For the second day in a row, I would like to offer a pre-music disclaimer that says that we're going to get into some issues of human intimacy,

in some rather odd expressions, and since I know that many of you listen with your kids, I always think it's cool to give you a heads-up when we're headed in that direction.

You have been advised. Thank you for heating my disclaimer. Alright, let's get after it.

Yesterday, I took probably way too much time on the front end talking about the invisible visceral reactions that happen deep within me, deep within other people, I think,

when we get called out on something that we rightly need to be called out on. It is an awful feeling. It's gross. It's this moment of feeling like the gig is up.

We feel this weird cocktail of regret and resentment of the person who said it, and also embarrassment, and how many other people see this going on too?

Oh, my life is a wreck. What the heck am I doing? You swirl all of that together in the drink, and it doesn't taste particularly good going down.

But when it's all said and done, we're going to handle that pushback one of two ways. We're going to begrudgingly lean into it, acknowledging that, yeah, you have a point I was being kind of dumb, my bad, I need to change some stuff.

Or we are going to double down on destroying the person who called it out. And in Matthew 14, we are running into a scenario where somebody is rightly called out, not even based on my own personal preferences or standards or modern more as that I approve of, but based on the agreed upon societal standards, religious standards, even legal standards of the day.

What we're talking about here is a scenario where somebody got rightly called out, and rather than responding with humility, they melted down and tried to destroy the person who rightly called them out and send a message to any other possible whistleblowers that should they call out this behavior, they will get burned down as well.

But once again, here's the passage, Matthew 14. At that time, that time being right after Jesus got run out of Nazareth because nobody really liked his teaching, and he didn't do many miracles there, it says, at that time, Herod the tetrar, heard the reports about Jesus, and he said to his attendants, this is John the Baptist, he's risen from the dead.

That's why miraculous powers are working him. Now Herod had arrested John and bound him and put him in prison because of Herodius, his brother, Philip's wife, for John had been saying to him, it's not lawful for you to have her.

Herod wanted to kill John, but he was afraid of the people because they considered him a prophet. So Herod's over a barrel. He did a thing that he's not supposed to do. We looked at Leviticus, whatever it was, 18, I think, 16 yesterday.

It's a super obvious verse about like, hey, you're not supposed to have sex with your brother's wife, that would dishonor your brother, obviously.

So that rule is in place. Herod knew dang well what he was doing when he disregarded that rule. It's not like he's offending some overly offendable religious conservatives or fundamentalists, people who are being actively demonized by the majority of society at that time. No, no, no, no, no.

Everybody was down with this ground rule that it's not cool to have sex with your brother's wife, let alone steal your brother's wife,

let alone just have sex with her like all the time. And now as we're into day two of looking at this confrontation, it's impossible not to notice all of the additional human psychological soul level layers of what's going on here.

So nobody else is saying this to him. I mean, if so, we'd probably hear about all the other people who ended up getting arrested for calling out Herod Antipas, but no, it's just John.

This is where you've got a guy who has nothing to lose and therefore is not afraid to say things that are incredibly true right in the face of power, right in the face of the person who has all the authority in the world to damage this person's body, this person's life, to deprive them of freedom, to deprive them of food, to spread rumors about them, all the power in this scenario in a world kingdom sense is in the court of Herod the Tetrake.

And none of the power is with the homeless weirdo that eats bugs for a living out in the desert. And so in this case, John is actually really well positioned to say things. Now why did other people say things?

Well, one reason that other people might not have said anything is because they had something going on the side with their brothers wife, people who are getting something wrong that they see other people getting wrong as well tend to not want to bring that up because intuitively I think we all know that whatever measure we use is going to get used on us.

It certainly gives me pause about going around and hassling other people about their problems because I've had problems. I still have problems.

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