Hey, everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast.

And for the last few episodes, we've been doing this kind of odd pre-music intro,

but that's just me resetting the stage so that we're all on the same page.

We're breaking down Matthew 15 verses 21 through 28, which I am coming to see as effectively

the mid-season finale of the Gospel of Matthew. It seems like Jesus and Matthew are drawing us

to a place where we take a little pause and size up everything we've done in the first half

of this book and size up where we're at with the conversation, with the example of the Canaanite

woman right in front of us. So we started out on a quest to figure out what's going on with Jesus

and why he seems harsh here. We're still working on that, but I'm sure you're also feeling this too

that the conversation is taking us beyond this question of, hey, what the heck is going on here?

And into a larger question of, hey, what the heck just went on with those first 15 chapters,

the first half of the book, and what do I make of this stuff that has been put in front of me

by Matthew? Let's go and pack more of that right now after some music.

And then Jesus says the thing, yeah, it's not right to take the children's bread and toss it

to their dogs. Is he saying that because that's what he means? Because he thinks the entire

redemptive plan of his father is wrong. Look, somebody might look at the Bible in Jesus and say,

ah, it's interesting. I don't know, I'm not convinced. I don't think I'm going to follow Jesus

or anything, but I like the book and he's an interesting character. Okay, that's cool. But I think

it's very hard to carefully read the book of Matthew and imagine that he just has this one line

that's a total departure. I mean, for kind of loud, even if the book of Matthew is a complete

fraud, you'd still have to acknowledge it's very obvious that whoever wrote the book of Matthew

is making Jesus look good. He likes Jesus. He wants people to come away thinking positive

...