 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit 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 214, our 26th question and answer episode on the layman, Tray Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser. Hey Mike, how you doing this week? Pretty good. I'm not hectic, but you know, that's better than being bored, I guess. I hear you. And also, if you're listening to this listeners, we are actually currently in Israel right now. Mike, this is week one of Israel. I can hardly wait, I know Shalom, I can hardly wait for, oh yeah, you know. Are you prepared? Have you got all your notes, bullet points? No. I finally got, I got back from the April travel and now I have a few days to scramble. So you know, it is what it is, but I'm sure it'll be fun and you know, hopefully not overbearingly hot and safe, of course, but I told my mom, you know, my mom's like, oh, you know, you don't go over there, you know, look, it's just this horrible this and that. And I said, look, I'm going to be with two FBI agents and Tray's like the size of a defensive line. It should be okay. Yeah. You know, well, hopefully we're having a good time there when we get back, we'll let everyone know how it went and what you said and give a report. So we look for that. Absolutely. We'll give the update. Yep. That'll happen in the probably three more episodes from now. So what we're going to do is over the course of the next three weeks, we're going to have three Q&A episodes to cover our trip while we're gone. So be expecting three Q&A episodes coming your way, Mike. And here's Q&A number 26. So I'm ready with questions if you are. Sure. All right. Our first one's from Ghostman and he wants to know what is the meaning of Ecclesiastes 321? Yeah. And for those of you who don't have your Bible memorized completely, Ecclesiastes 321 in ESV says, who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth? Question mark. Again, this rhetorical question. You know, I think in a nutshell, the point of the verse is that human beings are mortal just like the beasts, okay? If you go back, you know, to verses 19 and 20, you know, there's a couple of preceding verses you read. You know, something of the effect that all of them, both human and animal, all have the same breath, everything is meaningless, you know, says the writer, Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, the preacher, all go to the same place. In other words, they all go to the grave, everything dies, all come from dust and to dust all return. And then we get this statement, well, you know, who knows if whether the spirit of man goes upward or the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth. So the real question here is the author is wondering if people, if any people wind up being taken out of the grave, you know, out of Sheol, because everything goes there. Everything dies, which is pretty self-evident. And this verse is part of the whole discussion in the Old Testament about Sheol because, you know, everybody dies and everything dies. So on my website, you know, years and years ago, boy, it's, I don't know, five, six, seven years ago, whenever it was, I went through a series on Sheol and the human dead versus the nonhuman, you know, spirits, you know, that are in, you know, Sheol and who's in Sheol and all that kind of stuff. And so we, you know, discussed broadly, you know, this whole topic, but this verse in particular is part of that complex of ideas. And you know, what you get as you read through the Old Testament, is you get this notion born of reality that everybody dies. And then there's this sort of question like, well, then what? Because even in Sheol, you have this conscious life going on, you know, people would say, I'm going to go be with my father's. Well, you know, that reflected the idea that you would rejoin, you know, your family members. People were buried. You know, we talked about Old Testament view of the afterlife. And again, I'm one that doesn't think that Israelites thought there was nothing going on or soul sleep or anything like that because they would be, people would be buried with things that they used in life under the assumption, you know, that they would use them in the next life. I mean, Israelites weren't any different than lots of other cultures in this respect. People just anticipated to have some sort of existence. But if you were a Mesopotamian, you would sort of view this existence as kind of cadaverous, you know, nothing really good. If you were an Egyptian, you viewed it a little bit differently depending on which era of Egyptian history and the theology that went with it was in. Sometimes the positive afterlife was just for the pharaoh and whoever he granted it to. But eventually it widens, you know, to more people. And Egyptians were, you know, quite noteworthy for their positive outlook of the afterlife. So, you know, Israel is part of this mix. When it comes to the biblical writers, again, there's, in some passages, there's a question, well, you know, like, we don't really know what's going to go on. And in other passages, it's actually positive that there are Old Testament passages. And again, in that series I did on my website, you could look them up. There are Old Testament passages that have a positive view of the afterlife because it's anticipated, or at least hoped for, that the righteous, you know, those who have a right relationship with Yahweh, the God of Israel, the God of the Bible, would be removed from shield. Yes, everybody goes there, but, you