 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, click at nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 133, live from San Antonio. I'm the laden, Tray Strickman, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Hey, Mike, you're in San Antonio, my home state. Look at everybody. We got people here in front of us. Yes, we do. We have live people. This is awesome. It's good to have live people. It is. And we've been doing shows all week, but this is our first show that we actually get to do that actually get to talk because normally when you're interviewing somebody, I just sit there like with my mouth shut because I don't have anything intelligent to say. Those are great shows too. Yeah, those are the best. Right. I'm sure everybody just fast forwards through my parts and just gets to you. I see how that is. No, but well, we went to see the movie of the arrival last night. I don't know if anybody's seen that movie. Yeah. Anybody seen that? You say? We won't give away any spoilers. Yeah, we won't spoil it, but did you like it? I did. I did. It's pretty heady. Have any of you seen the old Jodie Foster movie, Contact? It's like that. I don't think it's as good, but it's good. But that's that's kind of what you're looking at. It's not Independence Day. All right. It's Burnett. You love you love Independence Day. Yeah, we also have David Burnett here. So any questions targeted towards David, you know, let you know, ask him. We're here. So I'll defer some to David. How's that? Sounds good. All right. Well, I'll hand them off. Do we just want to get straight to the questions? Sure. All right. Do you want me to just go around the table, Bree? Are you all right if we start with you? What do you want me to go the other way? Or Brian? Chris, you up? You want to start? You have a question? Or which way you want me to go? Who wants to be in the spot first? We're going to let Brian, Brian got here super early to help us get the loft here in Rosella, coffee shop downtown San Antonio. Give them a shout out. So Brian got here early. So we're going to let Brian start it. My question is, I guess more about just application, present day application to this information. I guess in more of a worship context and how biblical authors kind of viewed worship and how we view it is probably two different things. I know the example like Psalters were like an Old Testament priestly leaders of like Jericho, but they were like warring too. And so how do we put this into present day context, this information about the gods? Could we be worshiping other gods and not even realizing it? Sometimes, I know idols exist in like occult settings and stuff, but could idols be on TV? Could idols just be in stuff that these gods inhabit? And we need to kind of view that as serious. And how do we apply what you're teaching here? It's just our everyday life is kind of my example is my question. Dave, did you hear that? Okay, because I'd be interested, because you had you pastored for a while to I'd be interested in hearing your take on this too. Well, I think I think at some level, you I mean, you all know I'm not going to abstract the gods so that they they aren't real, you know, in other things. But there is something to be said for what you swap in, you know, to, you know, to worship in the sense of adoration, what what receives your attention, what do you trust in, I think is a big deal. We've actually had a similar question on a Q&A in an earlier episode, where I talked about part of a sort of a worship status between, you know, an Israelite and God really relates to what do I put my confidence in as far as who's going to sustain me, you know, in this state, because they don't take a lot of things for granted in terms of, you know, what they have to eat, what they have to drink, their personal safety, all this sort of stuff. So trust actually was a was a significant part of, you know, how a person thought about Yahweh. And again, if you're not trusting in him, and you're trusting in something else, either yourself or you're convinced for some reason to trust another deity, well, there's an example of idolatry, even without you having to sort of go, you know, participate in some ritual, you know, at some cult location. So I do think that that's an element that we can see sort of a transferability in terms of, again, where where our confident, confidence is for living. It's kind of interesting. Also in that when we we talked to NT Wright today, in his latest book, one of the things I wanted to kind of, you know, get some response out of him from or for was he talks about sin being really at its at its heart idolatry. He, you know, it's not so much I broke a rule. It's my loyalty is is toward another. Okay. And that can manifest in a variety of ways. So we talked a little bit about that because I thought it was interesting that he would would sort of, you know, funnel biblical talk about sin in that direction. And you know, I think that's, you know, a touchpoint to that we can talk about, you know, how does God really look at us? I mean, if you remember, we've had a couple episodes on the podcast, including some Q&As where we talked about, you know, David, okay, David was a mess. I mean, he commits all sorts of sins and some really horrible ones. But the thing he never does is he never there's no question about his loyalty. So even though he's a screw up in so many ways, he's never crossing the line where oh, I maybe Yahweh isn't the God of that's not even on the radar. So that that's a good example where God looks at violations of, let's say, morality or something like that. And yes, they're wrong. Yes, they're violations of the law and whatnot. But the big focus, again, is who is your God? I mean, when it really comes down to it, where is your believing loyalty? And that that directly relates to idolatry. So that I think that's another example of a kind of thing if we were preaching, instead of talking about sin in terms of breaking a rule, it's, you know, when push comes to shove, who are you trusting? Where is your believing loyalty? Because forgiveness is a factor there too. If you abandon your confidence in the Lord's forgiveness, that actually itself is sort of a form of idolatry. And you're putting yourself in the place of God as far as your an assessment of your relationship with God, you sort of become the arbiter of that relationship instead of trusting Him. So I would tend to apply it in those sorts of ways. I'd like to hear, Dave, what you think. Yeah, I'm not sure if I would go about it the same route. When we ask questions of worship and idolatry, we got to be sure that if we're asking the questions of the biblical texts, that we're using the categories that they're using. So when, and I'm sure you've all heard this before, I grew up hearing this, is when you hear sermons on idolatry, right, normally what pastors will do with that and preachers will do with that is they'll say things like, you know, the money can be your idol, right? Or sex can be your idol or, you know, whatever, you've heard that, right? I mean, I have, I don't know, I've heard it all my life, but when you, the biblical tradition doesn't, that's not idolatry. None of that stuff is idolatry. None of that stuff has anything to do with idolatry. So when we say, well, can you make money your idol? No, you can't. Can you make sex an idol? No, you can't. You can't make your wife your idol. You can't make your children your idol. Just stop that language right now. Because idolatry, just like the term worship, and this is actually really important, and I'm glad you paired those in a question, because biblically this, this, this is a kind of a complicated issue, but I'm trying to simplify it. Idolatry always had to do with, and Mike, if you want to nuance this, you can, but idolatry had to do with literal cultic worship of deities. So if you, and what I mean by cultic worship of deities, this has to do with what worship means. There's a debate in early Christian scholarship on whether the earliest Christians, the Jewish Jesus followers actually worshiped Jesus. Now for many Christians, they'd be like, what? How could you say that? But the, but the question, the way it's framed, is with these modern categories of what worship is, right? So like when we think of what worship is, it's like singing to God or like praising Jesus or whatever, but worship, the terms for worship in, in Greek in particular, and then also into Hebrew, the Greek term I'm thinking of is Treskeia, which means cult. It means sacrifice. So you would bring offerings or sacrifices to deities, and that's what would frequently be called translated worship. Now where this gets, why I said this is complicated is when you're reading your English translations of your Bibles, most English translations, and I don't really know any other English translations that don't do this. Maybe I'm ignorant of one, but most English translations will translate that word Treskeia for cult that you offer to deities. The same as they'll translate the word proscuneo, which means to just bow down or fall prostrate. This is a big, big problem. Okay? For us in modern reading modern English Bibles, what that causes us to do is when we see worship of idols, like they have real gods behind them, we tend to equate that with other passages that are using proscuneo, which means just to bow down. Now the reason why these are not the same things is because you can proscuneo a master of a household. Like if you're a slave, you can bow down and prostrate before your master, right? Or it's something you do before a king, but it does not mean you're offering them cultic worship. So you see those terms, that's really important distinction when we talk about worship and idolatry. That's good because what I was tracking on is essentially, what do you think you're getting out of it? And you're hitting the good, the distinction with the practices. Yeah, I have to hit that up because I think it's one of the biggest kind of exegetical failures of preachers is that they don't know how to make those distinctions. And it can confuse people because they're like, well, am I like worshiping idols if I like money a lot or something? It's like, no, you shouldn't like money a lot, but that's not what we would call idolatry. Right. And since that part of it's sort of taken off the table, then in terms of our modern application, we do have to ask ourselves, you know, what, what do we think we're getting out of this other stuff? You know, even though we can't strictly practice idolatry in the mode, you know, that they were doing. Right, right. It's like we have to, this is, this is kind of an interesting, me and Mike have talked about this before, is this interesting problem where you have all these texts in the Old Testament talking about idolatry and New Testament, particularly in Paul, that pastors want to make some readily quick application with, but sometimes you just can't and that's okay. Like, I mean, we, we, most of us grew up in the monotheistic West where it's not that people, we have the reverse problem now. The problem in the West, the monotheistic West is not the gods per se. They don't believe in those anymore. It's like, do you believe in God? That's all people say, right? It's like, do you believe in God? Well, no, I don't believe in God. It's like, no, they have gods, you know. So that's, we have a kind of reverse problem in the West. So I think it's almost impossible in the West to have idolatry in the biblical sense. Again, I know that it's difficult when we use these terms, but I just want to bring clarity to that because I think that's such a confused topic. So I don't know if that's, hopefully that's helpful. In regard to, oh, like the Korites, I'm actually, I'm actually kind of interested in why you're asking it up, but you can, you can jump into that later. So we get that on. Just who are the Psalters, the Korites, the people who wrote the Psalms? Like, what was the purpose of even having Psalms back in the Old Testament singing, and how did that relate to giving gratitude or thanks to the gods or Yahweh? I think there's, I think there's several purposes. I mean, and you see this in other ancient Near Eastern cultures, you have the same kind of thing where you'll get either ritual language. Again, some, what we would think of as something liturgical. You get like a ritual language. Some part of a ritual itself is set to music or written in such a way that it's, it's more easy to remember it. Again, you know, it's just like poetry, you know, that it's a memory device. So I think that was, that was one purpose for it. You know, maybe even for the priests, you know, who had to perform, you know, these rituals, but because it's not, it's not like everything was public to the masses all the time. I mean, there were some things that were, but you, you can communicate, you know, liturgy or ritual through them. You can communicate naturally if, if the content component is about the deity. That's like communicating points of theology as well. So I think there, there's a memory element. I don't think it was about making the people listening feel a certain way. In other words, it wasn't directed to them. It was directed to the deity. But if you look at the content, it, there's still expressions of, you know, the human condition in some respects. I mean, it really depends on context, you know, because you're going to have some things that are very, very cult oriented, you know, very specific reason why we're saying what we're saying. And then you're going to have other things that are more sort of freestyle, you know, adoration, again, not directed toward making us feel a certain way, but praising, praising God, praising the deity in other, in other contexts. So I tend to think that what we do now, there, there are some significant disconnects, you know, in how not only how we do worship, but how we even use some of those elements. Yeah, I actually think there's two parts to that question. Because, because when we talk about the Psalter, and, and, and then why there's Levites always in front of the temple, always singing, right, at the, at the doorway, I think those are two different questions. But the, the, the priests always singing from the temple is really interesting. There's a lot, there's, I think there's a lot we could say about that. But one thing that I think is really interesting. And I think my, I don't know if we've talked about this before. I think there's a sacred space element too, because normally you don't see people singing all the time. Right. But when you, when you encounter this place, it's like incense. It makes this place different, singing. It makes this place, it marks out sacred space. But where else do you hear about choirs singing all the time? Yeah. In the Old Testament, in heaven. Yeah. But particularly in the heavenly temple. So this is really important, actually. Job 38 is an interesting passage here that, that you can make a correlation to. Job 38, that is where God answers back Job, you know, really intense passage, you know, not really intense devotional right there. You are nothing, you know. I love it. But they recount the narrative of creation. And they tell it in, you know, what Job tells it in a way of temple building, of temple construction, you know, when God's like, where were you when I laid the foundations, right? Or sank the plumb lines. But he's talking about creation. But he's, creation is temple building. And so, and what were the angels doing when they, when they created, when