 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, go to nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heiser's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 248, live from Denver. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's a scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser. Hey, how's our Ray doing? This is fun. What's your favorite thing to do when we cover these conferences? Yeah, we've done this for, what, three, four years? Sorry, third. We've covered the conferences, but this is our third live meetup. Yeah, third live meetup. So, yeah, thanks everybody for coming. I know you might have had other things to do, so it's nice to see you come out. I should explain who's up here with me because obviously we're going to open it up to Q&A, but I brought some friends. And to my right, again, as he was already introduced, Pastor Doug Van Dorn, who is local, but this is the guy who wrote the original manuscript for the handbook for Unseen Realm. So I often get asked, hey, what's the best way to teach the content in my church? Get his handbook. If you go up to Amazon and you find Unseen Realm, it's going to be along there with things that other people purchased along with Unseen Realm. Cover looks pretty much like Unseen Realm, a little bit of a difference there you'll be able to detect, but he's the author of that. And then to his right, we have David Burnett, David managed to come over. He's been on the podcast a lot. And if you're up here, I mean, you can ask any of his questions. David is here, of course, for the academic meetings, Society of Biblical Literature, which technically started today. He's at Marquette. He's in a doctoral program in early Christianity, 2nd Temple Judaism. And again, if you've listened to the podcast for any amount of time, you should be familiar. And then to his right, how many of you have watched at least one Fringe Pop 321 episode? So we've got a few hands here and in the back. This is Greg Outlaw. He is the CEO of AllAboutGod.com. And he is the ministry partner with my non-profit, neglect.org, to create Fringe Pop. Greg's specialty is search engine optimization, AllAboutGod.com is actually sort of a network of websites aimed at evangelism and discipleship. And Fringe Pop was really his idea. So if you have questions about that, again, I'll probably bring him into the conversation. If you have questions directly for him, please feel free to do so. So that's who's up here. All right. Before we get started, I just want to thank Pastor Andrews and Colorado Community Church for hosting us. We appreciate that. And our friend, Phillip, for helping organize that. We appreciate that, sir. And with that, if anybody has any questions, please come up. Here's the mic. It's ready to go. And I should say, at least in my part, it doesn't have to be a biblical question. If you can ask me anything. If it's personal, I'll decide if I'm going to answer or not. Hello, my name is James Clapper. I'll start out with a lightweight question. What is your opinions on child demon possession? Child demon possession. Yeah. So in Mark 7 and 9, it talks about a boy and a girl who are possessed by a demon. I was kind of wondering, you know, what causes that? I'm sorry. What causes a child to become demon possessed? Is it an action of the parents or the child themselves? Yeah. Well, I don't know. I mean, David, if you want to chime in here too, but I can't really think of of anything that specifically I don't see the victims of demon possession in the gospels being blamed necessarily for it. So I mean, they there's acting out as a result of it. So if that's the case, I think my answer would be he doesn't have to do anything. In other words, this is this is a an occurrence or a happenstance that isn't triggered by something necessary. Can you think of any example? I mean, I can't not in that instance. And in this noptics, at least, because John doesn't have any exorcisms, there seems to be a sort of genuine understanding that despite what the crowds might assume about the people's family or their heritage, the demons are seen as oppressors of the person. So Jesus is releasing them from oppression. And there's no clear etiology for most of the possessions, like like origin story. There's no clear origin story for it. All we have is sort of the release from it. So it's hard to say. I don't know enough to. Yeah, I can't think of any specific example where the victim is sort of like, well, you did this and this is what happened. How about the idea of like a familial spirit? Would that you think that would relate to it at all? I mean, if we're going by the familiar spirits in the Old Testament, maybe like the Python oracle and things like that, we still don't have, you know, origin stories for that. Is that a possession? Is that kind of what you're suggesting? Is that a possession? You know, I wouldn't be too troubled by calling such a thing possession because the person is under the control of the familiar spirit, even though you don't have the same sort of acting out, violent kind of behavior. But to me, the issue is control. So I'd be willing to sort of lump those things together. So one thing about the Old Testament demon possession, there really isn't any. So the first, unless you're reading your Catholic Bible, Orthodox Bible, the first instance of that is in the book of Tobit in the Apocrypha, is the first instance of demon possession that we find. So some of, I mean, there's differing explanations as to why that is. Some trace it back after the fact into certain stories in the Old Testament, but an explicit described possession is until you get to Tobit, which is, you know, at least, what, 150, 200 years before Jesus, something. Yeah. What David said is correct as far as, you know, examples and use the word explicit. We did a whole episode on, I don't know what the number of the episode was, but it was on why exorcism is sort of, you know, from the reading of the New Testament, not a surprising component of the Messianic profile or perhaps an expected component of the Messianic profile. And you basically Solomon traditions in the Second Temple period attribute exorcistic powers to Solomon. And of course Jesus is the son of David, the son of Solomon, Solomonic line, but that tradition is also linked back to one or two, one or two Psalms were depending on, on the language of the Psalm and how it's translated, you might get a reference to, again, powers over demons or powers over the powers of darkness. And so that's, that's sort of the thread or the trajectory that's followed in the inter-testamental period that, you know, moves on into the New Testament. So if that's the case, then you would at least have the idea of demonic oppression and deliverance in the Old Testament, but there are no explicit examples of that. Hi, my name is Nate. This question is actually from a fellow listener named Daniel Wesley. He writes, I've learned that a common denominator issue with Christian Middle Earth is not understanding the epistemological differences between the modern and ancient world. He's asking you, Dr. Heizer, do you have any recommendations for how to teach people about these complicated, biblical, theological and philosophical issues in a way that they can approach? Well, I would say if you're, if the problem is confusing, let me put it this way, if the problem is reading the Bible through the lens of a modern worldview and then finding that to be some somewhat troublesome or in conflict with an ancient worldview, then again, my answer to that is don't read it with modern eyes. I mean, application is different than hermeneutics. You know, I'm not, I'm not an enemy of application, but, you know, the writers, you know, the ancient writers were writing from their perspective, their worldview with their vocabulary, with their knowledge base, you know, with just the way they looked at reality. And they're writing to people that that all applies to as well. So it's an ancient communicator and the communication is being received by ancient people. So it makes sense to me to try to read it with ancient eyes but still apply it, you know, in terms of, you know, our situation now. But I realize what the what the question is pointing to in terms of the conflict is either maybe a resistance to that or maybe an unease, you know, doing that. But again, you know, for me, it's this is an intentional decision to at least try to, you know, read scripture, you know, with ancient eyes and then, you know, make make the best of it based upon our best shot at trying to see what the writer was trying to communicate. And there are many contexts. Worldview is a big one, literary is another one. Just trying to do our best with situating the text in its own context and then reading it, you know, in light of those contexts and then doing the best we can to make it relevant, you know, to our lives. So I think the answer is you have to make an intentional decision trying to approach it that way and, you know, do the best you can with it. And one more. Is that OK? It's more practical. Is having a personal relationship with Jesus is something that we should strive for. A lot of churches seem to be promoting this idea, yet it seems to be entirely emotionally charged and doesn't seem to have any grounds in scripture itself. How should we approach this subject and the idea of a relationship with God that's personal? Yeah, to me, that sounds like the problem is is an emotion based relationship as opposed to something that mixes in a biblically grounded knowledge as part of the basis for that relationship. I mean, if if the parent, child, father, child metaphor in the New Testament means anything at all, it has to at least mean some kind of relationship, you know, in a positive way. Otherwise, you sort of eviscerate the metaphor of any relevance at all. So again, as I hear that question, I think what what seems to be the target there is having a purely emotional based reason for doing what you're doing as a Christian or in church or in, you know, again, pursuing some relationship with God or a spiritual journey that that lacks some very specific grounding. That's what I hear anyway in the question. I do you know the person? Personally, coming to a church where they're all about experiencing God and the worship seems really over the top at times where it seems more performance based instead of like actually like trying to worship God like in a liturgical sense. They do a lot of repetitive stuff that almost looks like, you know, a faith healer session or the the smells and bells kind of stuff. It does, you know, the way you do things. And it really struggling in that church context because people in my family enjoy that. But me personally, I'm sitting there being thinking otherwise. Well, I mean, I know people who who do enjoy that or not and are really grounded and I hate to I hate to put it this way, but the worship sort of seems, you know, incidental to them. It's not it's not really effective them in a good way. They can either bypass or just dismiss it or, you know, think nothing at all of it. So I say that to say this, you know, they're if the person really is grounded, it shouldn't have that, you know, negative effect as far as this is like destroying my relationship with God. And because of, you know, if that's the case, then I'd wonder, you know, really how much you really understand, you know, what's involved in the cross and salvation and God's pursuit of you and so on and so forth. But on the other hand, I can see if you don't have that, then it does become some kind of an entirely, you know, emotionally driven thing. I mean, I'm not the most emotional guy, OK, you're laughing Burnett. So OK, I'll give you I'll give you an example. And this will probably yeah, about me or about you. So I got invited to speak at the frequency conference a couple of weeks ago. And this is a was a predominantly African American gathering. There were 1200 people there. It was great. And I was I was so glad that Dr. Mason is Eric Mason. His epiphany church there was the one that set up the event. He had read Unseen Realm and asked me if I would come. And I did. I spoke a couple of times. But I stood out like a sore thumb in their worship. And I'm OK with that. You know, I sometimes I like to see people enjoying things like that. And I don't wonder. I didn't wonder in that gathering, if I was in another church where I didn't know that there were a lot of people who were there intentionally that had really, you know, solid theology. And I mean, that these are church planners, these are pastors, these are people doing all sorts of things in ministry that, you know, may or may not even be on on on the radar, as far as like publicly known ministries. But everybody was engaged there. It was about, you know, racial reconciliation and unity and, you know, cultural healing and stuff like that. Everybody's serious there. So I kind of like that because I don't have any. I don't have any nagging suspicion that this is all that there is. In other words, they had substance. So I felt quite assured and comfortable in the environment. It's just that I don't have any rhythm. OK, I don't have any sense, you know, for something like that. OK, I know you're just dying to say something. No, I want to respond to the emotional sort of church stuff. I can I come out of that tradition when I was young, too. I think the issue isn't the relationship with God language per se. It's how we rightly understand that language because generally in evangelicalism, especially in the south where I'm from, when when people say to have a relationship with God, what it generally translates to in practice is a positive emotions like really exuberant joy, dancing, singing. And then if it's not really positive or joyful, then there's like something wrong with your relationship or something which is complete nonsense because it does away with the entire lament and petition tradition in the Bible and in Christianity. And sometimes things just suck and they don't get better. And and the I mean, we have endless, endless lament Psalms like almost a third of our Psalms are lament. And yet we sing joy, joy, joy, joy, joy every Sunday. Well, sometimes you don't feel joy and sometimes God is nowhere to be found. And it's a dark night of the soul for like everybody. And that's the reality, I think, for more people than they would like to admit that are in these kinds of churches that it's like if you're not joyful, raising your hands all the time, there's something wrong with your, quote, relationship, right? That's the word that gets thrown around. And the problem is anyone with families knows relationships are not always joyful. Anyone with people that feel distance, that feel