know, the righteous are going to be removed from it. So that the, you know, the writer of Ecclesiastes is sort of in that mix. Ecclesiastes is kind of an unusual book to begin with, because parts of it are really cynical and pessimistic, and other parts of it are optimistic. And so scholars always discuss Ecclesiastes with the question, well, is it a pessimistic book or is it an optimistic book? And it's some of both. And again, this question kind of reflects that. I want to read something from Provan about this particular passage. He wrote a commentary on Ecclesiastes. It's in the NIV application commentary series. So, you know, looking up Provan here, he writes, the one place to which all the living go is shield the world of the dead. For example, Job 30, 23, the place appointed for all the living. In other words, all the living are eventually going to be among the dead, they're going to die. It's translated in the NIV simply as the grave in Ecclesiastes 9 and 10. The Old Testament often speaks of death as if it were a final ending to human existence, a place of separation from God. And he gives a few Psalms here, Psalm 6, 5, 88, 10 through 12. It's a place of separation from God that the righteous as well as the wicked will experience as darkness and chaos and from which they will not return. Again, everybody dies. You're not going to, that there was no sense that when you died, well, maybe you'll be undead at some point. Yeah, that wasn't a question, just like it is for us, you know, on one level anyway. Other texts, however, tell us that the wicked depart to shield Psalm 9, verse 17, Psalm 30, 31, 17, implying that the fate of the righteous is ultimately, if not immediately, different. A point explicit in Psalm 49, 13 through 15, where the righteous are ransomed from shield's power. And he has a cross reference here to Psalm 16, 10 and 11. Job 14, 13 pictures shield as a place in which God might hide Job until his wrath has passed, the passage envisaging a later time when God will remember him and the dead will be roused out of their sleep. That's also Job 14, 12, and also verses 14 through 17, the same chapter. And of course, the famous Job 19, 25 through 26. That's the I know my Redeemer lives passage in passages like Isaiah 26, 19 and Daniel 12, two and three. Moreover, there are clear references to resurrection from the dead. That's the end of Provence quotes. In other words, there are clear references to being removed from shield. The writer of Ecclesiastes here is sort of expressing either a non-committal ignorance or a pessimism. You know, that's reflected by his words. Well, who knows if so on and so forth. Provena elsewhere says, the writer cannot be certain what will happen after death. It is unseen. He rests content with that which in the grace of God, he has come to see. Namely, that death renders pointless during life the quest for gain or advantage over the rest of creation. So it's the end of the second quote there. So Proven is saying, you know, the writer at the very least, he's sort of saying this in the context of the fact that everybody dies and death is ultimately going to sort of be the great leveler. And so why should we waste our lives, you know, after ill gotten gain and taking advantage of other people, so on and so forth? Because he's going to end the book with this is the conclusion of the whole matter, fear God and keep his commandments. But during the course of the Ecclesiastes, you know, he asked questions like this and expresses either pessimism or some sort of cynicism. Now, another way to look at this is or at least, you know, part of the discussion of this kind of statement in Ecclesiastes is the whole issue of progressive revelation. Why would we assume this is important? Because, you know, as people are listening to this, they might be thinking, well, shouldn't the writer of Ecclesiastes know that the righteous go to heaven? And why is it even a question? Well, it's a question because not every biblical writer sort of would have known same time. This is, if you think about it, you know, we're fond as evangelicals of sort of touting the Bible as this book, collection of 66 books were, you know, written over, you know, a couple of millennia and all this kind of stuff. Well, it is, it is all that. But all those people obviously didn't live at the same time. Why would we expect that all biblical writers had the same grasp of some point of theology if they all lived over the course of a couple of millennia? Why would we expect that they all had the same knowledge pool in their heads to draw from? That's an unrealistic and frankly, an unbiblical assumption, but it's a common one, you know, for the average, you know, church person because, well, they're writing show up in the Bible. So they all like believe the same thing, right? Well, you know, maybe when you when you meet, if you could assemble them all in heaven, well, then there'd be agreement. But in real life, in real time, there are doctrines even within the Bible itself that develop, that grow, that get that get accrued to. It's not just one knowledge dump in Genesis one. And then everybody sort of knows the same thing, you know, throughout the course of human history and all that. Again, this question, again, like so many others, sort of dovetails and is influenced by what I have contested on many occasions to be a deeply flawed view of inspiration, the one that one that sort of eliminates the humanity from it. And in this case, there's just no reason to expect biblical writers