Mastering Bible study with Dr. Michael S. Heiser

okay do i yeah i don't really need to be looking at anything other than you yeah correct i may i may occasionally um do like that and then make you come up here when you're speaking um but other and i might occasionally throw up a bible if someone asks something bible related but other than that um yeah it'll be just you and i okay so well i see two people have joined already awesome i'm going to sit tight for a few minutes and wait for a couple more people to join i know this various social channels take a minute to catch up sometimes what do you do in dallas um i work in cyber security so i am a a real life ethical hacker i study the bible as my side gig i have i have a friend in the fbi who's in uh management in cyber you know so i i have a little bit of a glimpse into that world but it is it is not diff very um different i think than um kind of your world requires a lot of deep very deep digging you got to go past the you know what jumps out at the surface it's often not you know your fringe pop logo it's often not what they what they appear to be in the you know at the first glimpse good afternoon norman um thanks for the shout out how's the audio in the video norman is everything clear can you hear us can you see us is there any bizarre echoes or anything along those lines shoot me a little one in the chat if everything is a-okay good afternoon cynthia visiting us all the way from the caribbean i'm going to give it a couple of more minutes um yep that's cynthia okay you can always count on moms you know oh yeah oh yes for sure awesome thank you norman so we have clear audio we have clear video it is now 11 o'clock well my time 12 o'clock for eastern time we will now begin so um welcome to bible hacking um today we have an extremely special guest dr michael heiser he doesn't know i'm about to say this but dr heiser is probably single-handedly the person that got me um kind of reinvigorated about the bible been a christian for a very long time so it is a massive honor to have him here to just you know be able to kind of chew the fat a little bit and find out you know what's new in bible and you know kind of get some questions answered so i'm going to start by saying i have been hyping up online a lot that we will be giving away two of these you can probably see them there two books of enoch um volume one and volume two i have two sets of them right here they're both going to be given away to some lucky audience member um so stay tuned on how to do that but you got to be active in the chat you got to be obviously tuned in live and i'll give you instructions but it'll have to do with the chat so they're here i'm going to fedex them out today to the two lucky people that win and you will have them in your mailbox or whatever tomorrow so if you're interested in that hang around um so on that note let's dive in um this is going to be very q a heavy as well so if you have questions put question in the the comment you know big capital letters and then um you know put the question behind it so i can identify him quickly um i see lots of people starting to join now good afternoon michelle thanks for joining michelle is one of our mods michelle is phenomenal mr phil fox norman hardman cmb the ambassador grace and peace brother so let's dive right in dr michael heiser is here with us as i mentioned dr heiser i'm going to give you a super quick introduction dr heiser is a biblical scholar written numerous books actually many of them are in the background behind me you probably see demons fuzzy in the background as well as unseen realm um pretty much every book dr heiser has written is in my library somewhere as well as many others so he's a prolific author host of the naked bible podcast and i'd like to say welcome to you dr heiser yeah thank you for having me i'm i'm glad uh you know to hear my work actually was useful and helpful to you too it really really really was um and it's also um interesting um the impact i've seen it have on particularly the older generation so not just my mother but you know i come from a generation of christians where you know you kind of don't push against you know what is known and what you you know what what tradition has told you um so typically when i would bring up very subtly things you know maybe you're reading that wrong or maybe you're missing some some detail there um you know usually the pushback would be very heavy but un inevitably like i i don't have any examples of where this hasn't been the case once they dig in a little bit deeper um that you usually start hearing oh my god this is changing my perspective so um that's good that's good yeah yeah well once you see it you can't don't see it exactly exactly my experience yeah yep that is very very very very true um for for myself as well i'm going to jump in with a question because i am sitting here and i have the honor to ask my own question first so i'm going to jump straight in um one of the things that's been on my mind and we can talk about enoch as a matter of fact this is probably orthogonal to you know the con a conversation on enoch so i've heard you say many times dr heiser you know the book of enoch doesn't need to be canon for it to be important um you know it tells us about you know the the world view and the perspective of the the ancient near eastern biblical audience so for that reason alone it is important um what about some of the other books i've been struggling struggling too strong of word i've been kind of parsing through and you know processing texts such as for example tobit or even um um one that i've been hitting with a lot maccabees so what makes one text um canon versus another text that is not canon and i'll dig deeper into that question and where that's leading but let's let's start with what makes one canon versus yeah in a jewish context the there were two sort of broad [Music] um criteria for canonicity you know one is the one you'll well you may hear about both of them you know sort of in a evangelical church context but you know maybe not one was can the book be traced to you know the the hand of a prophet okay prophetic a prophetic line a prophetic lineage might be a better way to