JOHN164 - The Last Thing You Want to Be is a Copier

When I was in elementary school, there is a lot of mean things the kids would say to each other. I'm sure I was a part of this on the giving and receiving end at some point. You know, kids can be so cruel. But most of the insults, as I recall, didn't really cut to the bone because they were surface level insults.

Like your shirt is dumb. I don't like the gym shoes that you purchased. Your mom dresses you poorly. You know, I don't know. What kind of your face is ugly? Ah, that might feel bad, but it's surfacey. It doesn't cut to the heart of who you are. But there was one that if you got called this, it was the Scarlet Letter.

It was a brand that would not leave you, at least at my elementary school. And this insult was the dreaded copier insult. Yeah, that girl, she's just a copier. She saw what Melissa was doing and she just copied it. And everybody's like, What? A copier? You know, on a surface. Oh, well, you're just not a creative person.

I guess that that's pretty pretty bad. You wouldn't want to be that. But it was also bad to be a copier because it meant you were desperate. It meant you couldn't figure out how to get people to like you yourself. You couldn't get any followers, any little gang to follow you around and hang out. So you had to look at what somebody else was doing and try to rip off their thing and see if it would work.

And it's true. I mean, that comes off as pretty desperate, right? You know, when we get to be adults, we're uh a little more sophisticated in hiding our impulses and what we do and uh out of our insecurities and our desire for acceptance. But it's a pretty bad insult or label to get when you're an adult, too.

Is no, that guy just he's just copying people. Like he's trying to get people to like him with copying. Yikes! You don't want to be accused of that, and you don't want it to stick. Well, likewise, here in John chapter three, some people are gonna try to throw the copier label on Jesus, and they're gonna go tattle to the cool kid, the leader of the group, and be like, there's a guy over there, and he's copying you.

And as silly and trite as that sounds, it actually really matters what the guy they tattle to says about it because he is very influential, and back then, just like right now, being called a copier and having it stick, even if it's not true, that's a tough brand to shake. In this case, the person accused of being a copier is none other than Jesus of Nazareth, the guy for whom Christianity is named, Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God.

He's being accused of copying by the people who keep track of such things. Though it may not be fair, his reputation is kind of in play because he's been charged with the worst thing you can be, which is a copier, John 3, 22. After this, what is the this? It's the conversation with Nicodemus. Jesus and his disciples went out into the Judean countryside, where he spent some time with them and baptized.

Now, John, that's John the Baptist, also was baptizing at Anon near Salim. We'll talk more about all this stuff in a minute. If you don't know where that is, don't panic, don't worry about it, we're gonna make sense of it. So John's also baptizing at Anon near Salim because there was plenty of water, and people were constantly coming to be baptized.

And then verse 24 says, in parentheses, this was before John was put in prison. It goes on. An argument developed between some of John's disciples and a certain Jew over the matter of ceremonial washing. They, that being John's disciples, came to John and said to him, Rabbi, that man who was with you on the other side of the Jordan, the one you testified about, well, he is baptizing, and everyone is going to him.

It sounds more pathetic when I inflect it like that, doesn't it? That's good. I think my inflection here is in keeping with what's going on in the actual passage. All right, let's break this thing down a little bit. Jesus was down uh getting baptized by John the Baptist. Probably, you know, I postulated, maybe you see it different, but my theory is that the baptism that happens in John 1 and all John the Baptist's baptizing and the place where Jesus meets the first disciples, I theorize that that is at the very, very tippy top north end of the Dead Sea on the far side, the east side of the river.

Oh my goodness. I thought of a thing. I found a second error in my book, which let me tell, oh, it's crippling to find errors in a book that is published and is out there on the internet. I made it to somewhere in editing. I I don't know what we did. We put a sentence together or something, and instead of just saying that Rhea Bohem was the son of Solomon, I lumped Jeroboam in with that, which is not true.

And I know that's not true. Dang it. I've it's just a lot to look at, right? So a lot of you have been very helpful and let me know. All of you have been polite. Thank you for that. So I I've been living with ah, until we print another edition, I got that error out there in my book, right? Well, then my dad read my book, which was incredibly meaningful because my dad's you know, he's like kind of my hero, and he sort of waited until all the dust settled on the book promotion stuff.

And was there like, I'm just gonna read it a little later. And he sat down, settled into it, powered the through the thing in like two days and giving me all these updates, and it really meant a lot to me. Like, like dad showing up and cheering for me at my ball game when I'm a little kid means a lot to me.

Like you'll just always be my dad. Nobody else can be that. And so he gave me just a ton of encouragement. It was really cool. And then we got on the phone and he's like, hey, yeah, one thing you might want to try to fix, though, uh, in like a next edition. You said that Colossae was a hundred miles west of Ephesus, and I think that would put it in the middle of the Aegean Sea.

You might want to, you might want to just switch that to east. I was like, Come on. Also, I'm really thankful to my dad for pointing that out. Also, I'm really thankful to all of you who pointed out my stupid Rhea Boam Jeroboam thing. It's weird. If it's the internet, I can just go back and fix it later.

Nothing I can do when you already put a thing in a book. But this time, I promise you, I'm getting it right. Jesus baptism site. I postulate, we postulated that Jesus baptism site is at this Bethany beyond the Jordan place, which is north of the Dead Sea and then just east of the Jordan River. I've got my east and my west right this time, I promise.