abandoned, that have been wronged and that have not received justice. I mean, this is where we cry the cry of the prophets. This is where we cry the laments. This is where we cry in the earliest Christian tradition of sanctification is imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ. And what does Christ do? He laments on behalf of the injustice that's taken place against him and against his city and against the people, against the poor, against the widow and the orphan. And sometimes tears are necessary. Sometimes lament is necessary. Sometimes joy, joy is not. And yeah, joy comes in the morning. Well, it's not the morning yet. Resurrection hasn't happened yet. You know, we're still in the wilderness. So I think evangelicalism has to, this is not an option, in my view, that it has to recapture the lament tradition. It has to, because what we're doing is if we don't is we're saying that the world is OK the way that it is. And it's not. If we're singing joyful all the time, then we're saying we're speaking a lie. The world is messed up. And it needs to be set right. And so we what's the prayer that early Christians prayed three times in the diddique, the earliest example of Christian tradition that we have in catechesis, like what they were being taught in Antioch. Three times a day, they'd have to pray the Lord's prayer. It replaced the shema in Antioch, where morning, noon and night, they would pray the Lord's prayer. And what do they pray? May your kingdom come in heaven, is it is in heaven? On earth as it is in heaven, which means it's not finished. And they prayed it all the time, wishing for it and dreaming for it. And so we have to recapture that lament tradition. It is OK to cry in church. It is OK to be pissed off in church. It's OK to be mad at church. It's even OK to question God, read David, read the Psalms, read every single prophet, read Jesus on the cross. OK, like this is OK, guys, it's OK to lament because God hears that and he's not beyond questioning. You can question him all day long, you know, read the Psalms, please. Dr. Heiser, I wonder if you would. You want to add something? Doug wants to add something. So the original question was about a personal relationship. And if the way these guys have taken it with the idea of. You know, this feeling sort of Christianity, if that's what it's related to, then there's problems. But now take what has just been said about this like full orbed Christianity where you have all the feelings of humanity being expressed and then take that into the idea of a personal relationship with Christ and has a totally different kind of a meaning. So but if we were if we were able as churches to recapture what he's saying, the idea of a personal relationship with Christ would be completely different in the way people interpret it. There's nothing wrong with a personal relationship with Christ through a spirit and we grieve the Holy Spirit. And like, what's the opposite of that? It would be an impersonal relationship. I don't even know what that would be. So of course, we have a personal relationship, but he's the God of the universe, too. So, Dr. Hazard, I wonder if you would also I've invited several people here tonight that are just new to the entire concept of the Divine Council. And I wonder if you would take a moment to give us a summation of that perspective. And then would you also answer the question of how much would you say that Genesis six, one through four provides the basis of how we should interpret the rest of the Bible all the way through Revelation? I'll take the second one first. I think Genesis six, one through four, and I'll say one through five because verse five is really important, especially in the Second Temple tradition, Second Temple understanding of what's going on there. It bleeds into the New Testament in a number of passages. I wouldn't say it's some sort of guiding hermeneutic. I would just say that what happens there provides sort of a trajectory that is discernible and was discerned in the inter-testamental period. And you can see it if you kind of know what's going on in the Second Temple period. And if you're familiar with the Mesopotamian background of Genesis six, one through five, and you can see how Second Temple Judaism picked up on that. They understood the earlier context, the Mesopotamian context. So if you know what you're sort of looking at, you will see, again, that thread sort of leak into a few other passages, you know, maybe a dozen or so. It just depends on really how granular you want to get. But it's not a it's not a guiding hermeneutic, you know, for scripture by any means. It's a component, it's a component of a worldview and really where where where I would fit it, again, because this is the this is a it's not Mike's outlook. It's again, the an ancient Jewish outlook. Is it's one of three rebellions. It's the middle one. And the fundamental problem that is presented to humanity is not the Nephilim that is dealt with. The Nephilim stuff is really about, you know, communicating the idea that that supernatural rivals to Yahweh are raising up, you know, an in control of enemies to God's own children to keep them either out of the land or to destroy them. But that's dealt with, OK, in David's time, look, look who actually deals with the Nephilim problem. You got Abraham and even preceding the conquest back in Genesis 14. You got Joshua, Yeshua. In the conquest and then you got David. All three of those personalities, those figures are prefigurements. And now, you know, they're analogues to the Messiah. That's not an accident. You know, but that problem is taken care of in the Davidic era. What isn't taken care of? Again, if we understand what's going on in Genesis six, is the problem of depravity. Again, the original Mesopotamian context for this is the Apkalu story. It accounts for every element of Genesis six, one, three, four and also verse five, the forbidden knowledge that troubled the Jewish writers. And again, the whole concept of being in league with chaos, OK, that, you know, looking positively toward Babylon. All of that stuff was favorable in Mesopotamia. The Apkalu and the Mesopotamian story are the ones that gave them civilization. They're the reason Babylon is great. Well, in biblical thought, Babylon is chaos. Hey, Babylon is anything but great. And so, you know, the knowledge that led to the greatness of Babylon and the Babylonians I is the thing that destroyed humanity in the Israelite Judaic worldview. OK, the forbidden knowledge is what essentially accelerated and proliferated human depravity, which is another way of saying it taught us more how to more efficiently destroy ourselves and to become idolaters. And this is why when you get out of Genesis six, you've got, you know, the giant clan stuff. There are clear connection points back to Babylon, back to the Amorite traditions of the Babylonians, whether it's Augs bed, OK, whether it's the term Amorite, which is used also in Amos to describe the occupants of the land. I mean, you have hooks back into Babylon because what they're trying to communicate is these are bad guys and what, you know, they are part of the reason why the world is in chaos and the place that it is. OK, you can cut off, you know, the Nephilim thing. Again, that ends with David, but what you don't deal with is depravity. That's the bigger problem. So let's go back now to this Divine Council worldview thing. I'll take one step back and talk about the three rebellions. And if you ask the average Christian, you know, why is the world the mess that it is, you're going to get Genesis three in the fall. If you ask the same thing of a Second Temple Jew or a literate Israelite, that's not the answer you're going to get. They're going to look at three problems. OK, there's the thing, there's what happened in Eden. And the end, you know, we have human and divine rebellion. Rebellion erupts both in God's, you know, family, his heavenly family, the council and on earth. The result of that is death. That's why the leader of that rebellion on the supernatural side becomes associated with motifs about death and shield and the Lord of the dead and preternatural spirits that belong in shield. I mean, you have all these passages that characterize that event and associate it with death. OK, the problem there is death. We have to cure that problem now. Then you get to the Genesis six thing. And the problem is reception of knowledge that leads to human corruption and idolatry. So we got to fix that. And the third problem is what happens at Babel, OK, the Deuteronomy 32 worldview where God again, after we've had Eden, we've got the flood. Now we got Babel and we're still sort of out of whack in terms of doing the thing that God asked us to do, which was a reiteration of the original Adamic, you know, commands. You know, again, God's trying to kickstart what he wants in the first place. He wants to return his presence to earth with a human family, the kingdom of God idea. And so when that's resisted, God says enough, you know, Deuteronomy 32, when the most high divided up the nations, when he set the boundaries of the nations, he divide them up according to the number of the sons of God. But Israel is Yahweh's portion. Jacob is his allotted inheritance. So again, if you've read my material, you'll listen to the podcast. You know what this is about? God divorces humanity. OK, we're done, but not quite completely. Because God surrenders humanity, it's as though he abandons the thing he wants the most, again, to have a human family. So I've had enough of this. But then he turns around and says, OK, here's what we're going to do. Rather than just like wipe everything off, you know, just we're done with everything, you know, permanently. I'm going to go to war and I'm going to have a conversation with a guy named Abram. And his wife is too old to have children, which means she's perfect. OK, because I'm going to raise up a new humanity, a new human family through them. They're going to be originated by a supernatural act of on my behalf. They're going to become, again, the place where I again, try to work with humanity to kickstart the kingdom of God idea, the reign of God and relationship with God. They're supposed to be the conduit through which the nations are going to come back. He makes a covenant with Abraham and says, hey, it's through you and your seed that all these nations are going to be blessed and be brought back into the family. And we know this story. The point is, if you if you think that those are the three problems, death, depravity, and now we've got most of humanity on the outs. OK, they're they're, you know, they're estranged from God. Yeah, they're under the curse, too. But, you know, God abandoned them. And, you know, the they're allotted to lesser divine beings, lesser gods, lesser, you know, sons of God, you know, they're not God. They're placeholders. We don't know when they become corrupt. Psalm 82 is all about the fact that they do. They have a stranglehold on their nations. They put the nations, their populations in chaos and destruction. He saw many to us about God's anger with them. He's going to punish them. He's going to rise up at the end. We did a whole episode on this with David. You know, rise up, oh, God, and take back the nations and all that stuff. So this is the condition of the world. All this rebellion has caused death, depravity and estrangement from God. And in the cosmic realm, the supernatural world, you have rebellion. There's going to be death when there shouldn't have. God is going to end. He's going to destroy the sons of God in there in Psalm 82. And now he has rivals. He has enemies in the spiritual world. It's it's a it's a total chaos picture. So if you if you if you believe all this, if you think all this, when you think about Messiah, what are you going to think? Oh, he's back here to cure Genesis three. No, he's here to fix all of it. And if you have an eye to that and you read the New Testament, this is why, you know, Paul, again, back to the episode with David. Somehow, when Paul thinks of the resurrection, he doesn't think, man, I'm going to be at my ideal weight. You know, I'm going to get the body I want. You know, don't don't even start. OK. But instead of that, instead of thinking about the personal sort of effect in in in many cases, the next thought in his head is, yeah, the demise, the nullification, the stripping of the authority of the rulers and the authorities and the principalities and the powers. Why does Paul connect those two things in his head? Because the Messiah rose from the dead, ascended. And that nullified their authority. Well, how does this work? Well, we know that the resurrection, of course, fixes the death problem. That's the one everybody sees, because that's the one that's preached all the time, all right? How does it address depravity? Because that's the lingering problem from Genesis 6. How does it fix that? Well, again, I'm of the opinion that. This is where the talk of Jesus in his relationship to the Holy Spirit really matters. Because Jesus rises from the dead, he ascends. And why does he need to ascend? OK, yes, he needs to be on the throne. That's part of it. But he needs to ascend so that the Spirit will come. You've got the Spirit sent from the Father and from the Son without getting into that whole controversy about who sends who and all that. But you have the Spirit come to put the caps down and fulfill his part of the new covenant, which, of course, is obviously linked to Jesus. But what does the Spirit do? The Spirit empowers believers to resist temptation. I mean, the Spirit does a number of things. But that is the way depravity is blunted and retarded from the domination that it can have. It's through the Spirit that we are able to not be the depraved people that we are. And all of this is conditioned on the finality, the accomplishment of what Jesus does on the cross and the resurrection and the ascension. This is why Paul mixes the Spirit of Christ with the Spirit of God in some places. It's why Paul refers to the Lord, who is the Spirit? Two times. There's this link. And the unseen realm stuff is kind of fixated on Jesus a little bit. As Jesus is, but isn't God. I mean, he is God, but he's not the same. He's not the Father, but he's still God. So you have the Spirit is, but isn't Jesus. I mean, this is why you have this mixed language about Jesus and the Spirit. How else could Jesus say, we're two or three are gathered together in my name. There am I, and they're missed. It's a reference to the Spirit. All the talk about, you know, lo, I am with you always, even under the end of the age. Well, he can say that because in some way the Spirit is not Jesus and is distinct from Jesus, but in some