JOHN056 - It's Weird, but Sometimes Places Get Lost

John 1:28

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

There was many years ago in Rapid City, South Dakota, a terrible, terrible flood. That happened to the community I call home years before I was born. But in this horrible flood, tons of people died, and the whole map got redrawn. There's a canyon here. It's called Dart Canyon. Rapid Creek runs through it. It comes down out of the mountains and it fills up this lovely little lake on the side of the city called Canyon Lake. It's full of trout. People play there and hang out. It's just a beautiful part of town. Idyllic. There's a little resort on the shores of it. Just lovely. But some horrible rainstorm happened in the spring of I don't remember what it was, 72, 74, something, 72, I think, three. I'm making stuff up, early 70s. And this wall of water came down the mountain in the dark and it just burst through everything. I mean, like the main old part of the town was down below the dam where all of the flooding happened. And it was absolute chaos. I've watched all these documentaries on it. I'm really interested in the history of the town where I live. I'm also really interested in all the little vestiges that I can find of pre-flood Rapid City. There, there's little hints. I think I see a few little places that give me clues about a pre-existing structure from before the flood. When I go up the canyon, I see little buildings that look like kind of they're from the age of family tourism in the 1950s, like little stone cottages and foundations and steps and stuff that were too sturdy to get washed away. But you know, now nobody knows what those things are anymore. And I guarantee you there were all kinds of places that had nicknames. Everybody knew. I bet a little ways up the canyon, there's like some sort of like a make out corner or make out hollow where you know the couples would go up and smooch after dark there by, you know, this little pagoda or whatever. And now you can just see the little foundation of that. Well, almost nobody has the names of any of that anymore, but you know there was a time when all of that stuff was known, all those names were retained. It's weird how locations get lost to history. Something's gonna happen and the map's gonna get rewritten. And in the process of that, some places we thought we'd never lose are gonna get lost. I'm talking about stuff where, like, hey, somewhere within this 30-mile radius, we know this thing used to exist, but we just can't find it. And it's always really fun for me when they get found. A lot of times it takes a while, it takes a little bit of digging, and eventually you dig up the right thing, and you're like, oh, that's exactly where that happened. And here's the smoking gun evidence. Well, one of these places that is lost to history, that there's been all kinds of debate and speculation about because something really important happened there, is the site of Jesus' baptism, the place where John the Baptist was attracting these crowds. And we get a name for this place that would have made sense to the original audience in John chapter one, but the name of the place it doesn't make sense to us. It's not still called that. So there's been a lot of guessing over the centuries. So in John 1, you know, of course, right off the bat, we get the great big prologue that describes the nature of Christ, the logos, uh, God dwelling among us. It sets up the whole big story, throws down the gauntlet of what John is going to be about. The challenge is there for the reader, the this this light and life that is God, this is for you. Take a look at this. If you're Jewish, this is a fulfillment of the Old Testament. If you're not, this is for you as well. This is for everybody. You can be called children of God. At all points of Jesus, it's all very exciting. Then the prologue ends, and we pivot into the scene that you and I have been looking at for the last couple of weeks. This forerunner of Jesus, John the Baptist, is somewhere. He's at this place called Bethany on the other side of the Jordan, or Bethany beyond the Jordan. He's doing all this baptizing, and all these people are here, and the religious leaders come out, at least one group, maybe two separate groups, come out to investigate what's going on. John the Baptist is teasing that there's this great character out there. You got to be looking forward to. You don't know what he looks like yet, but he's coming, and I'm not him. And this baptism thing, it all points to him, and it's a all of this is a bigger deal than you guys are even understanding. And that's a wrap. That's the end of our first scene. There's no resolution, there's just this tease, this sense that, well, something big's about to happen. Well, who is this fellow who sandals you're not worthy to untie? So far, Jesus is kind of shrouded in mystery. You know, for the person who doesn't fully get it yet, it's like he's straddling between two worlds, the world of the divine and the world of the human. But what does he look like? What does he talk like? What does he do? Where does John fit into all of this? Really, we're asking the same questions as the religious leaders. But then John, the gospel writer, kind of wraps up this scene and moves us on to the next scene, which will include Jesus. And this is how he wraps it up: John 1.28. This all happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan, where John was baptizing. You hear how that sounds like sort of a like a mid-season finale kind of for this chapter? There you go. Uh the tension is set, your interest is piqued, both by this prologue that's very philosophical and theological and timeless, and also by this scene with this mysterious character who doesn't even have a name. He's just a voice. But even the way he says he's a voice is a nod back to very ancient language, ancient predictive language. Ooh, it's all shrouded in mystery. All of this was happening at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan where John was baptizing. Now, verse 29 is going to say, the next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And boy, oh boy, is that going to be interesting. But we're not there yet. We're going to talk more about this Bethany Beyond the Jordan, this missing location. Well, so where is it? Some people have theorized that Bethany Beyond the Jordan is up north at the bottom, the south end of the Sea of Galilee. Now, I know that most of you are wearing your athletic unitard and you are at the gym with headphones in. Too sweaty right now to get out your phone and flip through things. You'll drench and damage your expensive smartphone. So don't. I don't want you to have to do that. So I'm just going to describe the map to you. You can just kind of look forward and visualize that in front of your treadmill here during your morning workout. Okay, when you picture Israel, picture something very vertical, like, you know, kind of a trapezoid, but almost like a just a vertical rectangle, right? And on the left side of the rectangle is