they built? They were singing and rejoicing. So this is really interesting because, you know, I didn't pay, it took me a while to catch on to this. And I think it was Margaret Barker or somebody, I can't remember who I read that, that tipped me off on the connection. But, but the idea that they're singing, going on and rejoicing as God's bringing order to the chaos, which is good news, right? Because there's inhibitable space, there's place with darkness and chaos. And when God begins constructing his temple and bringing order to that, which has no order, it's something worthy to be praised and to sing about. And so, when the temple's constructed, they're singing and rejoicing of the angels in heaven. And the priests are like mirrors of that reality. And not just mirrors of that reality, but literal participants in it. Because an ancient Israelite wouldn't know the difference between temple and the temple of heaven, per se, because there's overlap there. We call it the gateway of, you know, heaven on earth kind of. Yeah, I remember when we were doing the series on Leviticus, you know, when we talked about concepts of sacred space, that one of the reasons they had, they had calendar and calendar was a big deal and festivals and, and the timing of this or that was this notion of being in sync. That's, it's also astral. So all these things mark out sacred space. God's house is where you would expect order. Right, that's right. You won't, you don't expect disorder there. And what do you find? And what do you find in that Job 38 text? It's interesting. Who are the ones singing? It says it's the sons of God, but it also calls them the stars. Right? Yeah. So it's the idea that that order and all that stuff. Yeah, the celestial order, everything is kept in order. Right. So when you see like a falling star, you know, it's normally some rebel angel or something in the Old Testament. So, yeah, that's actually exactly right. Actually, that's, I think that's one of the best ways you could put it, is you're in tune with the heavenly order. That's, that's a really good way to put it, because that's the way ancients actually an interesting note on that. This is one of the main reasons, Mike and I were just talking about this. This is one of the main reasons why the Qumran sectarians, not necessarily all the literature from Qumran, but the sectarian literature at Qumran. And I'm thinking in particularly a letter called 4QMMT. And this was a letter written to Jerusalem from the sectarians who were separating. And in this letter, you find a number of interesting things. But one of the main reasons they separate from Jerusalem cult was they were on an astral calendar, on a lunar calendar, excuse me, and they were on the solar calendar. And they believed that now for us modern people, we think that's why would you fight and go out to the wilderness over this? Who gives a rip? Yeah, what a stupid thing to separate over. But it's not stupid if you actually believe that those festivals that you're participating in, are literally participating with the angels of heaven. And that your participation in the cultic festivals and in those times and seasons are literally assisting in those who would keep the orders of the whole cosmos. And so, if you're doing the wrong thing, guess what? The cosmos is out of whack because you're supposed to participate with them. And so that was a huge deal in early Judaism. This was not a small thing. So the being in tune with the heavenly order is a really big deal in early Judaism. I just wanted to tag on to Brian's question then, in light of everything you said, at the quantum level, everything is vibration. And so we talk about bringing order out of chaos and the angels are singing and the angels are the stars. So without spending a lot of time elaborating, do you think it matters then what tune we play or what harmony we put to it or what rhythm we use with it? And I'm just thinking about how things have changed from the expressions of the Psalms that would come out of people like Bach and Mozart versus the expression of the same Psalms that's coming through a lot of more popular Christian music that draws its themes from secular music. Do you think that matters? Yeah, I'm a music idiot. So I mean, literally, I don't even know what the notes are. I don't know how I got out of grade school without knowing this. I mean, I understand why you're asking, but music in ancient Israel would have been dramatically different than Bach and Mozart as well. So I don't know that we can make a value judgment on the music. I certainly can't because I don't know anything about it. But I think we can make a value judgment on sort of why we're doing what we're doing. And I realize this is subjective too, but one of the points of application you get out of what David was saying, the whole you're being sacred space should be different. You're invited to sacred space. What goes on here should reflect what again, the idea of orderliness and glorifying God that went with sacred space, cast in heaven. So those are the kinds of things we can use, even though we're not so tuned into this idea of being in sync with the angels and all that sort of thing. But we can still take what they were thinking when they were doing that and ask ourselves, are we pun intended? Are we in tune with that? That sort of thing. So to me, for me personally, again, because I don't know anything about, I can't really evaluate what's actually done in performance. But I think I can evaluate. Does this draw not only the person doing it, but the congregation? Does it feel like we're on holy ground now? Does it feel like we've entered sacred space? Is this different than what our regular lives are? Again, trying to get to the distinctions, trying to think in these terms, that this should be something special. The problem that we run into is that we are sacred space. So it's a little bit different. But I think even though when we gather as an assembly, it's still useful to be reminded of these ideas. It's still, this is still points of biblical theology that are useful to help us maybe take our minds away from the mundane things of life and get us to focus on the heavenly life that awaits us and so on and so forth. So I think it's very useful. Can I add one more thing? Just one quick thing about that question. I was asked that question a lot, you know, as a pastor and that there's two different answers I would give to it. One, there is, I think, I hesitate to use this word, but there is an objective, a kind of objective sense of harmony to the created order that humans are intended to tap into. And I think that's where most a lot of beauty comes from. Like a lot of art and music are, I mean, I have philosopher buddies who have done PhDs on this, I haven't, but about beauty as an objective apologetic. And so beautiful music should, I mean, the most beautiful music should be in the church. And I actually agree with that. I think the most excellent music should always, should be in the church, I think. But the second part, the answer to that, that's I think really important for people who ask the question, is to know that we have to remember that when, when Revelation talks about a people from every tribe, tongue and nation are all worshiping the Lamb, they're all doing it in their own languages. And God doesn't make them, it's really interesting that God doesn't make it all one language. You know, isn't that interesting? It's like, because some, some Jewish traditions at the time would say things like, and you find this in Pseudopigraphal literature, that, that the, the heavenly language is Hebrew. And that's, that's what all the animals and the human spoke before the fall. And this is actually a pretty dominant Jewish view at the period of Jesus actually, weird folks, but since Hebrew is like a post-Cadian dialect, but whatever, some of them thought that, but it shows the ethnocentricity of it. Like, you have to speak our language, you have to be just like us. But the New Testament shows a completely different picture that the worship is actually different languages and different cultures. And sometimes that's going to be different melodies, different tunes, and that's beautiful to God. So I think the multifacetedness of worship is actually essential in the world. I'm jotting myself a note here, because it's too bad. Stephen, Huebcher's not here. He's posted several things on celestial worship. He is a music, he is a musician. So I'm just putting myself, give myself a note to ask him, you know, to maybe, maybe give us a post on that. What do you think about that? I'm Jonathan. It's a pleasure to be here first of all. So a few days ago, I was able to go here, NT Wright speak at the McFarland Memorial Editorium in SNU, and it was the first lecture out of three, I think about the Jesus we never knew. And in it, he brought up a early on lecture. He brought up a point about how we look at the afterlife right now versus how the first century disciples would have looked at it. And the theme of it was that to them, you know, heaven and earth, they belong together. They were experiencing something that was like, you know, the climax of world history, you know, the resurrection of Christ. But then he mentioned that how we looked at the afterlife now is more borrowed from Nazism. It's a private spirituality. When you die, you go to heaven. It's escapist. And that if the first century disciples had really thought that way, they wouldn't have been persecuted because they were proclaiming, no, no, no, it's a new world order right here, right now, you know, something, you're not going to worship Caesar anymore. Jesus is the king now. And that's why they were persecuted. It wasn't kind of like, Oh, we'll do what you want. And then, you know, when you die, you get to see what the kingdom looks like. And then I kind of feel like this sort of dovetails into everything we're saying, because I believe that when you look at the Old Testament, you see that an anti right brought this up that the tabernacle is a model of creation that all these things, you know, mirror what's going on above. And there's supposed to be constant reminders that one day when things are perfectly set up, heaven and earth will be one thing, they'll be married, they'll be reunited. My disturbing thought of that is, you know, being a non specialist always, you know, the nasty, yeah, so we inherited this nasty view. And that's what I've always heard. Am I wrong to think that way? Then, you know, well, he in his book, he refers to it as platonic, platonic eschatology. Yeah, I kind of disagree with him, too. But but he he doesn't, he doesn't deny what when he says stuff like that, some have wondered or an accused him of denying an intermediate state. In other words, you die, you're with the Lord. Okay, so that like, you do go somewhere. And but but but he'll say that, that Paul affirms an intermediate state, you know, some kind of thing like that. But I saw it since he does that since he doesn't deny that, he would be to use his own words back at him. Well, you're a little platonic, too, then. But I think what his polemic is, he doesn't want to, let me say it this way, I think he thinks there's an over emphasis on that, and not enough emphasis on seeing the purpose of the atonement, you know, your your your destiny as a believer, projecting it, you know, sort of, okay, when I die, that I'm out of here. And and for a lot of believers, that's sort of where it ends, that that's the end game. And what he's saying is, we shouldn't be overemphasizing that. But again, not denying it, we should be thinking more in terms of, and this will be familiar for this audience, restoring it. And we actually got into this today, because I said, you know, this is how, you know, we talk about it on the show. This is, you know, how I talk about it in the book. And I mean, he he's right there. So that, I think for him, it's an issue of emphasis. You want to add anything to that? With all due respect to Dr. Wright, I cut my teeth on his work in my undergrad. This is not the only place where David disagrees. Yeah, yeah, this is not the only place I disagree with him. But me and him had this debate in 2014, when I when I defended my paper against him. And we're hopefully we'll have it again Monday. But this this notion that and now a lot of a lot of things he says around this topic, I completely agree with. But this this picking and you will hear this a lot if you pay attention is the modern critique is of like everyone who's writing in who like bought into that paradigm, they'll say, well, you either believe in a physical, you know, this earthly resurrection, or you're a Platonist. That's actually not true in the ancient world. And that's an oversimplification, because there are other ways of thinking about becoming. So this is his objection to other scholars, like myself, who think that the celestial transformation is literal for Paul, that they he literally believes you'll become like the celestial bodies. Now, for right, what he thinks is well, then you're just a Platonist, because the the celestial bodies and Plato, they're they're a somaton, they're unbodied. They're your soul, or your second is it leaves the body, the prison Plato calls it, you know, and you flee the prison and then you're truly free in heaven. That's only a Platonist view. The Stoics in the ancient world do not agree. Take Cicero, for example, Cicero, and I'm this is a major part of my research actually, Cicero chides Plato for this. And even so Cicero is writing in Latin and he writes this text called on the nature of the gods. And it's it's probably the most definitive treatment. And you there's English translations of this you can read online for free. So because it's, you know, open source or whatever you call it. So Cicero talks about how the Platonists say that the gods are and even quotes Plato in Greek, even though he's writing in Latin, saying the Platonists who say that the gods are unbodied, he says is wrong. Because any anything that has movement and will and operation is a bodied phenomena. So they have bodies. They're not the same kinds of bodies as like humans. They're immortal. They're made of like Numa or ether, which is what exactly actually the words Paul uses when he's describing the resurrection body. He uses the same language. He says that we put off the Cicicon or the or the Epiglia, the terrestrial, the earthy bodies. And we put on the pneumatic bodies, the celestial bodies. And so the stuff of heaven of the heavenly bodies is the stuff that our resurrection bodies are made out of. So you can have a celestial body and it be bodied and be perfectly okay in the Greek world. So it's not this one or the other. You know, there's a plethora of views. My gosh, Cicero has like, I mean, there's like so many different Greek philosophers that all disagree on this. Yeah, right. So it's not that simple. Right. Well, tend to get criticized by other people for I don't I don't know that there'd be anybody who put it in these terms because it sounds pejorative, but but kind of either or fallacies. Some will accuse him of being very reductionistic in an argument. And, you know, yeah, he does some of that. I've actually I know a couple who say that. Yeah. Okay. They'll use that. They'll go unnamed. I've kind of wondered if he's not a little too if he hasn't bought a little too much of the common view for the Old Testament, that the Old Testament doesn't really have the concept of an afterlife, you know, which I don't believe either. But but