JOHN087 - Never More Than Twelve

John 1:51-52

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and I have a riddle for you. What has two thumbs, male pattern baldness, and never recommends shows to you? This guy! It's it's me, Matt Whitman from the internet. I'm the one who never recommends shows to you. And do you know why? It's not because I don't like shows. I really like the shows and the movies. They haven't been quite as good lately. You know, God bless everybody. They're trying hard. Maybe they'll get good again soon. But there have been a few good things that have happened lately. And even then, I don't usually recommend them to you because it's kind of a big room, and everybody's got different sensibilities. And some of you might go and watch one of the programs that I thought was real super, and you might be like, that wasn't super at all. What about that really bad thing? And because I'm not in the room to be like, no, I'm also against that really bad thing, you might think that I'm for that really bad thing. Well, today I'm going to make an exception because there is a program that I've enjoyed so very, very much and that has stuck with me over these last couple of years that I have decided to cautiously recommend it to you with careful parental guidance assumed. The show I want to recommend is Andor. It's a Star Wars show. It's on Disney Plus. I mean that's where you would find it. It's two seasons long, and it is brilliant. I think the guy who directed it is also the guy who did the born identity. It's it's very, very smart, and it's not super sci-fi Star Wars y. It's definitely not a kid's show, but it's certainly not trashy either. It's just it's very complex. And it's about a guy who lives on the fringes of an oppressive empire, and he doesn't really he doesn't want to mess with the empire, he doesn't want to be messed with by the empire. He's just trying to stay out of the way, but ultimately he discovers that there's nothing he can do to stay away from the tyranny of this evil empire, and eventually he finds himself mild spoilers here. Yeah, this is spoilery. I don't, I just I don't know what to tell you. Can skip ahead a minute if you don't want to know. I'll try not to ruin a lot. But he finds himself in an imperial prison, and the prison sequence in this show is phenomenal. Basically, I think it's nine episodes per season, so 18 total episodes. Every three episodes is like a a film they combine for act one, act two, and act three of an individual film. So the three-episode arc or the mini film that is the prison film sequence is just magnificent. Maybe it's so good that I told you about this before. I don't know. Whatever the case. There is a turn of a phrase in that prison sequence that is so much more powerful than what the overt spoken turn of a phrase would seem to be. And that phrase is no more than 12. There's another layer of the floor where some other people I mean, the prison is just perfect. It gives the impression that no one could ever escape. There's nothing you could do. But the Empire is very stingy with its resources, and so it spent a lot of energy trying to give the impression that they have the upper hand when in reality they don't. And somebody on another floor starts to spread the word amongst the prisoners, there's no more than 12 guards at any time on a level. And once that idea, that one seemingly innocuous phrase drills into the prisoners' brains, they're like, There's never more than 12. There's never more than 12. We can escape. The Empire is vulnerable, it's weak. This isn't the way things have to be. Uprising is physically plausible. The prison's aura of invincibility is fake. We can do this, but they don't say all those words to each other. They're in prison and their words are supervised. Never more than 12. That's what gets it done. That simple loaded phrase, or as we were talking about yesterday, that wink phrase, that if you know you know phrase. Likewise, John 1 ends with a wink phrase, an if you know you know phrase, a never more than 12 style phrase. Jesus tells the beginning of his group of disciples that they are going to see greater things than what they've seen so far. And they're going to see things that rival even the stuff of the dreams of Jacob, the one whose name became Israel, from whom they're all descended. They will see the physical manifestation of the stuff of God. They will see angels of God ascending and descending on the final three words of John chapter one. On the Son of Man. Wink. I added a ding sound here on my little mixing board so that you can hear the little uh ding that goes along with uh wink when it's a knowing wink. So let me try it again. Angels of God ascending and descending on the son of man. I'm pretty proud of that.

unknown 5:34

Ding.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

It's a wink ding. I've decided that's what this kind of little insider knowledge phrase shall be called. I don't know, that might not stick. It's it sounds kind of troubling now that I think about it. Whatever. As Jesus is running up to the final three words of John chapter one, I'm sure his disciples, who, you know, they're somewhat catechized, they kind of know what the deal is with Judaism and how this all works, but they're pups. They're figuring out they're young guys, they're chasing after something, they don't totally understand it yet. They know some stuff about the scriptures, probably, but probably not completely. And they're like, all right, well, that's going to be amazing. We'll see miraculous things. But then really Jesus tips his hand with the never more than twelve winked ding kind of comment, son of man, which I think would have most obviously sent their brains scrambling to Daniel chapter 7, verses 13 through 14. Now look, Daniel 7 is one of the most difficult passages in the entire Bible. For language, original language reasons, it's very hard. For context reasons, it's very hard. For understanding how the prophecy, the very strange prophecy depicted here pays off, it's very hard. But the most obvious and easy to understand part of this very difficult chapter in the Old Testament, Daniel 7, the easiest part to understand is the son of man part that Jesus is referencing back to right here. The phrase son of man appears in some other places in the Old Testament as well. We'll probably get to that also. But I want to focus in on this. Okay, so you got Daniel. He is a dude who lived in three different paradigms. As a young man, he lived at the very end of the run of the southern kingdom of Judah. Those are the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin. But he was taken captive by the Babylonians and lived the majority of his life in Babylon, even as an advisor to Babylonian kings. But he was also there the night that Babylon fell to the Medes and the Persians, and his career continued late into life into the Persian age as well. So this is a dude who has seen a lot of change. He's thought a lot about, he's seen God guide him through big dramatic swings in history. Whereas for you and me, for most of us, especially if you live in Canada or the United States, North America, you haven't really seen gigantic changes in your lifetime. You haven't seen empires rise and fall. There's plenty of stuff to do hand-wringing about. Some of it may even be justified, but we're not talking about the cataclysms and reworking of the entire order of the whole world kind of stuff that Daniel saw happen multiple times. So this is a dude who God is speaking through, but also God is working through the lived experiences of Daniel. I really do not want to cut right here, but we got to split this episode into two because I want to read you this whole passage from Daniel all at once. I need to explain it because this is a passage that you have to feel in order for it to work. The context is so big. And then the payoff when the son of man shows up at the end of this passage is it won't make as much sense if we split it into two days. Okay, so, anyways, tomorrow we're gonna pick up right where we left off. But for today's purposes, in the same way that the phrase never more than 12 in that imperial prison in Andor had a hundred times the level of meaning of just than just those words, never more than 12. And in the same way, you as a viewer figure out pretty quickly, wow, that's a powerful phrase that does so much work with such few words. So, in the same way, we are figuring out, and we're gonna figure out more over the next couple of days, that the phrase son of man is so loaded and so powerful. And there's a reason that this was Jesus' favorite name for himself. It said a ton. It positioned Jesus in God's redemptive plan, it positions Jesus in terms of his identity, like cosmically, celestially, as God, as the Son of God. And it also gives the attentive reader and the original audience member a sense of the stakes of what is happening here in this moment that Jesus has taken on flesh and stepped into the world. So we'll make more progress on that next time around. That's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.