 Well, thank you so much for joining us today, and I've not had a chance to personally meet you. This is really our first interaction, but I want you to know that I don't know if it's appropriate in Christian circles to say it, but I'm a big fan. Somebody about three years ago, a good friend of mine, handed me this book called The Unseen Realm, Recovering the Supernatural World View of the Bible, and I put it on my stack of reading, and I thought, oh, I'll get to it, and I got about halfway through another book, and it just wasn't grabbing me, so I took this, and my wife Jane and I were on vacation, and I started reading it, and I could not put it down. And my wife asked me, she said, what are you reading? Is it like a novel? And I'm like, no, I'm reading the footnotes, because if anybody has read this book, you realize a lot of the good stuff is actually in the footnotes, and it radically impacted the way that I was reading the Bible, and I've been a pastor, I've been a ministry for over 25 years, and kind of considered myself pretty well-read, but I loved this book, and that led me on to reading some of your other writings, Angels and Demons and Reversing Herman, and so thank you so much for coming on the show, and really appreciate your time today. Well, I'm sorry I ruined your vacation. Well, you didn't ruin my vacation. You may have ruined my wife's a little bit, because I wouldn't pay enough attention, but so what I ended up doing this, you might find this interesting, is we have a network of churches, of about 50 churches from all over the country, and every year we do a prayer retreat in northern Michigan, so after I read it, I bought a copy for all of our pastors and gave that to them on the retreat, and over the next several months, after giving that to them, I could not believe the amount of interaction and conversations that were developed about it, because it just started getting everybody thinking from a whole different vantage point, and it's led to some very interesting discussions. Are you still friends? Yeah, we're friends with most. Everybody loved it, actually, and I think probably that little gift I gave to everybody probably led to hundreds of more books, because they gave it to their leaders and hundreds of text messages of people asking questions, but what I'd like to do is I want to start out by maybe having you to share a little bit of your story of how you came through the academic circles and ended up writing about these type of things. The subtitle of your book, The Unseen Realm, is Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. So I'm really curious of how this became a specific field or study, kind of a special lane of study and research for you. Yeah, well, I relay in the first chapter of Unseen Realm, or I guess it's the introduction, sort of my watershed moment when I was in grad school, but earlier than that, I just, we'll just take a step back a little bit. I was pretty spoiled, I know now. I didn't know then so much as I do now by my original church context. You know, I became a believer when I was a teenager. I didn't have any sort of Christian influence at home. You know, just really, we were nothing. And, you know, there were lots of, you know, conflicts in the home for different reasons and whatnot, so it was sort of a free-for-all. But it was through a friend in his family that I met when I was nine and, you know, sort of grew up with this kid that I eventually became a believer. And my first church context took scripture really seriously. It was expository preaching. It was, you know, in our youth group, you know, we did stuff in our youth group that I know now, like, if you went to Bible college somewhere, you're getting that stuff. You know, we had it as teenagers, we didn't know any difference. So, you know, and none of us complained. I mean, we liked it, you know, I had a pretty tight-knit group there. But I was just taught, you know, to take scripture seriously. I had a certain set of naive assumptions that I'm pretty willing to bet that the criticisms that get levied at scripture are not new. You know, I had stuck my nose into scholarship, even as a teenager that much, that, you know, you sort of get a sense for people say the same things on both sides. And, you know, there's nothing new under the sun and so on and so forth. So, by the time I get to grad school, I was good at academics. I felt, you know, that the Lord wanted me to do something with that. I knew I wasn't cut out to be a pastor, even though everybody tried to steer me into the pastorate. For a number of reasons, I don't feel qualified for that. So, I'm there, I am in grad school, and I've taught by that time 20 different courses. I had two master's degrees. I'd been to Bible college, I'd been to seminary, and I'm in this doctoral program. So, I think, you know, I'm thinking I got a decent handle on this stuff, you know, on my PhD and be a crusty old professor somewhere. And then I had my Psalm 82, you know, stick it to Mike Mom. The providential, let's rattle Mike's cage a little bit here. You know, it was just this friend, you know, handing me, you know, his Hebrew Bible and said, you need to read Psalm 82 in Hebrew. I don't even know what we're talking about. But again, if you're doing it, all I remember was the outcome of the conversation that I relayed in early and unseen realm. And it forced me to realize that, you know, we talk about interpreting the Bible in context a lot, but am I really willing to do that? Like, really? Because to do it, I have to start thinking like these people thought, and they weren't me. You know, they would not approach the subject of the supernatural selectively or through the filter of a modern post-enlightenment technological society human, you know, in the Western world, they're not doing that. Right. And so am I really willing to think that to understand what scripture says about God and God's activity and the spiritual world and how it intersects with our world, am I really willing to let these people live inside my head and direct me? And that was a big deal because it was uncomfortable. I knew that if I cross the Rubicon here, there's no turning back. You know, I'm going to lose jobs. I'm going to not be able to apply at certain places. I'm going to lose friends. I'm going to, you know, these different things that happen to you in terms of relationships within a ministry context. And it was like, you know, it just feels dishonest. If I feel like a pretender, if I don't do this, if I don't try to read the Bible on its own terms. And so eventually that was the tipping point for me. And how that led to Unseen Realm, you know, after I was forced to look at Psalm 82 and let the text say what it actually said, you know, that became a focused point in my dissertation, which ran against the grain of, you know, the way critical scholars look at this thing. It ran against the grain of how