JOHN035 - Nemo's Dad Overcorrected and it Cost Him, John's Trying to Help the Jews Avoid the Same Mistake

John 1:15-18

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. I have an urgent, important, pressing question for you. Who's the main character in finding Nemo? On the one hand, you're like, well, it's gotta be Nemo, because Nemo's right there in the title. But then on the other hand, you look at the rest of the title and it's finding Nemo. So whoever's doing the finding is maybe the main character. And indeed, I think the person doing the finding or the fish, the character doing the finding is the main character in finding Nemo. So the dad character who I cannot think of his name. It's played by Albert Brooks. Help me out. What's the name of the dad character in Finding Nemo? It's right there. Jeff, do not edit this out. Let everyone see that I don't know this. Let me bear this shame in front of everyone. I'm gonna think of it later, and I'm gonna totally say it, and I know every single kid listening to this is screaming this name. Dang it, what's the name of the dad fish in Finding Nemo? I feel such Marlon! It's Marlon, it's Marlon, it's Marlon. Marlon is the main character of Finding Nemo. Here's the way the whole thing sets up, and this is why I think it's easy as a viewer, as an audience member, to care about Marlon and not be mad at him, but to view him as an object of empathy, even though he's a flawed and damaged character. Because at the beginning of the movie, Marlon, you know, he's a young dad and he's got his little orange clownfish wife, and they're happy and they got a little clutch of clownfish little baby eggs, but then a big mean barracuda shows up, and in one of the most traumatizing scenes ever in a children's movie, the Barracuda I mean, it happens off screen, but let's just say what happened. I mean, the Barracuda eats Marlon's wife and all the eggs, except for one. And Marlon was too far away. He wasn't there to protect. And so that one little egg is all he has left. And who hatches from the egg? But it's little baby Nemo, and he's damaged. He's got, you know, a little baby Finn. And Marlon, he overreacts to the lesson that he needed to learn. Maybe he was a little too far away. I don't know. I don't particularly, I watched the movie, I don't really blame Marlon for what happened. That was just a very big barracuda. But let's just, for the sake of the illustration today, say Marlon needed to learn to be more attentive and more present and more protective. Okay, sure. Well, he certainly takes that lesson overly to heart throughout the rest of the movie, and it causes the tension between him and his son, and it's what sets everything in motion. So, yeah, we're finding Nemo, but really Marlon is finding himself. He's overcoming this overreaction that is his defining characteristic. Well, likewise, there's a great big overreaction that occurs in the Bible, and it's a really understandable one. And I think we gotta muster that same empathy and mercy that we feel toward Marlin, toward the people who made this mistake. Who am I talking about? Jews during the time of the Bible. In the Old Testament, what was the Achilles' heel of God's chosen people? Well, it was idolatry. They worshiped other gods. It's what they always got wrong. And it's right there at the front end of the list of the Ten Commandments. Don't have any other gods before me. You're not supposed to worship idols, you're supposed to worship God alone, but they really have a hard time getting that right. And one of the craziest scenes in the Bible, God leads the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt with this like big pillar of fire, fire tornado, and they got the wind comes up and it parts the Red Sea and they walk through on dry ground, and God uses his control of nature to defeat the pursuing Egyptian army. It's amazing. They get to the other side of the sea and they're like, we're free, and we also have a bunch of Egyptian gold that they just gave us. Let's sing an amazing song. And they got tambourines and they dance around and they sing and they praise God. It's just a beautiful scene. Well, not too long after that, they're at Mount Sinai, and God appears, like physically. Remember, we talked about this a while back about how God manifests among his people. God appears on the mountain and he's talking with Moses. They're just working out some details up there. But the people are like, ah, yeah, that's a long time though, to go without worshiping an idol. And he's been up there for what hours? Let's melt all that gold that God provided to us from the Egyptians and we'll make a golden calf and worship an idol. They just can't help themselves. It's their vice, it's their thing. Certain things that aren't a problem for you in any way absolutely wreck other people. And certain things that absolutely wreck you would never even occur to somebody else. Well, I don't know. I haven't really ever thought about making a little idol or something and worshiping it. But I know what it is to have things that seem innocuous be like a huge pain in the butt for me. So, all right, let's just all drop the facade here of like I'm better than somebody else, or like we all got problems, we're all weird. I don't know what your Achilles' heel is, but we all have one, right? So the Jews' Achilles heel in the Old Testament was they just liked idols too much, couldn't get over it, just crazy about idols. And God was constantly like, stop it, worship me alone. I'm the one true God. These things are made of stone and wood, it's so ridiculous. And he commanded them not to do it and he punished them when they did it, and they just, I don't know, couldn't help themselves. In the end, the whole northern kingdom basically gets wrecked because of idolatry. And, you know, a lot of the idolatry came in through like what seems like really honest means, right? Like God would say, and you're a people set apart, but they'd be like, Yeah, but you know, we it's important to love your neighbor. And the neighbor I love is that hot woman from a foreign tribe who lives next door who worships idols. And wouldn't I, I mean, so now we're married, wouldn't I want to be a good husband who, like, you know, at least respects her idol worshiping a little bit? And if this seems unfair to you, by the way, all I'm doing is just spouting Bible. This, like, this is the problem as outlined by the Old Testament. And so this intermarriage then would prompt the worshiping of foreign gods and it caused total chaos. Well, fast forward all the way to the end of the Old Testament, right? We get into maybe some of you were here for the series we did on Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, all the stuff from the Persian age of the Old Testament, ranging from 538 BC up through uh the 440s BC, right? In this window, something happens, something clicks. I