say that and that that gets a little a little fuzzy or at least it sounds that way to our ear but to the jewish community they sort of had a sense of of who it was that they accepted you know from the biblical period it's easier because you know we have a textual accounting of these people and then after the biblical period closes after they return from exile you know then you still have a few kind of straggler books you know you know ezra nehemiah daniel if you think it's late so on and so forth so they have to be attached in some way you know the the community has to recognize some attachment to this prophetic tradition so that was one criterion the the other one is a little more simple and that is the jewish community tended to not recognize something as canonical or sacred if it was not witnessed in hebrew and that pretty much wipes everything off the table uh in the apocrypha and and pseudographical material now there are some exceptions like ben sera you know has a hebrew witness but you know that that sort of makes sense because it's the it's their community they're tracing this back to biblical days when they actually did things like write in hebrew you know so there's this point of connection and that that that was the standard you know and so it was why books like enoch were not considered really even candidates for this now there is the major exception are the people at qumran the they did reference the book of enoch in the way they referenced you know books in the hebrew bible they wrote a commentary you know they had commentary there's there's evidence of that on enoch and the other one they did also was the temple scroll but everything else that gets commentary treatment is in the hebrew bible so this this particular sect of judaism at qumran widened you know the gap a little bit and you know that's part of why enoch gets attention of course the other part of why it gets attention is the the early church had an attachment to it uh because the early church didn't have the the hebrew criterion you know it's like hey you know when someone had to invent the codex okay we have the septuagint let's let's put that in a codex bind the one side and create the book you know we take this for granted now but somebody had to do that and then there were these other books included in codexes and a lot of the major codexes had you know enoch and these other books and so the early church just kind of grew up with it you know in other words the fact that it was included in a codex tells you that the early church had had an attachment you know to the book they were utilizing it so it doesn't necessarily mean that it should be considered canon even if it's in a codex because there's lots of things in a codex that aren't thought of this way anyway but it just gives you a little bit of a glimpse into the consciousness so the theological answer to this is is the community the believing community is led by the holy spirit to recognize which books should be considered sacred and this is why you have people like you know tertullian and irenaeus who who fought for the the inclusion of enoch you know toward the end of their lives they just basically owned the fact that they were the still small voice out there in the wilderness you know arguing for this and they they were humble enough and i think reverential enough to say we're going to assume that the spirit of god has led the mass of the believing community in this direction it's not our direction but but we are going to you know lay the sword down and assume that the spirit of god has led this way and we're fine with that so it was really kind of a a community spirit led recognition of certain books um this is all you know you have the gnostic gospels we're never even part of this discussion even when they in ancient harmonies like tatians diatessero never included thomas you know they they're just things that that never even get to the level of discussion uh enoch is is again one of the few that did um you know because of its influence uh you know the way it filters into the new testament and again early church attachment to it and and you know that attachment you know shows a deep awareness of the content so that it that mattered more i mean nobody's arguing about should we include menander because paul quotes it in the canon nobody's arguing about the baal cycle you know when psalm 74 dips into that or psalm 29. again it has to be more than usage for for a book to even get floor time you know for consideration and enoch is one of the rare exceptions to that so let's take that let's let's dive a level deeper into that how do we then parse out with that what you just described in mind doctrinally what fits in you know our doctrine and what doesn't and i'll i'll give a pretty extreme example uh i can't remember exactly where it is somewhere in maccabees i want to say maccabees 12 juan macabee 12. maybe 2 maccabees 12. don't remember there's this talk of praying for the dead um you know there's a war and a bunch of people get killed and you know the the commander says hey let's go and pray for the dead so that they're not damned you know to hell basically or you know whatever the correct term would be there i've always understood like in my christian upbringing that that you can't pray for the dead once you're once they're dead they're dead that's the end of that it seems as if at some point it was part of the christian body's understanding that you could do that when did that change happen and how do we determine which is valid doctrine and which is heresy okay i picked that one on purpose because that's borderline heretical to most christians like you can't there's also something else that needs to go into the mix actually i would say two things you know there is a passage in peter that people still argue about today about whether after you're dead you get a second chance okay this this notion of um again you you may get you may get a chance to still embrace the gospel at that point again there still arguments about this sort of thing so that that's not the same threat as the other one the prayer for the dead but it's a related thought it's that that becomes part of the discussion so it's not just a maccabean