Hey everybody it's Matt this is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast you remember

yesterday when I was like and tomorrow we're gonna start Matthew 28

because this is the most important thing in the Bible.

Well, I've thought about it some more. And I stand by my remarks that it's the most important thing in the Bible.

Everything hinges on that. But about that thing where we were going to start on it today. As you know on January 2nd

we're starting a whole new series where we're going through the entire Bible one book

per day until we're done looking at how it all fits together but looking at my

watch here even though I'm not wearing one because that's just what I do out of

habit and I'm seeing that we have plenty of time left to handle chapter 28 before the end of the year

to dive deeply into it the way we do everything else. So let's take a minute and

carefully consider how we got to where we are in Matthew starting here.

The book of Matthew starts after like a four century break

from what was in the Old Testament.

In that time, empires rise and fall.

The Persians rise up and defeat Babylon. Alexander and the Greek mercenaries and the Macedonians rise up and defeat Persia.

Rome defeats their neighborhood rival way out west of the Carthaginians and they expand

and take over Alexander's old territory and the Roman

Republic which looks a little more democratic, morphs into the newly born Roman Empire

under Caesar Augustus and he's the guy in charge when we step back into the story of God's

Redemptive Plan in Matthew Chapter 1 and it would seem like the big story of everything would be the dramatic ascendancy of Rome but Matthew

doesn't hold it out that way for him it's a story that's wrapped up in a bunch of

names a lineage of a whole bunch of people who came before and his original audience would have known so many of the names in that genealogy in Matthew Chapter 1 and every one of those names would have caused a story to pop about God's persistence, God's faithfulness, God continuing to do stuff even after seemingly long breaks from a human perspective.

...