mean, the northern kingdom of Israel got completely wiped out, the southern kingdom got wiped out and taken into captivity, the temple got destroyed, and that was enough for them to sober up on this weird addiction they have to worshiping fake gods. And it takes time, but in Ezra Nehemiah, they finally repent. Not immediately, immediately they go right back to what they were doing. God gives them back Jerusalem, he gives them back a temple, and they're like, awesome, let's marry foreign wives and a little bit worship their gods. And Ezra comes along and is like, no, I'm gonna yank out my beard. You guys gotta stop it with the foreign god worshiping. What the heck? And then Nehemiah comes along and he's you know less of a priest and more of a very competent, like Ernest Shackleton type hardcore leader of men. And he comes along, he's like, No, we're not doing this. This pattern of intermarry and make families and make allegiances with our neighbors who worship fake gods, and then we worship a little bit of the real god and a little bit of the fake gods. This is how everything has gone wrong in the Old Testament. It seems so innocent, but it's such a slippery slope. And Ezra and Nehemiah are like, no. So they gather all the Jewish people that are there in Jerusalem together inside the newly rebuilt walls of Jerusalem. And what I, if I remember right, is like the fall of 444 BC. I don't know. I knew this like a couple years ago when we were doing the season, but it's something like that. And they make a platform, and Ezra and the little priestlings and Nehemiah, they're all up there and they read the Bible to the people. Here's everything. And then they pause and they send down, like, you know, kind of the ancient equivalent of pastors down into the crowd to be like, all right, I'm gonna explain what you just heard from the Bible in language you can understand. Do you get it? This neighborhood? Cool. What about this family? Do you guys get it? All right, we're ready for more Bible. And they crank it up and read more. And eventually the hearts of the people are torn in two. They're like, what are we doing? We're repeating the same mistakes. It's idolatry. It's always idolatry, stupid. That's our problem. We have to, like, as crazy as this sounds, and this does sound crazy. They're like, we have to divorce all of our foreign wives who we brought in. We can't a little bit worship their gods and a little bit worship the one true God. God made a covenant with us that He would bless us if we obeyed and punish us if we didn't, and we didn't. And so they do that. And if you're troubled by this, I break it down in way more detail in that season on Nehemiah toward the end of it than we did a while back. But bottom line is that's what they do. They do this mass divorce. There are even some scholars who think maybe they got it wrong here, but it shows you how seriously they were taking things and how seriously repentant they were. And then a little bit of time goes by and they're like, well, maybe we'll remarry and do a little more idolatry. And then Nehemiah comes back, is like, no. And to their credit, they once again put out their foreign wives, as weird as that might sound. But they do it all in the name of this thing that is just unequivocally good, which is the rejection of idolatry. They reject idolatry, and this time it's final. The Jewish people never go back in mass to practicing idolatry ever again. That's great. But in the same way that Marlon initially does the right thing. I mean, he responds to a previous mistake. I wasn't present enough, I wasn't attentive enough by being more present and more attentive. That's great. But in the same way that Marlon overcorrects from his previous mistake, so the Jewish people overcorrect from their previous mistake of idolatry. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that their overcorrection was like, oh, they too much rejected idolatry. They should have kept like 5%. No, 0% idolatry is the right amount, but what they did to lock in that commitment was it ended up being a problem. The overcorrection was to make rules and institutions above and beyond those even that God made, and to self-obsess about being right with God through a certain degree of self-discipline and religiosity. And then that metastasized and mutated and morphed into something that was very gross and very self-centered, and institutions that were very corrupt, whitewashed tombs, you know, white on the outside, death on the inside, once again. And the version of Judaism that we get 400 years after the Old Testament, after Ezra and Nehemiah, when we get to Jesus, is a Judaism that really is getting a lot of things right. And I think they deserve credit for that. Most notably, what they're getting right is they reject idolatry. But it's also getting a lot of things wrong. The religious leadership class is a parody of itself. It's a clown show. They're experts in fixating on the wrong thing while not thinking at all about the important things of God. And that's why they come into conflict with Jesus so much. Well, that's most of why they come into conflict with Jesus. The other reason they come into conflict with Jesus is because they think Jesus represents idolatry. Remember a minute ago, I was like, they really rejected idolatry, like harshly, aggressively rejected it. And next time around, I'm gonna tell you about a couple of stories, extra-biblical stories from history outside of the Bible, that corroborate, that show just how intensely the Jewish people and Jewish religious leadership from the age of Jesus rejected anything at all that looked like idolatry. On the one hand, that's great. But on the other hand, if a work of God were to occur and you mistook it for idolatry, you would miss out on that work of God. And I would argue that's exactly what happened to the religious leadership regarding Jesus. And further, I think it can be argued that the Gospel of John represents an attempt on the part of John to persuade the Jewish portion of his audience that Jesus is not idolatry. Hey guys, I know you're very sensitive to this. That's very good. But Jesus isn't idolatry, he is God with us. This is what we actually want. This is what we actually look forward to. John, in the Gospel of John, seems to be trying to help his fellow Jewish people not to over-correct so aggressively against idolatry that they reject the real thing when it shows up and is present among us. And in these final couple of verses at the end of the John prologue that we'll look at next time around, we can see that John is rounding out his case to say, don't make the Marlin mistake. Don't overreact so much in the opposite direction of your previous mistakes that you miss something beautiful that we've all been looking for. We'll flesh it all out more next time around. Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.