to have the same grasp of really any given subject at the same time, especially, you know, when they lived in such a broad range, you know, chronologically, revelation, information from God is given over time. It's a self-evident thing, but it's something that, again, evangelicals often don't think about at all. But it's true. Material is added to theological threads. Part of our job as Bible students is to trace the threads. Anyone living after the time of the writer could provide a better answer because they had more revelation. People living further down the road, like let's just say in the New Testament, are going to be able to answer certain questions better than certain people in the Old Testament, just by definition, because revelation is given progressively as just another example, or I guess a related example here. In the Mosaic era, you know, the dead, you see this phrase that dead go to be with their fathers, again, this afterlife notion with loved ones, that's different than the wording here in Ecclesiastes 321 about going up. OK, remember Ecclesiastes 321, you know, who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth. Well, we know that everybody's spirit goes down into shield, but the question is, does the spirit of man go upward? That up language is different than I'm going to die now. I'm going to go be with my fathers. You know, because people were, they had different ways of expressing the notion of an afterlife, but here you have this directional element that sounds to our ear more like heaven. So and I think there is this sort of God attachment to the upward language as opposed to just a general afterlife with loved ones kind of feel that you get in the Torah, for instance. So you have certain ideas that in parts of scripture are going to conform to the upward language, other ideas that are going to conform to the again, you know, positive afterlife expectation, but not necessarily this upward orientation. Fox, in his commentary on Ecclesiastes, Michael Fox was my advisor at Wisconsin. He writes this, he says, the writer is aware of the belief that at death, the soul goes upward to the heavens rather than down to shield. So he's aware of the idea. This idea is not Semitic in origin, but it was found in popular Hellenistic religion, which held that the soul arises to the ether, the heavenly seed of the gods. And I would I would actually quibble with that because of the Psalms language about being with the Lord, you know, having the Lord take you out of shield. Well, if the Lord takes you out of shield, where is he going to take you? He's going to take you to be with him and he's in the heavens and so that would be upward. So I don't think I think Fox is giving it a little bit too quickly to this Hellenistic idea. Now, as the writer of Ecclesiastes portrays things, Fox says, the sage, again, the writer has heard of this notion, but he doesn't know for sure if it is true and he refuses to be comforted by the conjecture. Again, I think it's a bit overstated. Is it is it really a lack of comfort or is he just being sort of cynical or or or his is he just saying, Hey, I don't know. Again, those are those are three related but different things. So I read Fox here because that he's kind of the the broad consensus kind of position on this. But Provan, again, is a little more positive because of the language in the Psalms. And again, it stands to reason if God is going to take you out of Sheol, he's going to take you to be with him. And that is a pre Hellenistic and it is a Semitic idea. So I wanted to throw that into a dress again that the consensus thinking consensus thinking, I would say is not terribly coherent, at least in its consistency. Now, as time goes on, the two ideas of positive afterlife, you know, in some sense, you know, being not being left in Sheol, that idea and then this upward with God kind of orientation. Those two ideas are fused in the Second Temple period in the New Testament and their joining is logical from the Old Testament. Again, what other source of ongoing life would there be but with God? So this is a good case. And I think you have instances like the Doctrine of Satan, you know, a few other things in the angelological and demonological sphere that the Second Temple period literature and the New Testament will say things that they'll essentially take data points from the Old Testament and then connect the dots. But the dots are not connected in the Old Testament, they're connected later. But but the connection points, the data itself, the data that themselves are quite consistent with the Old Testament because the Old Testament is their source and the connections that are made are coherent and logical. It's just that you don't find the connections. You don't find the picture, the mosaic in the Old Testament. You find it later. And I think this is kind of an example of one of those sorts of topics. OK, Mike, this next question and I've been working on my Croatia pronunciation. You need to work a little harder. Yeah, Ante, it's Ante from Croatia. I hope I did that right, sir. So all right, he's got two questions. And his first one is, can you give a few examples where Jesus uses Jewish doctrines developed in Second Temple period that are not explicit in the Old Testament? That's an interesting juxtaposition. Juxtaposition, in light of what I just said. Yeah, I mean, you do have broadly. I brought up Satan. Again, the full picture of Satan is going to be different in Second Temple, a New Testament. But to be more specific