Welcome to the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast.

Right now, we're going through the entire Bible to understand it is one big cohesive story.

We're covering one book each day, and this one is about John.

If we want to make sense of the book of John, I think we have to look back at the last three days of conversations we've had about Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

The first three accounts of the life of Jesus, the first three gospels.

And then I think John's book, the fourth gospel, is going to make more sense.

Because I think John wrote his book fully aware that these other three were already done and floating around out there.

Because he's doing a very different thing.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are sometimes called the synoptic gospels.

It's a fancy term, but it's pretty easy if you break it down.

Like synonym, meaning same, an optic, like optic, meaning eyes.

The idea being that they're coming from the same perspective.

They're drawing on the same material. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are all the hyper, rightly excited about Jesus.

They view him as the completion of everything.

And all four of them are trying to get the reader, not just to read an interesting story, but an interesting character.

They want you to read it and be like, dang, that makes sense to me.

And I got a wrestle with what I am going to do in response to the claims about Jesus.

But these are also smart, empathetic people.

And they understand that the world is big and diverse and people are diverse.

And you got to say it in a way that's going to make sense to different groups of people.

So as a result, Matthew writes to Jewish people.

And he's trying to convince them that Jesus is the long, promised king, the descendant of David, who is to reign forever.

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