way he is. And since Jesus is God, the Spirit is also God. I mean, you have this, you know, sort of this interchange of these figures and these ideas and these persons, but it's the Spirit that combats our depravity. And then the third part, how does the Messiah fix the third rebellion? Well, that's kind of obvious. It's the ministry of Paul, it's that focus bringing back the nations, you know, releasing them from their bondage. You know, Paul goes into a city and it's like, hey, you know, yeah, I know you people really believe. Again, how many of you heard me tell the story about that pagan podcast I was on? The Voice of Olympus. You don't know that story? I gotta tell you the story. So I got this email one day and the email is signed Hercules. Okay, so that kind of caught my attention. He's the host of a podcast called The Voice of Olympus. And he wants me as a guest. Yeah. So I'm like, you know, it's one of those do I or don't I? You know, just answer this email. So I replied to him and here this guy says, I'm a pagan, I worship the gods of Greece and Rome, but I just read your little book, Supernatural, and I loved it. Will you be on my show? So I thought, okay, this will be interesting. So he says to me when we do the first show, he says, now there aren't a whole lot of people that I can have a conversation with. And I didn't say it, but I thought, yeah, like really? You know? Yeah, that's right. So we got into a conversation. And for like the first, I don't know, six, seven, eight minutes of the podcast, this guy's going through Greco-Roman religious texts that articulate the Deuteronomy 32 worldview that we worship these gods because they were allotted to us and we were allotted to them. And the bigger God said, no, you worship this one and not that one. It's this rivalry within the pantheon and it's played out on earth. So he's like, I get it. It's like the same thing in the Bible. He was so excited about this. And he says, I have one question. This is a really good podcast show. I got one question. He says, if Yahweh, the God of the Bible is the one that set up this whole system in judgment, what does he want? It's like, oh, I'm so glad you asked. You know, because this is, I felt like Paul for a day or at least for an hour because Paul goes into a city. It's like, look, I know that you think that if you leave your gods and you embrace Jesus as your savior, as the incarnation of the most high, you're thinking, I am just in big trouble. The gods are gonna come after me. I'm gonna be persecuted or killed. I mean, all this bad stuff could happen to me. And so Paul's like, let's think carefully about this. The most high is the one who set up this arrangement. And it's the most high who became a man and went to the cross and died for you and rose again from the dead and ascended. And he nullified the authority that he at one time had given to the gods of the nations. And yes, they rebelled and they turned out to be really awful. But he has now the same authority figure, has now nullified, deauthorized their control over you. The greater authority, the great test authority now says, you come back home and over to my side. I'm the one in control here. I am the greatest power. He will protect you. He will save you. You are released from your bondage. You are released from your obligation. He wants you to come home. And not only does he want you to come back into the family, he demands it. This is Paul's, this is his message. He's speaking the same language as the pagan. I mean, he knows what they're thinking because they have this shared outlook. So the Messiah is supposed to fix all of this. And you're getting back to the summary, the divine counsel worldview. In simplest terms, the divine counsel is just the heavenly host. But there's rebellion there. And it plays out on earth in a number of ways. And you have this, the Old Testament, this is where the cosmic conflict comes in. The Deuteronomy 32 worldview is where we get the princes of Daniel, Daniel chapter 10. It's where we get the principalities, the powers and the rulers and the dominion. These are all terms of geographical dominion. It's not an accident. The Shadim and Deuteronomy 32 that turn the hearts of the Israelites to worship themselves and other gods. It's an Akkadian term that refers to a territorial entity. Again, this just makes sense. This is their worldview. And it's the backdrop for New Testament talk about what we think of as spiritual warfare. You wanna, I thought you wanted to chime in. Yeah, go ahead. Quote about the Shadim and Deuteronomy 32 that Israel went after. First Corinthians time, yeah. Yeah, it's quoted by Paul and First Corinthians 10 in Greek from the Septuagint, which reads Daimonia, which we translate as demons. But that term in the Greek world, everyone knows. We think of it sometimes looking back through Christian lenses as demons like little red pitchfork things or something, you know? But if you're in the Greek world, Daimonia is a common term that everyone knows from texts like Plato and a lot of others that Daimonia are lower tier deities or lower tier heavenly powers that Chronos at the beginning of time separated and put over the nations. Yeah, it's the same word. It's the same term. So in the Greek world, everybody knows those stories. That's the etiology of how all these nations got there, the origin story. And so when the Greek translators of the Hebrew scriptures were translating Deuteronomy, and the term only appears, I think, twice in the entire Septuagint, maybe only once. Yeah, it's pretty unusual. It's hardly ever used. But it's, which is really important because where it is used in Deuteronomy 32 is they chose the term that Greeks would know when they hear that these are territorial spirits. And that's the term that they chose to translate Deuteronomy 32. And that's the text that Paul draws on in 1 Corinthians 10 and says, when you're eating in temples to other deities, right? He says, you're eating with Daimonia. You're actually eating with them. And so you're not eating the Lord's suffer. You're still eating with demons. So, and the temples are territorial, right? Any major Greco-Roman city has a different territorial deity and territorial spirits. And so it would be a common thing, and we've talked about this on the podcast multiple times, but if you haven't heard this, it's a very common thing in the ancient world to go on temple tours. This is normally only if you're super rich. Poor people don't get to do this. So rich folk will go on these temple tours and all over the ancient world. And if you're a foreigner and you come to a city and you don't show up at one of these big festivals, the city throws, which are at temples and dedicated to deities, then you're seeing this like this anti-social hater. You're screwing up our economy here. It's like, come on, this is what we do here. Take part. And so this is where we get the term, and some of you may already know this, Atheoi, where we translate atheist. This is where the term actually originates is Greco-Roman people would call Jews this because they wouldn't go to the temples. Well, at least the ones that were trying to obey Torah. There's plenty of Jews that did, but Jews that were trying to stay faithful to Torah would not go eat in these temples and they would only worship one God. So because they wouldn't worship all the other gods, they were called Atheor, they were against the gods. So this is the tradition that's picked up by Paul and says, if you've been rescued by Israel's God, who is the creator of the entire cosmos and redeemed from those gods, you do not go back in those temples and eat the food sacrificed to idols because you're eating with demons, those territorial spirits, they're real for him. So it is a literal redemption, not figurative. They're literally coming out from under the power of that deity and in celebration of that, the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist, is celebrated in Corinth. They say, and the way Paul does that in 1 Corinthians 10, when he talks about the meal, he relates it to Exodus and says that we're eating the same spiritual food that our fathers ate in the wilderness and the same spiritual drink from the rock which followed them, which was Christ. And where did they just come out of? Egypt, under oppression to foreign gods and they were delivered. And he says, that's exactly what's happening to you Greeks. Same thing, you've been taken out through your baptism, through the waters, out from under the oppression of those foreign deities and under the reign of the one true, ever-living God. So that's the image. That's why you don't go back to those temples, you see? So the demonia are very real. And that's the concept of demon that you actually get in Paul. It's a little bit different in this synoptic, obviously, it goes back to the Genesis 6 thing. But the way demon is in Paul goes back to the Genesis 10 and 11 issue. You do get that vocabulary in the Gospels, but as David pointed out, there's the Genesis 6 connection. It's interesting that the other vocabulary you get in the Gospels helps sort of reinforce that point. Now I don't know if you've read, I think it's Waddell's study on unclean spirits. But have you ever wondered why demons are called unclean spirits? It's not because they make a person impure, it's because they are mixed. Think of the Levitical rules against mixing things. They were viewed as the result of a mixed heritage, human and supernatural. It's why they're called bastard spirits in the Dead Sea Scrolls, because that's what they are. So the vocabulary, again, helps make this little distinction that David pointed out. But again, it's easy for us to sort of read right over that and not even ask the question, well, why would they call them that? What would that mean? Yeah, generally, the demon, yeah. So again, in our tendency, again, it's because of the broader picture of the West and the way, typically, we're taught about angelology or demonology in church, it's filtered to us through church tradition. And typically, what's done is we take all this terminology and we smash it all together into one thing and the good guys are angels and the bad guys are demons and that's pretty much it. Again, it's a lot more variegated and complex and I would say interesting and important if you're actually paying attention to the vocabulary you get in the text. Hi guys, I'm so excited to be here. This is awesome. By the way, love the Two Swords podcast. That was so awesome, changed my view completely. It was like, oh my God. Okay. And also I really am digging and have dug the Leviticus podcast. Wow. I know. You're a lifer, man. I've listened to it like five times in a row over and over again, just trying to soak it in. When Trey helped me reboot the podcast, I actually said to him, we're going to start, we're gonna do Leviticus like real early because if it's still a podcast at the end of that, then we'll know that we actually have something. That's what I'm saying. It was really cool. And couple of a two for question in that. Should we be looking at atonement in the New Testament in light of atonement of IE decantamination in the Old Testament? That Jesus's blood sacrifice decontaminated or was a decontaminating sacrifice for us to approach and be able to be in relationship, direct relationship with God, living within us. And that's part one. Two, I'm just trying to clarify. As I understand it, the laws of Leviticus were for temporal relationships, IE the community that the sins were against God's rules for the community and they affected the community. And that the punishments were to protect and reimburse the community. I don't see the laws being focused on sinning against God per se as much as the community, although the two are tied together. Obviously we're breaking God's rules, but those rules were applied to the community. Is that because you are in the community and loyal to Yahweh that you can simply go to God and ask for forgiveness then? Although you may have to recompense the community in some way. Yeah, I mean, some of the laws are certainly proscribing direct offense against God. It's just that those sorts of laws end in either exile or the death penalty. So there certainly are laws that are pointed at a direct offense toward God himself. But I think, having said that, there's a lot to be said, again, for this community aspect and this sacred space aspect and whatnot. I mean, David and I were looking at each other about the atonement, because this is a really big and still there probably always will be a controversial topic. I do tend to like the notion that atonement being, again, the wiping away, the decontamination of the thing that the blood is applied to, sacred space, it protects it from defilement and takes care of that problem so that the priest in that case can have access and all that. I think that's not so much the difficulty because you could say, well, the New Testament talk of atonement means at least that, but the question is, what else is in the picture? Yeah, and there's more going on and then scholars like to argue about, well, which nuances are there and which ones are we gonna fight over? That kind of thing. Do you think he could summarize that? Because he, David has his head in this because of where he's at and what he's doing. Give him the options here. Okay, yeah. I can't summarize all of atonement theory in like five minutes. It's a quagmire. It's a quagmire. Okay, well, I mean, let me just, let me do it this way. There's, I'll problematize it. That way, it'll sort of open it up. So traditionally, at least, so it depends on what audience we're talking to, right? So in an evangelical audience, traditionally they've inherited some sort of Lutheran or Calvinistic view of atonement, which generally goes something like, you screwed up. You need, you're unrighteous. You need God's righteousness. He gets your unrighteousness. Jesus, you get his righteousness game over. Well, that's not what atonement means. So if, does it cover those things? Yeah, it deals with those things, certainly. But if that was all that atonement meant, then why do you make it for land? Did the land, did the grass like piss off God or take off God, you know? I mean, why do you make it for vessels in the temple? Right? So atonement must be something bigger than this. So I like the decontaminate word, like purification. He made purification for sins, you know, it often reads. And depending on what translations you read, it gets tricky here too. So the idea of purification, in particular, a cosmic purification. So one that goes from the top down. So because in the Levitical system, right, it's not just blood for the people sins, it's even for the high priest himself, right? And that's