Hey, my friends, it's Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast.

You know, the return of the King by J.R. Tolkien, it's not a coincidence that that sounds

a lot like what we're looking at in Matthew 21 here, right?

I think it's pretty clearly intentional on the part of Tolkien that the character of

Erragorn in that story is this long-promised King, there's prophecy, there are indications

there, much like we keep saying about the book Matthew, there are a bunch of boxes that

need to be ticked, and Erragorn, this Ranger, he's the completion of the story, he's

the guy who's going to come and restore the thing, he fits everything just perfectly, and

so the third installment, the third book, the third portion of the Lord of the Rings series

is the return of the King, and it explores a whole bunch of these same themes that we're

looking at here, down the home stretch of the book of Matthew, and in that book when

the King returns, it's not that splashy in terms of regal procession and all of that,

it's a bit more military in nature, but it's interesting because with the story unfolds,

Erragorn in a way has to conquer death, defeat death, and subjugate death in order to

come and also subjugate the hideous forces of ugliness and evil and oppression and

abusive power and pretender kings and dark spiritual forces, and again, the Lord of

the Rings is not an allegory, it's not like the Chronicles of Narnia, it's not like

CS Lewis's work or John Bunyan's Pilgrim's progress where everything exactly means something

else, it's imagery, it's thematic material, maybe some of it's very, very on the nose,

maybe some of it is more loosely connected and it's just an overflow of Tolkien's faith

and understanding of exactly this story that we're looking at right here where the people

of Jerusalem are experiencing the return of the King, and in this case, the return of

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