idea of at least in terms of the second chance or something like that the other thing is we have to be really careful to assume from a book any book maccabees enoch whatever it is in the second temple literature that everybody in the second temple period looked at it the same way uh you we have we have somebody at least one person wrote that book and wrote that verse how representative that that is of not only the wider jewish community singular noun but communities again there is no such thing as as one monolithic judaism in the second temple periods just like christianity today there's no such thing as one monolithic christianity we've got infinite varieties of it you know the big ones are eastern orthodox catholicism and protestantism protestantism breaks into you know how many goodness dozens hundreds you know okay so so there's no one mind and one voice in judaism so what we know for sure is okay we don't we know at least one person thought this and it's probably fair to say that you know other jews thought this but to put a percentage on it like is this even representative of second temple judaism we have no way of knowing that now a good a good sort of telltale sign would be is if this item gets discussed in a lot of other books and that increases the chances dramatically that this would have been a doctrinal idea but if it's only in one book in one verse that's probably not something we can really say was doctrine in second temple judaism to somebody it was but as far as a widespread influence you know i i would doubt that significantly you know and there are other things like this you know that that only you know pop up once or twice you know it so how do we know what's going on with that so i think that needs to be part of of the mix in approaching a question like this now my own assessment with all this material is that i think all of it is useful and i as you you quoted me earlier you know a book doesn't have to be canonical to be useful all of this stuff tells us how somebody somebody in the serious second temple jewish tradition was thinking about the text now this might in this the case of this verse are they linking back to something in the text or are they sort of being innovative what i want to know is what's the context for making this statement and do they hook into anything else preferably in their own sacred scriptures like the hebrew bible and the way you would tell that is you know you'd have to you know look at the greek the greek text of that you know are there any touch points with some other passage could they conceivably be thinking of this passage in the hebrew bible of course in the septuagint you know when they're using you know when they're writing this in maccabees you know i don't know it to me it's like if you can't attach it to the hebrew bible then this thought that they're thinking is not something that has a direct relationship to the stuff that nobody would argue is sacred and therefore that's the fodder from which that's the pool from which we get our doctrine it could just be a tradition of some rabbi some some teacher that was known and this guy's passing it on in in the maccabees you know book that's nice it's it's interesting maybe it's part of a bigger topic okay but at the end of the day if if all we have is some sort of rabbinic tradition that doesn't really attach itself well to the stuff that everyone accepts is sacred i'm not looking at it as doctrine period it's not good fodder you know upon which to build you know doctrine so again that's just how i look at i'm always looking for breadcrumb trails you know i'm looking for how people interpret the the scriptures you know again the canonical stuff that everybody accepts how are they thinking about it what insights do they have here and i'll tell you why it's useful because if you don't read this material if you're stuck in one little tradition and sub-tradition of christianity you'll never even think about the questions you could be asking it'll never occur to you it'll never occur to you that that this verse over here could be thought of this way it'll never pop into your head so that's really useful um to help us think about the biblical text and so anything that really helps us think about the biblical text to me is worthwhile doing but you know i have these these parameters in my head and i just described you know how i think about some of that when it comes to this material i want to see the breadcrumb trail show me your work you know your our math teachers used to insist on this tell me how you got the answer did you just get lucky if you show me your work i'll know so that's what i want to see i i want to see the writers you know give me the breadcrumb trail so i can follow their thoughts i love that i love that so there's a question in the chat i will post the question in a second um for you to answer but i want to make two comments to the audience one the next question that gets dropped in the chat gets this um next biblical related question gets this bundle mailed to them via fedex you'll have it in your inbox tomorrow it's volume one and volume two volume two is brand new of dr heiser's companion to the book of enoch so the next question in the chat that's for dr heiser um gets this so i'm monitoring um you mentioned you know kind of figuring out what the author's intent was and how they're speaking one of the things and in your naked bible podcast and um i saw someone post that i'm going to repost that right there um definitely make it a point to go and check out dr heiser's podcast i listen to it absolutely weekly um maybe to the point of driving my wife and daughter completely insane but my wife's because i listen to a lot of podcasts and my wife does say dr heiser's voice is perfect for radio like very soothing that's a good there's other people that she says the diametric opposite of like could you please turn that lunatic off either much or whatever have you but it is what it is um so your your voice is well respected and well recognized in the house so in terms of trying to figure out what the author means can you re-explain a bit how that applies to for example the study that you're doing right now on revelation there's been and i