like the final offering goes in. And then the shofar can be blowed on Yom Kippur, on the day of atonement, blown. And then it'll be announced when the high priest comes out and raises his hands and announces the sins are forgiven. But that's a climactic event that incorporates all of the other things. And in Protestantism, we've gotten really good at talking about dealing with personal sin and we're really bad at dealing with systemic sin. We're really good about this goes back and this is tied to that personal relationship stuff, right? Because atonement is only about making you the individual right before God. So come down, give your life to Christ, boom, atonement, right? But atonement was, it's a systemic issue. It's something that the whole camp has been messed up, right? And you don't just slay the goat, you send one out too, right? And it bears, and it's called a Zazel. So now we get into the Enoch stuff, right? The scapegoat, you know, bound and they really believed ancient, many ancient Jews really believed in the Levitical code and we don't know which tradition came first actually, the Enochic or the Levitical. But the actual demon, the chief of demons is literally being bound to the goat and sent away. And then in Second Temple tradition, they would make sure it's gone and push it off the cliff, you know? Well, they would. It's like, this is the, so some of this Farisake edition was not that bad. They're like, we're gonna make sure that thing dies. So, but it's about expelling it from the midst of the community, right? It's not just about the individual. There are, otherwise- First Corinthians five. Yeah, First Corinthians five. I mean, it's literally Paul. I'm a Paul guy, so I always go back to Paul, but Paul hardly ever uses sins, Pearl. Very rarely, if ever. What he doesn't shut up about is sin, singular. Something that comes in at Adam's transgression. It comes in like this imperial dark cloud over the world, and with it brings death. Now, death doesn't happen to just individuals. It happens to all things, right? So, the whole creation in Romans 8 is wanting to be set free, right? Not just people. The entire creation in Romans 8, Paul calls on this. The entire creation is groaning, waiting for the revealing of the real sons of God. And why sons of God plural in Romans 8? Have you ever thought about that? Why doesn't it just say at the apocalypse of the son of God when Jesus comes back? But it says at the sons of God plural, talking about all of us in Christ, because Paul has this assumption that in the eschaton, what the creation really needs is for righteous people to take it over. Because it's run by a bunch of horrible people. And the creation is like, get rid of these stupid empires, you know? We want the sons of God to take over, you know? So, we forget about the systemic aspect altogether. And that's, I think, the biggest issue with our Atomic Theology in evangelical Protestantism is we're really good at the individual and we're terrible with the systemic issues. One note, then I'll hand it back to Doug. That's important. I hope you were listening carefully. Saying that the atonement is wider than, again, the sort of individual associations we have doesn't mean that you eliminate the individual. It just means it's bigger. Because a lot of the atonement discourse that you see on the internet, you know, out there in the wacky Middle Earth is like, you know, I often get the impression that it happens just to deny, you know, the individual component. But if you're listening carefully, that's not what he was saying. It's just bigger. To say it's bigger than the individual doesn't mean that the individual thing isn't relevant, it isn't biblical, it isn't part of biblical theology, it is. Right, you can't have one without the other. I'm thinking of an analogy with Lord Supper. So, I'm sure you've heard of these churches that have drive through Lord Supper where you can get a little individual packet and drive through the window and then go home. Seriously, seriously. Yeah, I know you're serious, but I just... Why do we take the Lord Supper? What is the Lord Supper about? It's about taking the Lord Supper with the body of Christ. And the body of Christ is always two things. It's always the individual and it's the church, simultaneously. So, and it's the blood of the covenant. And so that's the atonement part of it, you know. That it's covering the community. Yes, yes, yes, amen, amen, amen, amen, amen. I'm really big about the Eucharist, okay? And Paul gets to the atonement, or the Lord Supper in 1 Corinthians 11, right after he's just talked about eating with demons. That's right. And, okay, this is very, very, very important. Atonement is attached to the Lord Supper, his death taking in the blood, taking in his body, right? This is the great relegator of all of mankind. When we individualize the Lord Supper, we've killed it. Because the Lord Supper, the great image is, all who come to the table, black, white, Asian, Native American, Iraqi, Russian, you name it, Republican, Democrat, I'm serious. All have to come to the table. The richest of the rich, the most powerful billionaire in the world, and the pauper living in the box, have to come to the table and bow the knee to King Jesus. That is the great relegator of all of mankind. If we lose the corporate vision of the Eucharist, we have lost Christianity. I have to say that again, because I know thousands of people listen to this podcast. If you lose the corporate aspect of the Eucharist, you lose Christianity. So box over. By the way, the watchers are in trouble for ice cream. That's what we believe. That was my husband. Thank you all. Dr. Heiser, I want to say that's kind of on a personal note that my husband has been listening to your podcasts and for four years now, I think, and it really has revolutionized his walk with the Lord. And yeah, it's been really an amazing experience to watch. I kind of tease him sometimes and say, sometimes I hear Mike Heiser's voice more than I hear yours. And so we've had little arguments here and there. But I'm very, very grateful for what he's learned from the time that he spent listening to the podcasts. And it also has helped us to be kind of more laser focused in our understanding of faith and that it's believing loyalty in Yahweh, so that's been super helpful for us. I might throw you a curveball here and what I'm about to bring up, but I had to write my notes down. We were attending a church that had a lot of influence from the charismatic movement and some of those more kind of charismatic aspects, which I'm not condemning that. I just think that there's got to be a little bit of balance going on in there, kind of back to that personal relationship and the emotional experience and whatnot. And it also had influence, I think, from several of the kind of super popular authors of the day that the prophets and the prophetesses and again, not a condemnation, I don't know. When I get to heaven, I have a lot of questions and I kind of feel like at least the church that we were in, which is a fairly large movement, that it was a lot of the new apostolic reformation ideology, the NAR, but I know that if I were to bring that up and try to kind of present that, that that would almost be scoffed at, kind of like, that's not what's happening. But my own experience was incredibly painful and Glenn, actually after hearing about, or hearing a couple of episodes that you had with, was it Audrey? The first one was Holly, are you talking about the NAR or Fernan Audrey? Fernan Audrey, oh, I'm sorry, okay, right. There's something about Fernan Audrey. There was one overlap because we did a Fernan Audrey episode where Beth was on the podcast and she came out of that tradition, so that might be why you're in the next one. Okay, and he actually said, honey, I think this is what's been happening to you, that this was, you're under. And so we were not with that church anymore, we needed to leave, but I found that it became like a kind of a very works-based kind of a thing. If you would only come into alignment with this thinking or if you would only, you know, one of the things that was said just within the last year was, you know, Jesus is waiting on us to return, which I was like, well, he was gonna wait a long time because we're a mess, you know? If he's waiting for us to get our act together, we're in trouble, the whole world's in trouble. And there's actually very little freedom in that. And so my concern is that this is actually kind of a great deception that's being perpetrated upon a large aspect of kind of the charismatic movement, but probably not just limited to that. And let's see, I gotta, you know, kind of because that seven-mountain mandate idea, like we've got a, it's on us to present this kingdom now that's been completely conquered here on earth and return it to the Lord when he comes back like, here, look what we did. And I just, I think there's some confusion in there. You know, I've spent kind of eight months detangling from it and detoxing from the lies and things. So I guess my question is, like, do you see a lot of that, you know, just in general, kind of that NAR works-based ideology? You know, because for us, we find it's kind of like, you know, how do we wade through something where it's like, you feel like you're trying to nail Jell-O to a wall to explain it? Yeah, you know, I'll answer that this way. My youngest daughter, you know, she had her first boyfriend a year ago. You're laughing. You haven't come to me yet. I know, it hasn't come to you yet. And, you know, she dated a guy who was the son of a local pastor. And, you know, we knew that the church had some sort of charismatic orientation. It's not our tradition, but as a, when I think charismatic, I'm thinking like in the 70s. Okay, yeah, you know, that sort of thing. And so, you know, it was really, you know, I thought I was sort of filling in the gaps there correctly, but it turns out that I wasn't. Because this particular church was very much what you're describing, and we learned that really exceedingly manipulative. You know, since, you know, my daughter was dating the pastor's son, they'd go to youth group, and he'd ask her questions like, why aren't you smiling? You're not smiling enough. You're not happy enough. You know, you're with me, so people are gonna look at us. You know, it's just this sort of thing. He would talk to her like he was her dad. Okay, it takes a lot for me to get like really irritated, but this went on for a while, and she would dread getting a phone call or a text from this guy. Because it would be like half an hour later, she's in tears because she's just not measuring up. And so I actually had to say to my wife, it's like, okay, Dreena, you need to go talk to this guy because if I do, it's going to be ugly. Okay, it's just not going to go well. Is it, it just pushed all the buttons. So what I learned through that was, you know, to sort of, I got kind of drawn into this world. And again, this is just sort of another segment of what we would think of as, you know, the charismatic thing. It's not all or, you know, it's just, it's a subset. Okay, but it's very performance oriented. You know, and you, when you live like that, when you're in that kind of environment, even if you meet the expectations, then the issue is what's next. Okay, because something else has to separate the really spiritual people from the people where they're at now. And it's just sort of starts to accrue different experiences, different, you know, outward behavior, different this or that, again, to move up the spiritual ladder. You know, and so yes, I have seen that. And it has not been good. But I know enough people within, again, the charismatic orbit that are not that, and in fact, recognize that for what it is. So I don't know institutionally, you know, how big the gnar is because we had Mike Brown on as well. And he's like, most of the people, if you went into these churches and you talk about gnar, they have no idea what you're even talking about. And again, I didn't doubt him when he said that. So maybe it's just people who are in power positions or maybe it's just an influential author that just gets filtered down some way. I don't know, but any sort of performance oriented redefining of the gospel is just really dangerous. It's pernicious. So yeah, I've seen that. But again, I'm not gonna paint the whole, you know, movement. Now what I've actually seen more of, and I happen today again, we actually had a series of interviews and one of the guys, in fact, the last person I talked to today, we spent about an hour together after we were done. And he's a charismatic pastor, his PhD in New Testament and he was using unseen realm content and just basically wanted to talk about, you know, it was helpful and he has some questions. So we spent about an hour together. And this guy again, it was representative of the kinds of churches that I seem to keep stumbling into. And that is, well, we're open to the gifts. And so some would call us charismatic, but the charismatic would say you're not charismatic enough but the ones who don't like charismatic would say you're too charismatic, so there you go. You know, it's just you have the believers who are open to these things, but they don't drive the bus and it's not performance oriented Christianity. So I don't know what you call that. I don't know if you can stick a label on that, but it just seems that there are more churches that are just sort of content with, we're open to God doing stuff and we don't really think that we should expect God to conform to our theology. And if God wants to do this or that, he'll just do that and that's okay. But we're not gonna say, oh, if we see this happen, everybody needs this experience because then we'll know you're close to God. You know, in other words, there's a clear recognition of the abusive part of it and they're searching for this balance. So I actually see more of that than I do the other. That's very encouraging to hear because you can get so locked in to just kind of what's happening to you. And I mean, I was a little bit hesitant because I don't want to condemn an entire group, just say, well, you know, I look charismatic, I'm not. I tell people, even in these groups, I say, look, I doubt everything, I'm suspicious of everything, but I'm open to anything. And I'm not gonna be able to parse your experience. Like, I'm not you, how would I know? I wasn't there, I'm not you. But I want to see the fruit of it. I want to look and if it's somebody I know, I'll be able to know if you're turning this into a performance-based thing, if you're condemning other people because now I've had this experience and you have, I'll know that. You know, so my thing