evangelicals look at this thing. And basically evangelicals don't bother to look for the most part. Right, right. You know, so I was going uphill or upstream in two different ways. And that was okay because, you know, my advisor let me do it. He let me do a dissertation about the Divine Council. And I rejected the notion that Israelites evolved out of polytheism like the Academy says. And I didn't have to care yet about evangelicals, you know, who say, well, the gods are just men here, you know, there's none, you know, sit, move along citizen, there's nothing to see here. Right. So I knew that that day was coming. But I distinctly remember sitting in Memorial Library at Wisconsin one day and it was, it was shortly after I discovered what I call now the Deuteronomy 32 worldview and how that answered simple questions like where did Daniel get his theology in Daniel chapter 10, this notion of supernatural princes over nations? Like where did he get that? There's, it's nowhere else. Well, yeah, it is Deuteronomy 32 8. If you read it with the Dead Sea Scrolls, right there it is, you know. So I had just discovered this and how that relates to the principalities and the powers and the gods were real spiritual beings for the biblical people. And then they become the princes and the principalities and powers. And Paul obviously takes them seriously. And, and I, the thought struck me, you know, 95% of the, of the people I know that are believers and I'm willing to bet 95% of just believers in general who care about scripture will never have this experience. They will never see this and, and how it informed so many other things. And so honestly, that just didn't feel right. So my one word answers to as to why I wrote Unseen Realm was guilt. It was that simple. It's like, I, this shouldn't be the case. You know, what, why is it? And I wasn't angry, but I just wondered like, why, why did it take me, I'm pushing 40 here in a doctoral program and why am I only seeing this now? Wow. You know, what, what, what's going on here? You know, what, what else am I missing? And again, I wasn't angry about it. Like, like, oh, you know, I've been deliberately steered away and have been taught stuff that isn't true. I didn't think that at all. But I just thought, why is there's this gap here? Why, why does the academy treat scripture this way or see these things? Why do you think that is? Why do you think that in the academic world and even in the evangelical academic world, there's this almost, well, it's not even subtle. It's a very overt anti supernatural worldview when it comes to scripture. Yeah. I mean, in the academy, I think it works two ways, because you have certainly a number of believers in the academy, you know, who are, you know, they're biblical studies guys, but you also have a lot of people who aren't believers at all. I mean, they don't have any theological or confessional, you know, commitments, they're agnostics or, you know, in some cases, they're atheists. I mean, you run into all types in the academy. But I think just generally, you have two issues going on. You have one where we have no commitment to belief in a personal God who acts in history. And so we don't really care where that we're working in the text and seeing these things and dealing with the data of the text. You know, so what? That's what they thought. Right. Okay. And we're just going to deal with it. I don't feel theologically troubled by it because I don't really have a theological commitment. Now, on the other side, for people who do, for people who do, they instinctively have a struggle with, if I embrace these things, are my colleagues in the academy who don't give a rip about supernatural stuff? Are they going to look at me like I'm, like there's something wrong with me? Like I'm not a good scholar or I'm not a good thinker. And then in church, it's like, well, if I start to say some of these things that I know are in the text, it's going to freak people out because it's not in our doctrinal statement. It's not in the creed. It's not in our denominational distinctives. And we can sit here and kind of chuckle and say, well, people should know that the doctrinal statement isn't the Bible and blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, but they're essentially taught. But the way we teach a lot of people is we're taught to measure everything they hear against where the church, that is this local body, stands. And if it's not in there, and if I've never heard it before, then it's viewed as suspicion. That's partly our fault. So scholars in the academy get the double whammy. I don't want to appear disreputable or a bad thinker to my colleagues. And then over here in the church side, it's like, I don't want to get kicked out of my church either. So it's the Silla and Charybdis to use a classical mythology illustration. Do I lose six people or the whole ship? Pick your poison. Yeah. Is it ironic to you that even in the evangelical church in America, though, I mean, and when I use that term evangelical, it means a lot of things to a lot of people. But if we're talking specifically about people that talk about the exclusivity of Christ and the authority of scripture, that even within that framework, though, when it comes to things that are supernatural driven, whether that be demons, angels, gifts of the spirit, prayer, those kinds of things. Do you find it ironic that even within that sphere, though, here we are reading a supernatural, the whole Bible, I mean, whether you believe it happens now or then, is just filled cover to cover with supernatural events. Isn't it ironic, though, that we have, especially as Western Christians, we have such an innate skepticism towards it that people in other cultures don't necessarily have? Yeah. Well, I mean, to try to be charitable to us, we can't help be what we are on one hand. We are modern Western people. We live in a scientific culture and a technological society. And so we have this impulse to approach things rationally, which what we really mean by that is, can I approach it scientifically? And is it in the stream of what other respected thinkers think? So we don't think that we do that when it comes to our Bible, but yet we do. We do it unconsciously. And this is why I talk in the book about selective supernaturalism a little bit. You actually just gave the answer to people listening to this or watching. The problem is, it's deeply flawed to think, OK, I've got this set, we'll just call it stack number one of supernatural theological claims. I've got the existence of God, the deity of Christ, Trinity, personhood of the Holy Spirit, virgin birth, hypostatic union, even the concept of salvation itself. How does a guy hanging on a cross affect salvation and cosmic? All this in stack number one, and those are the things that we look at and say, I'm good with that. And then we have this stack over here where we've got demons