 The thing I realized, so, as I was kind of remembering how I used to read the Bible, it was because there's the Old Testament, which is about the Jews and it has the children's stories about the old biblical heroes and the cute, no, it's arch animals and there's that and it's kind of sort of irrelevant to me. And then there's the New Testament, which is God's love letter to me and I can open it up and I can pick out the inspirational sentences and apply them to my life. And what is becoming more and more true and is that it's an epic narrative and in which I'm a part of it. So talk to me about the story. Talk to me about the first century. I never really, when I read it previously, when I read Ephesians, I didn't consider it like, oh, this is a letter from Paul to the church in Ephesus and I should consider that. And I should think about the whole letter, not just individual sentences. What's going on there? Who were they? So, paint a picture for me of the first century and how that Jesus came into and how his, what he said and what he did was counter-cultural and how that impacted the world after that, whether we know it or not. Yeah, yeah, yeah, great question. It's, of course, a huge question. The first century is very complicated, simply in the Middle East. The Middle East is complicated today. It was every bit as much in the first century. Different movements and parties and factions and we think of the Jewish people as though they were living in a country called Israel, they weren't. They were clustered in villages around Jerusalem and in Jerusalem itself and then some of them in Galilee, but all around were other peoples because when some of the Judeans came back from the Babylonian exile, there were lots of other nations around or small, what we might call city-states, that weren't sure who these people were, didn't want them back. So it's a very contested area and there's a lot of what we would call pagan culture there. You know, there are Greek theaters and gymnasium and so on. It's not a kind of a pure Jewish, so that's perhaps for starters. But the Jewish people whose works we can study and we have to be careful there because why are there writings we can study answer because there were people who'd been trained to be scribes who wrote them and there were a lot of people who weren't, but they give us a picture into the common life, the ordinary life of festivals and fasts and things that everybody did so that when it was Passover time, people would... Galilee was nearly empty, you know, there were some whole villages where every single person, man, woman and child, would have gone up to Jerusalem. And so when we think, what did they sing on the way? Well, they sang the Psalms. That's the songs of a sense, we're going up to Jerusalem. And I was glad when they said to me, we'll go to the house of the Lord. But what they were doing particularly was praying for God's kingdom, praying for God to come and take his power and reign in a whole new way. Why were they thinking that? Because that's what Daniel promised. That's what Isaiah promised. That's what the Psalms said would happen. And they looked back to the great story of the exile. They knew we were in exile in Babylon. And now we've sort of come back home. But Daniel 9 says it's not just going to be a 70 year exile. It's going to be 70 times 7, like 490 years. Who calculates that sort of scheme? Well, they did. We have writers in the time of Jesus who knew where they were on that time scale. And in order to interpret that, the two back markers way back other than creation and fall themselves are Abraham. We are children of Abraham. God promised Abraham that his seed would inherit the world. We're not sure how that's going to happen. But sooner or later, dot, dot, dot and Exodus. Exodus, God releases his people from slavery so that they can be his people and he comes to live in the midst of them. And so we want a new Exodus because as I said, we were going to get one. So there's a lot of stuff all focused on those great festivals like Passover and so on, which is saying God is going to come back in a whole new way and he's going to rule in a whole new way. He's going to do justice and mercy, which probably means rescuing us and beating up our enemies, of course, because that's the simplistic way of taking it. And so when Jesus comes and says, the kingdom of God is at hand, it's that expectation that he's playing into. Sidebar, some people in this last 100 years or so have said, oh, that meant the end of the world. It didn't. That's a modern misunderstanding. We can park that one. What it meant was the great turnaround, not only for Israel, but for the world, because the Old Testament has this extraordinary perspective. It's extraordinary from our modern Western idea that what happens to Israel is like a fulcrum for the rest of world history. It's a small point around which everything else is going to resolve. You see it in the Psalms and Isaiah and Zechariah and so on again and again. And Jesus seems to plug into that. Many will come from east and west and sit down with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. What's going to, how's that going to work? And so Jesus is then saying, yes, kingdom of God, but he's saying, no, it's not like you thought it was going to be. And so he tells these strange little stories called parables, which break open people's expectations and invite them into his way of seeing things and gradually bit by bit. He explains to his followers that the way it's going to work is by him going to Jerusalem and as in Isaiah, as in some of the Psalms, taking the weight of the world's sorrow and sin upon himself so that it can be dealt with so that then new creation can come out the other side. And that is the truly extraordinary thing, which is such a big and crunchy idea that it's very hard for modern Westerners who've been singing hymns about Jesus dying so we can go to heaven, etc. to get our heads around. But somehow if you stick with this historical narrative, then you get the whole story. So in the middle of all that Old Testament narrative, you have David and Solomon. David plans the temple and Solomon builds it. And the point of that is that Solomon builds the temple, David's son, so that God will come and dwell with his people. And then in Psalm 72, which is has a sort of solomonic ring to it, the king does justice and mercy for the orphan and the widow and the oppressed, particularly. And then the end of the Psalm says so that God's glory may fill the whole earth. That's the extraordinary promise. The Old Testament often says things like the earth will be full of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. And we Western Christians have thought, oh, well, we're going to get the glory of the Lord upstairs somewhere. No, it's a promise for this earth. So the temple is the sign and Jesus makes the temple the focal point of his ministry and message, which is why his prophecy about the destruction of the temple goes very closely with his own journey to his death. And then the early church stands back and says, this is what it looked like when God came to dwell in our midst. Yeah, yeah. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you very much.