Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Today we're gonna start with a grammar exercise. And I know that anytime we start with a grammar exercise or an economics exercise, that causes the brains of 50% of us to glaze over. Like if your brain was on the conveyor belt at the Krispy Kreams, and then it went under the waterfall of glaze, and then now it was glazed. I get it. Those can be very boring topics, but today it's going to be very interesting. Because we're talking about something that the point of the grammar exercise we're about to do is that you're really good at grammar, whether you think about grammar a lot or not. And your grammar brain, that even if you don't read a lot of grammar books, you got a grammar brain that's just in there and it just knows and it just catches stuff intuitively. So this is a grammar exercise that's gonna demonstrate that we're all smart and good at this, even if we don't know all the fancy words for it. Okay, ready? Is it set up properly? Unglazed? Here we go. I'm gonna give you two phrases. One is shorter, one is expanded, and I just want you to contrast the the two. Okay, ready? Here we go. Number one. I knew my enemies were lying in wait. Ooh. It's kind of exhilarating, right? Maybe something like that's in the it's not a quote from anything. I'm just making stuff up. It does sound kind of psalmy now that I say it out loud, but it's just a sentence, right? What do you make of the sentence? Okay, it's uh it's indicative, it's a statement of a thing that happened. I knew this thing. My enemies were lying in wait. Pretty simple. Now I'm gonna give you an expanded version of the same phrase, ready? I arrived in disguise for I knew my enemies were lying in wait. Well, now that I expand the I knew my enemies were lying in wait backwards into this larger sentence, you're like, oh, well, like the one necessarily connects to the other. You knew your enemies were lying in wait, so you showed up in disguise. And if you want to flip that I knew a thing, so I did this backwards, you wouldn't use so, you might use for. I arrived in disguise for, or because I knew my enemies were lying in wait. Well, if I just said, hey, hey, hey, I have a sentence I want to say to you. For I knew my enemies were lying in wait. Or because I knew my enemies were lying in wait, without even having a degree in English, you would be like, that's a terrible sentence, bro. Because the first word, for or because, teases like some previous thing that you're not saying. What what did you do because you knew your enemies were lying in weight? What did you do before you knew your enemies were lying in weight? Your sentence didn't make any sense, you might say to this person, and you would be absolutely right. However, I would posit to you that even though this is just incredibly intuitive in English or whatever your native tongue is, and you don't need to know the rules to just know, oh, that didn't make sense. I'm missing something here. In contrast to that, sometimes the Bible and the rhythm and the cadence of it translated from the original Greek into the English, and because we read it in little chunks, because the verses don't always divide naturally, because of that, sometimes we just don't ask the obvious question when we run into verses that start with words like because or for or therefore. And in Bible E's, we can just see those words and be like, well, that's just part of what makes the Bible sound so dang official. It has words at the beginning of sentences that we wouldn't normally put at the beginning of sentences because they were officialer back then. But this is not true. If you see for or because or therefore at the beginning of a sentence in normal life, you should ask, what, well, because of what? If you see that in the Bible, you should ask, well, because of what? And isn't it interesting that the most famousest verse in the Bible, I stand by that, John 3.16, starts with a four. It's one of these verses that is designed to be understood as flowing out of something in the same way that if I said four my enemies were lying in wait, you would be like, for but give me the rest of it. You forgot to say the first part. So when we read John 3.16 in isolation, for God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. So when we read that, the same thing in our brain should trigger and fire and be like, well, for for because of what because of why? What happened before? Well, let's go dig into that because these two things are profoundly connected. John 3 13. No one has ever gone into heaven, Jesus says, except the one who came from heaven, the Son of Man. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world. So there it is. There's the connection. The four flows out of this thing Jesus is saying in John 14 and 15 that likens himself to some reference to a snake in a desert and Moses a long time ago. And I happen to know what he's talking about. I remember it from another time that I read the Bible a while back. This is a nod to the book of Numbers, which is the worst-named book in the Bible. It's way back toward the beginning, it's one of the books of Moses. The Jews call this like in the wilderness. They have a way cooler name for it. Numbers has censuses in it. So uh it's just kind of how it got rendered over the years in church history. But despite the fact that it has, you know, some comparatively boringer parts that are based in censuses, it actually tells a really dynamic story, which I mean the censuses contribute to. They tell the story of what God had done faithfully in building up the people. And it was it the numbers tell the story of a contrast between God's faithfulness and keeping his promises and building up his people, and the tepidness slash faithlessness of the people he had blessed, in in that they would not trust God to do the things that he commanded them to do, that he had promised would be successful, and that he had backed up by breaking the laws of time and space and so forth. So, Numbers, I think, is a wildly underrated book of the Bible that is full of interesting action and a vastly important pivotal moment in the history of God's working with his chosen