to the question, examples where Jesus uses Jewish doctrines. Again, I'd quibble with the wording. I mean, Jesus isn't looking to use Jewish doctrines, but he's going to be part of the world, part of a world that has connected these dots. The dots come from the Old Testament, but they're not connected in the Old Testament. They're connected later. So I think that's even that is a helpful way to think about it. But here's a couple of examples. The phrase in Matthew 2541 about the Lake of Fire being prepared for the devil and his angels. Okay, that is an idea. This is the association of this place of torment, place of punishment, you know, that might be eschatological across the board. But to associate it specifically with the devil and his angels, as though the devil has a bunch of angels that work for him. Okay, that's not something you're going to find in the Old Testament. You're going to find the devil, the Satan figure. You're going to find other fallen, you know, divine beings that would be on the same team as it were with Satan. But you're not going to find verses that actually specifically connect them like Satan is the captain and here's his team. You're also not going to find this description that specifically the afterlife place of punishment, the one that's sort of made permanent, you know, this Lake of Fire thing that we see that at the end of the final judgment where they're cast into and there they go. You're not going to see the underworld really cast as a Lake of Fire. There are little glimpses of things like that. You certainly get the idea of punishment where Satan is cast down to the underworld. You certainly get that Jewish tradition, which is built off of, again, not only Old Testament, but also Second Temple stuff, like about the Fallen Sons of God of Genesis 6.1 through 4, since the Apkalu, which is the original Mesopotamian story for those four verses, since the Apkalu wind up being imprisoned in the Abyss, that's where that idea comes from. And the writer of Genesis 6.1 through 4 sort of assumed you knew the back story. He doesn't discuss the back story. It gets discussed a lot later in the inter-testamental period, Second Temple period. All that you get in the Old Testament are the Refaim, which, again, are part of the giant thinking in Old Testament theology. You see them in Sheol, but you don't ever have a verse where they're like working for Satan, like, what's my job today, boss? You never have this explicit association. You do have this place that's that if you're left there, if you have no hope of escape, that's bad. Because who are your neighbors now? Who are you living with? Or you're living with the original fallen rebel of Genesis 3, the Satan figure. You're also living with the spirits of the giant clans, which are demons in Second Temple thought. That's really not great. You know, I mean, can I can I find a better neighborhood? Well, the answer is no, because if you're left in Sheol, that means you're you're one of the unrighteous. So again, you have all you have these ideas, you have these data points floating around in the Old Testament, but they're never put together. And later on in the Second Temple period, you get the dots connected and the dots derive from the Old Testament. And they make sense in light of what you read in the Old Testament. They're just not connected the way you're reading them here in Matthew 2541 or in a Second Temple passage. That's the same thing for exorcism of demons. You don't have this in the Old Testament. In fact, you barely have the expectation of the Messiah being someone who would exercise demons. We did a whole episode on this on the podcast. It's episode 87. Where does this expectation come from that the Messiah would be someone who would cast out demons when you have like zero reference to exorcism in the Old Testament? It's built off one or two things that you find in one or two Old Testament passages and that get applied in this way. Certain little points of language get applied to the idea that the son of David, the Davidic descent and having power over demons and over evil spirits and things like that. So there's an idea. Again, Jesus obviously in the Gospels does exorcism on a number of occasions. You have the sort of the kernel thoughts and the data points in the Old Testament, but you have no sort of explication of those things, of the idea. You have no nothing that states these connections in the Old Testament itself, but then later on you do during the Second Temple period on into the New Testament. So there are things like this, again, that develop and I'll go back to my question to the previous question. Why would we ever expect all of the biblical writers to know exactly the same things at the same times or having lived so far apart? And again, why would we have this expectation that everybody knows the same thing? Well, the short answer is because that's what we're taught in church. That's not the correct answer. It's not a coherent answer. Again, we just sort of make this assumption that everybody knows the same thing. And then when they know it and they write something, it's like all written at the same time and everybody has a Bible. You know, folks, I hate to, again, try to disabuse listeners of this idea, but it wasn't until the modern era, post printing press. And even then, you know, you got to go a few centuries afterwards. It's only in the modern era that you could pretty much assume that the average person despite their station in life would actually have a Bible. That