that's sort of a dominant view. So he might be thinking, in other words, if you think that it cuts off continuity with the the sort of real embodied existence, you know, with the Lord, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. So if you don't believe that it looks like what Paul's doing is, again, pardon the pun out of the ether, you know, like he's not getting it from anywhere. Yeah, there's no continuity in the Old Testament. So I think I think you hit the nail on the head. I just get that impressed. I think Mike just hit the nail on the head is the sources for this stuff. Right. What you'll see in scholarship and a lot of a lot of folks just don't know this because they're they don't have time to read all this junk, you know, but it's in scholarships. Yeah, it's just so technical and takes forever. It's annoying. But but the some of the some of the sources of this resurrection body stuff is not just Hellenistic that some scholars will say this is a Hellenistic development. You don't have any sort of afterlife stuff until you get the Hellenistic world till after Alexander, the scriptures are translated into Greek and they're starting to mesh with kind of Hellenistic concepts of afterlife. That's just not true. That's just not true. It's demonstrably not true. And what Mike has said before, and I want to say amen times a thousand is that if a lot of these New Testament scholars now I don't fault them. And like I said before on the podcast, yet look, there's just so much literature out there. It's impossible to master even your field. But unfortunately, a lot of the New Testament scholars don't have any sort of or at least not long enough formal training in ancient Near Eastern context. So they're doing Hellenistic world stuff. And many of them haven't spent time in the ancient Near Eastern backgrounds. But if you if you know, if you know, I had to do this in my thesis that Mike was a reader on was that astral deification existed for the pharaohs in Egypt hundreds of years before you even have a Hebrew Bible. Like the pharaohs are said to not only become a star or ascend above the stars, sometimes to join their brothers or to reign over the stars, even interesting pyramid text I found, just pre the Middle Kingdom, where the pharaoh upon his death, not only ascends to heaven to join the stars, but he rules over them and the skies turn to black. There's an earthquake when it happens. Yeah, yeah, where have you heard that before? You know, so this we're talking, we're talking like 1000 years before Jesus almost, you know, so I'm just saying this stuff exists in the ancient Near East. Don't if someone tells you that this stuff is new and Hellenistic, don't buy it for a second. Just don't buy it because this stuff is all over the ancient Near Eastern world. That's my little stick. Sorry. That's one of David's hobby horses. Where's the questions? Go ahead and pass it. I'm just curious when you talked about the sync with the festivals. Does that have anything to say today? You know, I know it was for the nation of Israel and they were, you know, the purpose taking the good news to the rest of the world. That would be my question. Does it have any relevance for today? Are you wondering in terms of liturgy? Are you talking about chronology and calendar? I think both, you know, because it seems like there's such a disorder and in worship today, you know, what do we do? And so some people have gone back to that, you know, and I see why, you know, because it seems to make sense, you know, when you read that it seems to be something that sets it apart. And I'm just wondering if there's, I think some people definitely go too far. But yeah, you know, Christian liturgy, again, because of the whole New Testament idea that we are the temple, Christian liturgy tended to instead of focusing on, I'll say it this way, instead of focusing directly on a sync idea, because I don't think they entirely lost that. But a lot of the liturgy was sort of focused on, and I don't want to sound too Catholic, but re re enacting or reminding people of the significant event of the cross and certain theological points that went with that. But I mean, early Christian calendar, okay, you still have this sense that it's really important that we know the right day for Easter. Okay, that that whole, you know, controversy in the early church all the way up through the Middle Ages, like, like this is crucial, because of this thinking, again, so that there's still some of that, even though, you know, the the temple as it were, is now us. Okay, but I think, I think we have to keep in mind, yeah, is there any relevance to this? If my astronomer friend was here, he would say, Oh, yeah, you know, but there's also this sense of, while we are the church, there is to use to borrow David's language here, while we are the church, there is still something being built. In other words, the heavenly temple is being built, being constructed, moving ahead in time, you know, that it's ongoing. It's a process, you know, everything is moving to where God wants it to go, because ultimately, the abode of God will return to earth. So you kind of have the individual temple merging with the bigger idea, you know, in the eschaton. And so that's why even in Christian, you know, early Christian history, the Easter one is sort of the most obvious one that gets connected to the celestial stuff. But it's why there was still a lot of speculation on, um, like timing of the second coming. Okay, because it results in heaven returning to earth and the joining of all this stuff. So it never, it never quite loses that. Maybe in practical terms, if we just talked about that in church, instead of sort of making up ceremonies, you know, if we just talked about that in church, people would be thinking about it more in terms of, well, why are we here? Why are we gathered? What in the world are we doing here, you know? Yeah, to piggyback off that, I don't mind sounding Catholic. I have no problem sounding Catholic. Sounded Eastern Orthodox yesterday. Yeah, Orthodox. Yeah, my roommate's Orthodox. I have a lot of, so I have a lot of good Orthodox Catholic buddies, and I'm extremely ecumenical. Like I do not think that the church started in the 16th century. So that's just stupid. But look, there are a lot of babies thrown out with the bathwater after the Reformation. Okay, a lot of babies. And we're pro-life, so we don't like that. So the temple liturgy, there's a weird book, but I think a lot of the stuff in it is good. I was thinking Margaret Barker's. I thought you were going to do a Tom Horn book. No. Get out of here. The temple roots for early Christian liturgy, I think it's what it's called. Yeah, I think that's the title. I think that's what it's called. But her overall point, she has some weird stuff in there, but some really awesome stuff. But her overall point, I completely agree with, which is that, and Mike alluded to this, is that temple liturgy didn't go away in early Christianity. And this whole notion that a lot of free church Protestants have, and I'm not knocking one, I was one, am one. I don't know. But who want to go back to house church, and that's a real church, man, that's an early church. Well, that's because you're being persecuted. That's because you're kicked out of the synagogues. As soon as Christians could build buildings, they did. So it's not, don't take everything as prescriptive that you see with this whole New Testament church movement, because that isn't even a thing. What New Testament church, they're different in different cities. Some may be still close to the synagogue, some were kicked out, some were just started in houses, some were mainly Gentile, some were only Jewish. So let's stop that stuff. But what we do know for sure is when those buildings were built, the very buildings themselves, you still see this in Catholic churches, Orthodox churches, Episcopal churches, that the actual shape of the sanctuary itself is modeled after the temple. You have the holy place and the most holy place, which is the altar is there where the actual body and blood of the Lord is. And they thought that the actual liturgy in the early church, this is what they thought, like Mike was alluding to, they are participating in the order of the cosmos. They really believe that stuff. And the liturgy was essential. This is not something where you have Christian discipleship during the week and then you go to church. That wasn't a thing in the ancient world. You go to liturgy and then you really become a Christian. So that's how a lot of the early church saw it. Now I'm not, again, I'm not saying, all you go be Orthodox or Catholic. I'm not saying that don't hear that. But I do believe that that is what early Christians believed. And that's why the liturgy was patterned, I mean, almost the entire thing off of temple-like traditions. And so yeah, I just think that's really important. And a lot of Protestants just either don't even know that or don't realize the significance of that. So think twice if you're listening to this via podcast before you make fun of your Catholic buddies, okay? Yeah, I also want to apologize to Tim Andrews at the house church. That's a shot across the bow, Tim. Yeah, I think, again, the house church thing really has to be contextualized. No, Tim will forgive you too. Yeah, I mean, I would appreciate we're at a coffee shop and I'll much less coffee. Yeah, I mean, for him, it's like, you know, you get a, I don't know if you remember the episode with Tim on the podcast, but there's just a lot of, there's a lot of personal dynamic there with, I'll put it this way, the whole, the whole modern house church thing really isn't a protest against, you know, like liturgy or anything like that. But it's, again, this is just my experience. I just try to make a good general point here. It's really composed of a lot of people who are tired of playing church in a modern context. And those people tend to sort of get together. And once they get together, and they start to, okay, we got two or three or four families here who kind of feel the same way. Well, the strategy for them isn't to go back to this thing that either where they're not getting taught, or there's there's some kind of dynamic going on there that, you know, legitimately has led to them being really discouraged, you know, in terms of the whole worship, not just worship, but what the community is supposed to be doing. And so that's where you're going to turn. It's full of people who are, who just see something that needs to be done, and they're just going to do it. And they know it's imperfect. They're not saying every, every Christian in the world ought to do this. You know, they're not doing that. So it's not a movement in that sense. I, if you look at it that way, it's more of a, of a reaction that's happening in a lot of places because, okay, what else do we do here? We don't want to just quit. Yeah. And let me just clarify. I really did not mean to disparage any sort of house church thing. Please don't hear what I'm saying that way. I'll forgive you. Yeah. And first of all, just to be in context, if anyone gives their life to Christ, period, that's the greatest miracle on earth. There's nothing greater than that. So if their house church and that happens, that's cool. They're my brother's sister. Don't care. We'll pass it over here. Question I have is in reference to, I guess the New Testament church, what we call the assembly, in contrast or mirror to the heavenly order. And we kind of touched upon it earlier in your question. First part of 1 Corinthians 11, we see, we see it as that, you know, look at as the head covering issue. But I think that there's actually a bigger picture there that we're seeing the heavenly order and administration mirrored in the assembly and the synchrony between heaven and the order in heaven and the order on earth in the assembly. And from that, too, do we also see a picture of going back to the Old Testament, 1 Kings 22 is seeing Micaiah there in the, you know, the heavenly council determining the judgment against Ahab and that there is a a declaration that comes out of that assembly as to what is to happen. And it's the declaration of the most high. We get to John chapter 20. We see that the Lord instructed the disciples that they had the power to forgive sins and to retain sins. Again, as an aspect of the assembly in judgment of the church in order, maintain the glory of the Lord and the testimony of the Lord and the earth. And so I guess the question in the statement this is, do we see, do you see that aspect of the unseen realm mirrored in the New Testament assembly? I'm going to start off with a general comment here. I think there's, I think there is something to that because I sort of view, I didn't really get into this and unseen realm too much. But I sort of see what church is supposed to be as a community and as a family. And of course, family includes these things. It includes rebuked includes accountability. It includes encouragement, to live a holy life the way you should. I see what should go on in church as far as the believing community as kind of council training on earth, if I can say it that way, because we are our ultimate destiny is to be rejoined to this thing, the kingdom of God, the rulership of God, the family of God. And we already are, but we're not yet that sort of thing. So I just generally, it would be, again, I'm not saying that we should do sort of, you know, bizarre and invent bizarre ritualistic things to kind of align with our imagination for these elements. I just wish that we would talk about these things in church. So people would would be more conscious of, well, this is what we are. This is what we're supposed to be. This is what we're going to be, you know, to create, you know, a little bit of continuity between the present, between the already and the not yet. You know, to just be conscious that we're on this trajectory. This thing that we're doing now has a relationship to what went on before, not just in terms of the Israelite community, but in the wider family of God. You're going all the way back to Eden. And that's where it's going to wind up. I don't know if you want to say anything more specific there. Well, he did ask the question, the specific question about the, the women, the head coverings, the angels thing, the order of creation. Do you see that? I thought, I thought you were saying it's bigger than that. Yeah. Did you, did you hear his episode on the, on the head coverings? Oh, really? Really? On YouTube? Yeah, go to the website. Yeah, go to the podcast. Oh, do we even want to get into this? I don't know. No, I would refer back to the episode, but I will say something about that. That is a really highly contested passage. I mean, the best scholars in the world still argue about that passage all the time. And I don't, I haven't made my mind up on it. I know Mike's convinced of that argument, but I've had some close friends that really, really disagree with that argument a lot. So I think it makes sense of the evidence. But at the same time, I'm an, I'm an egalitarian. My cards are on the table. You know, I think the Galatians three that neither June or Greek slave nor free male nor female is the ideal of the celestial community. Like that's the ideal, but it's the, in the already, there's certain sociological phenomena where you just can't, you don't want to just tear up society and change it, you know, and say, all of you are wrong. You jerks, you know. So that's part of the being a humble servant