not names. The point is the Messiah thing was really popping at this time. There was clearly an appetite in this society for a Moses-style prophet, priest, king, liberator to come along and solve their Rome problems. And heck, maybe even solve the thought blob problems. Like, you know, we're all divided, we're all fighting against each other. We got like six or seven different strategies for what we ought to do about Rome and how we need to move forward as a Jewish people. And somehow the Messiah fits in there. Maybe there was a yearning during this time amongst the Jewish people for a messiah because they felt so divided and so conflicted. I mean, we feel very divided in my country today, and we basically have two teams. Imagine how it would feel to have six all in conflict with each other while you're being governed by foreigners. So in light of that, it makes a ton of sense that they would want to know hey, John the Baptist, are you another one of these? Because we've seen some people rally a following, and then it turns violent. There's always a next move, and the next move is put a crown on your head and start making messianic proclamations. So, in light of that, it's a pretty big deal that maybe the most effective, most popular such leader out of maybe 10 that we're aware of from during this era. It's a pretty big deal that the most effective of all those guys was totally deferential. And he was like, no, nope, not the Messiah. Nope, don't put a crown on my head. Nope, not gonna go conquer anything. Uh-uh. No, we're not doing any of that. And I think this was probably a surprise to the religious leadership. Okay, we got through literally only one of the first century congressional hearing grilling questions that are present in John 1 today. There's a bunch more. We'll just pick up where we left off tomorrow and keep chipping away at these awkward, tense, almost accusational questions that the religious leaders are throwing at John the Baptist. And we'll see how John the Baptist answers. That's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.