You guys remember the national debt? That was this thing that people used to talk about in my country, and people used to be all worried about it, and they were like, Oh, we owe like trillions of dollars, and that's really dangerous and bad, and it puts our future in jeopardy and the safety of the world in flux. Like we we really shouldn't know that much money. Oh, you simple people. Nobody's worried about the national debt anymore, but they should be. What the heck? Why are people not more worried about the national? We owe 40 trillion bucks. Have you looked at it lately? We owe like 40 trillion bucks. The last time I checked the Fed balance sheet, we had 19 trillion bucks in circulation total. We don't even, there's not enough money to pay off our debt that is like, you know, money that's out there. I think this should be the kind of thing we should be freaking out about a lot more and working on solutions for. Then, you know, it doesn't really matter what party you vote for, the debt always goes up, right? That's that's just the way it is. And so I've been kind of intrigued to see the wacky out there ideas that people float on the internet for how to solve the national debt crisis. And you know, some people are like, oh, we should spend less money as a government. Okay, well, that one doesn't ever seem to really get much traction. So we're not gonna do like fiscal responsibility. I don't think we're gonna do that. I don't think any of the parties are really interested in that. So we can just get rid of that proposed solution. Another proposed solution is just to default on it a little bit. You know, not all of it, but we'll just default on it. The way the debt breaks down, I think we owe like 32 trillion-ish that is publicly held. And then 8 trillion is kind of hard to understand, but it's like held within the government. It's like debt to itself or something like, you know, IOUs from Dumb and Dumber or something like that. So, okay, one proposed solution is fiscal responsibility. I don't think we have the political will to do that. Default a little bit, which I don't think it's probably gonna work either. And then another crazy solution that I saw was a debt coin. You just make one coin, and you're like, all right, how much do we owe? 40 trillions? Cool. Just have the mint print up a coin and just put 40 trillion on it, and then we won't circulate it. You know, you're not gonna like find that in the change drawer at the grocery store. Like, what? I got 40 trillion dollars. I lucked out bank error in my favor. No, it'll just live in Fort Knox or something. But then if anybody's ever like, hey, aren't you guys like 40 trillion dollars in debt, then we can just be like, no, actually, because we have this magic coin that we declared with the full faith and trust of the United States government that's worth 40 trillion bucks, now it's solve it. I don't think that's probably actually gonna get it done. I think that has some uh negative consequences go along with it when you start printing 40 trillion bucks just in an instant overnight. But then the other solution that I've seen is kind of it's sort of become a meme. It's on Twitter a lot and it gets reposted a lot. But some dude a few years back was like, I got a solution for all consumer debt, all national debt. We just pick one unlucky guy and we're like, hey, you now have all the debt. We're pinning it all on you, and then we just simply kill him. It's mean, it's bad, it's undesirable, but the whole debt of the whole world can go on him. And kind of the meme is that eventually pastors and Bible types they find this one tweet and then they they retweet it and they're like, Well, have I got news for you, buddy? It's kind of fun. I think they mean Jesus. I think that's what they're getting at. That's what I'm getting at. That theory right there, I don't think it actually probably works for economics, but dang, it's the economy that God set up for working with guilt. There's just, I mean, the whole idea of the Bible is that there's just there's this gigantic human guilt. I mean, you could even just call it imperfection in the face of perfection, right? But the chasm between God's perfection and the uh imperfection of humanity and the debt of guilt owed before a perfect God, I mean, it's just it's gigantic, it's incalculable. And kind of the idea of what we get throughout the Bible is that Jesus is the centerpiece of God's redemptive plan, and kind of it's like that tweet all the guilt of humanity is pinned on this one guy, and the you know, then they kill him for it. And obviously, there's a lot of layers to this aspect of theology and Christian faith, which is you know, when we're talking about the thing called the atonement or the atoning work of Christ, but certainly at least one component of the atonement or the atoning work of Christ is that he pays a debt that isn't his debt, is that he pays the price and the penalty for sin in the stead of sinful people. So God does not forfeit his justice in forgiving humanity. No, in Christ's death on the cross, a the price was paid for the enormous debt of the sin of humanity, it just wasn't paid by the people who owed the debt. So it's kind of a hybrid of the crazy debt coin plan and the crazy pin it all on one guy plan. The reason those won't work in a a human economy is that I mean it's it's just broken promises. It's just, you know, it's shuffling deck chairs around on the Titanic, right? I mean, we don't we don't have the capacity to actually declare worth and value and have it hold meaning. Economics determine what something is actually worth. Whereas God is the actual arbiter of justice and spiritual debt and guilt and all of that stuff. And in the maybe it's a crass way to put it, in the saving economy of God, this is how it works. The whole dang thing, all the ick, all the everything gets pinned on one guy. He dies for the sins of humanity. Now, there are certain groups within Christianity that look at that and they're like, no, we we kind of like to emphasize more the idea that what Jesus did on the cross is like medicine for the soul of the sick. I don't think these ideas are mutually exclusive. Others would say this is like a healing of