CBMC English · Transcript · · Updated
Where God Meets You: The Ground – Transcript
Video by CBMC English · Watch the original on YouTube
Summary
AI-generated from the transcript. Verify details against the source video.
- The speaker explains that an American insider argued the chateau location in France killed a merger by bringing out the arrogance and hubris of the French employees.
- Winston Churchill is quoted as saying that humans shape their buildings and thereafter their buildings shape them, which illustrates that locations are not neutral.
- The magi traveled to Bethlehem and bowed down face on the ground to worship Jesus in a simple house rather than finding him in Jerusalem or a grand setting.
Use this video with Pro
Reading, copying and transcript downloads are free. Create saved AI results for this video with a signed-in Pro account ($9/month).
Transcript
Search ignores accents. All transcript text stays visible.
and all these things would have happened. It would have caused problems for the merger. [clears throat] And right before that meeting in the airport, one of the French senior directors fell ill, so they said, "Let's have a change of plans. Let's have this meeting in France." And then they chose this location instead.
This is a chateau 1 hour away from Paris. And this was where they were going to have this merger meeting of equals. You have all these Persian rugs. You have it in the countryside, gold frescos, exquisite chandeliers, portraits of all these famous French soldiers. And so for three days these executive [singing] teams met together
18hour and long days and they tried to hash out this merger and then after about 3 days all plans for the merger just they all fell apart.
And what ended up happening as one French or one American insider said it was that the chateau brought out the Frenchness of the French. So we're sitting in the ballrooms and having these discussions and and you could see the arrogance and the hubris of the French coming out of the Alcatel employees. So they started becoming more comfortable with these negotiations and they were more
comfortable with the dominance that they had. it wasn't going to be a merger of equals anymore. They started saying things like when we take over. And so this French insider, excuse me, American insider then says, "I will argue until the day I die that the meeting place we chose killed the deal."
If you want to have a merger of equals, you don't pick a location that symbolizes inequality. You don't pick a location that symbolizes 18th century dominance.
Chateau communicates we're not equals. You're on our territory. You're going to do it our way. Location matters. Winston Churchill once said, "We shape our buildings and thereafter our buildings shape us. Locations are not neutral."
And so when we think about this, we behave one way in one room. If you're in a chateau, you behave a whole different way. And so that's why this Christmas, we are going through a series called Where God Meets You. And it's important to know the locations of the Christmas story and what they mean for us because we if if Church Hill was right, we shape our buildings or we shape our locations and the locations shape us. And so last
week we took a look at the location, the very odd location of where God wanted to meet his people after 400 some years. And it would be here in the wilderness. He chose that place. Out of all the places that he could have chose to reveal the Messiah, it would have been in the wilderness where there is absolutely nothing.
So today we're going to see this story and you're going to see perhaps uh a theme of social class, a theme of a chateau in a sense. And it all starts in Matthew chapter 2. Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem, well this could have been a couple months, days, it could have been maybe even up to a year. Who knows? Um it doesn't tell us the time. But after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in
the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, "Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?" So, character one, we got three different characters. Character one is Jesus. After after 2,000 years of having this promise of Jesus coming, of this Messiah coming, it's finally happened. and he's born king of the Jews, which was a prophecy in 1000 BC of a king that was going to
be a king for forever. One day, God would send this and that time is now. Character number two is this guy named Herod. He is Herod, the king, king of Judea, otherwise also known as king of the Jews.