is, you know, be a good husband, be a good wife, be a good slave. Yes, a slave, be a good slave, be a good this, but the, the, the, the notches in the rock are already being shipped away of the edifice of this world. So like, but when they gather in community, and not everyone agrees with me on this, but, but I think early on in the New Testament, what we see is this kind of image of a, of an egalitarian worldview, not necessarily egalitarianism. And if you don't know what I mean by egalitarian, I just mean that male and female roles are equal in the earliest church. It means more than that, but, but like a universal equality in the people of God, but that includes roles. But that goes away really quickly because I think of the delay of the Perusia, the delay of the coming of Christ, because when you have this apocalyptic fervor and everything is imminent and like resurrection is going to happen right now, the day is a night, you know, and that starts to die off. It's like, okay, we're going to need to tether this thing down. We're going to need the bishops to be a man of one wife and all that kind of stuff. So I think that this is just my view that yes, there is some heavenly and earthly order going on in those texts. But I think the ideal of becoming like the angels in resurrection that Jesus and Paul talk about is one that's not given in marriage, you know, Jesus will say like, like being that like the angels of heaven, he does not say the fallen ones. He says being like the angels of heaven who are not given in marriage, right? That's kind of the celestial ideal that there won't be any need for procreation in that glorified sense. And I still can't wrap my mind around what the heck that means. You know, I've tried for years. But but I think there is some sort of embedded sort of egalitarian sense about the vision of the kingdom. So in cultures, and I now you can push back on this, Mike, if you disagree, but I think it I think you can work in either model. I think in cultures, though, that have don't have the restraints that like the Greco-Roman world had as the ancient Jewish world had, that some of those some of those freedoms can be experienced in the church. Now that's just my personal view on that. You know, I'm open to being persuaded otherwise. But but it seems to me that if Paul could have a lot of the freedoms that he wanted, he would have done them. But it's it's one of those, you know, you care for the weaker brother, you take, you know, you don't try to mess up society, you know, you try to be you try to honor, you know, your love your neighbors well, you know, you don't just go around pointing fingers in their faces, tell them they're wrong, you know, that's that's called being a jerk and not loving them. I mean, let's let's take the heavenly council. Okay. You have I think I think it can work in either model, the egalitarian model or a complementarian model, which again, if you don't know what that term means, it's the male leadership kind of thing. I think you could actually again, construct an understanding of the relationship in either with in either respect, example. Okay, in the council, you have all Elohim again, defined as spiritual beings. But there still is hierarchy. There's still his order. There's still his role and rank and all this stuff. But on another level, they are all equal. So there's, there's ontological equality. And then there's this hierarchical relationships. And that's how the council runs. And so you can easily transpose that, you know, to an unearthly order. You could look at it and say this, well, in the beginning in the adenic beginning, you know, both male and female were given the command. Okay, this, this is great. This is your this is your role now, you know, within God's intended family relationship, where, you know, you are supposed to be part of this. In other words, the commands are given equal. And you can sort of riff off that to talk about an egalitarian model. And it goes back and forth all the time, somebody else will bring up, well, you know, Adam named the animals in an ancient Near Eastern culture, that denoted authority, and he doesn't do any naming. And it just goes back and forth all the time. There are elements of both, you know, in the descriptions that you get. But just one little thing there. But Genesis three, it's not until Genesis three, mind you, in the curse formula, in the curse formula of Genesis three, it's the man lording over the woman. Yeah, depending on how 316. Yeah. Right. Which is a real controversial verse. Just throw that out there. The whole egalitarian complementarian thing is just, I remember the first first one of these annual meetings I ever went to was in 1994. And they were debating it then. Okay, I mean, it just never goes away. And if you if you're a longtime reader of the blog, I did a series on this. And I, I invited John Hobbins, who's a pastor, and his wife's also a pastor. So he's egalitarian. And the invitation was make me care about this. Because that was, that was his mission. I said, make me care. Because I don't really care, you know, really about the model. I care more about the abuses in either direction. So I mean, I can argue both sides of this until your mind just becomes dumb. You get into, well, did, did Junia, did it have a circumflex over the alpha? You know, in the original text, because that distinguishes the jet, like really, you know, now we're now we're down to determining doctrine based on the presence of a circumflex, which they didn't use a little diacritical mark over a letter. They didn't use it in the earliest manuscripts and unsealed script. But that's where we're at now. It is interesting though. At the end of it, I told him he failed. I still don't care. I hate being this guy, but on the Junia thing, it is interesting that no, and I'm not doing the unsealed thing. I don't care about that. It's, but it, but what is interesting is in medieval manuscripts, you actually have scribes change it to a male name, Junius. Yeah, because they're not down with having a female apostle. You got all of that stuff. They actually change it in some of the medieval manuscripts. So that's pretty significant. They're like, we don't want Paul to say that, you know, I think that I think that the more interesting question and you can sort of backtrack it from this is to ask, will there be gender roles in the new heaven and the new earth? Okay, there's certainly hierarchy because, you know, we inherit the nations and all that kind of stuff. Right. But it's not gendered, you know, specifically. So if you want to approach it from sort of where it ends, and then walk it back, that's going to determine again, how you look at it, too. It's just, it's just one of these things that can be endlessly articulated and debated from both sides. And I'm like, look, I'm more interested in how the people, you know, men and women within your community, how they're relating to each other as imagers. I don't care what role they have, you know, necessarily just how are we doing this? How are we a family? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I want to be very clear just because I said I was the egalitarian. These are not issues to divide over. Okay, some of my best friends in the world are hardcore, like raging complementarians, like women get in the kitchen, complementarians. Now, I'm making fun of them. But seriously, these are not issues to divide over. The unity in Christ is way more important than this. And you know, I'm a big believer in God understands that we're not omniscient. So why should we like have to become omniscient to think we're pleasing God? I think God is a very realistic view of who we are and how we're able to figure things out. Could you maybe tie it into calling? What is God called you to and attaining to that? Yeah, I think you could. And ultimately, that's going to be between the per the individual and God. I agree with that. One of the things that, you know, Hobbins, I don't know if he asked it in one of the posts or if it was a conversation or something. Okay, well, and I actually got this in some job interviews, too. What if one of your students or like your daughter or something says, you know, I feel the Lord's called me in the ministry. What are you going to say? And my answer was do a good job. You know, I said, now, you got to be got to know the lay of the land here. Some people are going to look at this and hear the reasons why they're going to look negatively at it. Others are going to look positively. You need to know what you're getting into. I mean, I can, and I would look at my daughter and say, you know, I can argue this both ways, and I'll go through the whole thing with you. But at the end of the day, if, you know, if you sincerely feel that the Lord wants you to do X, Y, or Z, then you need to obey. And if it's the wrong decision, we have to believe that God will alert you to that. He will do something to change your mind. He will steer you in a different, but for right now, if you're being honest with God, this is what you do. You know, you obey. So your conscience is clear. And so my role would be supporting her to do that, to be obedient as best as she knows what to do or how to do it. You know, if we get to heaven and God comes to me and says, yeah, Burnett was right, you should have all been egalitarians. It's like, I'm not going to say, oh, I don't want to be here anymore. For the record, this just ruins it for me. For the record, I did not say we all have to be that. That's exactly the opposite of what I'm saying. So I would like to go back to something that you mentioned, Mr. Burnett. Basically, that in the first century, there was this fervency about men, the resurrection is imminent. And then as time went on, kind of, you know, the posture changed, right? And I want to touch on this book by a Gary Willis, what Paul meant. And he sort of said that Paul's main drive for everything he did was that he saw the risen Christ. That was his kind of, that's what drove him every day. And you can see that from when you read this epistle and so on. So as time went on, you know, when you go to church every week, you hear about the atonement, you don't really hear about the resurrection unless it's Easter. My question is, why did that happen? And how does that then deal, not that it's an overemphasis, because for all I know is, you know, God's providence, you know, that's because, you know, it would take a while for him to get back here. But how does that then sort of disconnect us from the bigger picture of having an earth being together and what the end goal is? What a fabulous question. So, okay, oh man. All right. So to address the preaching on the atonement, not the resurrection, there is no atonement without the resurrection. Period. Period. Now, let's be very clear about something. And people will read over this text and not pay attention to the gravity of it. But if you look at the end of Romans four, this is especially for my reformed buddies. Okay. The end of Romans four, Paul makes something very clear about what the resurrection does. He says that Christ died for our transgressions or for our sins, but he was raised for our justification, which could be translated vindication or even deliverance. Because it's, it's, you're being just as, you know, justice is being done. And so there is no justification without the resurrection. Period. So if you ever preach the cross, you pastors who are listening to this, listen up. If you ever preach the cross without the resurrection, shame on you. Because let me tell you something. If the cross is what solves the problem. And this is again, I have a lot of, I have huge problem with preachers and theologians that put too much emphasis on atonement on the cross. I'm not saying the cross doesn't take care of a tone. Okay. Just hear what I'm saying is that if you preach just the cross for atonement, what you get is you get the road to a mass story put right in your face. And what happened when you have a dead Jesus and no resurrection? What happens? People go away saying it's over. It's over. It was all BS. We can all go home. This is garbage. It's nothing happened. But with the resurrection, that is the vindication. That is the validation. That is the justification. And man, I mean, you cannot have atonement without the justification. So there's that. Okay. Now that that's off my chest. The problem with the delay of the Prusya, I think personally, this is a very big problem. There's a recent, actually, there's actually a really interesting book that just came out by Christopher Hayes. It's by Christopher Hayes. I posted something on it. You did post on it? Well, yeah, that it was available. Okay. Yeah. Just of it. Yeah. When the Son of Man didn't come. Something like that. I think is what it's called. Yeah. I think it's when the Son of Man didn't come. I think it's called, but it's dealing with this problem. And it's a whole collection of Christian theologians, biblical scholars dealing with this problem, because it is a huge problem in early Christianity. And it caused a lot of ethical and ecclesial issues. Because if when you're in radical Jewish apocalypticism, and Mike talked about this, and I've talked about this before, but resurrection is an eschatological thing. That is an end of time thing in Judaism. There isn't some sort of resurrection and then other stuff later. It's like resurrection is that's it. I mean, the Covenant's been fulfilled. They're glorified. They live forever. That's it. So when you have Jesus raised in the middle of history, and the great resurrection doesn't take place, you have a problem, right? So that that the early Jewish believers and Jidtah believers who knew the promises of Israel being taught to them, either through catechesis or just teaching through scripture or whatever. This was a big issue. And I think it still is a big issue for historians dealing with the problem. That's why I think these books are really important to address. I'm not sure if I agree with the answer that that book gives, but it's a really helpful book nonetheless. But in terms of you mentioned something about how, you know, resurrection affects like, you know, what we do in church now. And I would say yes and amen that every act that we do in the world that brings life to the world testifies to the truth of the resurrection. So some people will say, you'll hear this quite often, actually, I've heard this from my pagan anthropologist friends who have like PhDs from UT say like, well, why would you persist and continue in Christian ministry when there is no when if you can't show them any sort of tangible hope, right? So like say working, trying to set up an orphanage or something in a low income community to try to deal with the problem of unwanted children and the government shuts it down, you know, is that a failure? Like did the work of God fail in that community? But if you believe in the resurrection, and this is critical, this is so important. In 1 Corinthians 15, all that high flutin theology about resurrection ends with one of the most important statements in the entire New Testament. And he says, therefore, because of all that stuff I just said, the work you do now is not in vain. Because that's if we again, if we if we're thinking of resurrection as vindication, then everything you do no matter on the world scope, it might fail quote unquote. And when we're getting our hands bloodied and sweaty for working for Jesus in the world. And the world might say, haha, look at those failed projects. Well, on