is not true in the ancient world. And so these assumptions that we look at biblical characters, we look at biblical writers and we sort of expect them to just be able to look something up or just to automatically know it because they're a prophet. Well, they know every all that stuff that somebody else wrote because they're a prophet. Well, again, that doesn't make any sense. They don't have the information downloaded into their heads. Most of them will never, you know, pick up anything that you could call a Bible. It's that's this is why prophets exist. Prophets are the oral covenant enforcers. They this is why you have quote schools of the prophets in the Old Testament so that they can share information. You know, they can take what is written and it's not a whole lot. And then they can, you know, be taught by the prophet. They can pass that on because prophets need to be succeeded. This is how it works. It's not like our time when you can just look stuff up and everybody's got a Bible. It's just not the way it is. All right. His second question is what would you as an Old Testament expert say what are the best arguments from the Old Testament for Jesus being the promised prophesied Messiah besides stating that it is Messianic Mosaic and compare it with what usually Christians say. And what are the most effective scripture to share with a religious Jew and what are effective with the atheist? All right, let's just take one at a time. I mean, this might be disappointing, but, you know, honestly, I honestly don't know what else Jesus would have to do to to validate his status as Messiah. In other words, me as an Old Testament expert, I would say, go read the New Testament, you know, and align what Jesus actually does with the Old Testament scriptures. I could add the incarnation because the incarnation is absolutely essential to the Messianic profile because only God could fulfill the covenants that God made with man. So the only way to make that happen is if God becomes a man, because humans are going to fail, covenants that are made with humans. If God doesn't become a man and fulfill them himself, they're never going to get fulfilled because humans fail all the time with regularity, unceasingly and unfailingly. So the incarnation is sort of a wild card element here. But honestly, what else would Jesus have to do? You know, I'm just being bluntly honest because I this is kind of a familiar question. Why do we know Jesus? Well, what else would he have to do? And the subquestion is who else did that? Who else did? Who else fit the profile other than Jesus? And Jesus fit the profile really well. So what's missing? I would suggest to you nothing's missing. There's plenty of information there for you to draw the accurate conclusion that he was the Messiah. If you know what he did, the New Testament, you check back on the Old Testament. So if you run into a person that just, I don't know. Their problem isn't really Jesus. Their problem is is I'll be so audacious to say this. They probably don't know what they're looking at if they read the New Testament. They probably haven't spent enough time actually reading it. And then once they read it actually cross referencing the Old Testament passages. And then it gets a little tougher sometimes to conceptually understand what's going on between the connections of how a New Testament writer would repurpose an Old Testament passage, what he would see in there. That takes a little bit more work. But typically this is the kind of question that, again, I can only speak for myself, my own experience. This is the kind of question you get from people who just don't want to believe it. And they don't really put a whole lot of effort into reading both testaments evaluatively and then asking the other question, well, who else fits the profile? The answer would be well, really nobody. And then if you throw the incarnation in there, well, then it's really nobody because the incarnation is essential. So if we're talking about the way it's presented for most Christians, I think probably the incarnation might get, I won't say skipped, but sort of not fully appreciated for the necessity of the incarnation. Now, the other questions, something in the effect of what's the most effective passage to share with a religious Jew, I guess, to convince them Jesus was a Messiah, I would go to the two power stuff, honestly, it's one of the reasons why I've camped on it. In other words, a religious Jew has to be prepared, or at least has to understand how his ancient compatriots, his ancient forefathers could have accepted the worship of Jesus and not feel that they were violating the Shema, which is the fundamental tenet of Judaism. The Lord our God is one. You have to show them how that worked, how that often worked and could have worked in the ancient first century Jewish minds. So you would want to introduce into passages that reinforce what scholars call Jewish binitarian monotheism, because that's really what was going on in the first century. There were a lot of Jews prepared for the notion of a binitarian, you know, two powers, binitarian Godhead. And all of the Christians were doing, the Christians weren't inventing anything new, they were just saying, we believe that the second power is Jesus of Nazareth and here's why. So I would take a religious view to that because they're going to balk at the notion of, you know, if I convert to Christianity, I'm somehow dissing or, you know, giving up, denying the Shema and they're really not. So they need to