don't i know you don't really frequent social media that much but there's been heated debates about why is dr heiser making it look as if john you know the author of revelations wasn't just reporting the facts of what he saw it looks like dr heiser is saying john is just purposefully digging into the old testament to try to make a narrative himself versus i saw this it happened and now i'm reporting it and i'm writing it down could you kind of dig deeper into that again please all of those all of those things can be simultaneously true okay you know when john has a visionary experience he's not looking at the angel and saying wait a minute i got to get my my paper and pencil out here because i'm going to sit here and you know draw pictures and you know write stuff down you know occasionally you know like in the beginning of the book the lord will tell him to write something down and so on and so forth so you know it doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you have a visionary experience that you're sort of interviewing angels and you know you're taking notes in real time it's a vision okay it's a vision it's what it is and so john is going to be led by by the spirit of god to describe this mostly after the fact i would say almost totally after the fact and when john does that pardon john under inspiration trying to make sense of it for his audience okay of course he would do that he's going to see things that because of his understanding and knowledge of the old testament he's going to know where that came from he's going to know where you know what that image means to a jew or a christian with a serious knowledge of the old testament so why wouldn't he direct attention back to those things in the sacred texts it makes perfect sense for john to do that you know if john's not doing that you know what you could charge john with idiosyncrasy it has no attachment to the hebrew bible why should we think you know that john is telling us the truth this is all novel information that doesn't hook into the sacred text anywhere look does that make any sense of course not and the fact is that we can read it you can read the material we know where john is hooking into we know what he's doing we know what he's throwing into the blender you know and and wants people to think about when i relate this this experience i had here's what i want you to be thinking about here's some help to parse it okay here's you know the this idea this this symbol this vision whatever it is here's where it's going to hook back into other things that other prophets saw okay he's part of a community it's it sounds like you're appealing to john's intelligence and john's expectation that his audience has intelligence as well yes he's he's not a robot you know again we can read the texts they're right there in front of us why would john have bothered to write it down if he didn't want people to read it yeah okay if he writes it down chances are really good he'd like people to read that so what i'm trying to do in in the podcast series is again just get people to to take what john has given us his relaying of these experiences these visions that he had and how he describes them the means by which he describes them the techniques that he employs to describe them and to help his readers understand help him orient it somewhere the material back into what earlier prophets of god saw he is in a line of tradition of people that god you know brought into the throne room again it's the it's like i say an unseen realm it's the divine encounter that pre that that really validates the office of the prophet okay john is is the same as all these others and so he wants them to see how the things are connected now why would john do that other than just some explanatory value you know taking a stab at that trying to help his the people he wants to to relay these experiences to in some cases it's nice that john does this because the readers of john all of a sudden know that wow that thing that ezekiel talked about that really happened that came to pass the prophet didn't lie it's a fulfillment you know in other words it's confirming of the prophetic tradition that preceded him why should we have a problem with that you know when i when i jumped into the revelation thing i i i prep people for weeks saying look you all know how i feel about eschatology i have a pretty low view of eschatological systems we're not doing eschatological systems i'm going to give you the data and then you can go off and evaluate your own system to your heart's content what i care about is that you see how the scripture how the book of revelation is the capstone to all this earlier stuff and how it culminates in jesus and how john is thinking about the end of days in relation to the fulfillment of this and this and this and this and how it all gets funneled you know through through christ through christology you know this this is how biblical theology is done and in john in the book of revelation it on the one hand it's great for this because it makes such frequent use of the old testament but on the other hand john is not he's messy he just assumes that you know a lot and a lot of us just are nowhere near john's level of knowledge um you know a few points in the podcast i'll say look john just throw he takes five or six passages and he just sort of does this he just merges them he puts them in the blender hits the button mixes it up there you go there's you know that you know what the ingredients were in the recipe and you're supposed to just know where everything came from and why he connected it it takes study though it takes renewing your bible you're not going to come into it it quickly takes work i love it you know and john i mean the the if there's any practical lesson here it should be one of humility and shame because john just assumes a lot of his audience a lot and if if we don't measure up that ought to tell us something yeah exactly we're not spending enough time in the text maybe maybe we've neglected the old testament a little too much because we got no idea what this guy's doing i that's something i would tweet out if i was in a location where i could like tweet something right now if you're not understanding