the resurrection, buddy, those are not going to be failed. I mean, on the resurrection, all of that work will be vindicated. And the resurrection is literally the core of all Christian work in the world. All Christian service in the world is centered on the resurrection, because we really believe that that God is literally breathing new life into the world. I mean, we really believe that spirit that brought a man up from the dust has brought a man up from the dust again. We believe that like we believe that new creation has already begun. And we're either down with that project and we're involved with it or we're not. And the and the hinge, whether we are or not, is how much do you really believe in the resurrection? Because the problem of Christian ethics, I would say is anchored in the problem of the resurrection. Why you don't have good Christian ethics in liberal Christianity is because they don't believe in the resurrection. This is the this is the reason if you have a 100% assured faith in that God vindicated Jesus and literally raised him from the dead, then guess what? You can do anything. You can do anything. There is nothing that can separate you from the power of God in Christ because he's demonstrated it by raising him from the dead. I'm preaching now. I'm sorry, but that's a big deal. That's a big deal. Yeah, sorry. I'm a preacher too. OK, I'm not just, you know, you're not letting him have any more coffee. Push the coffee away from us. Anybody? This one's for you, Mike. It's a hermeneutic question. I obviously I believe in the year Deuteronomy 32 worldview, because it has explanatory power with phenomenon re experience. But what is the method for interpreting the scripture? Because obviously you don't take their cosmology about the flatter the dome. You don't bring that over. Leave that take the theological message over into our realm. How do you make that distinction? What's the process you go through to make those decisions that, OK, this is real, we can take this over here, or this is just God using their beliefs to tell them something? Yeah, for me, it's it's about general revelation and, you know, special revelation and its relationship to, you know, our own experience as embodied beings. What I mean by that is you have biblical writers that God chose who lived at a certain time and place and have certain access to understanding the natural world and all this all these limitations. And God is completely aware of that. And he allows them to express spiritual ideas, points of theology. He allows them to express these things using the tools of or the illustrations or the analogies or even more than that, you know, handling general revelation in a specific way as part of this communication. So again, God knows what they're doing. He picked them to do the job. He knows what the ultimate reality is and what it isn't. He has a perfect command of creation and whatnot. Nevertheless, he lets them do this. He lets them communicate the way they do it. I mean, his message, but he never says to them, Hey, no, the world really isn't like that. It's actually like this. And what I take from that is God could care less about what they knew. Yeah. So we can go ahead. We can look at that. And because we live in the embodied world and the knowledge of science grows, our knowledge of the natural world grows. If God were doing the same thing today, asking one of us to produce this passage, we would use completely different language and analogies. And we would think about that and express that point in a completely different way. And we might mess it up in terms of science, because if God did it a thousand years from now, then our, our touch points with this, again, the embodied world and how we think about it and how we either think it relates to the spiritual world or how we use it to express what, you know, something going on in the spiritual, spiritual world, that's going to change. It can be tested with the tools of science because it's part of the embodied world. All that's different than claims and assertions, you know, made in scripture about the disembodied world, the non-human world. We are dependent on, on God's trustworthiness as he prompts people to make, you know, to express these ideas in certain ways, even though the vehicle to express those things might be something that we can test it today and say, well, that's, you know, that's not really the case here. But that doesn't lose the, that's not the same as the assertion. The vehicle for expressing the assertion isn't the assertion. They're two related but different things. And if it's not subject to the tools and analysis of the natural world, because by definition it isn't, because it's not part of the natural world, then we can't use the thing that we can test through the tools of science to test the things that science cannot deal with that are outside the natural world. That's the way I parse it. Whatever's on that side of the world, that side of the line of reality is what he's trying to tell us. Right. I think, I think the obvious point is we can't use the tools of science to test something that isn't material. Yeah. I mean, like, say for instance, yeah, well, like, hypothetically, the whole Divine Council worldview, maybe they had that, God used that to express theology. Right. Now, how do we know that we can take that along with the theology as being? I think in that, in that case, the uniqueness or the phenomenon of the election of Israel. In other words, Israel is made different not, not because of any quality of it, but because God wanted a relationship with this people. And by definition, then what's going on with the other people, the people surrounding that? Well, there, if they're not in covenant relationship with, with Yahweh, okay, with, with the most high and whatever term we want to use here, then by definition, they're, they're outside that covenant relationship. And so that, that lends a coherence to the idea of, well, they do worship other gods. So where'd they come from? You can't have, you could reduce this to sort of philosophical discussion here. Can you have more than one most high? Can you have more than one uncreated being? You know, all these things that are required of Yahweh. And so, you know, philosophers and theologians, I think are the work they do, the thinking they do, the way they, they try to probe the propositions for coherence. I think they're, they're useful at this point. So you can say certain things about the entities in the spiritual world, the relationship of those entities that transcends, you know, something inscripturated. You can, you can probe it in different ways. But that's different than trying to use the tools of science to do that. You have to use the tools of something else. It does have explanatory power in our realm. I mean, you can, I just don't like going backwards. Like, oh, this explains this. Therefore, that's real. Now I can go back to the scripture. I don't know what you mean by going backwards. Well, we, we take the divine council worldview, bring it into our realm and explain some things. All right, you know, about well, that's why Deuteronomy 32 off the table or anything, take anything that way. Okay, God has entered into a covenant relationship with one people. Yeah. Therefore, he hasn't entered into a covenant relationship with other people. They worship other gods. Where do those other gods come from? Okay, do we have other gods that are that are, you know, equal ontologically with the true God? Do they create the other gods? They create themselves? I mean, I don't need Deuteronomy 32 to raise and address any of those propositions. Oh, sure. I can use other tools to do that. Yeah, it makes sense, because it's logical. Right. But yet, I mean, how much we hang our hat on it. You see what I mean? What is what is that in that in the sentence? The worldview worldview. I mean, we're building a worldview on logic, which is right. I think I think whether you're an ancient Israelite or us, I mean, it's gonna be we're gonna have problems either way. I think when it comes to, to propositional assertions about the spiritual world, and we're going to be back to your sort of your bedrock thing, that we do have to take by faith that there is and again, my head just operates in simple ways. When I say take a proposition by faith, then mentally, to defend that, I have to backtrack to things like, okay, is there a God or not? If there is, you know, then what would be true about him as opposed to things that would be less coherent to say about him? So you, you, you sort of, I hate to use that you sort of flesh out, okay, the person of God, you know, in terms of again, who he is, his uniqueness and all these, all these different things. And so, yeah, you build it and it changes, of course, as you go along. That's all, that's all the backdrop to saying, to saying, yeah, well, in an, in an, yeah, if you don't have that, you don't have anything, you know, in an ultimate sense it would be. But what, what I'm saying is when we taking something by faith doesn't mean it's unreasonable or even kind of unbiblical, you know what I mean? Or irrational, you know, that sort of thing. That's all I'm going for here. Okay. I know it was directed towards Mike, but I mean, Mike have, I've asked that same question to Mike many times. And my, my answer to that, I think that's, it helped me because I'll just be real candid. I had huge faith issues when I started finding this stuff, huge faith issues. But what helped me was a robust theology of incarnation. And, and what I mean by that is, is kind of a Carl Bart type view that, that there is a hierarchy in revelation, not revelation in the book, the idea of God revealing himself. And that the highest form of God revealed, and well, the text says this, you don't have to get it from philosophy, that Hebrews one says this, that Christ embodied, you know, God embodied in the flesh of Christ, like that is the ultimate revelation of who God is. So the other forms of revelation, pale in comparison to the reality of the incarnate Christ. And, and why that's significant to this particular question, I think, is because all other ways of revealing like, how the spiritual world really is, or like, what the ontology, the reality of the beings are, like, I'm writing on the celestial bodies as gods, do I think the stars are gods? No, not at all. Not even remotely. So, but it's how the ancients could have conceived them in some rough way. God didn't change their cosmology at all, but he incarnates it. And this is where Peter Inns is helpful, I think, to this, to this conversation. Peter Inns wrote a book that got him fired from Westminster called Inspiration and Incarnation. There's evangelicals in the problem of the Old Testament. And he deals with these issues. And in the way he deals with them is, he deals with revelation and inspiration of Scripture the way the incarnation is dealt with. That just, that Scripture is like the incarnation of Jesus. It's completely, fully human book in every way, writing as humans of that time would have understood, completely human, but incarnate with the Word of God. In the same way that Jesus was fully human in every way, he would have missed a free throw or stubbed his toe, you know, like, but, but he was fully God. So that, that has to go. So if we believe that to start, like as the ultimate revelation, like number one, then as we're going down the list, we have to say that the other conceptions of what is real and what isn't real about the gods or about cosmology is secondary and may not be right at times, but it's, it's how God reveals himself in that context. And so I think the, the incarnational point helps me at least deal with some of the difficult, like, man, I don't have a correspondent to reality to some of this stuff. Well, but the revelation that's made within that context is almost more important than the details that frame it. And that's, that's, that's, that's my answer. I don't know if that's helpful, but yeah, thanks. Yeah, and I would, I would agree that the framing is flexible. The framing, the framing will change. Right. It, by necessity, it will change because if you're, especially if you're talking about using the natural world or again, our experience to frame something by definition, that's going to change. And I think actually that's why God was okay with it. In other words, He knows that the method He's allowing to operate to communicate these ideas will change. So it isn't, it isn't the mode. It isn't the expression. It isn't the framing. That's, those are just vehicles. Those are just tools to expressing things that transcend all those other things, all, you know, the way it's, it's framed. But Tray just, just said this place closes in an hour or so. So we need to keep moving. Oh, anybody else for the question? So you probably talked about this somewhere and I haven't come across it, but in relation to Hebrews three, the mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs. But then also you have this thing that through the eternal purpose of Christ, that through the church, we're supposed to be making known this manifold wisdom to the rulers and authorities, you know, in high places. I'm with that context, I guess, have a two-part question. One is, do you have any, any additional clarity on the difference between sort of the lesser divine beings that we see being judged in Psalm 82 versus the demons that Jesus is interacting with, casting out and saying that His disciples will be marked by dealing with those. And then what do you think and what do you see is our interaction today as the church in terms of making things known to these lesser gods, these lesser divine beings? It's obviously a lot we're supposed to be telling them. What are we supposed to be communicating and what's the purpose of it? Yeah, let me do the second one. I got an email yesterday, last night actually from a guy who is going to be coming to Bellingham where I work to film me for something. I can't even remember what I'm supposed to be filming, but he says now, I was able to find a place and I looked at it online. They got pictures and it's the kind of backdrop I want and, you know, for all these other reasons. And he says, but it's in a yoga studio. So he wanted to know if I was bothered by that. So he goes, because we go to the yoga studio and they've got, you know, I call them like, are your pictures accurate? Because they've got the Buddhas and the idols and stuff like this. And he says, you know, what is, do we think, you know, we're getting in trouble here? You know, like if we show up to film here is, you know, basically are the gods going to get us, you know, that kind of thing. And I said, I said, I'll be thrilled to take them to task and talk about things on film that are going to undermine any goal they have. So fill the room. Okay. And I just gave them Ephesians, the passage in Ephesians about, you know, that the powers are defeated and whatnot. It's like, to me, it's fun to go to a place to say things that are going to undermine them. So like bring it on, you know, let's do that. And I tried to amp it up a little bit just so that he would get the point. If we are back to the resurrection, because the resurrection is constantly linked with the defeat of the gods. You either believe this or you don't. Now, if I don't want to, I don't want to minimize these stories we hear like out in the mission field, this place is under dominion and bad things happen and, you know, people get even get hurt or physically