and principalities and powers in Genesis 6 and 1 Peter 3, the spirits in prison, the descent into hell, all this stuff. OK. And somehow we think that I'm more intellectually responsible to go with stack A and reject stack B. Somehow, my neighbor who's not a believer will sort of honor me when I'm in stack A. But if I drift over to stack B, he's going to think I'm a lunatic. Well, the problem is, is both stack A and stack B come from the same source. Yeah. Right. So how do we do that? And we do these gymnastics to get rid of the stuff in stack B. We do these interpretive gymnastics. When the reality is, look, everything in stack B actually extends from stack A, and specifically one item that there is a God who exists. These things are intellectually defensible, not in a scientific way, but because I got news for you. Both things in both stacks. You can't defend those scientifically. Right. Resurrection. You can't. You don't put that under a microscope and you don't have repeated testability. You don't do that. So if there's a God, if the God of the Bible exists, then he must be able to do things and do things intentionally, including create beings that have a free will who can do other things, do amazing things. I mean, goodness, we're lower on the totem pole than supernatural beings. And we have creative prowess and power in all sorts of ways. I mean, we're at the point now where we're creating synthetic life forms in a graduate program at Harvard. Okay? It's like, this is us. This isn't like the beings above us. This is us doing this. So it's reasonable to think that if God endows his creations who are like him, they're his imagers, and he shares his attributes with them, that why would we consider these other things off the charts? Because none of it can be explained scientifically. But somehow, we don't even think about the dichotomy there. We don't think about the inconsistency there. And so one of the things that Unseen Realm does that troubles people is that it makes you think about that inconsistency. Right. And I had to go through that myself. I understand it completely. I was one who did the hermeneutical gymnastics to make Genesis 6 go away. I mean, I lived in that world. And at the end of the day, you realize what you're doing, at least I did, and how the arguments really don't work because that means I have to disagree with Peter or make Peter think he's not saying what he's saying. I got to make Peter go away. And then I got to make a whole bunch of other things go away. Why am I doing this? Right. I mean, honestly, why am I doing this? I don't know how Genesis 6 works. I don't know how the virgin birth works. Right. Exactly. I don't know how the resurrection works. Okay. Yeah. I don't know how salvation works. Right. Okay. So get over it. Nothing you believe. Come on. Nothing you believe about the supernatural world and your theology conforms to a post-enlightenment rationalistic trajectory of inquiry. Nothing. Yeah. Right. Get over it. But it can be tested for its coherence philosophically. And it has been for millennia. And it's still here, and it's doing quite well. Right. Right. So we're not trading rationality for irrationality. We're just asking, well, might we consider the right way to approach the question and then go from there. Yeah. That's brilliant. I heard a pastor one time say to his church, he said, some of you, you know, you want to believe in Jesus as Savior, but you don't want to believe in the literalness of hell or the existence of the gifts of the spirit. And he said, because you want to maintain face and look respectable and you don't want to be quote a fanatic. And he told him this, he said, you've already gone too far. You've already stepped over the line. You might as well go all the way. You're already a weirdo in their eyes. So you might as well embrace it all. Yeah. You know, I tell people a lot, you know, I want everything, you know, at the end of the day, I care about what can the biblical text sustain? That's all I care. I don't care where you land. I just want to know, is your defense of this or that position, is it biblically defensible, you know, in terms of the exegetical data of the text? That's what I want to know. So I tell people, look, I'm skeptical of everything, but I'm willing to believe anything. In other words, I want the data. And so if you're going to make a claim about something in Scripture, just show me the data. I want the data and I want it understood the way a biblical writer would parse it. Because these are the people that God used to produce this thing we call the Bible. And they were writing to people who lived when they lived. Yeah. These are simple ideas. It's the most obvious thing in the world. Radically different than our time. Yeah. You mentioned earlier that there was a time when you and you lived in this world, you said, where you were explaining away Genesis 6. And I was looking at your educational background. I believe you went, did you go to Bob Jones University? I went to Bob Jones for a year and a half and a summer. You know, I went there because it was the only place that would take my credits. Trust me, you should have me in the lecture to your high school because I could tell them my story so that they learn everything not to do when it comes to academics. On one hand, that's true, but on the other hand, I really can see the hand of Providence in some very distinct sorts of ways. But I had no direction in high school. Nobody had gone to college. It's like you're going to go out and get a job and that's what you're going to do. And I had zero direction. I didn't know what an SAT test was for. Like when I, just to ravage trophies for a second, when I went in to take my SATs, first of all, it was a Saturday morning, which I didn't like. It's like, why do I have to go to school on Saturday? But the lady wouldn't take my test when I was done. It's like, what do you mean you won't take my test? She goes, well, you got to put a number, you know, a code in there. I said, why? Well, that's where you want your scores set. And so there's this long sheet of school codes. And I don't know what to do, you know, because she won't let me leave until I put something in here. So I put in the number for the University of Kentucky. Why? Because I went to high school with Sam Bowie, who is infamous for getting drafted out of Michael Jordan. Okay. So I thought, well, if I go to Kentucky, I'll know somebody. At least one guy. Right. I mean, that was it. That was the thought process. Like I don't know what I'm doing at any level. And so I wound up going to a Bible college and I literally asked my pastor after I graduated, what should I do? And he said, why don't you try Bible college for at least a year? I thought, okay, I'll try that. So that's where I went and loved it. I spent three years there. And then that little school imploded like little Bible colleges tend to