So all that happens, and Jesus sort of he comes on the scene right there. He picks up those first disciples, they go north, parting ways with John the Baptist, and Jesus and his disciples are invited to a wedding up in Cana, which is kind of in the neighborhood of Nazareth, quite a ways north and to the west.

I really can do the cardinal directions, I promise. And they go to the wedding, and obviously, this first amazing sign happens up there, but then Jesus travels back down south. So it makes it kind of seem like the trip up to Cana, if this is all chronological, it's like a little side jaunt up north. But right now we're more in the Jordan Valley in Judea, a little more south.

So he goes up to the wedding, it's like okie dokie, did the wedding stuff, stop by Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee real quick, and maybe kind of set up shop, maybe get his family situated a little bit there, and then boom, right back down to Jerusalem for the Passover. That's where Jesus flips over a bunch of tables and gets into it with the money changers.

And then it looks like most likely, while he's there, Nicodemus, the Pharisees, watching all of this go on. He's like, This dude is different. He has an authority that's different. Nicodemus thinks to himself, this Jesus fellow isn't one more sailor who's been blown off course into muck bay with the rest of us, who's just slogging around in the slime of opinion soup, saying whatever he wants, and none of it matters anyway.

This Jesus fellow seems different. So Nicodemus in chapter three inquires privately of Jesus. We talked about that at great length. And then the first two words of what happens next are after this. Well, that seems pretty chronological. In other words, Jesus gets done in Jerusalem and he goes out into the Judean countryside.

So he's not back to Galilee. Remember, Galilee is the province that is north in all of this, surrounding the Sea of Galilee. And Judea is the historic homeland of the kingdom of Judah, the southern kingdom, with Jerusalem as its capital. And so now Jesus has left Jerusalem for the Passover, but he hasn't gone all the way back up north.

It looks like he's gone, my guess would be to about the halfway up the Jordan River position, heading back up toward Galilee. People who know this stuff way better than me have dug into what Anon near Salim means, and I've read their work. I just don't know enough to verify it. But consensus among people whose reputations I trust would put this disputed location at about, again, halfway up the Jordan River between the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee on the, I can do this, west side of the Jordan River near some springs that apparently are still producing there.

So there's our timeline. There's how Jesus is moving around. And when Jesus gets to this spot, he is reunited with John the Baptist. They have not seen each other since the initial baptism of Jesus down at Bethany beyond the Jordan. Now, did Jesus know John the Baptist was there? And is that why Jesus went to this spot?

Yeah, I I kind of think so. Because it wouldn't have been hard to find John the Baptist, at least outside of the religious and political establishment. He's the most famous person in Judea and Galilee at this point. And if you ever wanted to know where he is, it's kind of like when I lived in Wyoming.

If you wanted to know where the Elkurds were, it wasn't like there was a website tracker or something, but you could just ask people because everybody always knew where the Elkurds were. Like, oh yeah, you know, they're kind of nested down in this field right here because of the storm this week. Oh, okay.

I want to go see the Elkurds. Oh no, they're down a little bit further, a little lower elevation right now. Okay, I'm gonna go see it. It's just by reputation, people knew. So why did Jesus go to Anon near Salim? Well, I would theorize that it's because John the Baptist is there. And well, John the Baptist had a bit more vouching to do for Jesus before everything was done.

But I would not theorize, I would just say I know that Jesus was there because he went to baptize, and there is, quote, verse 23, plenty of water, which is very important for baptism when you're dunking people in the water. Which again, I understand why different groups do baptism in different fashions.

We've talked about this in the past when we were in John chapter one, but the Greek word and all of the descriptions in the Bible look like at least the early church, and maybe it's fine to baptize with a little water or a lot of water, but it looks like at least the early church was baptizing by immersion.

Baptize literally means to dip into the water. So you need a pretty good amount of water to do that, and it'd be great if that weren't rancid, because if the water is even a little bit gross, then every time somebody gets in there, they're bringing all their dust and their muck with them. And if it's stagnant water, that water is going to turn into just a nasty pool of filth really, really quick, whereas springs would be refreshing.

So again, that supports the Anon near Salim theory because it is a springy theory. Okay, so Jesus goes to a baptism site. It looks like there's a lot of springs there and plenty of room for baptizing. And apparently, as he is setting up shop, it is not immediately evident to everyone what is going on.

And some sort of argument or conversation that we're going to think about next time around breaks out that leads to John the Baptist's disciples figuring out that Jesus is over there in that other spring and he's copying you. There's the copier, copier, he's copying, John, he's copying. What do you? It's kind of funny the way that all plays out.

I guess we'll get into this more tomorrow, but I mean, Jesus' disciples sometimes say and do goofy things like this as well, where they miss the point. Maybe it's the kind of thing that Jesus and John could have a little bit of a laugh about. But we will see how the charge of being a copier plays out and how John the Baptist responds to it.

Because once that charge is made, everybody's gonna be like, it's gonna get real quiet. And the little guy at the saloon is gonna stop playing the piano, and everybody's gonna look up from the bar, and they're gonna be like, Did somebody just call somebody a copier? And everybody's gonna look at John the Baptist, who is the guy who got told somebody's copying you.

And whatever he says next is gonna be real, real important, no matter how silly that sounds. And that's what we're gonna talk about next time. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and I'd just like to remind you that north is up, south is down, west is left, and east is right. You're welcome.

Let's do this again soon.

JOHN164 - The Last Thing You Want to Be is a Copier

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