Hey everybody I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast and we are jost about to the last chapter in the book of Matthew.

We've put in so much time and so much work to dive deeply into this book to try to understand it the way the original

audience would have understood it, to spread all the parts out in front of us to try to hold the

whole thing in our minds at once.

We've got just over a month's worth of episodes left.

That's going to take us through chapter 28 into the end of the book and that as you

know on January 2nd we are starting the new series where we go through the entire

Bible one book per day until we're done trying to spread the whole thing out on the

table and understand better how it all fits together.

So with that in mind, I'm going to have Jeff play some music and then we're going to pick up

right where we left off yesterday looking at how Matthew has set up the whole

story to pay it all off in Matthew chapter 28.

Then in Matthew 13, this is the third of the five big speeches around which the book of Matthew is structured,

we get a bunch of parables.

One that really stands out here is the famous parable of the sower in which Jesus effectively answers the question like why isn't

everybody signing up for this thing automatically well turns out three of the

four types of soil that's a metaphor for the soul the heart the ears of the recipient who hears the message of the kingdom.

Three of the four types of the soil aren't going to be long-term receptive to the values

of the kingdom.

So Jesus is tempering expectations, and he also covers a bunch of other things in these

parables about how the kingdom is going to grow and how that might be a little bit sneaky and people

might not notice it right at first. John the Baptist gets killed by Herod in chapter 14.

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