Hey everybody I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast and when I was a kid my grandma sat me down one time and she's like you know

Grandson sometimes you're gonna find yourself in difficult social situations and you need to develop social graces to help navigate those things and make

other people comfortable.

And if you ever start to feel weird or people seem tense, like a dinner party or something,

you want to try to steer the conversation towards something that'll put people at ease like race, ethnicity, and religion.

And I was like, I don't, I don't know if that's the thing that you absolutely want to do.

And grandma was very insistentistent I'm sure she was right

therefore today I'd like to talk about race ethnicity and religion as it pertains

to Matthew chapter 8 and really the whole Bible in general because we're into this

super uncomfortable passage where a really neat thing happens Jesus gives this great

speech everybody's all interested he goes and he heals a leper, breaks social norms, he breaks more social norms by interacting

positively with a Gentile and occupying Roman commander who represents everything that's

gone awry militarily and politically for the Jewish people

and there's this healing that occurs but right before Jesus pronounces the healing which

is apparently efficacious which is sort of mind-blowing.

There is this speech that Jesus gives that sounds incredibly mean and racially charged and it comes

on the heels of the centurion assuming verbally the right posture

before the king acknowledging that Jesus has authority and that he knows what to do and

Jesus is apparently very impressed by this and he says when Jesus heard this he was

amazed and said to those following him that's funny because the Bible said exactly the

thing that I just said in my setup but it still works said truly I tell you I've not

found anyone in Israel with such great faith I say to you that many will come from the

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