revelation maybe it's because we're not spending enough time in the old testament and in the bible i love that we got a ton of questions um all popped at one time i can't imagine why um let's jump on this one first um cynthia richardson from the caribbean asks um what happens when a believer dies does the believer remain in the grave are they in purgatory somewhere decaying um is there are they introduced to the lord like what happens when a believer dies today yeah i i thanks for the question cynthia i take paul at his word you know to be absent from the body is to be present with the lord you know the body does decay hence we need you know a resurrection but uh i don't i don't think it needs to be any more complicated than that i think paul if he died he was expecting to be with the lord i mean and you go back to what jesus said today to the thief on the cross today you'll be with me in paradise he doesn't say well i'm glad you believe me now and you're going to be sleeping for a while and that's kind of a shame but i'll see you at some point you know no he he says today you'll be with me in paradise so i think these statements you know indicate again when when there's a severance of of you know body and soul or soul spirit however you want to put that you the the redeemed i mean just think about who we are you know we're we are redeemed spiritual beings trapped in unredeemed bodies that's what we are that's why paul talks about the redemption that awaits the body that's why peter's talking about fleshly lust which war against the soul it's the soul that is regenerated and redeemed the body is not yet regenerated okay it's we're going to have to either have you know i'll use the word rapture but not not necessarily in the way certain you know end time systems might be using it but we'll we'll throw that on onto the table there has to be either that's some sort of translation event or a death and a resurrection of the body but the spirit is already you know in christ it's already regenerate it's already redeemed so paul could say to be absent from the bodies to be present with the lord full stop another fantastic question here from benjamin handelman um are there any good resource and benjamin uh in my interaction with him is more than likely a scholar also so take the question with as much salt as you need to are there any good resources on what the communities that qumran use as their scripture how did they see canon yeah the problem is there's too much um gosh how how would i narrow this let me let me just i'm gonna look look this up in my in my logos library because i've got so much of this stuff eugene ulrich is sort of the guy who is kind of most known for the qumran view of the canon i'm going to recommend a general book here it's by roger beckwith the old testament canon of the new testament church and its background in early judaism so this book is going to get you into how the people at qumran thought about the canon it'll be wider than that and and from from an essay like that i mean you can even go to vanderkam's introduction to to the dead sea scrolls he has a chapter on canon and he'll lead you to other good resources there's just a pile of material on this because one of the reasons is because the the textual material from qumran witnesses to both what would become known as the masoretic text and also the hebrew text that underlied you know the septuagint and then the samaritan pentateuch as well and then there were unaffiliated manuscripts as well so since the people at qumran apparently knew of all of these textual traditions that's an issue for what what was the state of the text at the time okay that becomes an issue and so when you read ulrich or when you read you know beckwith and you know vanderkam's introduction to the candidate qumran you're going to encounter discussion of of certain books you know what state they were in you know are they still being sort of reworked by scribes and edited you know are they com are they sort of settled or whatever um and that affects you know how how the people at qumran were looking at this and again quran is like everybody else they settle on what would what we know as the hebrew bible but with two exceptions apparently and that was enoch and the temple scroll okay they treat both of those as though they were at the level of the rest of the hebrew bible stuff but that's pretty unique uh within you know the second temple period the other strains of judaism are not going to do that in fact in the samar the samaritan case they only accept the torah you know so you have a variance of opinion as far as candidacy but the people at qumran are going to be hebrew bible plus these two other things and so that that's what you'll find when you get into it awesome thank you this is another doozy of a question i love this one how do you view the different canons throughout the orthodox church and this orthodox has a capital letter on it so i assume they're talking about the eastern orthodox church aren't they specific i was thinking otherwise but well you know the orthodox capital o orthodox church does have a different canon than the protestants than the catholics okay there there are differences so again here here's the nutshell answer in the jewish community is it witnessed in hebrew oh it's not sorry you're out okay since the early church though became overwhelmingly composed of gentiles okay who couldn't read hebrew everybody's reading greek well that opens the gate to a lot of stuff being produced in the second temple period in greek okay enoch is one of those enoch appears in greek as well and and the early church you know used the septuagint because it was greek and when the septuagint moves from scrolls or individual manuscripts to the codex and other books are added in there the early church begins to develop a wider canonical sense okay it's just out of the gate and when i say wider canonical sense i'm referring to what we would think of as the old testament this extra stuff is still old testament orientation so after centuries of that and after the the rise of what we would you know what would become known as the roman catholic church that the church just inherits a cannon that is different