is, well, we'll look for the fruit of it and see what kind of fruit that produces. Thank you so much. Hello again. This one's for David from Zach, another fellow podcast listener. Are you taking live questions, by the way? Kind of. I got people from the Facebook group that are like, oh, you're there live. So this is for Dave. It's a question about his paper on Paul's Ascent and Angelic Torment. So get ready for this one, brother. What is your reasoning for regarding a seven-tiered heaven as authentically second temple as opposed to a Mesopotamian three-tiered heaven which would seem to fit, which would seem to fit the motif of standing in the council as a sign of a prophet? I'm sorry, can you repeat the question? Yes. What is your reasoning for regarding a seven-tiered heaven as authentically second temple as opposed to a Mesopotamian three-tiered heaven? Which would seem to fit the motif of standing in the council as the sign of a prophet? I don't really understand the question. I mean, assume some sort of weird cutoff in historical reception. Well, it sounds to me like, at which level do we stand, do the prophets stand? Like, is it the third level of the seventh? Yeah, so I don't, in my view, in my, you can kick back on this, but yeah, the reason why I say I don't really understand the question is because the question assumes some sort of essentialist reading of these levels of heaven as if there's one absolute right one and then there's like one, all the others are absolutely wrong. And so we look for that essential background to nail down that one vision. But in the second temple period, yes, Paul's inspired. So he says seven there, but it's like, in the second temple period, there's seven, there's 12, there's three, there's, you know, it depends on what apocalyptic author you're reading. So I have no idea how many levels of heaven there are. I don't know. I just know what Paul says in second Corinthians 12. And I'm convinced in second Corinthians 12, in that episode, that he's been to the highest. And because I think the rhetoric, the rhetorical structure of that text is really important because he's talking about boasting in his weaknesses, whereas his opponents are boasting in their strengths. And the reason behind that paper that I gave S.B.L. and then did the podcast on, the reason why I found the Abrahamic tradition significant is because nowhere else in second Corinthians, Paul's talking about Moses earlier. You know, he doesn't mention Abraham at all until you get to that ascent text. And then he's talking about the opponents who boast in the fact that their real Israelites, seed of Abraham, you know, he's like, I am too. And then he goes into this, all these horrible things that's happened to him, instead of good things, right? That you would boast in, if you were the seed of Abraham, you know, elected by God and given this great inheritance and I've blah, blah, blah, instead of that, you have this list of horrible things that happens to him. And then, you know, I even made it to the seventh heaven and there's no trampling underfoot because in some of these Abraham traditions, the promise of his seed, you'll find that this in rabbinic commentaries on Genesis, where, and I talk about this in the episode, where they think that the promise to Abraham in Genesis 15 is that when he's taken outside, he's literally taken up outside the world. And the reason why they do that is in Hebrew, taken outside, it can mean a lot of different things, but then the term for look can also mean look down and the rabbis will quote Proverbs eight when God's looking down at his creation. And so they're saying, so he took Abraham outside the world and he looks down at the stars and he's at the heights of heaven. And the idea was he tramples underfoot the thorn, the rabbis say, which were those in heaven whom under heaven fear them. And he calls them the thorn, part of that Genesis tradition of the curse of being put under like nasty powers, you know, draws on that thorn imagery from Genesis and the curse, because what happens in the end, you tread on the snake, you know, you crushed the head of the snake, you know, and thorns and thistles came out in the curse. So this is all part of this fulfillment of Abrahamic promise of like this great ascent would come with victory and that's not what happens in 2 Corinthians 12. The opposite happens. He receives torment from this angel from Satan, you know. So it's like, it's sort of a reverse reading and in my reading of this text, this is a reverse reading of the tradition saying what you would normally boast in to exalt yourself, I'm actually saying it's, I've been there and I've heard the unutterable words and I've received torment, you know. And so it's like, it's like, even if you're at the highest heavens, it doesn't matter. What matters is suffering with Christ, being with Christ in his infirmities. It's not the ascending to heaven that you want to get to. Like I'm higher than all of you. It's like, no, I'm coming down and I'm serving you and I'm dying for you. I'm not boasting of my position over you and lording it over you. He's like, I didn't ask for a dime from you, you know. So it's about, I think the tradition, it's sort of not even important for Paul so much. I think it is, because he thinks it really happened. And I think it probably happened. I don't know what it means, but I have no idea what it means. But so the levels of heaven thing, I'm not sure is that important rhetorically for what he's doing in that text. So I don't want to get carried away too far into the details because then I'll lose the rhetorical context. Does that make sense? So if you ask me like, what levels, what? Heck, if I know, I don't know. The apocalypse is, say, tons of different things, so. I mean, I would agree with that. I think, first of all, I think the question sort of misunderstands the three-tiered cosmology. Because the three-tiered cosmology is the heavens, and then what's under the earth? There's only one heaven thing there. The three doesn't apply to the heavens, so you can't really contrast it with the seven. And I would agree, because you do get these mixed numbers. I think the point of all the numbers is whoever's speaking has been to the very highest level. In other words, they're actually in the presence of God. Okay, so again, I think that's the import of it and the number, the way you describe it being in the very presence of God might vary. Yeah, but I don't view it as a contradiction to the three-tiered cosmology, because there's a disconnect there. And I forgot one point there, and I think I made it in the podcast, but just for the sake of the question, there are some scholars who have bought the thesis of Paula Gooder, who's a UK scholar on Paul, who in her monograph argued, it's actually titled Only the Third Heaven, question mark. Like, it's a failed ascent. He didn't make it all the way up, because there's different layers of the heavens, and so in the apocalypses, and she's an expert on this stuff. So she thinks he didn't make it all the way up, and that that's why he's treating it as a failed ascent. Like, I didn't make it, I'm a failed. He's taken that sort of persona of the lowly failed one, yet in my weakness I boast. So I don't buy that though, and there's some scholars that don't buy that. I think the rhetoric only punches the hardest if he did make it all the way, and still he was tormented. So it's like, you know what I'm saying? So I think that's the point of it there. And I think I said seven earlier, and I meant three, so sorry. Let's see, that's how many different levels Jewish apocalyptic, trust me. Did you go down there and grab it? Oh, my goodness. Hello. Hello. I'm Kitty, and I just have one simple question. I've heard you talk about the fact that the future of the church is going to be different from what we have today, and I wanted to know what you see as the future of the church, because I think you said that you don't see how it can go on the way it is today. You know what I'm thinking, don't you? If you want to go there, you just tap me on the shoulder. You know, I say that because I think our culture, I think we're transitioning from a post-Christian culture to an anti-Christian culture. I think that the culture is descending into tribalism. You know, the reverse mirror image of some of the stuff you talk to with community, I mean, everywhere you see, and the major sort of forces that capture the hearts and minds of the masses are encouraging this process of disintegration and tribalism. And, you know, we don't really need to get into sort of speculating as to how this is going to work, but it doesn't stretch my imagination to think that whether the trajectory makes sense or not, Christians are going to become the focus of a lot of anger. And again, the roads to that point can be quite diverse. I think they will be diverse, but I don't think it's a stretch to think that Christians, you know, 10, 20, 30 years from now are going to be monitored because of hate speech laws and how points of Christian ethics might contradict the cultural consensus. And in days gone past, it was okay if you disagreed, as long as you were tolerant of the other side and you sort of lived and let live, you were allowed to sort of have a voice there, that's going away. It's no longer sufficient to be tolerant and allow someone to have a disagreement. Now we have to celebrate evil or we're in trouble or someone's going to manufacture a reason to demonize something that is either doctrinally or ethically that we think is important. And again, even if people don't understand it and years gone by, it was okay, Christians are kind of nutty, but hey, you do good things and we'll leave you alone and we're glad you're here. You know, there's a shift going on there. If you doubt this, I would suggest you read a small book. The author's name escapes me, but I read it a few months ago. It's called Dangerous to Believe. And what's really alarming in the book is part of the book goes through how one of the major cultural forces for good, i.e. Catholic social services, has been directly attacked on a number of fronts and in a number of ways. When you start thinking about the reach of Catholic social services and the amount of good things that an agency like that does, to have people say, I want it to die and I want it to suffer and go away, I don't care how much suffering it relieves, that's, you're in a bad place. Okay, if you're doing stuff like that, so the author of the book goes through some legal cases where they've been targeted and whatnot and they're not the only example. The book is just filled with examples of this. So I see a cultural shift coming and so when I think of that, I do believe that we're going to have to, and I wish we would start now, we're gonna have to reimagine how we do what we're supposed to do in terms of the Great Commission, without things like buildings, without tax exemption, without the freedom to post what we think on the internet or to use the internet for evangelism. How do we do what we're supposed to do if that goes away or it comes at the cost of monitoring and tweaking? Okay, I mean, we're gonna have these decisions to make. We're gonna have people in our congregations that train for years and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to become doctors and nurses and PAs and we're gonna wind up in a cultural situation where you must perform an abortion to have a job. Well, then what? You know, I mean, how does that person get out of debt? You're gonna have people lose their jobs. I mean, right now we talk about the baker and all that stuff and baking the cake for a homosexual couple, should she send some cares or not? Again, that's one example that people can disagree about, but they're gonna be added examples. They're gonna be other things that go in that bucket, okay, where people are going to lose their livelihoods. And the church as a community ought to be the place that pays that person's rent, gets, finds that person a job. I mean, this is what community does, or at least it's supposed to do, but there are a number of obstacles to that. You know, there's so many rabbit trails I could go down on this because again, I just think that we are going to have to, the church ultimately is gonna have to get out of the real estate business. The church is gonna have to start reimagining what community is. It's gonna have to start being creative. One thing we could really do is, let's encourage people in our congregations to make money, to be entrepreneurs, because you know what entrepreneurs do? They give people jobs. They hire people. So somebody in your congregation loses a job because of some point of their Christianity. Okay, now you can hire, you have somebody who can hire them. We look out for each other, but you need people with resources. You need people who know how to manage resources. You know, I gotta have people who can know how to manage people. I mean, you just need multiple skill sets in community that don't think of the community as sort of, well, this is where I apply my skills part-time. It's like a hobbyist. They ought to be thinking, this is where I apply my skills all the time. Okay, it's transformative within a particular community. And this just plays out in all sorts of areas. Now, Greg, I don't know if you wanna get into this. Greg and I have had, let me just tell you how we sort of got linked. I mean, Greg had followed my work sort of at a distance without really identifying yourself for years. And eventually he sort of came out of the woodwork and helped me do some things. And that partnership and that friendship has grown. But we had a conversation one day. He had just read my second novel. And in the novel, there are a group of believers who are sort of, they're in this situation before it becomes kind of a global crisis, but they're forward-thinking. And they have resources and they're using them very strategically too. To do things that need to be done that are really hard or that churches typically don't wanna touch with a 10-foot pole. Okay, so they're driven to do this. So he had just read this and we're talking about this. And I said, hey, have you ever wondered, how would we do ministry if Christians aren't allowed to have domain names and we can't use the internet or we're censored or we're blocked or I gave him a couple scenarios. And I'm the technological primitive here. This is his world. What he does for fun is read Google's patents. I mean, literally, that's what he does. And I'll never forget your answer. He goes, oh yeah, we've thought about it. He goes, I have a 130-page document on exactly what we would do the day that happens. And this is the phrase you said, when that happens, we're gonna throw a