do. Okay. And so it's like, who's going to take my credits, you know? And so, because I'm paying for all this, you know, myself and, you know, I got to I'm working a lot. And so I don't want it to just go in the toilet. So Bob Jones said they would take my credits and I, this is going to shock people. But for me, you have to understand my original context. It was a very separatistic fundamental Baptist church, which I still look at and say the benefits far outweigh the liabilities because they took scripture really seriously. And I'm still living off the capital of that. Yeah. But, you know, I went there and it for me, it was a move to the left to go to Bob Jones. Right. Very challenging. That's quite a statement. It is. But my roommate was Southern Baptist and we thought they were terrible, you know, because this is what they had liberals who they're very liberal. The guy that lived next door was a Lutheran. And my two favorite professors were Presbyterians. Okay. It was the first time I had ever seen a non-denominational context. And I needed to see it. Wow. You know, so I had a very good experience there. But that's why I wound up there. The only place that would take my credits. And, you know, thank the Lord they did. Yeah. You know, and I was blessed because of the experience. I didn't like everything there. But oh, wow, just man up and, you know, shut up and finish. Get it done. Like the military. You're not going to like everything here either. You know, it's just, you do what you have to do. So you went to Bob Jones. I know you've kind of done different schools at different places. Were you on the faculty at Dallas at one point? Or did you teach there? No, I went to Dallas. We lived in Dallas two years. I got married in 87. The year before that, I went to a Baptist seminary in Lansdale, PA, which no longer exists. So I went there for a year. And then I decided, you know, we got married. I sat out a year. And then we decided we're going to go to Dallas because I had this thing that, again, this is, you know, this was like between me and the Lord. This thing about, you know, every place that you go should be different. Bob Jones offered me a complete free ride through the PhD if I stayed there and got all my degrees there. And I said no, which they couldn't believe. But it was too inbred. Okay. So it's like, I need to have it be different. And I'd like it to be more challenging. And Lord willing, I'd like it to be more hostile. Because that's interesting. Well, it's like, I give me your best shot. Give me what you got. And I had this, again, this sneaking suspicion that when the dust cleared, the scripture's still going to be there. Somehow it's still going to be there. But I want to see what's going on here. And so I went to Dallas for a year and loved it. But I wound up not being able to afford it. I was there the year before I actually left the year before they accepted loans. You had to pay everything up front. So I for three years, I was, I'd go a year, sit out a year, go a year, sit out a year. And it was just going to take me forever, you know, to get through school. So I loved it. But I couldn't, I couldn't stay. So I wound up at least getting some scholarship money going back to the university setting, which was good for me again. I mean, my whole life is a series of having to make decisions and God's left only one door open. So I couldn't screw it up. That's really the story of my life, you know, that it's convoluted. I don't recommend it to anybody else. It was painful. I worked 15 years. I went to grad school. It took me 15 years to get my PhD all total, you know, two masters and a PhD. And I worked full time the whole time. I had four kids. You know, it's just, it was brutal. It was honestly brutal, but, but I feel so blessed, you know, bought by it because I was always in contact with, with lost people. I never lost touch with the real world. You know, I come from a blue collar family, you know, it just, you know, it was, I don't want to minimize it and say it wasn't difficult. It was, it was horrifically difficult, but I wouldn't trade it. But I also would beg people to not not repeat it, figure it out ahead of time and then do something intelligent, you know. I loved your statement that you wanted them to give their best shot because you had a faith and a conviction that when the dust settles, the scripture was still going to be there. It was still going to be valid. And I just think that that is such a powerful statement because I think sometimes people feel like if I allow my belief system to be challenged, then it could break. I could deconstruct. I could, you know, I might be somebody different. And what's really devastating to a lot of people both in the church and people who do the academic route like I did. And that is they can't think outside the either or box that they think they live in. Right. So what I mean by that is, you know, I went through 15 years of grad school and I'm not going to say I never changed my mind on something. Of course I did. You know, some of the positions I have, you wouldn't find your traditional Bible-believing person. Yeah, they're not found in your syllabus in 101. But the thing is when I would run up against something where obviously the data do support XYZ idea, the question is framed correctly because a lot of these debates that really damage people are really about how the question is framed. Okay. So I'm very sensitive to that. But you go through all that and it's like, okay, this idea, this has substance to it. So rather than saying, okay, I have to accept this and then dump part of my theology. That's a deeply flawed either or way of thinking. What you should be saying, well, if this is true, then how did the Lord make that happen? Like how did that work in terms of, you know, like how this was written? What was the writer's context? Like how does this factoid that is sort of outside the evangelical kind of common orbit or whatever it is, how would that work within a theology that does take the scriptures as inspired? Like how does inspiration really work? I can tell you how it doesn't work. It doesn't work where it's not, I have this thing, this lecture I do on you and it's on YouTube so people can get it, why we should not have an ex files view of inspiration. And that is where the prophet gets zapped. His mind goes completely blank. It's automatic writing, his hands and his arms are waving and then he snaps out of it when the spirit leaves and looks down and says, I can't wait to read that. I bet that's good. No, but this is the way we're taught to think about scripture like it's a channeled document. Right, channeling. That's for UFO new age cults. That is not good local inspiration. So how does this thing over here fit into how inspiration really worked? And I take a providential view of inspiration that God was involved in the lives of the writers before they ever even