assaulted. Yeah, that happens because you know why it happens? It happens because it's a battle. Okay. And I think that that part of telling the powers, you know, the way it is, is just stuff like this. If you don't go to these places, if you don't assert truth in these places, they're not going to learn anything. Okay. They're not going to learn what they're supposed to learn. They're not going to hear what they're supposed to hear. The people aren't going to hear what they're supposed to hear. And so why should we necessarily adopt a sort of cringing defensive posture in these situations? So that I think, again, is how I process that whole. We got a message, you know, to get out there and people aren't the only ones listening to it. They're not the only ones observing, you know, what we're doing in the name of Christ and so on and so forth. Now, the first part remind me again what the first part was. Yeah, I was just asking if you had any additional clarity on the difference between the divine beings from Psalm 82 and the demons that Jesus interacts with. Yeah, there's a little bit on this in unseen realm. The quick and dirty answer is you have to think in terms of rebellions. We've got a rebellion in Genesis three that involved one, you know, divine being and of course people. We've got another rebellion in Genesis six, one through four. All the traditions, whether it's mess, the Mesopotamian backdrop with the Alp Kalu, whether it's Second Temple material, and you also get hints of it in the Old Testament, that those responsible for doing that in Genesis six are put in prison until the eschaton the time of the end. It's very consistent. So now you got the one, you got a group that's in the abyss, and then you got the Babel story. So those are the gods of the nations. They're not these other two groups. It's a third different group of rebels. The demons that Jesus encounters, again, and the traditions, the text Old New Testament are outside, again, are very consistent here. That what we think of as a demon is not technically and is precisely what's being talked about there are the disembodied spirits of the dead Nephilim, the next generation of these guys. You get hints of that in the Old Testament when you see these visions of Sheol and you get the Rafaim there that this is where the idea comes from. It gets more, again, to use the stupid pun again, fleshed out in Second Temple literature because the Second Temple literature is heavily dipping into the original Mesopotamian context for Genesis 6.1 through 4. So now you got four groups. Okay, you've got Satan, the Satan figure, the serpent, you've got the Genesis 6 dudes, the watchers, you've got the gods of the nations, you've got, again, the disembodied spirits of the watchers who are also called watchers, but also called demons and all these different groups. You have Shadim in the Old Testament is really not a demon like we think of in the Gospels. Shadim is a territorial entity, that's what the Akkadian term means. It's really referring to one of these gods of the nations, which makes perfect sense in Deuteronomy 32 because they're the ones the Israelites get seduced by. Again, it's actually a coherent picture even though it looks messy to us because we're not familiar with the vocabulary or the context. Yeah, about the demon issue, why that's a little complicated in the New Testament is there's more than one meaning of that term. You also get a conflation. When you get to the Hellenistic period onward, in the Old Testament you can take a term like Malahim, angels, and that refers to a third tier of the Divine Council, different from the sons of God in rank, not ontology, but in rank. But when you get to the Hellenistic period, they start to use Angoloss the way the biblical writers would think of Elohim. Elohim is the generic word for spiritual being. Angoloss becomes that for the good guys. The bad guys, you get Daimon and Daimonion, which are neutral terms. They are. Right, but especially when they're pluralized, it's the bad guys and so you get this conflation of the terminology. So this is really important that they're neutral terms because there's two main senses that the New Testament will use that Daimon term, the demon term. When you're talking about the Gospels, and this is really important, is I think that Enochic background is behind those particular demons. Me and Mike agree on that. And the plural is important. Yeah, the demon's plural. But the narrative, the way the narrative frames them is really important. And how narrative, how historiography works in Greek is you can front load the title of a being in the beginning with adjectives, and you don't have to repeat them later. Right, like if I've told you once what they are, I'm not going to tell you like 20 more times. So when you're going through the Gospels, take Luke, for example. Luke at the first casting out of a Daimon in Luke 4, what you have is the narrator telling you that this is an evil, unclean spirit. So because in Greek world, if you're hearing this in the Greek world, there's good Daimons, there's not just apathetic Daimons. It's a plethora of different ones, but these are particular, the evil and unclean spirits. And so that's the one form of Daimon. But then the other one that Paul uses is not the same as the Gospels. When Paul uses the term demon in 1 Corinthians 10, and this is very important distinction, this is not what the Gospels are talking about. Yeah, that's the exception because of what he's quoting. Go ahead. These are the lower tier gods. And if you think that this is just an Old Testament thing, it's not. Because in the Hellenistic world, they use the term the Daimoness for these lower tier deities as well. In Plato's laws, it's written like a discourse where you have like three people talking to each other. And the Athenian talks about how Chronos, the High God of Time, established kind of like how the earthly dominions would work. And he says that Chronos and his wisdom saw that humans left to their own devices would just end up killing each other. And they need to be ruled over just like humans rule over goats or beasts. And so they're the Daimons. So those are those spirits that are placed over different territories of peoples to rule over them. And when the Septuagint comes along, the Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible, and they're trying to relate these concepts in the Greek world, in Deuteronomy 32, which mentions the gods that they went after in the wilderness, the Septuagint translate those, the Daimoness. Because in Greek world, they already have categories. They know what territorial spirits are. So it's an easy translation for them. They would understand that. So it's really important to know that that term can cover any one of these beings. And you can tell that Paul is thinking of that concept because he quotes Deuteronomy 32. Yeah, he literally quotes Deuteronomy 32, 17 there, which is the territorial spirits of the Daimons. So just to be super clear to go back to the first part of your answer, when it comes to what we are supposed to be making known to these rulers and authorities, it's really nothing more than just a proclamation. I think it's the proclamation of what happened at the cross and the resurrection. Again, a reminder of what the story is now. And if you think about the gods, the nations in particular, the resurrection means that, okay, we had this system in biblical thinking where God himself set this system up. Okay, because as a punishment at Babel, just inheriting you, I'm taking Abraham and I'm going to make my own nation. You guys get these guys. This one's allotted to this and all that. And so a Gentile, and this was even part of their own literature. They don't have to be reading the Septuagint to get this. They're thinking, well, I'm supposed to worship these other gods. If I don't do that, then I'm going to get hit by the thunderbolt, the world's going to descend into chaos or whatever. And so essentially what Paul's telling the Gentile is, look, the God who set this up and punished you with it is now saying the authority, their authority to rule over you is over. It's done. I'm not only saying you're allowed to forsake them, I'm demanding it. I'm saying it's time for you to come back into my family. If we want to use this kind of terminology, they have no legal authority to demand your worship. So tell them to go straight to where. He's demanding that they move back into the family by embracing the risen Messiah. So that is part of the messaging. You know, if we want to just focus on them. What about reversing? You might call that reversing, Herman. It is. And again, I go into a lot of the details of this in that book, which is going to be out in February or March, but reversal is a big deal. Because as we think about what all this means, we talk about mirroring and reversing. Okay, so whether you're Jew or Gentile, but let's just think about Gentiles. So I'm going to abandon these gods that you Jews out there said we're supposed to be worshiping them because your God set this up. But now you're saying that that God came to earth incarnate in Christ, died and rose again. And now I don't have to. I'm not bound. I'm not under bondage to these other gods who frankly, you know, again, as things are chaotic on earth, that's a reflection of their attitude toward the people they rule. So as I enter into the kingdom, their kingdom diminishes. As I will inherit even already, but not yet the resurrection status, I will live, but they will die. They will be destroyed. You know, because that's ultimately where the eschaton leads. So you have all these already, but not yet and these reversal themes that are that are really tied to what we call the Deuteronomy 32 worldview. And it's reversal because of the resurrection. And Paul, and he's not the only one there. New Testament writers are tracking on how one thing counteracts the other. And that's the way it's supposed to be. I think I think your question was great, because when you're saying what are we supposed to be announcing, right, that announcing the kingdom of God, the reign of the God of Israel is literally the opposite of all these other gods, rule and territory. And what's interesting here is in Hebrews, and that's not the only place, especially in Romans, really, really big in Romans is not all Jews, most Jews who are like really urbane, sophisticated Jews would think Paul's a lunatic, because what are you going around telling these Gentiles not to worship their gods for? It's fine. They can worship them. A lot of Jews thought that was okay, like that the other Gentiles can worship their gods, because look, the Most High gave them over just let them, you know, let them do their thing. And they may go to texts like Deuteronomy that says, and God apportioned, you know, the gods over the nations. But if you look in Deuteronomy, there's no condemnation of the other nations to do that. I'll go through there. And what's interesting, this Septuagint, Paul of Friedrichs and Paul, like the Psalm 228, the Isaiah passage that links the resurrection with taking the nations. Yeah. But some Jews didn't read those, they didn't pay attention to those texts. They're like, yeah, we don't like that stuff. We're not crazy apocalypticists, you know, we're more sophisticated Greeks, you know. Well, I don't know why I did this. That's weird that I don't think they did that, but whatever. So one thing, one, one reasons why they wouldn't, they would, they would hate Paul and these other guys who are going around announcing the kingdom of the one God taking these nations back is because in the Septuagint, I'm getting this from Paul of Friedrichs and a scholar from Boston College and a lecturer at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She, she has a very interesting, and actually this goes, it's really fascinating how much some scholars are now talking about this. Yeah. You've been talking about forever. I can't, I was in some session yesterday and that thought hit me like, yeah, it's just kind of weird. Paul of Friedrichs and I mean, talks has a lecture, you can find it on YouTube of Paul, Judaizing the Gentiles or something like that or Paul's gossip, something about Paul's gospel. Look up Paul of Friedrichs and Paul, you'll find it. And she talks about how he's Judaizing these Gentiles because he's having them worship the Jewish God and leave their gods behind. But in the Septuagint translation of Exodus, and I don't remember the chapter and verse right off the top of my head, because Septuagint is different than the Hebrew on this, that when there's a passage that says, do not blaspheme God or do not, you know, which blaspheme doesn't mean like, you're not God, it just means like, don't bring a reproach on the deity, right? Like don't be a jerk, you know? That that when you translate that into Greek, they said, do not blaspheme the gods. And it was they always plural. And the way some a lot of Greek Jews interpreted this was, if you're going to pagan cities in the Greco-Roman world, this is really important, because it has implications for us right now. When they would go into pagan cities, Jews who believe in the one God and worship the one God, right? If you're going into pagan cities, one of the things you do, this is just what you do to be a social good person, is each of these cities has their own patron deities. They have their own temples. And that's where all the big festivals are. That's where the parties are. The best craft beer is there. Like, you know, there's all kinds of temple prostitutes for you to have fun with and all that. So you go to these cities and you're invited to these big, if you're some sort of, you know, let's say you're a pretty well-to-do Jew and you're going along the Roman road and you're visiting Ephesus or you're visiting Corinth and, hey, come to the temple of Asclepius. We have this great banquet. It's of the fourth month of whatever. And we're celebrating Asclepius today. And we're going to have a great feast and sacrifice food to him. And they're going to sing worship songs to him. And it'll be a great party. And Jews wouldn't go. And they're like, those unsocial jerks, you know, they're like the little separatist weirdos, you know, they're like, oh, there's only one God. And that's where the term Atheoid, what we call atheists comes from. The Greeks, that's a Greek term that the Romans would call and Greeks before the Romans would call Jews. They would call them Atheoid. They didn't believe in the gods. They didn't honor the gods. But some Jews would take the Septuagint translation to mean like, look, when you're in another city, don't blaspheme the gods. Go to the banquets. It's fine. Just be a good dude. And so some of them would think that's cool. Just go eat the food put before you. Just be cool. Don't be a jerk about it. Yeah, you have the one God. But don't go blowing it in people's faces. New Testament says quite the opposite. New Testament is like, nope, all you are wrong. This is the time. The time is at hand. The reign of God is at hand. The kingdom of God is at hand. That means the death of the gods. And some of these Jews would be like, what the heck? Why do they need to die? Give them a break. But do we not have this same problem today? Like in this sense, this is why I think it's so important to know these things about history. Because when we're talking about preaching the gospel today, right? And you go somewhere like that some people may not know the gospel or they have some really weird view of the