switch and we will infect the web. And I said, that's all I had to hear. I'm in, okay, I'm just in. So I don't know if you wanna elaborate on any of that. Thanks, Mike. So yeah, some of us do have a calling to think about those things long-term and what it will look like. And so we sat down and we started praying and then we started writing and figuring out what Google is doing, what Facebook is doing. It's not really so much about what the government's doing, at least here yet. It's really the businesses. It's the corporatocracy that are doing these things. So we've thought about what happens when it becomes illegal because we are haters to own hosting. So you don't have the ability to host a website online. What happens when it becomes illegal for you to own a domain name? How do you handle that? And so, or DNS server, which is a little more technical, but it's when you type in something like allaboutgod.com or mclott.org, it's what actually reconciles that entry to the actual IP address and sends it to the right website. So what happens when those things happens? We've thought about all of those things, we've planned it, and we even thought about it from the worst case scenario, which is actually, the best case scenario is there's a pre-trip rapture and we're not here, right? That's the best case scenario. But from our perspective, looking at worst case, yes, worst case scenario is what I think about and I think the worst case is a pre-trip rapture because I want the people that are saved during the tribulation to be able to infect the web. And so part of infecting the web is actually all of these databases of websites, so people use WordPress and CMSs and everything else, we're providing them free SEO, free hosting, free domain names, all of these things for free in exchange that they would put the gospel on their website, whether it's a Christian business, a Christian ministry or anything else. And then if something were to happen and either the organization that is providing this, and it's not just one, it's several, that are providing this, we're taken out in some way or put in jail or executed or raptured, whatever the case is, and I don't know, how would we handle that? So you need an unmanaged solution that is capable of running at least seven years, if it's a seven-year tribulation, some people say it's a three and a half, right? You also need money that funds this. Doug and David. We thought about how do you create a trust, a financial trust to fund this? How do you use the latest blockchain technology or technology similar to that to decentralize these things? How do you actually take these things and plant them in a place where the antichrist does not have power? So like it talks about in a Daniel, in Daniel 1141, it's talking about him and he says he doesn't have power over Edom, Amon or the people of Moab. That's not interesting to me. I know. Right, so whatever the case is, all of these things, we don't know. I subscribe to the thing, I have no idea what's gonna happen in eschatology. I don't know. So all I can do is I can pray for the best and I can plan for the worst and we are planning for the worst and we are intentional about it and we have been since 2006 with this document. So we are executing on it. So you would say though, just so that everybody understands, based on discussions we've had in the past, the eschatological element you're using as an illustration. What he's proposing and what they are noodling, can I use the word noodle? Was that a Pennsylvania Dutch thing? Isn't tied to any eschatology. This is something that could, if something happens tomorrow or 10 years from now, where it creates these problems, you have to have some mechanism again to provide some sort of solution. It's just one of these things where you try to imagine again, whether you link the imagination with some sort of eschatological system or not is incidental and ultimately unimportant because we could wake up a year from now and the eschatological stuff that maybe is expected by a lot of popular Christianity or different perspectives of it, either turns out to be a myth and a fairy tale or it has no relationship to it at all but you're still in that situation. You're still in that situation. So the technological end is just one example of this because we are becoming so technologically dependent. It would honestly freak people out if they were cut off from some of these things. What would you do if your phone didn't work? And you couldn't do this and you couldn't use that. Again, you're gonna survive but the question is, the more we get hooked into this, this kind of stuff in our personal lives and the more we have our churches hooked into it, it's gonna really freak people out but the problem is bigger than that. It's not just technology. It's freedom of expression. It's again, being the target of tribalistic tendencies. So, regardless of what area it manifests in your mind, when I think about what the future of the church is, I think we're really headed for some serious problems. They may be again, widespread targeting of what Greg thinks about with the technological stuff. It might just be a financial hit like removing tax exemption. They're just gonna be things that happen to the church that are gonna force us to do what we do in entirely different ways. Now, there's a flip side to this coin. Again, I don't wanna sign up for hardship for the church but I actually think it would have a positive effect. The church has historically been no stranger to persecution. Who are we? I know. Who are we that we think, we have these thoughts in the West like we're, because we're comfortable. I've said on a number of interviews, a number of shows that I basically think that the church that's persecuted now and the church in the third world is at some point gonna save our butts. Okay, because they have been there and done that. They know exactly how to function and not only how to survive, they know how to flourish. God blesses them in persecution. I mean, we think the church is dying because we're thinking about the West. You know, the church is over in the UK, they're just museums now or whatever and that's not true. You know, in those churches, there's a remnant. There's a remnant in all of these places. In the third world, even though you can't see it because nobody holds a microphone or puts a video camera in front of it, the church is growing by leaps and bounds. It's flourishing, it's a powerful force. So we have this very insular look and it creates these insecurities and the conspiratorial thinking and all this kind of stuff. You know, there are some serious things that could happen but it's not the end of the church. It's never been the end of the church. You know, God is gonna find a way and it's gonna be through individual Christians. I personally think it's a good thing. The state is not gonna save us. Okay, that is the kingdom of the world. The state is not the solution. I'm also willing to say that institutional Christianity is not the solution. I think it's been thoroughly compromised and permeated by all sorts of garbage. In every denomination, whether you're a Protestant, Catholic, you know, whatever, it's all got problems. You know what the solution is? The solution is individual Christians and the formation of Christian communities that are actually doing their job. I mean, that's the solution. Now, that can bubble up, you know, within existing structures, you know, within existing communities, within existing denominations. It's just gonna take a new round of, okay, we really need to be serious. We need to be Christians in the context that whatever is persecution or not, we have these wonderful examples historically. We have wonderful contemporary examples of church under persecution. They can, they have done the job and we're gonna have to rethink who we are. You know, just all sorts of battles they're gonna have to take place. It's just gonna be rough. Okay, with all due respect, this is in my Kaiser event, but I am gonna push back a little bit. Go ahead. Yeah, I love you. He's the optimist and I'm the pessimist. No, that's not it at all, actually. Go ahead. He's downing tradition all the time, so I'm gonna come back and throw it in his face a little bit. It's not a bad thing. So, I think the answer isn't the Christianity needs to figure out a way, a different way to like operate with, no, I don't agree with any of that. I think Christianity needs to remember what it is. Yeah, we really need to remember who we are. And that means everything, this is the basis of the radical orthodoxy movement, by the way, is that everything that we need to challenge every structure in the world to represent the crucified Christ in the present evil age is already in the orthodox Christian face. Every tool we need, we just have to use it and know it and understand it. And two things I would say- And be willing to suffer. And be willing to suffer. I'm going, I'm getting there. Two things we need to remember to start with, the Apostles Creed and your baptism. And I say this for a reason. Apostles Creed, if you don't say it in your church, start doing it. This is what every Christian believed for all time. Start saying it. If you don't know what it is, go online. Google, you have it on your phone. Look it up. And it's, we believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic church. That doesn't mean Roman Catholic, my Roman Catholic buddies would argue with me over this, but Catholic just means universal. We believe in one universal apostolic church by the apostles and it's universal. It is not American. It is not white. It isn't black. It isn't anything other than the universal church. I love this because I see kingdom obsessed over here. Love that. And I love that there's all these nations represented here. I want to see every nation represented here. Like the idea is that we have to remember that. So when we think about, oh, what's going to happen with the church? Normally as Americans, when we ask that question, we think some of our freedoms are going to be taken away. Oh no. And people freak out while people a few hundred miles away are getting killed. What about Libyan Christians? What about Christians who've been Christians hundreds of years longer than America has existed? Saying liturgies and wearing things that most American Protestants would think they're Muslim. But they're singing, they're singing liturgies that are hundreds of years old. They gave us Christianity, not the other way around. When we ask questions about what are we going to do? Normally that's an American centric question in this country and it's jacked up because it forgets the rest of the world church and how the world church is suffering elsewhere. And oh no, they're going to take another freedom away. Cry me a river. I'll send you a box of Kleenex, okay? Like, people are dying. Do we actually believe in one universal church or not? Do you remember your baptism? That's the second part. Do you remember your baptism? Remember your baptism, the apostles say. Remember your baptism. Why do they keep saying that? Because what did baptism symbolize? Not symbolize is the reality. They baptize unto death and raise to walk a newness of life. To live is Christ and to die is gain. My preacher side is coming out. But this is important. This is important to remember your baptism. What did you sign up for? You did not sign up for the government to mollycoddle you. You signed up for crucifixion. If you don't like that, there's the door. That's what Christians have to say. Look, it's gonna take people off. It's gonna make people unhappy. But we don't know who the Christians are. So this is, I struggle with my faith all the time. I'm putting my cards on the table all the time. Every day I struggle. Sometimes I wake up like, is there even a God? Like, but we need to, because we need to have something discernably Christian. And what I think the Catholic tradition does, what Orthodox tradition does, the Episcopal tradition does, the high churches do, is they preserve those creeds, they preserve those liturgies from ancient times and so that we remember them. So they're not the enemy, okay? If they proclaim Jesus is the Lord of the world, they are not your enemy. You are fighting the wrong people. If you attract bombing Catholics, you are the problem. Okay, we have a much, much bigger fish to fry, okay? Much bigger fish to fry. So that's my little pro Catholic, pro Orthodox soapbox there. Hi, thanks for having me. My name is Ivory and my initial question was going to involve some of the things you said in your book and I'm new to your unseen realm. So I've been just listening to it for the past couple of months and I was going to ask about the demons, the offspring of the angels and the women. And it's my understanding that you're saying that the Bible says they are human. They are human, yet I guess my basic question is do they or have they had, because the Israelites were told to kill them all. So is there evidence that they had the opportunity to accept Christ in their depravity? I mean, you had women and children and all of those and I didn't see, I haven't gotten far enough to know whether or not that occurred for them as well because they seem to be, as you said, bastards. They're not from heaven originally and they're not really basically from earth. So basic question. Yeah, before you answer that, I was thinking about this earlier for you too, because it's related to this, to have a point of clarification for people because you were talking about demons earlier and I think it gets confusing because we use the same word for two totally different types of entities. And you're talking about one type of entity and you were talking about a completely different type and I think that that gets lost in people. So if you could, in your answer, help to clarify that to that, I think that would be helpful. I know what you mean by accepting Christ, even though that's anachronistic. Do they have an opportunity to become believers? Well, I think if we take the Rahab incident where she says that, hey, we've all, the people of not just her town, but all of this, okay, we have heard about what your God has done, you need to do the Egyptians and all that stuff. I would have to say, yeah, they could have decided that the God of Israel was the God of gods and made a decision to switch their loyalties. And we know there are other instances where Gentiles do this. I mean, my mind always goes to Naaman. It's a curiosity to me that when Jesus pulls two examples of faith out of his hat as it were, it's Naaman and the widow of Zarephath. Like what's that? But if you actually go, I mean, they're both pagans, but they respond correctly to the little bit of revelation that