wrote anything. He's preparing them for the moment and the occasion and all sorts of ways to do the job and they did it well. So how does this work? So I was always thinking about how to frame questions. How do these two things that shouldn't be opposed? I mean, how can they cohere? You know, things have passed the coherence test. I need data and I need coherence. I need questions framed properly and I didn't have anybody teach me that. I don't even know where it comes from. I'm just- That's hard wired. That's hard wired because most people don't think like that. Right. I can't get away from it. So I was, this is again looking back on life where I'm glad that I had the sense that again, I guess it was naive in some way that it'll be okay. I'm not going to be the first person that holds a high view of scripture that walks into one of these institutions and gets all this stuff thrown at them. I'm in a long line of scholars who have stuck with it. You know, and I want to know how they thought. I want to know how they approach things. That's what I'm here to figure out. So give me your best shot. Well, I think this is your most recent book. Is this the most recent one? Demons? That is the most recent non-fiction sort of academic thing from Lexham. I just had a, I did a little book on the gospel according to Stranger Things, you know, the world turned upside down. Oh, that's right. I did see something about that. Yeah. Well, this book, I just, I read this when it first came out. I preordered it and then read it when it first came out. But it, I'll tell you this. So I'm a kid that grew up in the church, graduated high school in 1989. So I was in the era of Frank Peretti's, This Present Darkness. I don't know if you remember that. And, you know, Michael W. Smith came out with his song Ashton and there was all kinds of films and different things that came out. And so between the unseen realm and your book prior to this, Angels and then Demons, it really messes with your traditional framework about demons, their origin, principalities and powers, spiritual hosts of wickedness, kind of that whole evangelical diagrammed out hierarchy of the spiritual realm. But it does it in a really, a really powerful way. So in this book, you talk about, well, maybe, maybe do this because some people have not yet read your books. Can you just talk about and tie it in any way that you want to that I was taught as a young person that demons were actually fallen angels? Can you talk about why you don't see that in scripture and what their origin is? There's so much to untangle here, as you know. Yeah, it's a big question. So it's one of those, where do I even begin? In the beginning. So here's the way I usually jump into this talk. If you ask the average Christian, hey, why is the world a mess? Why do we have all this evil and sin and chaos? And the Bible talks about Satan and demons and how in the world, if God created everything and he was in charge, how in the world did we get here? What is going on? Well, the average Christian would say, well, that's the fall. Haven't you read your book? Genesis 3, that's the fall. But if you ask the average, the same question as the average first century Jew, somebody living when Jesus was incarnation, that period, that is not the answer you would get. And we know that because they wrote lots of stuff about evil and Satan and demons. That is not the answer you would get. The answer you would get is, well, there's actually three reasons why the world is a chaotic mess. The first one is, yeah, what happened in Eden? That's the sort of the kickstart. We have first supernatural rebellion and we've got first human rebellion. So that's where things start to unravel. But the proliferation of depravity throughout the earth doesn't come from that. It comes from what happened at Genesis 6. And this is the weird sons of God, daughters of men, and stuff. And of course, their answer to that is presupposed by two things. One, that they actually have an inkling of the original context for Genesis 6, 1 through 4, which is ultimately a Mesopotamian story that the writer is shooting at. It's a backdrop to that story. And it's also presupposes that they're going to know certain passages that describe the underworld and they see Rafaim giants in it. Now you say, what does that have to do with what we're talking about? Well, everybody in the Second Temple period, and this is one of the rare instances where everybody agrees on the answer to something. I mean, it's really unusual, but this is actually one of the cases. Everybody would say that demons, their origin comes from the, they are the disembodied spirits of dead Nephilim, dead triumph and people that had their origin before the flood and existed after the flood like Genesis 6, 4 sets. And it's because you get Rafaim, which is one of these giant clan terms that they show up in hell as it were, in Sheol and Isaiah 14 and think just things like this. But again, a lot of it has to do with the Mesopotamian backstory. So that's where demons come from. But there's also another aspect to Genesis 6 that was a big concern. And that is the second temple in an inter-testamental Jews believed as well that when the sons of God came down in Genesis 6, they not only did what was described in Genesis 6, 1 through 4, but they're also responsible for verse 5. God saw the wickedness of man was great on the earth and that every thought of the imagination of his heart was only evil continually. Like how do we go from sons of God and Nephilim stuff to everybody, all the humans are corrupt. And the answer to that lies in the Mesopotamian backstory and the Dead Sea Scrolls talk about this. And that is that these sons of God came down and they taught humans certain things that led to their self-destruction and depravity. Think like astrology, how to make warfare, weapons of warfare, idolatry, arts of seduction to promote immorality. Just a whole grocery list of things. And so you're living in Jesus going to say, these dudes really messed us up. We're living with this. And then the third reason is what happened in the battle. In church, in normal, traditional Christianity, we're only taught about Genesis 3. We are taught to not see Genesis 6. There's nothing supernatural going on there. It's the Sethites or something. It's the sons of Seth. Right. And when it comes to the third one, what happens at Babel, we never see that at all. And that's because if you read the Babel story, there's no reference to demons or supernatural beings in there. That's true. But if you go over to Deuteronomy 32, 8, 9, if you ever find that verse or find a Bible version that actually translates the verse the way the Dead Sea Scrolls have it. Now you get it, because it says, when the Most High divided up the nations, when he fixed their borders, this is what happens at Babel, the segmentation of the nations. God did that. He divided them up