gospel and you're trying to correct it, and you're calling someone to repent. When you call someone to repent and believe the gospel, the good news, and you're announcing, hey, the kingdom of God is at hand. Jesus is Lord of the world right now as we're talking and breathing his air. People will get pissed because you're saying, well, oh, so yours is the only way. Yours is the only truth we can't have our truth to, right? So this isn't new. People think that in the modern and postmodern world, this is some new thing. Like, oh, you know, we're pluralists, you know, you can believe whatever you want. It's fine. People were saying that in Rome. This is not new. Don't buy this stuff like, oh, we're this sophisticated post-enlightenment modern world who knows all this religion stuff is silly. In the ancient world, they were saying the same thing to Christians and Jews. So don't buy that malarkey for one second. The gospel still has the same power now as it had then. And it was delivering people who had worshiped these gods and the temples all the time had just miraculously stopped and worshiped the one God because something happened to them. And so I think that's a really important background to this, I think. So the question is probably directed to both of you guys. It revolves around the Deuteronomy 32 worldview that we've sort of been discussing, right? In particular, when you're talking about the Elohim that were, you know, God's like, I wash my hands of you guys because you essentially turned your back on me and started doing things you're not supposed to. And now I'm placing these Elohim over your, you know, you're going to go over here to the Amorites, right? And you're going to go to Canaan, all these guys, right? So when you think about particularly Hellenistic greed, you know, forget about which Artemis we're talking about or Demeter or Apollo Zeus, pick the God. Is that going to be the same in the Hebrew, the Elohim that was placed over that group? And then if we go east towards, you know, the Asian countries, the, you know, China, the time of Mongolia and was now Japan, they had a totally different setup. Are we, can we make the connection between the Hebrew Elohim in all those cases? You know, Artemis was an Elohim and, you know, the ancestry worship that you have going on Shinto that also was an Elohim. Yeah, I think Elohim is sufficiently elastic to incorporate all of that. You know, how people talked about Elohim spirit beings, okay, how people conceive those spirit beings, how they talked about them varies widely by culture. Now there's some consistency, oh, there must be a hierarchy. You know, some must be calling the shots, some must be more powerful than that. So all of that gets, you know, projected and articulated and conceived by analogy again. But the, how they're talked about, there's, there's going to be, again, difference and differentiation and disconnect between cultures that that's pretty obvious. But what they are is still this spiritual being that is in a rebellion state against Yahweh. That sort of thing. So, you know, and think about the names. A lot of them are related to geography. A lot of them are related to some perceived attribute, maybe some event that happens in a particular place or whatever. There's any number of reasons why a deity would get called certain things and associated with certain places. You know, but again, that's, that's how humans are processing these divine presences as opposed to the ontology of the presences themselves. I don't, I don't know if the Bible says anything about that. So, because in the, in the ancient, you know, Jewish narrative, the 70 nations are just that, basically the ancient Mediterranean world, you know, like in a disc, like Spain being the ends of one end, you know, yeah. See, I, my quirky northern Africa on the other end, you know, it's like, so I don't think they even know about China. So, I mean, they don't, and this, this is actually my sort of odd view of why the Perusia was delayed, because I think the Perusia is delayed. It's directly related to the concept of the fullness of the Gentiles. Oh, okay. God knows the world is a whole lot bigger than the world of Genesis 10. Okay. And, and the disciple, I mean, this was their world. This is what they knew, but God knows better. And so if you're going to include people everywhere who are not Israel, in other words, they're not, they're not in this unique relationship. And that, and this relationship is supposed to abound to all other nations and all that kind of stuff. God knows what the real picture is. And so the fullness of the Gentiles could not be fulfilled in just that limited space, but they don't have, they don't necessarily know that. They really, they don't know that. So again, that's, that's my view is probably a little idiosyncratic. Yeah. But I'm attaching it to that phrase, which, which can't be denied. That is a key element to the whole eschatological outward. Yeah. And then, but I think there's two, I think there's a distinction that needs to be made there because I don't believe that the historical Paul knew anything about those nations or knew anything about the fact that they needed to be saved or whatever. But yeah, I don't, I don't think he did either. Yeah. But, but it's like one of those things where the, I guess you would categorize it as progressive revelation, I guess. Well, I would, I would say that God knew what his plan was. Right. Right. Right. So, and he doesn't, he doesn't hold Paul accountable for, for knowledge that he couldn't possibly have had. Right. But Paul will say like, I've reached the whole world. Right. In his mind, this is his mission. Because the 70, though, the way the map is, he thinks he has, you know. He thinks this is, this is his job. Yeah. Tarsus Spain was the end of the map. Yeah. Like the end of the world for him. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So the, so I mean, this is what my paper is on Monday, actually, is that when Paul talks about the resurrection, he doesn't actually use that term often. People think that's what he's talking about all the time, but he doesn't. He only uses it in a nominal form where he's describing the event. And what God does, it's a giro, it's raising them up. And, and I talked about this in the podcast before, but the event of the resurrection, part of that was destroying the rulers, the principalities and powers, which goes back to Psalm 82. So that's, Psalm 82 is the destruction of the gods at the arising of the divine figure. And, and early Jews were already saying this stuff before Jesus, like 11 cube Melchizedek at Kumran has the Melchizedek figure of Psalm 110 is the, the Psalm 82 figure who destroys the gods. And what does Paul quote in 1 Corinthians 15, 20 through 28 about God who arises to destroy the rulers and principalities and powers? He quotes Psalm 110. He quotes the same passage saying, saying that he'll make an enemy's footstool for his feet. So, so Paul thinks that this is happening right now when Jesus, like that Jesus right now upon his resurrection, that's the role he's destroying those principalities and powers so that FNA, the nations that are allotted to them, he can legitimately tell them, hey, you're free. Like you're like legitimately free. Like the, the, the God's rule is at hand and you're literally liberated, not some sort of like, you know, you feel good about in your spirit, because God saved you. Yeah, you'll be, yeah, you'll get excited, but some days will suck and you'll cry, you know? So it's, it's, it's more the reality that spiritually and ontologically there is nothing that enslaves them anymore. And so that goes back to his question earlier, is that's what we're announcing. You announced that in China, you announced that in native tribes in the Americas, which the Europeans were horrible and did not represent the gospel when they slaughtered natives. This is completely contrary to the King of God. Not in the Bible. Yeah, in the biblical description is limited because of the knowledge of the writers. Perspective is limited. You know, if you're asking, if you're, if you're framing the question as the concept of the Deuteronomy 32 worldview is to set Yahweh against all other beings that are hostile to him and his people against those who are not his people, well, then it does apply. But if you ask Paul, Paul would say, well, I know what the job is and I gotta, I gotta get to Spain, you know, because that's what he knows and God doesn't expect him to know something he can't and God's fine with that. Yeah. They're gonna, they're gonna have, they're gonna have similar ideas because they're gonna have, some of the cultures are gonna have similar cosmology. Well, when you, when you, if you're, it's hard to frame these things in heaven and hell kind of terminology, but the good place would be where the gods are, where the gods are up there, where we don't all that sort of stuff. And so when you die, since you're put into the ground in a lot of cultures, that's typically the realm of the dead. And again, you, you, you, these places don't have latitude and longitude, but the conception of heavenly versus this is where we get buried, that's pretty consistent in a lot of places, not everyone, but it's pretty consistent. So there's the realm of, that we hope to go to, and then there's the realm, you know, that we don't want to stay there, you know, we don't want to end up there. So there's a lot of overlap in terms of the cosmology that's going to, in a cultural engagement, you can map some of that over. And then again, you know, the whole idea of there being divine beings, a populated, an animate spiritual world, again, that maps over real, real nicely. What's different about you, you going and presenting, you know, a gospel message to one of these other cultures is you are free from, again, worshiping these other gods because of the incarnation, because of this event, you know, the death and the resurrection and all that sort of stuff. So that, that's, that's the element that is news. That's the different thing that you were tasked with taking them to. But this, this isn't to make light of the problem. I mean, it was historically a very difficult problem, like of, you know, what do we do about the nations that aren't in scripture, you know, they're out there. But I agree with Mike that, that in terms of conceptually, it's easy to think of that, okay, well, then there's more to do, you know, there's more work to be done and to reach the ends of the earth. But if God thought it was necessary to communicate to every piece of turf, okay, he would have waited till like when we had the internet, you know, to give us revelations, you know what I mean? There would have been some human mechanism by which he would meet that goal. But, you know, apparently because of what we have, God didn't care that that was immediately known or immediately accomplished. He knew how it would be accomplished through people, through images, through, you know, members of his family. And God likes that. He likes us to participate in the task and enjoy the results and all this sort of, you know, these big picture theological concepts you see from the very beginning. So I like to say these are God's choices. And I'm not going to, I'm not going to sit in judgment on God's choices. Well, it would have been better if you did. No, we're going to let God work the program like God wants to work the program and believe that he knows what he's doing and it'll get done. I have a bunch of questions, but I have one, I'd be remiss not to mention my brother and I go back, me and Jeremiah go back and forth about, and I know you guys joke about prophecy. This is not necessarily, we don't need a detailed, I don't need a detailed answer, but just a place to start. And this might have even been mentioned in a previous episode about the role that Israel might play in the end times. I know it's a massive subject. If that's somewhere else in another episode, you can point me to. I have a second question that might be a little bit easier. It goes back about demons, but we start with Israel. I think Israel has some role just because of the way we have events like Armageddon described, the Harmoe, the Mount of Assembly, which is Zion. These are terms that have a geographical context. Now, yeah, there's a heavenly Zion and all that sort of thing, but that's also part of the picture in Revelation, but there are other passages where there are events that are clearly portrayed as happening on earth. So what would the earthly Zion would be? Well, probably the Zion of the Old Testament. There are just things like that that I say it very broadly. That piece of turf has some role to play in the outworking of the eschaton, something like that. I don't really like the schemes and the systems and the charts and all that sort of thing, because they all look beautiful until you compare them to something else, to a different view, because everybody sort of hides the outliers. I like to say they cheat. My own view is that you can't avoid that, because I thought Messianic prophecy was deliberately cryptic. I think it's going to be the same way the second time around. We will only understand these things in hindsight. So while it's part of Scripture, yeah, we want to study that. We want to try to come to grips with what the end game is at least. The kind of stuff we're talking about here tonight is very end game oriented. Do that. But if you're trying to marry, if you're trying to create a system that is going to answer every question, I don't really think that's a good use of Bible study time. That's just me, because I think it's going to work the same way it worked the first time around. You're only going to understand what all this means in hindsight. Just to add a book that might be helpful in how to begin to re-read certain prophetic texts with kind of an ancient lens that isn't always predictive in the sense that most people mean prophecy is like, this means this event. This means this event. There's a book by Brent Sandy called Plowshares and Pruning Hooks. That one got him fired ultimately. Oh, it got him not surprised. Cal, leave. Well, the book's great. I mean, the book helps you see that a lot of prophetic texts that we would kind of de-ethicize, if that's even a word, is pushing people into a way of life and a way of being that's vindicated in the eschaton rather than predicting timelines. He does a great job of showing how that works in its ancient Hebrew context, but I really recommend that book because it helped me in my undergrad when I was asking those same questions. I read that book from a Hebrew prophet that told me to read it and it helped me a lot. It's a very readable book because Brent used that in his undergrad classes where he taught at Grace. The second one was about demons, but more in reference to the spirits of the hybrid relation between fallen angels or spiritual beings and humans. They were released back into the earth and my question is why would God allow them to just roam around being jerks still? Why wouldn't you just destroy them as opposed to just letting them run around here? Yeah, I tend to file this on why doesn't God just destroy everybody who does evil, all the jerks, which would of course include all of us. Again, I actually think it goes back to Genesis again where we have imagers that they're not only just us, we've got to remember the plurals. The non-human spirits also are created as his imager, like him sharing his attributes, all this stuff. Part of that is free