understand what first century Jews were thinking. As far as the atheists, atheists don't care about scripture, so there is no passage. Why would we assume that I'm going to quote a passage of scripture that atheists is going to make any difference at all? I would say with an atheist, you need to get atheists to probe their own views and their own ideas, seriously probe them for their weaknesses in terms of coherence. You know, tell them why you don't find atheism persuasive. Tell them, you know, or ask them, hey, why is it, I file this under, are you an honest atheist? Okay. I would recommend, you know, having these these conversations about how honest and atheist they are. And here's what I mean. Why is it, you know, if I'm sitting across the table from an atheist, here's what I really want to know. Why is it that someone with exactly your education went to your school in your field, educated by the same professors, you know, you were, and your faculty. Okay, you have people who were educated by the same people that educated your faculty, who don't buy atheism, they don't find it persuasive at all. Rather, they find theism and Christianity very persuasive. So, so what I want to know is, have you really thought about how this isn't an intellectual position? That it's really not about who's smart and who's dumb? Because I can, I can, you know, you can you can show people hard sciences. There are thousands, 10,000s of people in the hard sciences who are educated at the same universities, they have the same PhDs, they're published in the same journals, they write or co-write for the same publishers, you know, they go to the same conferences, they belong to the same scientific organizations, their papers are cited just as often as somebody else's, and they are Christians. Okay, why is that? Can you explain that to me, Mr. Atheist? I want to know if you realize, if you've come to grips with the fact that there are many people just like you and the people who taught you that find your atheism completely unpersuasive. Why is that? If you really think about it, they've only got a couple of choices. They have to say, well, all those other people are deceived. All those other people are lying. Well, good, you're an atheist and you want to depend on, you know, empirical research. So where are the studies for that? Can you show me a study that proves empirically, scientifically that all of these other people are deceived and all of these other people are lying? Can you show me that? Okay, they obviously can't. And what you want to do is you want to you want to get them to start thinking about, well, why do I really why do I adopt this position? And oftentimes it's because they've met one Christian or maybe 10 Christians that are just jerks. The Christians have done them wrong. They have some some problem of pain just more broadly speaking and they're blaming God for that. And that's when you can, you know, Lord willing with the pain issue, you can, you can, you know, help them to realize, well, lots of other people have gone through exactly the same thing. And that's not to excuse it. But it is to say that, you know, you have a you have a group here, you know, that, you know, sort of becomes your your peer in this regard, you know, people who've suffered exactly the same thing. And they know it's horrible. But but they process it a different way. So the question is really about processing it. Why do they approach? Why do they process it this way? You process it another way. You know, atheism, I think what you're what you're trying to do is you're trying to show the atheists that at the end of the day, their position is no more intellectual than anything else than theism or Christianity, they're, they're winding up in their position for some other reason. And, and maybe the best you can do is just have that conversation with them. And then if they were burned by Christians, you know, then then you need to be the counter example, you need to have, you have the best relationship with that person you can possibly have, you need to affirm them in any way that you can to help defy the stereotype or sort of undo or at least be a living apology for what happened to them because typically it's about pain and it's about anger, you know, with with the atheists. But a lot of them just have never really at all taken the time, they just assume a position of intellectual superiority and they've never actually thought about the kind of questions, you know, I just brought up here, but but quoting a scripture, then that's not going to do anything. In fact, that's what they expect. That's what they expect. And they're just going to dismiss that. It's only after they've thought and processed about why they're making the decision that they do, that if they, if they, you know, can at least, you know, cross the road to theism, then things like appeal to scripture might might be something that's really useful. But from the gate at the outset, we have no reason to suspect that that's going to move them at all. But I'll admit, you know, we don't know what's going on in their heart of hearts, you know, maybe the word of God, you know, God can take his word and use it in some specific way. But to just sort of randomly quote something about them to defend yourself. That's what they expect. They expect you to defend yourself. They don't expect you to really politely insist that they defend themselves and their thinking. And if you have a sincere one, if you have an honest one, they should not be afraid to do