Many of you are like me in that you are intrepid internet explorers. You like to get into your vessel and sail the high seas of the internet and try to go discover all the interesting little outposts that aren't well documented and enhance your understanding of the world. It's a really enjoyable thing to do. But from time to time, when I am sailing the high seas of the internet with my right knee at the prow of the ship and my elbow bent over it, peering off bravely to the horizon, every now and then I'll notice a strange shift in the algorithmic winds, and my sail will turn and I'll find myself blown off course into a strange little pocket into a part of the map I try to avoid but can't always avoid, and that is Conspiracy Theory Bay. As we talk about Conspiracy Theory Bay, let me just clarify that I'm not talking about Critical Thinking Bay, which is where people gather together and compare notes at the dockside bars of Critical Thinking Bay, where they think to themselves, hmm, it seems like a lot of times throughout history, more than one person gets together with another person and then they concoct a lie to trick people for their own gains. That's critical thinking. People conspiring to create lies is something that obviously happens, and well, even the Bible exhorts us to think sharply about such things and not be taken in by such foolishness. I'm not talking about that bay here. I'm talking about, for lack of a better term, conspiracy theory bay. This is the bay where thoughtfulness and a healthy suspicion of dubious claims flips over into a foolish suspicion of every claim. This is the bay where everything gets muddied and mucked up. And as soon as you start to get into the bay, those crystal clear, beautiful waters you've been sailing on start to get full of seaweed and they get muddy and murky and there's pollution floating around in this bay. And when you put into the dock to quickly reprovision and maybe grab a meal at the dockside bar, you realize that the conversations here imitate the conversations everywhere else, but they don't quite follow the same beats and the same rhythms and the same rules. The starting point of every assumption is that everything is a lie, except for what the eye patch wearing, goofy old sailor with the giant bushy beard says to you, suspiciously, squinting out of his one good eye while taking puffs on his pipe. Here, all the conversation assumes everything is a lie except for the thing I know. And do you want to know my secret about things? But when I leave Conspiracy Theory Bay and sail out into clean waters, every now and then I will rendezvous back on the high seas of clarity with a buddy of mine in real life who works on the space station. That's his job. He goes there from time to time and does space things. Humble dude, smart dude, love his perspective. But one thing I love about his perspective is that he is one of a few people who can empirically put the flat Earth thing to rest because he's just hung out in space and looked at the world a lot. He knows he has had the perspective to be able to say is not a disc. And that is that. His empirical perspective, his five senses read on the situation, really should be the end of the conversation anytime he's talking with someone who believes the world to be flat, because the person who believes the world to be flat has never seen the flat world, and my buddy has seen the world as a sphere in its totality all at once with his own eyes. And all of that is very clear and very obvious. When you're out to sea on the shining water and you've got the fresh sea breeze cycling through your body, your brain works, there's nobody shouting a bunch of crazy stuff at the same time. Clarity, very easily achieved. And in this case, achieved by one who is a witness to the exact issue in question. But when you are filling your nostrils with the stench of conspiracy theory bay while trying to choke down some disgusting food at the dockside bar there while you wait to reprovision, and there's a hundred people yelling different conflicting things at you, it's not so easy to sort it through. It's like you're caught in the muck of the whole thing yourself, and truth can be obscured, and all of a sudden everything's a debate. I don't I don't know. I can't think quickly enough to refute all of the bullcrap that is being spewed at me. And likewise, that kind of chaotic, murky, mucked-up thought easily happens when we talk about theology or the Bible or what to make of God or how one escapes the trap of this life, the consequences of sin and the flesh. And you've felt it before. You've felt it in person with people, you've felt it on the internet, you have had your vessel at some point, no doubt, blown off course into mucky, murky, confusing theology bay, and it's pretty overwhelming when you get in there because everybody's in the muck together, and nobody has got the perspective. So, in the same way that it is very refreshing when you leave Flat Earth Conspiracy Bay and go and talk with somebody who's seen the whole thing for themselves and can just clarify the reality of the shape of the planet, so it would be massively refreshing to plow through the litter and filth and goop of theology muck bay out into clear water and meet with someone who had seen the entire theological conversation from the 50 bajillion-foot view. And John chapters 1 through 3 make it abundantly clear that Jesus is that guy, that Jesus is the Son of God, that Jesus is God in the flesh, and that he is the one who can transcend the confusing muck of the conversation. There are so many opinions on screen from John 1 to the middle of John three, where we are right now. People coming from different angles, people corrupted in different ways, people who know they're corrupted, people who don't know they're corrupted, people who are intellectual cowards, people who are trying to discover their intellectual courage, people who have given up much because of their intellectual courage, absolute stalwarts like John the Baptist. We see the muck of theological confusion in the first three chapters as multiple competing voices are crying out. One stands out so far, it's the one crying out in the desert who says, make straight the way of the Lord, and then points to this one who he says, That right there is the Lamb of God who's going to take away the sin of the world. Paraphrases only very light, but behold him and have life. That right there is the one in the same way that if somehow I spent too long in Flat Earth Bay and it actually made my head spin, and I was like, those guys sort of actually made some sense. I could go and talk to my friend who has seen the sphere of the earth, and he could be like, I've seen it, Matt. It looked like this. It's okay. Okay, well, in the same way, John 1 through 3 begs for a situation in which we could go and talk to the one who has seen it from the outside. And that is explicitly what John the Evangelist tells us we get when we listen to, when we engage with, when we behold Jesus of Nazareth. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Now think about it. We've considered that opening line of John from the perspective of creation, from the perspective of how it mirrors Genesis 1, the authority of Christ, all of that stuff. But just think about it in the context of conversational muck, of conspiratorial thought, of confusing too many voices. We're never going to get this thing sorted out. I guess it'll always just be an opinion fest. Okay, but now listen to that and how true it rings. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. It's bigger than all of that. All of the stuff that's in your mucky, goopy, polluted bay where people just yell ill-informed opinions at each other until the whole thing becomes so mucked up that truth feels impossible. Contrast that with this shining beacon of truth from far beyond the bay, from far beyond that temporal conversation. John is saying from the outset, this is not another religious opinion that you're about to get. This is not some dude's interpretation who also can't see the larger playing field. You are about to hear from, you are about to encounter the one who has seen the whole thing from the ultimate perspective. Through him, all things were made, and without him, nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. That light shines in the darkness, but the darkness of murky, mucky, conversational chaos bay has not understood it. Mild paraphrase, and there is mine. Then it says John the Baptist came along to testify to this light. He wasn't the light. He was one more guy in the bay, but the only reason he was able to see things right is because of this light. It's the only way out, the true light that gives light to every man that was coming into the world. Okay, so he's coming into the bay. He's not just even out at the high seas, like he's coming into the muck. Whoa. He, this is Jesus, was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world didn't recognize him. I get that. How would someone in mucked up bay have any sense of truth? He came to that which was his own, but his own didn't receive him. Why? Because they were yelling at each other in a polluted bay, slogging around in the filth of ill-informed competing ideas. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. Children born not of natural descent nor of human decision or husband's will, but born of God. There's not going to be any good place to divide this in half over the course of two days. So I'm just going to pick right here, as an arbitrary pause point in our conversation, because I'm not done properly mangling this mixed metaphor about this hypothetical bay that we're discussing. I think it works, right? I think you're tracking with what I'm talking about. There's a lot more here, and I want to finish comparing what's going on at the end of Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus with what John is doing right at the beginning of John 1. I think this is really important for us to have in our hip pocket to understand what John is talking about, what he's trying to accomplish here before we move forward into the next chunk of the book. So picking up right where we left off tomorrow. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.