according to the number of the sons of God. There's that creepy phrase again. This thing happens in Genesis 6. He divides them up according to the number of the sons of God, but Israel is Yahweh's own portion and so on and so forth. Israel doesn't exist yet. The teaching is God looks at humanity after the flood. I mean, we've had a flood. God repeats the Edenic commands. He hasn't given up on humanity and says, now go fulfill what you're supposed to do. Be fruitful and multiply and spread over the earth and do that Adam and Eve. And instead, I love Genesis 11. Let's build a tower lest we be dispersed. Otherwise, we'd have to obey. They build a tower. Well, isn't that innocent? No, because the tower, everybody agrees it's a ziggurat because it's in Babel, part of a temple complex. You build one to bring the deity to you and negotiate with you on your terms. It's not what we're doing. And that's good. So God judges them. He confuses their languages. He divides them up and he assigns the nations to lesser members of the heavenly hosts, the sons of God. He allots them. How do we know that that's the right way to take Deuteronomy 32, 8, 9 because of Deuteronomy 4, 19 and 20? It's the parallel to Deuteronomy 32, 8, 9 with God. He allots the sun, moon and stars, the host of heaven who are called Elohim later in Deuteronomy 17, Deuteronomy 29, Deuteronomy 32. He allots them to the other nations. There's supposed to be placeholders because when God says, I'm divorcing humanity, I'm done. I'm done with you people, but I'm not done with the plan. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to start over. I'm going to call one guy, this Abram guy and his wife who can't have kids. That makes them perfect because I'm going to enable her to have a child. And this person's people, Israel ultimately is going to exist because of a supernatural act. It's the only reason for their existence. They're perfect just like Adam and Eve. I'm the one who's going to bring them into being and they're going to be the conduit through which I get the Eden plan accomplished now. So he makes a promise, a covenant with Abram and says, now it's going to be through your seed ultimately that all these other nations that I just put on the shelf, they're going to be bright. But that's not the way it works out. Israel turns to idolatry. The nations turn to idolatry. We saw many too. This is what it's about. This is where my journey started, really. God is excoriating the gods for the injustice, the chaos they sow among the nations. At the end of the Psalm, the Psalmist says, rise up, oh God, and take back the nation, all this kind of stuff. So the world is a mess. This last one is where Daniel gets his principalities and power or his princes theology, supernatural powers over geopolitical entities. Well, that's what you get new launchers. Right. And so that's where Paul gets his principalities, thrones, rulers, authorities. They're all terms of geographical dominion. It's a consistent coherent picture. And so what elemental spirits do you think that fits in there? Elemental spirits is something a little bit different because they're not tied to earthly geography. They are tied to celestial language, which is very common in the Old Testament as well. This notion that the unseen forces of the world are actually intelligent beings. This is how it was conceived of in antiquity. But also, again, in the New Testament, we still get some of that because God commands members of the heavenly host. This is where we get it illustrated anyway. God has the capacity to change certain factors in the physical world by use of his agents in the supernatural heaven host. So that's more or less their turf there. But you've got this whole situation. But what we're taught, there's so much layering and nuancing. There's three rebellions instead of one. And all of these ripple out into not only the Old Testament, but the New Testament, places where Jesus goes, the confrontations he has, the dialogue between him and some supernatural being. They reflect all three of these, not just one rebellion. You can have any one of the three and play at any given time. But we're instead taught white hats and black hats. White hats are angels. Black hats are demons. And the demons are fallen angels. That description really only applies to the last group, sons of God, who become corrupt. It doesn't really apply to the other one. Cherubim is not an angel, so the Satan thing doesn't really apply either. This is what we're taught. And we're taught that a third of the angels, when did they fall? Well, a third of the angels rebelled before creation or before Adam and Eve were created or before the fall. There isn't a single verse in the Bible that says any of that. But that's what we're taught. I know I looked for it. Yeah. It's a neat little package. You know, it's easy to transmit to the next generation white. It's very dualistic. Yeah. Yeah. So we're done now with our angelology and demonology. Now, this is not an exaggeration. I told you that it took me 15 years to go through grad school. Okay? Right. So I'm going to loop Bible college. In my three years of Bible college, my year and a half, you know, undergrad at Bob Jones, my two years of seminary on into grad school, I received one clock hour, not credit hour, one clock hour, 60 minutes of instruction on angels and demons. Unreal. Okay. So when that happens to you, you reflexively think, well, it can't be that important. You know, if it's been more time on. So I don't even need to think about this stuff anymore. That's amazing. But how much of Jesus's ministry was him confronting the powers of evil, casting them out, teaching his disciples about that, even the early church in the book of Acts? Just the simple thought that when Jesus begins to launch the kingdom ministry. Okay, right there. Inauguration of the kingdom, Luke chapter 10. Let's just use that. Why is that linked with authority over demons? And he sends out 70 or depending on your translation, 72. It's either the Maseridic text or the Septuagint, which is the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament pointing back to the nations at Babel, because that's the number 70 in the Maseridic text, 72 in the Septuagint. What is he telegraphing? I'm here to reverse. Look, fellas, I'll take care of the first rebellion, the death problem. All right. But along with that, we're going to deal with demons, and we're going to take back the nations too. I am not just the Messiah for Israel, I'm the Messiah for the entire world. We're here to take people back. That's such a whole new span. Right. But just that one thought, why is the kingdom linked to this stuff? We never explore that. Why does Paul, in half a dozen passages, when he talks about the resurrection, every time we think about resurrection, it's like, oh, I got a new body. I'll be at my prime weight. I get rid of this disease. I got more hair. We think we personalize the resurrection language and experience. That's normal. But why does Paul, when he gets into this, half a dozen times, he links it to the demise, the stripping away of the authority, the principalities and the powers. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. He's angling for something. Yeah. He's following a trajectory, because this has to be reversed, just like this other thing has to be reversed, and that other thing has to be reversed. This is so layered. Yeah. That's sort of the downside, that there's so much to see. This is why I wrote Unseen Realm. Yeah. And again, the light version of it is supernatural for people who don't like the footnotes. I'm glad you mentioned the footnotes. The footnotes have good stuff. Oh yeah, it's juice. So the downside is good grief, like how am I going to learn to see all this stuff? And I get it. But the flip side is, once you see it, you're not going to be able to unsee it. Right. Okay. You're going to read scripture. You won't be able to help, but you're going to, the line I use, you're going to read your Bible again for the first time. Yeah. And I say that because that's what happened to me. Yeah. As a doctoral student. Which is amazing. Like, how does this happen, you know? But I say it's like the, it's like the matrix. You have the red pill and the blue pill. You take this pill and you go back to sleep and wake up. But if you take this one, you see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Yeah. I would encourage anybody who hasn't read The Unseen Realm or the lighter, more popular version, supernatural needs to get that because you just gave us 25% of your whole Bible college angelology demonology right here. So you could really go graduate level by reading the book. But I want to ask you some kind of shotgun questions because some of the people who are dear friends knew I was going to be talking with you. And so I've got three questions. These are rapid fire. You can do them as quickly as you want to. First one is this, Nephilim and demons being the disembodied spirits of Nephilim. I've heard you teach on Nephilim before the flood, after the flood. Are there still, do you believe, Nephilim in the earth? No, I don't think so. And the reason is because if you trace the, those blood, I'll use the word bloodlines, okay, those families, you know, through scripture, the last vestiges of those get wiped out during the time of David. This is Goliath and his brothers. And what you have, and you'll know having read Unseen Realms, I think that the conquest narrative is specifically oriented by the need to eliminate the Nephilim and their people, these people groups. That doesn't mean that other people weren't killed, but the logic, the rationale for the conquest, you know, go in and wipe out this or that town. How I get that is if you look at the verbs of killing, including the big one, the harem passages, devote to destruction, they all occur in places where the Nephilim or the Anakim or the Refieeim were spotted or said to live. I don't think that's a coincidence. So when you get to the end of that, Joshua defines the conquest, he defines victory in Joshua 11, as there are no more Anakim in the land, except for the ones that ran away to the Philistine cities, one of which is Gaza, Gath, this is where Goliath comes from. So David has to mop up the job, but look at the typology. Who gets rid of the chaos agents that were started before the flood? This whole sons of God thing. Joshua, Yeshua, Moses, who's the prophet like unto Moses? That would be Jesus and David, the son of David. All three of those are our type portrait of the Messiah, all three of them. But the bloodlines end in the time of David with Goliath and his brothers being killed. And I think that's why they're mentioned specifically to communicate that idea. Okay, next question. Recently, the government is releasing information on unidentified aerial phenomena or what we grew up calling UFOs. They've showed footage of the F-18 Hornets engaging with them. What are your views? I know that you've been invited to a few UFO conventions. What are your UFOs? Yes or no? Alien extraterrestrial life? Yes or no? Your audience needs to realize that I have been in the fringe community for over 20 years. And this started back in 2001. I took the first year of my dissertation because I was kind of burned out in grad school and decided to write a novel. It was just a bucket list sort of thing. Go fiction. Yeah, I just need a break. So I just thought I'm going to take ancient texts, biblical stuff, supernatural worldview, watchers, UFOs, Nazis, conspire. I'm going to throw all new a blender, hit the button and see what comes out. And the result of that was the facade. That's the book's title. Okay. And shorter than I could believe, I wound up on Coast AM, which is still today has the largest listening audience for late night talk shows. That's amazing. I have now been on the show 34 times. I'm the friendly debunking Bible guy. But I got on for the facade and that's what sucked me into the vortex of getting invited to UFO conferences and stuff like this. Eventually it became about two things. One was debunking ancient alien nonsense. And the other was the question, could Christianity, like serious Christianity, Bible believe in Christianity, could it sustain a genuine extraterrestrial reality? Is that a reason to lose faith or not? Right. Right. So I have lectures that I would go to UFO conferences and lecture on these things. And people liked it because they're predisposed to think these very big picture questions. Now, right to your question, people can get a little bit of this. If they go to YouTube and go type in fringe pop, that's F R I N G E P O P 321. That's my YouTube channel for all this kind of stuff. Okay. We have over 100 videos. We do interviews and I do episodes on fringe topics where we try to respond in a friendly way, but to get people to think better about primary sources and critical thinking and Bible primary source, that sort of thing. So I don't think we have any real evidence right now that intelligent alien life exists. That's a biological claim that requires biological evidence. So I'm not bothered if we get that someday. Again, go up to YouTube and listen to the lecture for why I answered that. Now, when it comes to the latest flap, all right, my sort of specialty is UFOs. I just, I've always been interested in it since junior high. You know, I dabbled. It wasn't until, it wasn't until 1997 that I got serious though after I listened to the 50th anniversary CNN conference, you know, press conference on the 50th anniversary of Roswell. Some of the stuff said in there was so ridiculous that I thought somebody somewhere in the military wants this myth to live and I'd like to know why. Because I knew enough about the case to know that the Air Force has had three explanations. Why do we