JOHN036 - Emotionally Charged GOAT Debates

John 1:15-18

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. A few years back, people started using the term goat to describe somebody who's the best of all time at a thing. And then now it's become popular. You've heard this expression. Maybe for a while you were like, wait, I don't get it. How does goat mean the best ever? Well, it's an acronym, it's greatest of all time, the goat, see? And I always thought that was pretty weird because it's like the exact opposite of how that term has been used historically. Generally, you don't want to be the goat. I think the that idea goes all the way back to Leviticus and the first five books of the Old Testament where you had the scapegoat and you'd put all of the guilt of the camp on the goat and you'd send it out into the wilderness to die, and it was symbolic. So it's weird that now, here in the last 10 years or so, goat can simultaneously mean the one who takes the blame for everything, or it can mean the best ever of all time. I mean, I don't know, whatever. In sports, there's a lot of debate that goes around about who is the goat, greatest of all time. But you particularly see it in basketball. Like in baseball, I don't know, there's not, it's just not that kind of game where you debate that. Football, I hate it, but it's Tom Brady, obviously. So there's no conversation there. Hockey, there's no conversation. It's Wayne Gretzky soccer, or as some of you call it, football. I haven't I don't know anything, I don't know anything about that sport. I don't I couldn't tell you what the debate is there. But in basketball, for some reason everybody's always very concerned about who's the GOAT, who's the greatest of all time. Well, who do you think it is? Everybody has an opinion on this, even casual basketball fans, right? It's it's probably Michael Jordan. Jordan seemed to just kind of do it effortlessly. LeBron James has worked very hard and hired a big team to try to model himself as the GOAT. It matters a lot to him. I don't have a ton of respect for LeBron James in that regard. I just I don't like it. My favorite basketball player ever is uh Nikola Jokic. He's probably my favorite athlete ever. I just love the way he carries himself. If you don't know who he is, go look up clips and highlights. He's a gigantic Serbian Orthodox Christian center who has zero social media presence. And in basketball, generally, centers don't pass the ball much, but that's his game. He's a great passer. He makes his teammates better, and then he refuses to talk about himself. So I like him. I look up to him. It's weird. I physically look up to him. He's huge, but he's kind of somebody I'm taking cues from right now. I like the way he lives. Now, if you're listening to this five years down the road and he goes off the rails or whatever, just remember I said this now and not then. Here's my point: the goat thing, the greatest ever, the who's the big legend here, it casts a long shadow. And you just heard my little opinions come out. Like it matters to me, right? I that I care about Nikola Jokic. It's personal to me. It's kind of silly that it's personal to me, but in a way, it's not silly because it's not just about basketball to me. I look up to the the way the guy does life and family and treats teammates and approaches his job and the sport and his perspective. And so, yeah, I'm a little bit personally, emotionally invested in that debate about who the greatest players in the world are right now and who the greatest players ever are. But I still think that in any sport, in any context, there's usually just one or two people who you can look at and be like, that that's who you have to answer with. Like every dude, every lady coming down the pike for centuries to come, they have to contend with the legacy of that individual back there. Well, who is that in the Bible? I mean, let's talk about just at the time of Jesus, who would be the goat in the modern sense, greatest of all time? Who's the big name? Who's the legend? It's gotta be Moses, right? Now you could say Abraham, but Abraham didn't give the law, which was kind of the defining contract, the defining non-human entity of all of Judaism at this time. Abraham, I mean, he had a priestly role, but he wasn't like this great prophet and priest. Abraham didn't really write any of the Bible. It's gotta be Moses. And I think the New Testament confirms that it's Moses. It's like the whole New Testament is in goat conversation with the legacy of Moses. And from the get-go, just based on what the New Testament authors write, you really get the impression that, you know, they have their finger on the pulse of their audience, and they know that the same way you walk into a sports bar and start talking about LeBron James being the greatest basketball player of all time, like, whoa, hold on. We got to talk about Jordan here. Same way you know that intuitively about basketball goats, the New Testament authors know if you bring up Jesus and you start talking about him as the greatest, use all the superlatives, the best, the true high priest, the true sacrifice, the true bread from heaven, all of these titles that get rightly heaped on Jesus. If you start doing that, well, the old heads, like the old school guys are gonna be like, oh, whoa, whoa. Like sit down for a minute here. Let me buy you a drink. We got to talk Moses. Like you kids are always in such a rush to crown a new Bible goat. You need to settle down a little bit here. Let me tell you about our guy from back in the day. They're gonna want to talk Moses, except it's gonna be even more passionate than people get about sports. This Moses as the goat mentality, it's a cousin mentality in the original audience for John with the no idolatry mentality. Moses is the one who wrote down the thing from God that said, no to idolatry. Moses is the one who started the Old Testament-long fight against idolatry that eventually, you know, Moses won from beyond the grave. It took a thousand years of leaders in the footsteps of Moses to finally defeat that impulse toward idolatry, to finally see through the vision of Moses for these to be a singular people set apart wholly, doing something unique and not intermarrying with all their neighbors and copying all of their pagans. Like everybody else is a pagan. Everybody else is worshiping all kinds of gods. Everybody else, all of them on earth, everybody else is worshiping gods made of stone and wood that just sit there and just rot and don't do anything, but they all like just go through this performative lie, like, oh great rock that is carved. You are true and real, and you can definitely solve my problem. Everybody else does this. But after a thousand-year ordeal, the vision of Moses is achieved, which is really the vision of God. But the vision that is achieved in the age of Ezra and Nehemiah is no more idolatry. We're not going back to that. Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. We're not going to worship anybody else. We're not going to make graven images. We're not going to worship any God other than the one true God. It finally happens. So it's part and parcel when we get to New Testament times. This audience, the, or at least the Jewish part of the audience that John is writing to, it's part and parcel. Moses is the goat. Why? Well, because he did a whole bunch of things and he played all of the roles that all of the people of the Old Testament played. He gave us the first five books of the Old Testament, but also Moses is the goat because he's the guy who set in motion as a prophet and priest the message of God, the vision of God that he would have a people set apart for himself, unlike every other people group on earth, only worship one God and only worship the one true God. Sure, it took a long time and a lot of pain, but eventually that vision is realized. That's great. I see why all the Jewish people at the time of Jesus would be so crazy about Moses and would hold him up as like the goat, the standard. I also see why everybody at the time of the New Testament would be so touchy about idolatry. Because every time they dipped a toe into the water of idolatry in the Old Testament, there was ruin right after that. God's judgment, God's justice was quick to follow. But let me just big picture what we're doing right now. We're at the end of the prologue in John, or what I call the prologue. I've been told some people don't like that term. Maybe we'll dive into that later. And at the end of this prologue, the last few sentences of it are kind of giving us an interpretive hint of what to make of the reason this whole prologue exists and what is happening here. And you're getting the impression that this whole prologue is a look back, but also a look forward. It's a look back in that John seems to be saying that worshiping Jesus is the right next thing for the Jewish people. It is not idolatry. Jesus is not a graven image, he's not some false expression, he's not an additional God. You're not becoming polytheistic to worship Jesus or rightly acknowledge him as God. He is God. He has always been God. And the God of the Old Testament who tabernacled among you, remember how you, you guys, you like that? You want God to be among you. And remember how this is like the vision and the hope for the end of time is that God will visibly tabernacle among you again? Well, guys, that is Jesus. If you caught the bonus episode on Saturday or whenever I put that out, Dr. Steve Bryan from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School said very eloquently that the prologue of John is effectively John saying to the Jewish part of his audience, Jesus is not a violation of the second commandment. Jesus is the completion of the second commandment. Jesus is in keeping with the second commandment. Jesus is the fulfillment of the second commandment. So the reservations that the Jewish part of John's audience were going to have here to the whole Jesus thing and to this whole Gospel of John thing were pretty much twofold. Objection number one is what we've been discussing. Well, Jesus looks like he might be, you know, might be idolatrous to worship Jesus. We don't do idolatry anymore. Okay, cool. We've unpacked that a bit. We're going to unpack it a lot more as we go through the book of John. But then objection number two is that emotionally charged objection that's a little bit infused with nostalgia that you and I have over sports and movies and other things like that. And that's just the goat objection, the greatest of all time objection. We already have a goat that's Moses. He's the best dude ever who did all the stuff. Like old heads have this one right, and we don't want to back down on it. It's Moses. Well, what John seems to be doing in the prologue is knocking down right at the front end here those two main objections to Jesus. Jesus is a violation of the second commandment. And Jesus is not better than Moses. Like settle down. You're talking like he's the greatest of all time. Settle down. Well, in my estimation, John is deftly weaving together some larger Greek ideas that we talked about episodes and episodes ago that would make this make sense to a very broad audience. But he's really trying to make this make sense to a Jewish audience who are infused with and affected by Greek ideas and Old Testament ideas who are scattered all around the ancient Mediterranean world. And there's two big hurdles that have to be tackled. One is the charge that Jesus represents idolatry, and the other is the charge that Jesus is some sort of upstart that threatens the status of goat of Moses. And what John is doing already in the prologue, and what he's going to do through the rest of his book is flip those two objections on their heads. He's going to take those two things from very serious objections a Jewish person might have to, whoa, loving the second commandment and worshiping only God and also seeing Moses as being great actually both point us to Jesus, not away from Jesus. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.