than the jewish candidate has some of this extra stuff in it well when you get to the reformation okay we'll talk about the protestants now they had a very simple litmus test is it witnessed in hebrew in other words they went back to the jewish model oh it's not too bad they just went back to the jewish canon and so they lopped off the the books and then they referred to them as the apocrypha okay which the catholic church still today refers to as the deuterocanonical books so this is all a matter of historical happenstance and tradition why we get these different canons and orthodoxy is going to add a add or or remove you know some of these you know from from the greek material again this is greek orthodoxy okay so they're working with the greek you know canon that they inherit you know moves east and all this sort of stuff so all of these things have historical circumstances to them the protestant canon that most of your listeners are probably used to is in the old testament a return to the jewish model and then the new testament you know pretty much everybody's in lockstep there anyway but that's why we have different ones again my my attitude is you know toward his look i'm fine with the protestant cannon if i get to heaven and you know the lord says you know you know enoch was in there everybody got it wrong i don't think that's going to happen because again i i'm with irenaeus here i would think if the holy spirit wanted us to recognize that he would have moved widely to do that but i'm just using it as an example i'm not going to be disappointed to find out in heaven you know that that maybe there was another book in there like i'm not asking to leave at that point i'm not disappointed to be there so on one level it's kind of an absurd you know thing to really worry about my my approach is that look i'll take the minimalist canon and i'll read everything else you know because again it's gonna it's gonna help me understand when it when it hooks back into you know old and new testament text it's gonna help me understand how these things were understood and read and i'm especially interested in second temple judaism because i i want the older the stuff the better i'm not really interested in post-biblical contexts i'm interested in when the old testament was writing old testament writer was writing what's what what's in his cognitive environment that's helping him and then when the new testament writers are writing what's in their cognitive environment well it happens to be the old testament and the second temple period if it's after the new testament writers right i don't really care too much about it however it's still useful because you know why you know why would we read the church fathers if you have my view of this sort of thing i'll tell you why because the church fathers what they wrote is very contextually conditioned in other words they have specific things that are going on in their day that they need to respond to there are things cropping up there are really poor understandings of jesus or scripture or whatever and this tells you how they were thinking at the time and how they answered certain questions it also since they have to think more philosophically if i can use that term they have to they have to think more abstractly because of of the intellectual forces going on around them you know platonism neoplatonism all this kind of stuff they have to do philosophical thinking about the text that forces them to ask certain questions that we wouldn't ordinarily think of it forces them to approach problems and frame problems in a different way than the biblical exegete would okay it just it just helps you think in different ways about the same body of material and and to try to understand why they landed where they landed why they said what they said and that is largely conditioned by what what the problems were that they had to deal with and that can be very useful because i got news for you last time i looked around the western culture it's becoming more pagan becoming more pagan for decades we are we are moving forward into the past and i can guarantee you that we can talk all we want about new age and paganism and weird occultic stuff and all this kind of stuff hey the church fathers were there and back a dozen times this was their world you know the the the pre you know pre or or you know what the non-christian spirituality world that was their world yeah okay and so a lot of the stuff that that the church is being confronted with now and will be confronted with then the church fathers are going to be really useful you know to help you i i could not more vehemently agree with you even you know the stuff you see peter talking about uh quite frankly a lot of what the apostle paul talks about in terms of how we interrelate with each other like these are our challenges today um so i'm gonna change directions a little bit there's a question in the chat about cosmic geography and geopolitics which i definitely want to hear your take on but in connection with you know like a real world problem i'm really interested to hear your um viewpoint on this question from the perspective of you know someone who has studied the scripture so the question is it's a long one i have a friend who sees herself as lesbian but wants a relationship with god she struggles with the thought of being an abomination and she is angry with god because of it what are your thoughts on homosexuality sin slash god's love well the fact that you're a sinner doesn't preclude you from the gospel you know i i i can only speculate why homosexuality sort of gets this elite status you know among sins you know you struggle with thinking that you're an abomination to god you know because of your sin well yeah yeah we all are this is why romans 5 8 says while we were yet sinners christ died for us it doesn't say after we cleaned up our act a little bit after we stopped this or that behavior you know after we took took assessment of our lives and and fixed a few things christ died no it doesn't say any of that okay we are all sinners the only thing different is which sin are we trapped by it's good okay that that's it so you're you know a lesbian orientation does not disqualify