they have come across that has been given to them providentially. And that's what God wants. He wants loyalty. He wants believing loyalty. Naaman's never gonna read Torah. He's never gonna do a Jewish festival. He's never gonna be part of the calendar. He's never gonna observe the same. He don't know about any of this stuff. He's gonna go back to Syria, but he knows the one essential thing. I know now that Yahweh is the God of all gods and I will not sacrifice to any other God. He has made his decision. So, if it's true, if we can take the Conquest narrative, the element that, hey, we've all around here, the whole area has heard about what happened at Egypt and people coming out of Egypt and what happened at the Red Sea. They had a chance to make a decision as to which God to follow. The Nephilim stuff, I'm gonna answer that the way I actually got this question in a conversation earlier today. And there it was a conversation about that was sort of laced with like science-y talk, you know, species and all this sort of stuff. I don't believe, and I've said this many times in the podcast, I don't believe that the Bible, the early chapters of Genesis or really any part of the Bible was given to provide us with scientific knowledge. If God intended, when he tapped somebody living in the second millennium BC and prompted them to write something in a book that would become part of the Bible, if God intended that this material, the product of the person that he chose, was to satisfy 21st century medical scientific knowledge, then God made a really bad choice because that guy doesn't know anything. By definition, I don't think, you know, scripture, I don't even think it asks these questions. And so for us to try to answer these questions, automatically by default puts us in the area of speculation. You know, I don't know if, and again, like in Unseen Realm, I say there's essentially two ways to take the Genesis 6 thing and still honor the sort of the supernatural flavor of it rather than just denying, you know, the supernatural intent of what's being described there. And one of those is again, this literal cohabitation. So let's, for the sake of the discussion, let's just go with that. I don't know how that worked. I'm not a deity. I'm not an Elohim. So I don't really feel like I have the authority to talk about what a deity can and cannot do. I have no idea. And frankly, neither does anybody else. I mean, if you really believe in the intelligent, that the spiritual world has intelligent beings, they have personality, they have abilities, they have capabilities or whatever, and they intersect with our, in other words, the biblical worldview. The Bible doesn't give you the necessary information to know how things happen. You might as well ask, well, how'd the virgin birth work? Like, can I have a scientific explanation? I know there are people who like to try this, but that just isn't the point. I don't know how it worked. I don't know how God becomes a man. I don't know how miracles are done. I don't know how the virgin birth, I don't know how any of this works because I'm not a God, okay? I'm not a deity, I'm not an Elohim. I have no idea. What I do know is that at the very least, what this material is trying to communicate is supernatural rebellion and conflict that involves the lives of the people on earth, the destruction of the people of God, an impediment to God getting what he wants, and that is a people in a land, and to bring back the nations, and all the stuff we read about later on. This is an obstacle. There's conflict, there's rebellion, both in the spiritual world and the human world. And I can't parse how that works. Now it's true that like Arba, one of the Anakim is called an Adam, a word for a man. You have at least one of the groups called Am people, a people group. That actually doesn't help much because the two angels at Sodom and Gomorrah are also called Adam, but they're angels. Again, well, there's still a man, it's human vocabulary, and people have tried to distinguish these terms, and good luck with that. I'm doing it, baby. I know you're doing it. You know, it's just that you, these, at the very least, these aren't, these aren't terms that map over to discussions about genetics and species, you know, and all this sort of stuff. In other words, to sort of be able to explain satisfactorily what's going on so that a modern scientific mind is satisfied. Again, that's my take on it. I just don't think that scripture was intended to provide that kind of information, that kind of precision. So the ultimate answer is, I don't know. I don't know what's going on here. I'm content, you know, if what's being described, like I said in Unseen Realm, the alternative is the mythic view, and that is that the language of sexual cohabitation and genealogy and lineage is used specifically to communicate the idea that there are supernatural forces raising up and using human population groups to destroy the people of God. If I get to heaven and I find out that that's what, what really the language meant, I'm okay with that. I just don't know. I have no idea. Besides the ontological point, and what I mean by ontological is like, how we understand those beings in reality or what is their reality, you know, outside of the ancient description and what we do get is the unique theology in the Hebrew telling of this story. And that's what we need to zoom in really carefully on. Because if these myths exist outside the Bible, which they do, hundreds of years before the Hebrews got them, and after, Greeks have very similar, because if you've listened to Mike, I'm sure you know. I mean, these sort of mythical archetypes are across the Mediterranean. And so you could say, you know, the angels that sinned are down in Tartarus, right? In Second Peter and Jude, this does this. And that's where the Titans are in Greek mythology. Because it maps well onto that myth, right? But the point was, what happened in Genesis? Well, the earth was filled with wickedness and violence. That's not the cause of the flood in those other stories. In those other stories, that's not the cause. And you get in Enoch, what Mike has expanded on multiple times, there's a very important thing, all this like secret heavenly wisdom they teach them. You know what one of the things that angels taught them according to the Enochic tradition? How to make swords and spears and weapons and armor to fight and kill each other. That was one of the things the fallen ones taught the human beings. And so these are etiologies. These are origin stories for what you see in Genesis 6. It's like right after this cohabitation happens, the earth is filled with wickedness and violence. So this is Enoch's way of explaining that. And that is the dominant reading in New Testament sort of Jewish culture. That's the dominant interpretation of that text. And even from like, Urbain sophisticated Jews in Alexandria to like apocalyptically minded Palestinians under the Roman Empire, you know? So it's a pretty, it's a very common view, but that those particular sort of ethical instances and theological differences we have to pay attention to. Because it gives us sort of the early Christian view of how did they see violence? You know, what were their views on violence? Why is Jesus never fighting back? Why is Paul saying things like, never seek to avenge yourself? Never. And he uses the same term that he's gonna use in Romans 12 for the government in Romans 13, saying brothers, Christians, never seek to avenge yourselves. He says, oh, those government, they're the avenger. So those ethics are rooted in these stories. So we have to be careful not to, again, I think this is same as that level of heaven question because we can get so caught up in, yes, but where are the demons like this? You know, and forget like what happened in the story. Right? That's my little caveat. And you know, the whole, the chaos element is a big deal. Again, what a Babylonian would think, oh, this is wonderful, it brought civilization in order and we're magnificent, aren't we? Again, you know, the Judeo-Christian version of that is no, not so much. This was a disaster. And so, yeah, I agree, you know, if you start sort of looking at the trees and you sort of forget the forest, you know, it can be a little bit distracting, but, yeah. Hi. Hello. I told you to go, I was going to ask you something. Oh, do I need both? I want to thank you, Mike, I've had the opportunity to just become acquainted with your work in the last couple of weeks. Just in a nutshell here, my dad passed away three years ago and both my mom and my dad both survived World War II. My mom was in concentration camp for four years. She dug a hole that allowed her and 21 other people to escape. 11 of those were caught, 10 of those were not caught, of those 10, four were my family. It's just in the last three years since my dad passed that I have found myself wanting more out of my Christian faith and that set me on this really strange Hebraic roots type movement journey. So my question is really, I wanted to preface that by just introducing myself a little bit to you, but my question is pretty more of a personal note. A, have you guys ever been invited to a Messianic Jewish congregation or experienced that? And with regards to the divine appointments that I read about in the Old Testament, why wouldn't modern day believers want to be put onto or accept the idea of being put on a Hebrew calendar? Because as we all know, Jesus was not born December the 25th, but Jesus being a Jew, Yeshua being a Jew also followed and celebrated and acknowledged all of the festivals. So I don't know really how to formulate my question other than to say why wouldn't we want to consider exploring that? Yeah, I've been in a Messianic Jewish congregation four times. I have a friend in Tacoma who is, yeah. No, no, it's not that Mark Biltz's congregation. It's much smaller than that. I also have friends who are Messianic congregation, pastors, ministers and whatnot. I haven't been to their particular ones, but I've been in this other one four times. So yeah, I don't feel uncomfortable in that at all. I think I actually kind of wish that our church would follow the Jewish calendar. I just think it's kind of neat. I don't have anything against the liturgical calendar of Christian traditions. I know there are historical reasons where the two of those have been in good relationship and not so good relationship. I think maybe if you see resistance now, it may just be sort of fear of the unfamiliar. I mean, you might find somebody, I don't know if you had this experience, Dave, where you might find somebody who just doesn't want to do that for some less than noble religious, but I haven't really run into that. But to me, I don't think it's something that we have to deny this one tradition over here in this one calendar in order to do this one over here. Yeah, I mean, because look at your churches in the New Testament, they're mixed congregations. Granted, we don't have a lot of the traditions then that we do now. We don't have a lot of the calendar issues. Those things came about trying to calculate the time of Easter and Passover and all that kind of stuff. And then doing the retro version to get the birth of Jesus. I mean, they're historical reasons for all of this. To me, all of these things are good because they jar our memories to think about important things. They bend our minds toward things that we need to meditate upon. They sort of jolt us out of the everyday world and remind us of cycles of time and who's in control of history and human destiny and all this sort of thing. And so I think the surgical Christian calendar certainly do that. I think the Israelite calendar, again, helps us to think about the roots of what we're doing here. As New Testament Christians, this is our heritage. So I don't really view any of it negatively, but I know people take sides on it. That's what I would say to that anyway. First of all, thank you to all of you. This has been so enlightening. My question, I'm Sheila. How did this level of understanding of angels that you do so well in the unseen realm and angels? How did that escape so many Christians like me? I'm a theologian. I study all the time in the seminary. Never saw it in this light. And for a new Christian or an old Christian, like myself, experienced been in the church for so many years, when you quote scripture from the Old Testament through the prophets, there's a lot of metaphor and, of course, a lot of prophecy. And so as a new believer, that can be real confusing. Like, are we speaking of metaphor right now? Are we talking about prophecy? No, that's a load of questions. You don't go real deep in there. But if I were a new brand of Christian and I didn't read your books, wasn't exposed to it, how do we as leaders in the church and as just lay people, get this out? I think we need to realize ourselves and then help the people in church under our care understand that the biblical writers are communicating it in all the ways that we communicate. When we speak to another person, there's no assumption between the two people engaged in the conversation that every word that comes out of each other's mouth should be interpreted as the immediate, most literal kind of meaning that that should be attached to each word. We just don't think that way. We use expressions, we use metaphor, we use colorful language, we use just any number of figures of speech. We can pick up on that because we share the same cultural context and the same language context. But the important point is that people, I always think of Dax, the destroyer, if you've seen Guardians of the Galaxy, the guy who can't understand metaphor, okay? That's how we teach people to read the Bible. Do Bible study like Dax, the destroyer, where everything is the most literal thing you can think of and conceive of and that's what's meant by that. Again, the absurdity of it is well illustrated in the movie and of course if you read the comics or whatever. We just don't communicate that way. So why would we teach people to not think about what they're reading in the Bible the same way that we communicate? When all of these things are on the table, all of these possibilities are on the table. It's not just this literal one-to-one correspond at the most literal thing. Well, that must, I mean, I know there are reasons why for generations Christians have been taught to do that. It's an overreaction to critical methodology and critical study of the Bible, right? Because we think by training people to think in the most literalistic way that that is the antidote to some of the problems on this side, but that's not the case. What we've actually taught people to do is make the Bible sort of an