that. And you just take them through the through through questions like the examples I just gave. Chris and Baltimore, Maryland has a question about John 313. The King James version reading has quote, Son of Man, who is in heaven, end quote. One, is it possible this is the correct reading? And two, if so, is this a reference to the Son of Man of Daniel seven? I'm not quite sure I'm following the question. Let's just look at it this way. I don't know of any other readings that don't say Son of Man like that would say something else. For instance, Son of God or something, Son of Man, just that part of the phrases textually secure. Now there are additions to that, you know, who is in heaven is one of those and then there'll be other some manuscripts will have that others won't have that something like Metzger's textual commentary, you know will address that looking at the textual evidence who is in heaven again is in terms of manuscript data, probably a little better, a little better off, you know, in terms of manuscript data than the alternative, they're not having something there. I don't think it's a specific reference, though, to to Daniel seven, you know, who is in heaven. You know, it could be, you know, in John, you know, Son of Man, who is in heaven, the human one who's in heaven, I mean, elsewhere, Son of Man, you know, is pretty, pretty generic. If who is in heaven, you know, is the correct reading, it might be an illusion to that figure. But again, there are other there other ways you could you could look at it, you could just say, first of all, you could deny that who is in heaven part, then you're just stuck with Son of Man, that's very generic. You know, even if you have it, Son of Man, you know, who is in heaven, Jesus may not, I'm not saying I read it this way, but people could read that and say, well, you know, Jesus is not really identifying himself with with that or something in that that effect. I think it's it, it's possible that it's an illusion to Daniel seven, what I would really want to sort of feel better about it is some reference to the clouds, that sort of thing that you could say will come, you know, in heaven clouds, you know, it's kind of six or one half dozen another. OK, but but you have passages also from John like John 641, where you have the you have the Son of Man who has come down from heaven. OK, well, again, that that's not really people wouldn't really process that as a fulfillment of Daniel seven, because you're missing the everlasting kingship stuff, you know, giving, you know, being handed dominion over the nations of the world and all that. And it's the same thing here in John 313. So I would say that there's some possibility in in in these more generic passages that maybe the Daniel seven is lurking in the background, but I certainly wouldn't say that the writer is sort of viewing this as some kind of tight identification or removing toward fulfillment of that idea. I think that does come later. Jesus gets more explicit when he's on trial before Caiaphas. He there's a more secure quotation of Daniel seven there. So that's the way I would approach it. I would say that there's some possibility here. There's there's some things I wish I'd like to see that would make it a little bit tighter. But I think it's it's at least possible. Samuel from Winston Salem, North Carolina has a question that was prompted from episode 70 on the answer you gave. And he wants to know what happens to the Holy Spirit. If someone turns their back on God, does the Holy Spirit leave? Yeah, I would say he referenced the earlier episode. We've done more recent things that are in the same area, you know, same theological topic is this question. So I would say, you know, just generally, it'd probably be a good, a good thing to do to listen to some of the other episodes. But for this one, let's just say this, I would say that the New Testament says the Holy Spirit can be grieved and quenched. Again, the Holy Spirit indwells us to mark us and marking us is how I take the ceiling language of certain passages sealed with the Holy Spirit. I think that refers to being marked, sort of marked out from others. Not I don't take it in terms of of having some irreversible status on you. So I think the Holy Spirit indwells us to mark us as believers and to sanctify us and assist us in walking with the Lord. His presence doesn't guarantee that people will not turn from belief. Else the writer of Hebrews and other writers in the New Testament would have no reason to be concerned. The very fact that they're concerned that people not turn from the faith tells you or at least it ought to tell you that the ceiling language of the Holy Spirit is not about making it impossible for people to turn away from the faith. Certainly the New Testament writers are not reading the language that way because they are concerned. So either either we should as it were walk up to them and say, hey, you know, Hebrews guy and, you know, Paul or whoever else it is, don't don't worry. Don't you guys realize that once you have the Holy Spirit that that turning from the faith is impossible. So you don't need to worry. It's very obviously not what's that's not what's going on in the New Testament. And it's it's it's I would say it's painfully obvious. Anyway, in Ephesians 430, you know, given that little backdrop, in Ephesians 430, grieve not the Holy Spirit. We have to presume and again, just reading it sort of gives us the impression that it is possible that the Spirit can be grieved further. And this