you from god loving you see we this is this is a huge problem because this is why i wrote my little book what does god want okay just a little self-published book it's the one my non-profit has now translated i don't know 20 some languages and supernaturals in about 35 languages now but but this is this is largely the reason why i did this because we we have lots of christians who at one point in their lives understand the gospel i'm a sinner christ died for me i can't merit my own salvation you know i have to depend exclusively on his you know faithfulness that jesus accomplished his mission and all i need to do is believe it but then we we struggle with sin and there's this creeping thought in the minds of lots of christians and it goes something like this you know i'm really having a hard time with lesbianism okay really having a hard time because this is this is who i am it's this desire within me and and you know i i fall and i stumble and i fail i wonder if god loves me today as much as he did a year ago when i understood the gospel and embraced it okay god loved you then why would he love you less now okay for god so loved the world you know it we we have this backwards if if you if you struggle with that whether whether you're not a believer and you're you're struggling with you know the gospel or you're already a christian and you're struggling with you know that your battle with sin again you know paul struggled but read romans seven i mean he had a big struggle okay we all struggle you know john says if we say we don't have sin we're liars you know we make him a liar you know this this never goes away it never changes and that's good news because before we ever even had a thought or even cared what god thought he loved us why would he love us less now it makes zero sense but we're not we're thinking about it emotionally we're reacting viscerally to our to our own struggle and we have to get our eyes back on the fact that on our best day we can't merit salvation if we could ever say i didn't sin that day well that's nice but guess what that doesn't earn you a seat in heaven there's only one thing that gets you a seat in heaven and that is the work of jesus and all god wants is that you believe it it's all he asked for you embrace it you're believing loyalty is now with the gospel you're not going to you know add this to your to your you know your holster here and then go off and you know pursue some other god or something like that you need believing loyalty i believe this this is the the exclusive way of salvation which is what jesus said i'm the way the truth and the life no one comes to the father except by me pretty clear john 14 6 i don't see a lot of wiggle room there don't see any wiggle room there but but again the same person that said that says you know that it's because god loved you that i came to give myself a ransom for many you know so i understand the struggle i understand the even the tension but what it tells me is that you don't fully grasp what the gospel is it is nothing to do with your merit your behavior your change of behavior you know all this god is not asking you to clean up your life for you to realize and admit and acknowledge and bend the knee before the gospel and say jesus is the only and exclusive means of salvation and i believe it and i'm going to believe it from this point forward this is the only thing that's going to take my sin away it's the only thing that's going to make me right with god now your behavior becomes an issue of of discipleship okay and we all have to dispense with things that you know either are going to be you know something that displeases god and you know god you know who will forgive us he loves us as much today as he did you know a week ago when we came to christ you know through the gospel he doesn't love us any less he wants to use you he wants you know you to be a participant not just a spectator in what he wants to do because you'll enjoy it he'll enjoy it you'll enjoy it and when when we when we cling to things in our lives that we know are are contrary to what the lord wants it's an impediment to enjoying those other things and to being what god wants us to be why does god make these laws why did he make them for israel a couple reasons one was to distinguish israelites from people who followed other gods that's sort of the easy part but the other one is because since god created us he knows what will bring our optimal happiness stable relationships okay this is why we have laws about sex and sexuality and children and you know a household free of adultery you know and fornication and the complications those things create with relationships not only with the partners but with the kids that is a house of stress and chaos trust me i grew up in one okay okay god you know makes these commands because he knows how people will function well and how they will get the most out of this life loyalty to each other loyalty to their community loyalty to him they're going to be blessed by it it's going to be a good life you know but he lets you mess it up he gave you free will you know i'm just telling you how you're going to have the optimal life maybe you'll have to find out the hard way for for some reason you know none of none of that has has anything to do with eternal life and the basis for eternal life which is the gospel for someone who referring to you now dr heiser consistently says you're not a pastor you could never pastor um you're not a preacher i've heard you refer to one message you gave at a church i think in washington we spoke about naaman and the dirt and that was like your only message something you've given others yeah my historic message um for someone who keeps saying that you just had the entire chat room blowing up with people yelling preach preach preach that was one of the most pastoral answers to that question i've ever heard so um thank you um phenomenal answer very very much appreciated switching gears again um our geopolitical question now um from bk the apologist and you've been on his show by the way you being on bk the apologists um podcast was what introduced me to bk they apologist so we're now friends thanks to you in a weird way so internet good for