What's up everybody? My name's Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast and we're working through the book of Matthew right now. We are on pause between Matthew 23 and Matthew 24 because the story of the temple which dates all the way back to close to the beginning of the Old Testament, is super important for understanding what happens next in the book of Matthew.

We're in the home stretch right now of looking at that whole big story as we've been doing

for several episodes, so I'm just going to

pick up right where I left off yesterday.

Well eventually Well, eventually the Greek overlords who control Jerusalem, which at first were the

Ptolemyds who were mostly centered in Egypt, but around 200 BC, they lost a big fight with the

Seleucids who controlled Syria, and at that point the Seleucid Empire absorbed Jerusalem into it,

and these Seleucids were not so benevolent and in fact they were openly

antagonizing toward the Jewish people and their law and they tried to press

Alexander's desire for cultural

uniformity or Greekification on the Jews and the Jews didn't like it.

This culminates in an incident where a Seleucid Greek king, Antiochus epiphanies, goes and violates the temple and wants

to make it a place of Greek, pagan worship, and it's an absolute atrocity in the eyes of the Jewish

people, and they're right, it is a total violation of who they are and who God is and what

the temple stands for and this

Antioch as Epiphene's clown just could not read the room he invited on himself

destruction and ruin and then of course famously the Jewish people rise up and revolt under the leadership of the Maccabees as recorded in the inter-testamental book of first Maccabees that some Christians historically look at and say, yeah, that's definitely Bible.

Others look at it and say, this is definitely valuable, but it doesn't rise to the same level as scripture.

Whatever you make of it, the book of First Maccabees does speak directly to the situation and it reads as follows.

The history begins when Alexander the Great son of Philip of Macedonia marched from Macedonia

and attacked Darius, King of Persia and Media.

Alexander enlarged to the Greek Empire by defeating Darius and seizing his throne.

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