You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Tuesday, October 27th, 2020. This week on the Catholic Spouts podcast, we are talking about the baptism of Jesus Christ that started his public ministry.

Yesterday, we read from scripture from the book of Matthew, the story of the baptism.

And today we're going to go back and do some details to help us understand this story even better.

So first things first, let's talk about the setting.

Now, we know that this took place in the Jordan River,

but as you can imagine, the Jordan River is very long. The place in particular in the Jordan

River where John was baptizing was opposite of the city of Jericho. Jericho is a very interesting city. And what I want you to realize as we study the life of

Jesus Christ is that nothing is a coincidence. We can look at a place and its history or even the

details of a story that might seem unimportant, but everything in scripture is important.

So let's talk about the city of Jericho. Well, Jericho happens to be perhaps the oldest city on

earth, super old. Way back when people were nomadic, meaning they didn't settle down. They kind of

were hunter and gatherers. The very first place on earth that they planted crops and built

houses and stayed was Jericho. And the reason why they did that is because as we talked about last week, this area of Jericho. And the reason why they did that is because, as we talked about last week,

this area of Judea is kind of a rough desert, very dry, crops don't grow there, big cliffs.

But in Jericho, there was a natural spring. So it was truly an oasis in the desert, this strange little area of lush, lush water,

and crops surrounded by dry, harsh desert. So that's why people first settled there. And that's why,

as the centuries went on, this was an important city. In fact,

after God leads the people through the desert, the Israelites through the desert after they've escaped

slavery in Egypt, one of the first places that he directs Joshua to attack and conquer is the city of Jericho. And Jericho

was surrounded by walls. It's a great story, if you want a great action-pack story, of how God

mostly through peaceful means had them march around the city walls many days in a row. Finally, they blasted the trumpets and the walls fell, allowing the Israelites to easily conquer the city.

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