Herod was your ruthless politician. He was the guy who had great buildings and and and and bribed his way into the office. And so he was that guy that was cunning. Killed some of his own wives, his own children in order to stay in power. Character number three were the wise men from the east. And the Greek word there is magi, not wise men. And so that's why we say magi um is where we get the word magician from. But don't
don't think about hocus pocus illusionists, magicians pulling rabbits out of the hat. These were priests. And we'll talk more about that in a second. And so they're from the east as you see here. Now east in the Bible, it's interesting. We look at it, if you're just looking at it as a word, okay, that's directionally east. But east also meant something to the Jews because notice that in east to worship, you're going to see social class today. And
you're going to understand how this is going to all play out. Um and and so first thing and and I know in this room some of us have high standings. Um some of us were raised, you go off to college to get a higher standing. Um in in a place like this, the higher you go, the more successful you are. And this is what we want for our kids. This is what we want for life. This is something that's going to impact all of us. So
this is a question for every single one of you as it relates to worship. Where do you go? So number one, what you find IS YOU DON'T GO by looking up at the lad. So these wise men, these magi, where do they go directly to find out about worship? They saw that where is he who is born king of the Jews? in their world they wanted
they wanted power and the way they did that is they went to Jerusalem um first we just got to explain a couple things nowhere in the text are you going to find with the wise men that there are three of them so the song three we three kings um we don't find that they're kings either they're in fact they're not going to be kings um the magi are not kings they are priests we have a good idea of who the magi are because magi are this universal iversal class, this
universal job. And what you find plenty of inscriptions, you see this universally in the polytheistic world. These are people who are qualified. These are people who are trained. These are priests. We see the magicians in the Bible too because when we take a look at Egypt or we take a look at Babylon um with with Pharaoh, Pharaoh's spirit was troubled and he sent and he called for all the Egyptian magi to come to him.
Interpret my dream. Babylon. Uh Nebuchadnezzar had a dream too. It's those then he summoned his magicians. He summoned his enchanters, sorcerers to tell them his dream. In Acts 13, Paul and Barnabas, they encountered a magician themselves. So these guys were priests. Now notice in the social ranking world if the king was meant to be a representation of their god whatever god
that they they worshiped then the people who served that god were next in line in that world. What you find are these are the magi or the priests. They were the priests of the staterun religion.
And so if the king wanted to know, should I go off to war against that nation or should I go off to war against that nation? How did he figure that out? He asked the magi. And then the magi based off of their arts or their things, they would give him an answer. Now the magi had a a wide diverse range of jobs.
Obviously the simple one is they had to maintain the temple. Most of the people didn't go inside the temple. But then they started studying their gods to find out how can we get their our god's blessings and and so one of the ways is we're going to organize these festivals.
And so every year we're going to have this festival that festival. The interesting thing is not only that then when they let's say your kid was sick. Maybe your kid was possessed by a demon.
You had no idea. You took your kid to these priests and you expected these priests to exercise whatever demon there was. So then now these priests had to study demonology. They had to study, wait a second, this looks like it's this classification. Maybe it's this, maybe it's that. And so they had classifications for everything. Then the other part was they they specialize a little bit in medicine. Um imagine if
you've watched the Harry Potter things, you have all these different classes. That's kind of what a magi would have done. There was an herbology class. There was a charms class. There was a potions class. Uh a defense against a dark arts class. That's what they did.
They studied through it all and they were magicians. Oh, you're sick here? Take this Gilly or whatever it is and you will get better. Um then many of these priests, especially in Babylon, they studied [clears throat] astrology.
They were the ones who kept the calendar. And if you take a look at some of the inscriptions nowadays, um they still exist in history. They have all these clay tablets. If they started looking at the stars, they created the zodiac, by the way. So they were the ones who created let's divide all the stars into 12 30° regions. And that's the major constellation that's in the sky at that point. That's going to be
the god or whatever. Interestingly, that zodiac made its way to China. And that's how we have our version of that zodiac. But when they took a look at astronomy, they started making interpretive signs with it. So if Venus is in the sky at this particular time, that's good luck.
But if Venus and Mars and the moon are in the sky at that particular time, we're going to die. That's the way astrology worked. And that's the way these guys ran the polytheistic religion. So they didn't work for the people, they worked for the king. So imagine staterun religion and now they see a star and what are they thinking?
We're going to work for this new king. Where do you go to meet this new king? Well, they thought where do kings live? They're going to live in the capital. So they went straight to Jerusalem only to find out, wait a second, the king's not here.