the Mediterranean Sea. And on the east side of that vertical rectangle is like, you know, the rest of the Middle East. You're getting out toward like Iraq and Iran and all of that stuff. But in this little rectangle, what you got to do is you go up to about the 25% mark down from the top and just draw in your brain a little circle. That circle is the Sea of Galilee. It almost looks like a crater lake, like a water drop or a teardrop up there in northern Judea or in Galilee. Okay, I mean the Sea of Galilee, the Sea of Tiberias, it gets called different things. Okay, you got that picture there? Then coming straight out of the bottom, like I don't know, like six o'clock, straight out of the bottom of the Sea of Galilee, there is the Jordan River. Now, the Jordan River has it looks like it's carved a deep canyon or a deep trench that runs almost straight north-south from up around the top of our rectangle down toward the bottom of our rectangle. And it's a pretty straight shot. There's not a lot of bends in the Jordan River through there, and big cliffs rise off of the Jordan River, especially on the western side as you get out toward the Mediterranean Sea. All right. On the east side, it's cliffy, but not as much. It kind of expands out into the Jordanian desert, if you can picture that. Okay. So we got our rectangle, we got our little teardrop up at the top, then we got our Jordan River. It's just, let's just treat it, let's pretend it's just a straight north-south line that comes down to a long oval. Just draw a long, real skinny oval and have the Jordan River just go dumping right into that. That's the Dead Sea. At this point, the Jordan River is carved very deep, and the Dead Sea is crazy low. The Dead Sea is below sea level. And if you've never been there before, these two lakes could not be much different. The Sea of Galilee is lovely when the weather's right and the sky's right, the right time of day. It just looks like a this tranquil, lovely blue sea. You wouldn't want to try to swim across it. It's pretty big, but you can see across it in all directions. You can certainly imagine how you could get stuck out there if the weather got bad and things turned ugly. We have accounts of that happening in the Bible. But it's uh a much more hospitable, much more friendly body of water. The Jordan River, it's a lovely, lovely river. I when I drove from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea, I remarked often, especially in the like the first half of the Jordan River going from north to south. I was like, this just reminds me of the high country of South Dakota before you go up into the Black Hills. Like some of the foliage looks kind of similar. It's you know, and then it gets more and more deserty and more and more badlandy the further south you get. And when you finally hit this big long vertical oval that is the Dead Sea, well, there's a reason they call it the Dead Sea. It's got like weird crusty salt all over it, and uh the the base, it's not like gravel or anything, most of it's just weird mud. Some people think it has cosmetic purposes, so people like to bathe in the Dead Sea and then goop the Dead Sea mud on them. Qumran, the place where the Dead Sea Scrolls happened, that is all in this region. And so some people historically, we'll break this down more tomorrow, have looked at this location, this uh Bethany beyond the Jordan, and they've thought to themselves, ah, it's right there where the Jordan River dumps into the Dead Sea. That's gotta be where it is, it's gotta be on the east side of the Jordan River, because you know, John would have been writing from the perspective of Jerusalem or the main body of Israel. So he would have thought beyond the Jordan would mean going east. That's the assumption. So some people put the John the Baptist stuff just right across the water, practically from Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scroll stuff happens. That's pretty interesting, or close to that area. Other people have their reasons, and we'll break it down a little more tomorrow for why this baptism stuff happened up north, right where the Sea of Galilee skinnies down to the Jordan River and flows south to the Dead Sea. And there are a couple other outlier theories as to where this is. There are three reasons I want to break it down further tomorrow. One, it speaks to some interesting questions about the flow of Jesus' life. How much he was up north, which is what the Gospels primarily focus on, the Synoptic Gospels, that is, and how much he was down south. John gives us more moments in his life where he's down in Jerusalem earlier in his life, whereas the synoptics mostly focus on when he was up north until Passion Week, till he came down and got crucified. So there's the flow of Jesus' life geographically that I think is very interesting. Then there's the question of the origins of John the Baptist and his loyalties. I think if he was doing this baptizing near Qumran and Essene settlements, well, that's kind of a hint as to who he was and how to picture John the Baptist. If he wasn't there, maybe it's a hint toward other things. Third reason I think it's interesting is because of all the stuff that happened after the Bible, after this location was lost. A whole bunch of people have thought about this over the centuries. And I mean, the thinking about this is very, very old. And there's one person in particular who set out from modern day France in the fourth century A.D. They went from what we now call France and they walked or rode horses all the way down to the place where they understood these baptisms, the John the Baptist stuff the baptism of Jesus to happen, and they recorded every single leg of that route and even give us a little description of where they say John the Baptist was baptizing. And we're gonna look at that ancient document, that ancient itinerary tomorrow. Final note for today, as I'm recording this, the Lightning Fast Field Guide to the Bible has been out for five, or depending on how you count it, six days. And you all have been so cool about that. I feel I'm gonna sound emotional and squishy here. I don't know how I don't know how to phrase it. I feel very uh supported. Thanks for having my back. Thanks for trusting that uh a book might be good that is a product of this podcast and just buying it without knowing if it was good. So many of you bought it without there being any reviews or anything, you just trusted me, I guess. And that was really nice of you. Thank you for saying nice things about the book. It is okay if you buy it and you're like, oh no, it's not right for me. It's not my favorite thing. But apparently a bunch of you have seen what I'm going for with it and you appreciate it. Uh I've read all your reviews. Thanks for putting reviews on Amazon. Obviously, that helps, and that was cool and encouraging. And it's been a really an excellent first week. So just thank you. Means a lot. More on the missing and forgotten location of Bethany beyond the Jordan, manana. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.