people. But I just think it gets sold out by the name, and the name is not inspired by God. That's something that people made up, and it's just, I don't know, whatever. Numbers. In Numbers 21, the people who I described a minute ago as being often faithless are grumbling again. They've been griping since God led them out of Egypt, out of slavery. And now people are getting gripey enough that they're like, it was better back there before God broke the laws of time and space to free us from bondage and to make us really truly a people instead of allowing us to be absorbed into the centuries of history by being slowly enslaved and bred out of existence by our cruel masters in Egypt. It'd be better if we were there and if that were our fate. I mean, just what a lousy gripe these people are making. And God has had enough of it, so he punishes them. It sounds terrifying, and I'm not sure how good it would be if you or I did that to people we were leading who did a lousy job, but the Bible holds out God as being right and just in all of his judgments. And so here's the passage that Jesus is referencing in John 3, when he says, Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. Numbers 21, 4. They traveled from Mount Hoar. Quick spelling side note here. That is spelled H-O-R. It's a podcast, it's primarily an audio medium. You don't get to see the spelling of the words I say to you or read to you here. I don't want to put you in a position where you're going to humiliate yourself, like at Bible charades or Bible Pictionary Party. So once again, the spelling of Mount Hoar is H-O-R. They traveled from Mount Hoar along the route to the Red Sea to go around Edom, but the people grew impatient on the way. They spoke against God and against Moses and said, Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the desert? There's no bread, there's no water, and we detest this miserable food. Then the Lord sent venomous snakes among them. They bit the people, and many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, We sinned when we spoke against the Lord and against you. Pray that the Lord will take the snakes away from us. So Moses prayed for the people. The Lord said to Moses, Make a snake and put it up on a pole. Anyone who is bitten can look at it and live. So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, he lived. And that's it. That's the entirety of the bronze serpent story. And then you turn the page and you're into Balaam and his donkey, and numbers just runs on out from there. It's kind of an oddball story. There's some stories in the Bible that really neatly, lengthily crossfade into the stuff that came before them and this the stuff that comes after the story. Other stuff, it just kind of pow. Oh wow, there that is. Uh dang, that's a very potent anecdote that demonstrates things about the character of God, and it's kind of a little salt, a little spice thrown into the middle of this larger narrative. Huh. Well, I'd love to know more about that, like the Nephilim thing. Like what? Like these like giants or something? What are we even talking about? And boom, it's just over, right? Well, I'll tell you who would have thought an awful lot about that unusual little outlier passage we just looked at in Numbers 21, and that is Nicodemus the Pharisee, who Jesus is talking to in John chapter 3. Nicodemus, given his job, I bet he had the entire Old Testament memorized. If not all of it, a whole bunch of it. He knew this story. He'd thought about that bronze serpent thing an awful lot. He'd wrestled with it. I promise you, at some point in Pharisee seminary, he'd sat down with his buddies and they'd all debated in the cafeteria or something about, oh, I think it means this. Oh, yeah, well, Rabbi so-and-so says that the bronze serpent means this. Well, I think it means this. I mean, this is the kind of thing that's just vague enough to prompt that kind of discussion fodder. But I bet you Nicodemus had never heard what Jesus did with it. Just as Moses, this is John 3:14, just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. Man, that is just poetic the way Jesus put that together. It's like, here's one thing, and then likewise this other thing. I'm going to make a mental note of that. I think that could be rhetorically useful. Point that Jesus is making is that thing that's kind of cryptic that happened with the bronze serpent wasn't just about the bronze serpent. It's prophecy. It's a type, it's symbolism of something much more profound. It's a first fruits of how God redeems from the curse that is the consequence of our own sin. It's the first fruits of that that point to a way that that will be played out bigger and better later on. And Jesus is telling Nicodemus that Jesus is the bigger and better later on that that snake in the desert points to. Yeah, we got to unpack that more in the coming days, obviously, but let's get back to the grammar exercise that we started today with. In the same way that if I said to you, for I knew my enemies were lying in wait, you would rightly say, Well, what's the for? Give me the stuff before that. So likewise, when we encounter the phrase, for God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life, the most natural, obvious question should be, Well, for what? For because of what? What does that flow out of? And now we're ready to answer the question. It flows out of this. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. That is the clause that tees up the most famous verse in the entire Bible. And isn't it interesting that it is a clause? It is a sentence from Jesus that neatly connects the previous saving work of God from the consequences toward humans of their own sin with the work of Christ. Then 16 gives us a four that really takes it to the next explicit, larger, logical conclusion, just in case you missed it. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. We got to unpack more about this desert snake thing and more about this giving his one and only son, and what exactly this giving is. What is God doing? What is God accomplishing by raising up Jesus eventually here on a cross? That's it for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.