Hey, my friends, I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour podcast, and this is going

to sound a little bit morbid because it's a little bit morbid.

But have you ever been around somebody who was going through the process of a difficult

death?

Because I had heard about people dying when I was a kid, and I knew that people died,

and I was insulated from what that process looked like, and I'd heard of cancer and other

debilitating diseases that take somebody downhill pretty aggressively.

But then I witnessed it up close with a couple of people I loved very much, and it was

a very different thing to be told so and so is dying, or they're going to die in very

vague terms, versus actually seeing what that looks like, what it did to the body and

what the steps of that process were going to be like.

And of course, and share a bunch of you have experienced this as well, there's this hit

home moment that occurs the first time you really do the mental math as a person on what

that kind of suffering looks like.

The abstraction goes away, and the reality starts to set in.

It goes from being something cartoonish, comic bookish, movieish, to something really

real and human, and that really highlights the frailty and fragility and temporaryness

of what we have here.

And likewise, in the Gospel of Matthew, somebody that disciples love very much has started

talking about death a few chapters before the portion that we're looking at.

In fact, it's in chapter 16 coming off of one of the highest moments in the relationship

between the disciples.

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