will. The way I always explain this is that God is not willing to cheat. He's not willing to scrap the original plan and the original setup so that he can win early. He's going to let it play out. He's big enough to let it play out and keep kicking the can down the road. Remnant theology is part of this. God's never going to let it die completely if he has to intervene. He's going to do that, but he's going to let it play out and is big enough to win allowing this sort of chaotic set of conditions rather than just saying, well, I'm kind of tired of this. Just don't ever talk to me like that again if you've ever seen timebaths where he just blows up all the evil ones. He's not going to do that. He's committed to the original plan and I actually always think a job because, yeah, God could do that, but if he does that, then in an existential sense, his judgment, the questioning of his judgment is on the table. Was this a bad idea to begin with? Couldn't you think of something better? All these questions, so I think he has to let it play out. I think he hit something, hit a vein that is super, super deep theological stuff when we talk about... I love the question. It is a fantastic question. Why let them roam? I didn't have an answer to this until I started reading George Elden Ladd in my New Testament theology class and I had a professor by the name of Dr. Roy Metz at Criswell who changed my life and he taught that the gospel is about the kingdom of God. It's not about individuals, you know, sorts of salvation. It's that salvation comes through the reign of God being manifest and what's critical about this is, well, why has he let them reign? Why has he let them reign? Because the way that God rules is fundamentally, or the way that it's revealed ultimately, not like in some passages in the Old Testament, but ultimately and climatically is through nonviolent, non-coercive means. So that when Jesus comes on the scene and the spirits, what do the spirits ask him? When the spirits ask him and they're casting them out, they ask him, have you come to destroy us before the appointed time? So now, mind you, what has he already announced at that point? He's already announced that the kingdom of God is at hand, right? So in all conceptions, this is so important, this blew my mind when I actually got it was, why, that's a really great question if you're a Jew, like in the spirits are asking you that because you're thinking when the kingdom of God comes, this is a completely 110 percent irresistible event. Everyone will bow the knee. If not your toast, all the spirits will be killed immediately. You're just gonna put your face in the sand before Yahweh, the Lord of Hosts, right? But, but that's not how it was revealed. Now, here's the problem with dispensational theology. Sorry if you're disbie. I'm going to crush your hopes and dreams for a minute. So this is why people, if you're unfamiliar with dispensational theology, a lot of listeners are going to be really mad at me right now. But I'm obviously not a dispensationalist. But the reason why that developed at about only 200 years ago, by the way, was you have this hard reaction that, that well, the kingdom of God was promised to Israel, but they didn't accept it. So it's got put on the back burner, right? Maybe some of you have heard this before. Why would someone think that, though? The reason why someone would think that is because the kingdom of God didn't show up the way that they thought kingdoms should show up. This is critical. This is this is so critical and it plays right into your question because even the spirits are asking, so you come to destroy us now, right? And so, and even the, and even the people when they're waving palm fronds are thinking, man, son of David's here, he's going to kill everybody. And what does he do? He dies. So, so when God reveals how he rules, this is so, this is, this will save people's lives. When God reveals how he rules the world, guess what it's not like? The kingdoms of this world because what are the kingdoms of this world do? What does Jesus say? What do the Gentile kings do? They lord it over them. They take it by force. They take it by sword because Caesar has a good news too. He has a gospel. It's the same terms that he has a good news. They'll send his Angelo, his messengers out and guess what they'll tell their Germanic tribes. They'll say, hey, the good news of Caesar, the Lord of Lords, King of Kings, he'll bring peace to the whole cosmos. That all it's for him and through him and to him and Baba, literally the same terms. I'm not kidding. Same Greek terms. The and, but what happens if they don't repent? Slaughtered, you know, you kill them all, right? Just, yeah, good news, good news. We're going to kill you all and take your women and stuff. Yeah, not so good news, right? So, but when the good news is manifest of the kingdom of God, it is fundamentally not coercive. The God is a king like a good servant. That when Jesus at the meal, and this is the climax of the gospels, is the passion narratives where, where Jesus says, how do they rule over you? They lord it over you. But how did I come to you? Remember, he says, I came to you as a servant, right? This is fundamentally how he rules. So if he's just going around destroying everything, what difference is he than Zeus and everybody else? It's that fundamentally he's, he's a God of love before anything else. And that, that demonstration of love, which is what Paul says the coming of Christ is, it's a demonstration of God's love for the world that, that he doesn't destroy us, that while we're still sinning, Christ dies for us. Not like once we repent and get right and everyone puts their face in the ground. And, and, and we are supposed to, we're both supposed to mimic Christ in the same way. And Jesus himself says, all the stuff that happened to me is going to happen to you. So like, don't be surprised. Again, this is the mechanism. It's very, it's very contrary again to what you think. How does this affect the view of the Anihilist view of, or the Anihilist view of hell? How would it, how would decide the same idea affect the view that some people believe that when you die and you go to hell that you're basically destroyed? Does this affect that same, same thought process? Well, I would say that you, the, the result of that is you do not have eternal life in the family of God. I mean, in other words, it's the same outcome as if you took a non-Anihilationist view of hell. In other words, there's an eternal separation from the family of God. So they, they both result in the same thing, you know, ultimately. You're supposed to be coming back to the family, coming back to the source of life. You're going back to Eden. You're going to live there forever. You know, you, the new heaven and new earth, this is going to be your home. You know, all these things that were supposed to be originally now were at the end and things come full circle. If you're not in the family of God, you don't inherit any of them. So whether you're annihilated or whether you're, you know, in an eternal hell or the impact is the same. The effect is the same. The loss, you know, in terms of what you don't have is the same. So I think that, that's a big part of that. In other words, it functions in both models. And one isn't sort of violative of those ideas as opposed to the other. Yeah. I would take it just one step further, I think. It's not necessarily contradicting what Mike's saying in any way. But to take it the next step further, I do think there is a fundamental difference between eternal torment and annihilation. Like, I don't think it's just like, well, they just don't inherit. Because one, you have a God that will eternally torment someone, and then one, you have a God that doesn't. And so I am particularly would hold to the annihilation view. I think it's more consistent with certain characteristics of God in the New Testament and in the old, especially the end of Isaiah. I think the end of Isaiah was important for me is that when the leeches never depart from the bodies that are laid out in the field, you know, on the land, that's not meaning like they're eternally being eaten. It's meaning they're never coming back. And so, and I think the same image in apocalyptic is used. I'm obviously not the only one that says this. But again, I don't know for sure. And I don't think, well, I don't know, some people say we can know for sure. But I think it's against the character of God in the same kind of a way that we see like dealings with like children or people that don't know or stuff like that. I think it's similar, not the same, not the same. But one thing I can say for sure is that the main issues in terms of people's destinies in their response to the proclamation of the kingdom was determined on their rejection or not. Because I can't really say that much about, I'm not a Calvinist, so I can't say that much about those who don't know. But for those that openly reject and willfully reject, I can tell you there's no hope for you. I mean, I take, if you follow the podcast through Q&A, I've gotten the hell question before. And for me, you know, the annihilation view, I think both views are on the table for kind of what David said. It's kind of hard to know with complete certainty where to land. But for me, the thing that makes annihilation coherent is the language about the death of death. The last enemy to be destroyed is death itself. So if that's true, in other words, if you take that at face value, then how can you still have somebody that's perpetually like in the dying process? So that doesn't solve the issue with any completeness because you could say, well, that's just metaphorical and it fits over here this way. I get that. But I think that language has to be dealt with. And it's sort of there for a reason. But ultimately, the effect, our lack of omniscience on that point doesn't change the outcome in either respect. Right. Question about the Herman Bichon stuff. Well, for one, I'm kind of bugged that I've preached and been there four times, taught on it, and all before I read the unseen realm because I never knew the sort of peripheral connection. But when Paul X-9 is on the way to Damascus, that you're probably going to go through Bichon area. And then X-26, when he talks to a grippa about how he had proclaimed in Damascus and then Jerusalem, the Gentiles, do you think there is there any connection is acts playing on that? I don't know if the area of Bichon extended that far up. Well, if you remember the the acts series, I think the reason Damascus is included in the in the narrative in acts is because of the language back to Abraham, every place upon which your feet tread. Now, it's a little bit different with Abraham, but the gist of that statement is repeated two or three times in the Old Testament. And you get this language of where your where your feet tread, that's what that's your land. That's what you're going to inherit. And so Abraham gets to that point that is the northernmost point before you get to the land divisions and all that stuff. When he chases the captors of Lot, that's where he ends up. And so I think that that is that's theological messaging to say that, you know, because you're in this pattern, we're taking this this message of the Jewish Messiah to the Jew first. And that's part of of gobbling up all the places that would have been conceived of as Israelite Jewish turf before we shift to the Gentiles. So I think that's why Damascus is in that not not so much Bishon itself, but but I think that's the connection point. Okay, thanks. Anybody else have a question? Out of all the divine realm or divine council stuff that you've covered, is there any one particular area you think needs more research more looking at that you would love to but you don't have time for that? Well, I would answer that by saying go to more unseen realm calm and click on the tab that says what's next? Because there's there's probably 1520 couple dozen places either that you can drill down on or that I never got to in the book. So I'll answer it that way. Yeah, there's a lot to do. Unseen realm is just the lay of the land. These are the orientation points where if you if you see it, you're not going to be able to unsee it, because you will see it everywhere. You'll just you'll see the threads and the connections. And so that was the goal. So there's a lot you had to cover. That's one more but it's not you don't have to give you a long answer. You're real quick. It's a complicated question. Don't give me a long answer. Yes, no. Okay, so if if the gods are losing right now, okay, that's the message that you're kind of printing everything. The riff on this is already forming in my head. The gods are losing right now. Then how does the Antichrist rise up in the end? I approach this this way that we tend to think that God is only at work or God only shows up in the overt and the spectacular. I think the gods are losing. I think the kingdom is advancing. But most of the time what got even in scripture, frankly, you know, you don't have a miracle on every page, you know, this kind of thing in the life of the early church. Yeah, you had spectacular things happen. But most of the day to day stuff was people doing what they're supposed to do. God providentially again, moving the plan along. So I think I think we need to have a big view of Providence that most of the time, what God the evidence that God is working is not going to be overt and spectacular. It's going to be the unseen hand. And it's easy for us as Americans in the West and, you know, sort of the way the culture is dipping into a post-Christian era to think, oh, you know, the bad guys are winning. Well, I got news for you. There are other places in the world where the church, even under persecution, is a mighty thing. I mean, that's just the way it is. But again, you know, we see that the ballooning of the church like in China or Muslim countries or something like that. Some of that is overt, but a lot of it is just people. It's the Bill Belichick approach to biblical theology. Just do your job, you know, and it'll get done. And so why will any Christ rise? Well, any Christ will rise because the bad guys are not going to go without a fight. Okay, right. It's not linked to who's winning or losing or, you know, we're losing enough or winning. They're not going to go without a fight. They know what they're in. And remember when the good news is announced, somebody gets crucified. Yeah. Remember that. Yeah. You know, that's been the MO since the beginning. Those who suffer with him will be glorified with them. All right. I think that's a good place to stop. So answer your question. What needs to happen next is we're trying to get him to do this full time so we can get to some of those answers because I don't want to wait another 10 years for unseen round two. I know I repeat myself, but I get this lecture all the time. We're working towards it and we certainly, we couldn't do it if it wasn't for y'all too. So we certainly appreciate it. Yeah. Absolutely. Everybody just for everything y'all do contributing to being here tonight and telling your friends and family about, you know, Mike and David's content and the show and all this good stuff. And so, you know, I want to thank everybody for coming again and thank everybody else out there who's not here who listens and support us and we certainly appreciate it. And I guess with that is we're thanking everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs go to www.brmsh.com.