unreadable thing. So I would say that's a really important step. It's actually a really simple one that just assume the writers of scripture could be using any kind of mode of communication that we normally do in our everyday language or everyday communication with people. Now, to pick up what a biblical writer is sort of laying down, what we don't have is we don't have the shared context. We don't have the shared cultural context. There are some language issues here. If we can only read the English Bible, we're gonna miss some things and our English translations are good. Basically, every committee translation that you can name or use is, they did a good job. No translation is perfect. They're all gonna have strengths and weaknesses, but they're all gonna miss things that if you had a little bit of ability to drill down beneath English, you'd pick up a few more breadcrumbs. So getting some ability to do that would help. I often tell people, look, we would be better off if we read the Bible like it was fiction. And again, what I mean by that is when you read a novel, when you read a novel, your brain just sort of clicks into place. Something goes off in your head that you know what you're reading is intentional. The writer is trying to do something to you. He's trying to make you think a thought for his own purposes, okay? That piece of dialogue, that phrase or that word, I bet I will see that again. The place where something happens, I bet I'll see that again. I bet that meant something. The way a person was dressed, that's gonna come up later on and it's gonna take me from this thought to this thought to this thought. We're aware that we could be being misdirected because it's a novel, it's fiction. That's what novels do. And we're just tuned to read a novel quite differently than we would read a textbook or the tax form, okay? Or some other kind of literature that isn't a novel. The problem is, is we read the Bible like it's a textbook. We don't read the Bible with an expectation that the writer is actually intelligently doing something to us. They're dropping things that we're supposed to notice and we're supposed to see this and the writer wants our mind to see this and think about this thing over here. And once we do that, he wants us to connect these two things to this thing over here, okay? If we did that, if we could again, just train ourselves to read closely and sort of click our brains into fiction mode, we would sort of be more accepting or maybe it would be more intuitive to realize that the biblical writers are actually really intelligent. They have agendas, they have purposes. Agenda's not a bad word. They have something they want you to think they are guiding you, they are steering you, they are directing you. And when you get tuned into that, it becomes important to notice, well, how does the New Testament writer, what does he do with that Old Testament verse? In the Old Testament writers repurpose other Old Testament books, things that using cross-references, looking for what scholars call intertextuality. We live in a day where we have tools like software. I work for a software company, I don't get a percentage here, but we have tools that can actually ferret that kind of thing out, that can show you, you go back to David's thing on 1 Corinthians 15, the clustering of vocabulary. The assumption that goes back to this creation thing, oh, it actually goes back over here, but he notices this because again, he's used to thinking, asking interpretive questions like, I wonder not only where that vocabulary shows up elsewhere like in the Septuagint, but I wonder if there's like four or five words that kind of go together, they cluster together somewhere else, because when you find stuff like that, that tells you the writer wanted you to notice that because the writer assumes that you have an intimate knowledge of this other stuff over here. So all of these things, I think help us, help sensitize us to thinking, kind of being in the mode of the writer, trying to be and trying to recapture the cultural context of the writer, the worldview context of the writer, the literary context of the writer. What I'm getting at is we need to think like the people who actually wrote this stuff and the people who are actually receiving this stuff originally. Again, I want the Israelite living in your head. I want the first century Jew living in your head. And these are simple things. They're not necessarily difficult. They really aren't difficult. It's just you have to sort of do it repetitively. So it just becomes kind of a pattern with you. It becomes a reflex on how you approach scripture. I had to learn that. I often say I became a Christian when I was 17 and I knew I had heard of Adam and Eve. I had heard of Noah and I had heard of Jesus. I was tapped at that moment. So I'm like the cumulative result of like five minutes a day. I mean, when you go to grad school, just ask Dave, it takes a whole lot more than five minutes a day because then you're crushed with material. But the reality is what's important is cumulative effect. You don't learn anything in five minutes or a day. Anything that really matters, any skill, it's incremental and it's cumulative. So you get in the habit of doing these sorts of things, becoming this kind of reader. And it really goes a long way. It really does. And then you start bringing tools in to help you even go further. Do you wanna add anything to that, anybody? I'll kind of address your question from pastoral point of view because I've been teaching this stuff in our church for eight or nine years. And so this is kind of just a practical thought. Don't begin teaching it by saying, hey, Zeus is real..(audience laughs loudly and laughs loudly and laughs loudly Find places where people already believe the worldview because they do. So an example, I was teaching the Giants to a Sunday school group. And one of the guys was, he was just not having a good time with this. And he was getting angry inside about it. Like there's a moral reaction to it, which I find really interesting. And at some point, I finally just looked at him and said, I said, man, don't you believe in Goliath? And for whatever reason, he had never thought about that. He was like, yeah, well, yeah, sure, I believe in Goliath. Well, that's all I'm talking about. It's just that there's a lot more of them than him. Or take the idea of using the language of an angel. So, Subtuant will sometimes translate the word Elohim, God, into angel, sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes. And the point is, as a teaching method, say, look, you already believe in angels, right? And almost every Christian believes in an angel. So you can use that as a door to say it's translating this word here. Now let's look at how this word is actually used in other places. And you can use that as a way to help people. But just, so it's being sensitive to where people are at. Given the Deuteronomy 32, verse 8 worldview, that God apportioned nations according to the number of the sons of God. Number one, can that number of nations be quantified in that passage or within the context of scriptures? So as to say, how many nations there were, therefore, how many sons of God were given rule over those nations. And then secondly, assuming that that exists to this current time, that those nations are still under the rule and reign of those territorial spirits or sons of God. By what means primarily, are they exercising control over those nations? I'll take the 70 question first. 70 is the number of the nations because in the Maseridic text, traditional Hebrew text of Genesis 10, which everybody agrees is the, it needs to be paired with the Babel event, okay? In Genesis 11, of course Deuteronomy 32 is referring back to what happens in Genesis 11. So if you take the traditional Hebrew text and you just list it out, it's 70. If you use the Septuagint, you'll actually get 72 because some of them are cut in half. That's the backdrop, by the way, of why in the Gospels when Jesus sends out disciples, he sends out 70 and some translations will have 72. It's a textual issue. Either number points back to the same passage. Genesis 10, the table of nations. So that you'll see a variance like in study Bibles. So you get the number of the nations, let's just go with 70 for the sake of the question. It's an assumption that the number of the sons of God are also 70 because of the language of Deuteronomy 32.8, even though it doesn't actually state that. And it's also an assumption made on the basis of sons of God talk parallels like in Ugaritic and Canaanite literature where the numbers put at 70. We don't actually have a biblical verse that says 70 sons of God were put over the nations. It's just that that's just doing the math based upon the number of nations, right? And the Targums do it too. So that's kind of all the data that we have as far as the number. Now, the way I would address the other part of your question is I am a believer. I mean, I'm not a numerologist or anything like that, but biblical numbers are significant and they have symbolic value. They're not just to be overly literalized or only literalized. The number 40 is one of these that just occurs all the time. Things happen in 40s, multiples of seven, 70, 49. They hold you belief, you know, all that stuff. So I look at the number 70 and because it corresponds to the nations in Genesis 10, which would have been the known nations, the nations known to the biblical writer. I think that the numbering there really signifies exhaustive totality. In other words, those are the nations that that was the world as far as the biblical writer knew. And I think that's important because how does that map over to the world that God knows? I mean, the theological messaging is that if you're not Israel in the Old Testament context, if Yahweh is not your God and somebody else's, every nation that isn't Israel is by definition under dominion or subject to another power. And it doesn't matter if it's Australia or New Zealand or whatever nations that the biblical writer didn't know about. The other way to approach that is what about the Great Commission? Go you there and all the earth. Well, it's very obvious because the gospel applies in other passages, not only to the world, but to the cosmos, that the real target of the Great Commission, the real target of atonement, the real target of the redemptive plan of God is exhaustive totality. And so we don't have any reason to suspect or think that just because we only have these nations listed in Genesis 10, that the theology there doesn't apply both in terms of evil and in terms of redemption to every nation that we know about today. And because it extends even beyond that in the language of atonement in the New Testament. So again, that's the way I parse the whole numbering issue. The Great Commission is comprehensive. I think the messaging of the Deuteronomy 32 worldview is comprehensive in that if Yahweh is not your God, then somebody else is. And this is Yahweh's land. It's linked to the land. And when we get the gospel extending out to everywhere and even to the cosmos, the whole idea is that everything that is not loyal and brought into relationship with Yahweh, an obedient loving relationship, a saving relationship, all of the nations, that's what needs to happen. That's what God would ultimately desire. Redemption is for everyone in every place. So I don't think the numbering impedes or prohibits our sense of totality when it comes to evil and good, following this and redemption. So I don't know what their power and stuff like that looks like, but I do believe this. I do believe that there is something that stops their power, at least in terms of individuals. And that's the gospel. And I think about something like Revelation 20 and the binding of Satan. So a lot of people think that this is like some kind of an absolute binding. He can't do anything at all. He's in the pit of hell for a thousand years and then he's let out. That's not what the text says. It actually says that he's not allowed to deceive the nations any longer. And how does that happen? How does somebody get out of deception? They get out of deception because the gospel comes and the person is released and set free by faith in Christ. And I think that when that happens, you end up seeing this kind of, it has an effect in the culture. It's not for the culture. It's not like a salvation of a nation. It's salvation of people, but the redeemed people go into that world and have an impact on other people. And so the converse is when the gospel is not being preached, then the darkness encroaches again. And I think that that's what we're seeing in our day. I mean, my opinion is that the darkness that we're seeing in the West is the direct result of the churches refusing to preach the gospel. Good evening and thank you all for being here again. My name is Phillip and I just have one quick question. Here in the West, we've been raised that our Bible is the Bible and we only go to that for directions. It's been set up here, mentioned in the Apocrypha, as well as a book of Enoch, Jubilees, and there's a few other additional writings. What are your thoughts on us as we gain this new knowledge, touching into those other writings? Yeah, for the biblical writers, they wouldn't have been new. My answer to this is actually pretty quick. We ought to read the books that biblical writers read because if we do that, we will be more adept at understanding when they drop a few breadcrumbs from them, when they utilize them to make an argument or make some point, it just makes us more intelligent readers of scripture. So I mean, I've realized people talk about Enoch as it should have been the Bible to me the question doesn't even matter. I don't think it's canonical. I don't really, if I get to heaven and God says, wow, you missed Enoch, it should have been Enoch. I don't really care because I'm gonna read it anyway because I know that the biblical writers read it and they use it, they repurpose it. It helps them formulate some point that's in what they're writing. It helps them express and articulate some argument or polemic or whatever it is. It just helps them express something clearly that their audience is gonna immediately kind of know what they're doing with that. So the more I know of that, the more familiar I am with that material, I'll just become a better reader of the Bible. We wanna thank Pastor Andrews and the Colorado Community Church again for hosting us. We wanna thank everybody else for coming. Thank y'all. Thank y'all. We wanna thank y'all. We also wanna thank our special guests, Doug, David, and Greg. And I wanna thank everybody else 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.ermsh.com.