Hey everybody I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast. We're talking about

Simon of Cyrene in Matthew 2732 where it says as they were going out they met a man

from Cyrene named Simon and they forced him to carry the cross. This is about the only thing we hear about Simon. We get

maybe a minor detail here or there from the other gospel writers, but he's a dude who pops

onto the screen and then pops off of the screen and that's it. So why did

Matthew even tell us about that? Why did he leave these details? What additional

themes or layers of meaning might be sitting there for the taking if we think

a little bit more about Simon of Cyrene or Cyrene in general. So yesterday we were talking about

the region he's from, Cyrene or Cyrenaica, so right now we need to pick up where we left off and see what else there is to know about this place.

The Cyrenaica is another one of these Roman provinces. It just doesn't really come up a

ton in the Bible. But Simon the Cyrene is not the only time we hear this name.

In Acts Chapter 2, Luke, who probably traveled to Cyrene at some point, goes out of his way

to point out that some of the people who are there at the day of

Pentecost when everybody becomes Christians that they were from

Sireen there's also a reference I could not tell you for sure if it's at the Jerusalem Council or maybe a little bit

before that but somewhere in the middle of the book of Act so there's a list of

prominent leaders in the early church and one of them is a guy from siren I think his name was

Lucius I could have looked these things up that would have been responsible but yeah

you have Bibles in the internet, you can go and figure that out

and see if I got it right

or correct me if you need to.

And the fact that in the very early going of the church,

...