Hey, I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast and I super

appreciate you making the time to hang out with me and talk about the Bible.

So we're theoretically wrapping up Matthew Chapter 2 today but

surprise as usual I'm going to come at this from kind of a weird

tangent. It's going to make sense in a minute I promise. So in the Old Testament you've got this

series of contrasts between the God kings of the world who are masters of their domain and ordained by

pagan deities to occupy such a position and a little old God who was there in the background and maybe wasn't ordained by any pagan

deity to be king of everything but the contrast plays out in such a way that we constantly see the impotence and weakness and insecurity of human kings and the

steadiness and providence and enormous power and control and patience and long view of the true king of everything who is God.

One of the first examples we see of this is of course the Moses versus Pharaoh episode in

Exodus which would probably be better described really

it's God versus Pharaoh. By the way it works is Pharaoh is neurotic and controlling and

insecure and he presents himself as master of everything but the joke is that he's not

master of everything and just in case he thought that he's disabused of these

illusions by things like frogs raining from the sky and rivers turning to blood and swarms of locusts and eventually by the thing that even if none of us encounter crazy frog phenomena.

The thing that affects all of us is death.

And in the end, he's impotent to do anything

about this greatest of the human problems, which is loss and the expiring of our physical bodies.

God instead is rightly held out as being the arbiter of life and death.

And so Pharaoh behaves even more radically up down all over the place, violent. God's deliverance happens for his people and we even

get this crazy language about how Pharaoh isn't even truly master of his own heart,

but that God has the ability to soften or harden the hearts of kings.

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