a rift between humanity and God, what Jesus did on the cross by dying on the cross. Certainly that is an element as well. But also the Bible is very explicit about the idea of Christ's substitutionary role, being the guy that everything got pinned on, and then he gets killed for it. Who kills him for it? Well, ultimately the us, the people who owed the debt, are the ones who do the killing. That's the way the story works out here in John. Why am I telling you all of this? Well, because there's a really important phrase here, now that we're back to John chapter one, that John the Baptist drops twice in reference to Jesus. And it has got a lot of layers of meaning, but those layers of meaning kind of add up to what I'm talking about here, the idea of this substitutionary role, all the debt, all the ick being pinned on one sacrificial individual who takes that on. John 1, 29. The next day, John the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him and said, Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Then he goes on, he says, This is the one I meant when I said a man who comes after me surpassed me because he was before me. I myself didn't know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel. Well, one of the reasons John the Baptist wants to reveal Jesus to Israel is because they have a problem that's even more unsolvable than our national debt problem. And they were trying a bunch of different things to solve it. And remember, there were like six sects that exist within Judaism at this time, and each of them are advocating for a different solution, which interestingly is kind of the spiritual national debt crisis of our day. Our crisis that's even bigger than owing 40 trillion bucks is we have accountability to a perfect God who never messed anything up and is right in all of his judgments. He made laws and humanity has not kept it up. Some of it's just because you know we're mean cusses and sometimes we do selfish things, even if we can lie to everybody else, even if we lie to ourselves, God can see through those motivations. But other times the stuff we get wrong is just because we're people and we meant to get something right, but we just bumbled, or we meant to remember to do a very important thing, but we got busy and we forgot, or we got distracted. Our fallenness is both volitional, but it's also just a product of the fact that we're not God, we're flawed. There was a fall, and we are fallen, we are incomplete. And so, what do you do about that kind of guilt? Well, there were political strategies that I just mentioned during the time of Jesus, but there was kind of one big strategy throughout the Old Testament, and it was the sacrificial system. There was this whole religious system that existed through the whole Old Testament, but it really takes its form in Exodus and Leviticus, and then that holds pretty well. The temple sacrificial system holds from where the Old Testament leaves off up to the time of Jesus. And the idea is this God dwells with his people. And then further, the idea was that God in his grace would allow specific sacrifices carried out in a way that would have made perfect sense to the Iron Age or Bronze Age mind that would say, you know, you take these things, and God has declared that that gets it done. That communicates this, that illustrates this theological point about guilt and repentance. But you're gonna have to do it a lot. It's gonna be part of your regular rhythm. It's kind of a weird way to live, but it sure beats the alternative, which is death. Death is the product of sin, the wages of sin is death. By God's grace, he introduces this system as a way to. I mean, this is how you're gonna see it when you read the text. This is the way they would have conceived of it. It's staying the judgment of God, it's staying the wrath of God. But these sacrifices, they're not perfect either. They aren't designed or built in the mind of God or in the mind of the people who are doing them. They're not designed in the terms of the covenant that God lays out in the scriptures to cover things forever. So as a result, the old testament sacrificial system is begging for a perfect sacrifice to come along that just gets it done permanently. This solves the thing, this solves sin and death and guilt before God forever. Now, the ideal sacrifice in the old testament is this pure and spotless lamb. And when things, you know, really need the ultimate sacrifice, like this is the expensive cream of the crop, you pick the very best. This is what was demanded of a sinful household, which is every household, is this pure and spotless lamb. That motif comes up a lot in the Old Testament, and everybody who was at this baptism site with John would have known exactly what he meant when he said of Jesus, look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And then later, a few verses when he says, Look, the Lamb of God. Jesus at this point obviously has not gone to the cross yet. Obviously, people don't totally know what to make of him yet at this point. I mean, there's a lot of stuff ahead of him, but the promise on the front end from John, what he's strongly hinting at here is this guy is the completion of everything the Old Testament was pointing toward. The need that was demonstrated, the untenable debt that just could not be paid off, where the only way you could really even fantasize about making it better would be like if we could just pin that on one guy and then kill him, then you know, I guess all that debt would just go away with him. Well, John is strongly in toning that's the guy right there. That fellow right there is the completion of the Old Testament sacrificial system. He is what everything about our story has been begging for. Pay attention. All right. More about this Lamb of God idea and other stuff that John the Baptist said about Jesus next time around. If you're somebody who really likes the national debt and thinks it's a good idea and you're for that policy-wise, man, I probably really, really offended you today, and I would like it if we could still hang out. Thanks in advance for considering it. All right, more than all of this tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again.