Before we get started, I've got a quick invitation for you. If you happen to be in Rapid City, South Dakota, this Sunday, November 9th, I'm going to be guest preaching at Bible Fellowship Church at 9.45 in the morning. We're going to be talking about stuff from Galatians 3, Abraham, the Man of Faith, some Old Testament stuff. It's going to be fun. Come by, we'll go to church together.

We'll say hello. It'd be awesome. All right, let's get on with the episode.

Hey, everybody, it it's matt this is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast and I am not ashamed to tell you that I like musicals I am also not ashamed to tell you that I sing along with them and I

am further not ashamed to tell you that even though it's a little overdone and everybody

knows it, one of my favorite musicals is Wicked. I think people like Wicked because of the characters

are interesting, they're flawed, but it's easy to feel compassion for them and you see them change

and grow over the course of the story. I also think that Wicked, which got traction in the early 2000s, came out at the right time

for the story motif that is, oh, what if the good guy was bad and the bad guy was good? You know,

it's a topsy-turvy fairy tale, right? Where instead of the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz

being clearly irredeemably evil, she's actually just misunderstood. And the truly evil character

is the wizard behind the curtain. Of course, in the Wizard of Oz, we pull back the curtain on

that institution of Wizard. And what do we find back there? Someone who's pathetic and insecure and

bumbling, hiding behind a lot of bluster. But in Wicked, the topsy-turvy version,

we pull back the curtain on the wizard and discover, it's not that he's bumbling or insecure. He's

pure evil. The guy we think of as being the one who carefully attends to the needs of everyone

is actually the worst, and he's exploiting the whole thing.

I think part of the reason that resonated with people so much in the early 2000s is the bright

lights of the internet got turned on some of our cherished institutions and we realized,

there's some rot in here. It's icky. This doesn't feel good and it didn't feel good,

but also it felt good to sing along with a

musical. It seemed like it kind of got what we were feeling about stuff like that. And I like that a

story like Wicked, a topsy-turvy fairy tale kind of pushes us to be like, hey, I want purity. I want some

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