Hey everybody I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast and I just want to say a huge

thank you for being willing to hang out with me and talk about the Bible. I don't know if you've

heard this or not, but politics and religion

are like the two things that you're not supposed to talk about because people melt down and

freak out, but you don't. You're up for it. And I know the majority of people listening to this don't agree with me on a ton of stuff in fact I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the whole world who thinks the exact permutation of things that I think.

And so what that means is, we are overcoming the spirit of the age,

which is burn anybody down who doesn't agree with you on anything

just simply by the act of having this conversation together.

And I just love you for it. Here's exactly what we're doing. We're starting on Matthew Chapter 3,

and Matthew Chapter 3 introduces us to a new character in this story

and that is John the Baptist.

John the Baptist is the cousin of Jesus

who lived like a crazy wild man out in the desert

and prepared the way for Jesus arrival.

What exactly does that mean?

We'll get to that in future conversations.

But the dude has Baptist in his name and the whole baptism thing is some of the people tend to get a little bit chippy

about or have strong opinions about so we've got to break that thing down and frame it up first.

Number one, baptism is a super old Christian tradition, Christian practice, that dates all the way back to the very, very, very beginning of Christianity.

As we're going to talk about in more detail, it looks like it was sort of an innovation.

There's some rough corollaries outside of Christianity that predate this a little bit, but not much.

This is something that is pretty specifically Christian and Jesus affirms it and Jesus himself is baptized as we're going to see here in a little bit getting into Matthew chapter 3, but there's disagreement about exactly how to do it

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