need three? Okay, you know, there's just some flaky stuff going on there. So that's what drew me in, but the latest tic-tac thing, I'm honestly not impressed with it. Okay, interesting. Here's why. Anybody who's interested in this should go to Google and type in UFO or tic-tac, the word Navy, and then this guy's name, last name, R-O-G-O-W-A-Y. Guy's name is Tyler Rogaway. He writes for a military blog called The Drive. Okay, Rogaway has ferried it out of publicly accessible things like the U.S. Patent Office and military patents. He's not claiming to know what these things are, but he offers a number of very human technologies, both in our world, in the Chinese military, the Navy itself, that could explain what these people are seeing. So my question is, why isn't the New York Times asking this question? Why is one guy seemingly the only person asking these questions and going to these sources? So that makes me suspicious immediately. The other thing is, I watched the 60 Minutes thing that was just on a week ago. It was actually very good. I believe the pilot's completely. I don't think they're putting anything on. I think they're totally sincere. The problem is, is all the questions that they ask, all the questions they raise, all the other stuff, this is like Groundhog Day in the 1950s and 60s, all the same questions. It is. And why that's important is this. There were less than a couple dozen people. I mean, if you've read like Annie Jacobson's book on the history of Area 51, you realize that there are probably 20, 25 people in the world that know what they're working on, like with the SR-71. These kinds of projects are so compartmentalized that I don't find it unbelievable in any way that trained pilots would run into something like this and have no idea what it is. Right. Right. So that doesn't impress me at all. We don't even, we don't know if it was manned. We don't know if it's just, if they have gravity ramification. This is part of my novel work. The stick with my novels, I have two of them. There's a sequel to the facade and I'm actually working on the third one now. But the stick with the novels is everything in the book, when it comes to technology or a historical character saying something or a government document, everything in the book is real and it is. What's fiction is what I do with it and then, of course, the characters. The storyline. So in the first one, I get into gravity modification research. That has been around on a small scale, something, a disc that would fit on my desk for decades. Okay. So maybe, maybe somebody has done work on that and can actually produce these sorts of things and they're testing them. Very few people are going to know what that is. It doesn't matter. It's going to be top secret. Right. It can go miles in a second. You know, the G forces, if you can modify gravity, none of that matters. It doesn't make any difference at all. So to me, you've got two options on the table. One is, okay, it's extraterrestrial. It's not human. To me, that's on the table. But again, I would first need to know that extraterrestrials exist. Right. That's like a precursor to this, to that observation or that option. The second one is either us or somebody else has gone down, again, the gravity modification road and they're doing things. I personally think that we have a space program that is not NASA. That's okay. I think that's what's picked up a lot on the international space station feeds a lot, stuff that we just shouldn't. I certainly hope we do because the Chinese do. Yeah, they sure do. While we're down here, you know, looking for, I don't know, the latest narrow interest group person to be in the astronaut program, while we're worried about political correctness and doing Muslim outreach through NASA, whatever. But the Chinese are over their militarizing space. But what I hope isn't the case, but this is still the most likely option, is that somebody like the Chinese is way ahead of us and is flaunting it. Because what that's going to do is it's going to put us into another Cold War situation, but this time it's in space. So the question is, who gets to militarize space first? And that's a race I hope we win. I was glad we won the first one. Yeah. Because I trust us more than somebody else, even though we're far from perfect, I still trust us more. So that's what I think is probably going on. In the old days, it was a misdirection. It's easier to say, think of it this way. What do you think would break the public out more? Hey, you know, this stuff isn't ours and, you know, it's extraterrestrials, but they haven't assaulted us. As far as we know, their intentions are good. You know, we know a few things and have had a few bumps with them and we're good, we're okay, but that's what it is. We can't really do anything about it, but don't fret too much about it. We've been dealing with it for 50 years. We're still here. We're okay. Okay. Is that going to freak people out or is this? Yeah, it's not ours. It's not extraterrestrial. It's the Chinese and they're putting nuclear weapons in space and we don't have any. Yeah. Yeah, one's fiction, one's reality. Yeah. Well, I mean, we essentially become hostages. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I can tell you have given this some thought. I got to check out your other YouTube channel and I want to see some of that, the Fringe Pop 321. Okay, last question. This is a question from a good friend who was just here at our conference. He also is a Old Testament or linguist scholar and here it is. Is a hot dog a sandwich? Yes or no? Okay, this is the Mike Brown question. I actually did a Q&A last night and got this. Okay, here you go, Mike. I'll probably get like a text in 10 minutes here. Take a look at your hot dog. Okay, remove the bun. What do you have? Tell me what you hold in your hands. What do you call it? You got a tube. It's a hot dog. You call it a hot dog. Okay. That proves that the term is the label of the inside. It's not the sandwich. Okay. You take the bun away, you got a hot dog. All right. If I have a ham and cheese sandwich and I take the bread away, I don't have a ham and cheese. Right. Dat is clear. The dat is clear. Thank you so much. He said you did. So he wanted me to make sure I asked that question for clarification. Hey, we can't thank you enough for being on a podcast with us and thank you for sharing some time with us. Thank you for your books and for those of you who are listening and you would like to know more about Dr. Michael Heizer's books, I would recommend the Unseen Realm as your starting point and work your way out from there and give yourself some time because you're going to want to really dive deep, especially into the footnotes. So thanks again. Thank you for being on Spirit and Truth. Thank you again for joining us. Stick with us, subscribe to the podcast, and we'll see you again right here on Spirit and Truth.