Genesis 3:1-4:26, Matthew 2:13-3:6, Psalms 2:1-12, Proverbs 1:7-9
Today is 2nd day of January welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I am Brian it’s fantastic to be here with you today. I hope everybody is getting acclimated to the journey that we are on and that your accommodations are satisfactory here around the Global Campfire as we make this journey. This is our second step of 365 steps. And they go by pretty fast. We’re here at step two, and it seems like a long journey but wow, it’s like we’ll be at step 90 then we’ll be at step 180 and be halfway through and we’ll wonder where the time went. So, it’s great to be here at the beginning of the journey, fantastic that we are underway. I’m excited for the next step forward and today. That will lead us back into the book of Genesis. We’re at the beginning. And we will read Genesis chapters 3 and 4 today.
Introduction to the gospel of Matthew:
Okay. So, this is day two of our journey and we’re just getting moved into all of the different territory that we are moving through in the Bible right now. And, so, when we began yesterday, we started the Old Testament in Genesis, we started the New Testament in Matthew, and we also started the Psalms and Proverbs. And, so, let’s just talk about Matthew before we get into it today and just get oriented there. The gospel of Matthew is one of a grouping of books in the New Testament known as the Gospels. And there are four of them – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And each of these Gospels give us an accounting of the life of Jesus, who is our Savior. Matthew was one of the 12 apostles. So, he had first-hand knowledge of…of what he was witnessing to and the events that he recorded. Matthew, as were told, was a tax collector. And, so, he was not a liked person. We’ll see that in the New Testament, that the tax collectors were known as heathens and socially outcast, mostly because the way it worked in those days was that…well…the tax collectors, they felt like betrayers of their people. So, this is the Roman empire in the first century. And we’ll get to kind of know the time because we’re moving through this time as we move through the New Testament. We’re in the first century and so the land that we’re kind of parachuting into to observe the Gospels is the ancient land of the Israelite people, the Hebrew people, but at this point it’s part of the Roman Empire. And, so, they are under Roman rule, and they are Hebrew people that are separatists. And, so, they are separated but they’re also kind of ostracized, they’re in the margins. It’s very easy to persecute them. They’re considered less than standard. They’re not citizens of the Empire. And, so, there’s a lot of persecution that happens. And taxes being collected from these people was one of the jobs. And, so, if a person had a bunch of money, they could buy a license from the Roman government to collect taxes and then they would hire people to go actually get the money. And those people who went and got the money could, you know, pad what was owed a little bit and line their own pockets. And, so, they were just considered betrayers of their own people. This is somebody that Jesus chose to be really really close to Him. And when Jesus called Matthew, he left everything. And, so, from that perspective, this is a person whose writing gave up the life that they knew that…that was stable and perhaps lucrative and exchanged it for a huge leap of faith to follow somebody that you believe was the son of God. And, so, that’s what we’re reading when we read Matthew. Most scholars think this…this is dated somewhere, maybe 60s A.D.-ish. And it’s very much a Jewish book. It’s very much aimed at Hebrew people. So, when we’re reading the Torah right now, when we’re reading the Old Testament, we’re reading the Hebrew Scriptures. Matthew quotes the Old Testament more than any other gospel does.