is a little digging a little bit deeper. The grieving language of the Holy Spirit might come from Isaiah 6310, because the language is the same there. They rebelled, they grieved his Holy Spirit. And the rest of the verse says, therefore, he, the Holy Spirit, turned to be their enemy and himself fought against them. This is Israel in the wilderness wanderings, you know, where where God gets angry. You know, at the Israelites for their reaction, you know, they just they grieve the spirit. They turn away, you know, they rebel, all this kind of stuff. Well, again, if that could happen in the Old Testament and if Ephesians 4 is quoting this passage about grieving the Spirit, well, that says something. It's possible that the grieving language does come from that passage. And if so, then the Holy Spirit can act in judgment against a person who abandons faith. You know, that's just kind of scriptural math there. First Thessalonians 519, quench not, you know, quench not the Holy Spirit. This is the same verb lemma, the one translated quench, as in Ephesians 616, where where the fiery darts from the evil one are extinguished against same lemma. It would seem that belief and the ministry of the Holy Spirit positively to a believer are intertwined. They are interrelated. That's another way of saying if you want the ministry of the Holy Spirit to work out in your life, you need to believe. So we're all we're back to square one again. OK, you need to believe if this is a concern to New Testament writers that believers forsake their faith, they turn against and away from the God of Israel, from the gospel against the gospel. That seems to be a very transparent concern in the New Testament. And for that reason, if that is a concern and it's not hard to find me, we truck through a number of passages in the Book of Hebrews, if that's the case, then what does the Holy Spirit do? Well, the Holy Spirit could judge them. He could be the agent of judgment. And that doesn't that doesn't mean that it didn't mean the Old Testament, that the Spirit of God never has a positive ministry to that person. He certainly did with the nation of Israel. Why would we expect, you know, on the other side of the New Testament for the Spirit of God to not also try to draw them back? Again, we talked about that in Hebrews as well. That one of the ministries of the Spirit of God is to to work in the heart of a person to help them to believe, to keep them in the faith. But the Spirit can be quenched. The Spirit can be, again, grieved. We don't really like to to talk about these kind of verses. Again, it's largely because of the theology that sort of we have in our in our background that makes us look at these passages passages and sort of conclude that turning from the faith wasn't a real problem. That would have been news to the New Testament writers. Otherwise, why are they writing about it? And in the case of the writer of Hebrews, why is he hung up on it? The answer is, you know, the context, the persecution, just the hardship. This was a real concern. It was not a fabricated concern. It's not a theologically misguided concern. It's in the New Testament. And by virtue of it, you know, the whole idea of inspiration, I would say it's a valid concern. So the bottom line is that, again, the writer of Hebrews, other writers are either genuinely concerned about people abandoning the faith or they're not. Or they're or they're dumb or they're just theologically inept. I don't think they were dumb or theologically inept. I think this is a real concern. So if people cannot turn from the faith, these concerns are illegitimate. The writers are making some sort of theological error. I don't think they're in error if they can. If people can turn from the faith and the presence of the spirit is about something else other than guaranteeing that people can't turn away. Again, this is this is very simple, step by step logic, you know, thinking about what we read in the text. I'll repeat it. If people can turn away from the faith, and that seems to be a big concern from certain writers in the New Testament, if they can turn away, then the presence of the spirit is about something else besides guaranteeing that people who profess Christ can never reject that belief. It's pretty evident. Again, the writers are really concerned about it. So it would seem that we should take their concern seriously. We don't want the spirit of God who is, again, working to keep us in the faith. We don't want the spirit of God to have to judge us, to have to chastise us, be the agent of chastisement. You know, maybe that's for our own good because the spirit of God will, as he did the Old Testament with the Israelites who were cantankerous and rebellious across their history. The spirit of God did, you know, act on occasion, you know, as an agent of judgment. But he also acted, you know, on other occasions as the agent that God would use to draw them back through various means back to himself. All right, Mike. Well, that's all of our questions for this episode. So hopefully we can ask one more question of ourselves and that's to please say a prayer for us while we're in Israel. Everybody, pray for safe travel and appreciate you answering our questions. And again, send me your questions at TrayStrictly.net gmail.com. I will put them in the queue to be hopefully answered a future point in time. But with that, Mike, I just want to thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. 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. DrMSH.com.