something i guess how does cosmic geography impact geopolitics today and i i assume the context and i'm pretty certain the context he's going for we hear a lot in politics today you know that america needs to support israel because of what the bible says about israel if america doesn't support israel you know then america is tantamount to you know babylon or whoever have you so how does cosmic geography impact geopolitics today right well i think that the thing that trumps that subtext of the question is righteousness okay in other words when israel does wrong i feel completely free to say you're doing wrong when israel does right we ought to say good on you okay so in other words there's no sanctified state or you know when i say state i mean condition for any country okay and it's you know biblical israel you know the the nation of israel they don't get a pass on their behavior their conduct as a national entity because they were elect in the old testament you know how i know that because they didn't get a pass in the old testament okay god judged them pretty obvious we have this thing called the exile okay that was pretty traumatic so that the fact that they were god's chosen does not exempt them from moral i.e scriptural evaluation okay that ought to be completely transparently biblically obvious but it often isn't so if we move it in into today you know what what i would hope is that you know you you take the historical circumstances for what they are we know what the historical circumstances were you know to the rise of israel as a nation there were white hats and there were black hats okay that's the way it works in the human world that we can sort of you know i guess cynically call anti-eden all right this is the world it is not eden and it's never going to be despite all the utopian efforts that you know politicians you know and political theorists you think they can accomplish it ain't never going to get there because it's filled with people who are unregenerate and even the ones that are regenerate aren't perfect so you know with with that as as sort of a a wider context i think the the cosmic geographical stuff of the biblical world works like it did in the old testament looks like it it works like it did in biblical days and that is and i'll i'll get back to the to the to the twist here and that is you know the difference between sacred space being a country the size of new jersey in the old testament period and now sacred space is defined as the body of christ and believers okay that matters it's not tied to geography anymore the church you know god's presence is not attached to the nation of israel okay that that land mass rather it's attached to believers who are everywhere and that's the plan they're supposed to be everywhere because god wants to reclaim everything you know i mean this is a logical plan going back to geopolitics what you look at daniel 10. it's very clear prince of persia prince of greece and his supernatural princes over geographical geopolitical entities all that stuff is is there it's in the passage it's real but you have to think about you know the boots on the ground well what was it like to live in babylon well read the book of daniel guess what it was ruled by a tyrant who had an apparatus to control people and he often harmed people he was an abusive tyrant his name was nebuchadnezzar of course you know there are others in the book as well so in other words daniel affirms two things human tyranny yeah human activity we'll try to pick a nice term human activity on a geopolitical level and a supernatural reality or mind or mind minds behind what we see going on in the human world that's what daniel affirms for us how did how are people best controlled in antiquity force violence okay these are the mechanisms of control economy you don't listen to me well good luck finding something to eat we're going to go burn your field or i'm just going to take it you know or i'm going to exile you out of here good luck living in the desert i mean there are just there are any number of ways to control a population through threats and violence and whatnot in tyranny well guess what that's what that's the way it works today too so if i were a a cosmic villain if i were a cosmic you know entity you know one of one of the principalities here you know what i would do is i would ask myself a simple question you know there's there's a limited number of us here because the bible only use the uses the myriads upon myriad's description of the good guys so there's a limited number of the bad guys let's not forget that so there's a limited number of us and i'm i you know i've been given this neighborhood called you know america i hope i can solicit some help from other bad guys but i don't really trust them either you know because everybody sort of wants to control you know people so what i'm going to do is i'm going to find the people who live in this place who have the greatest reach and ability to control people for me because i'm smart i'd rather work smart than hard so i'm going to use people who want power i'm going to use people who have that tyranny streak running through them i'm going to use people who like to manipulate other people because i'm looking to move herds and control herds in the most efficient way that i can okay that's what i'm that's what i'm doing so now we have people who pass laws to intimidate to herd people and to threaten them with punishment sometimes that's good other times especially if it's aimed at believers or some righteous cause like you know preventing abortion you know you can actually get punished for doing the right thing or we have more overt tyranny we have more overt threats social media has become a big part of this yep okay right now you you've got the politicians opposing big tech because you know why they're opposing big tech it's not on moral principles because they're not in control they want control it is all about who is in control so you have these competing interests and pretty soon enough they'll get married or at least start dating uh so that the politicians can horn in on this but of course big tech is above the politicians and they know it see everybody's crying about socialism and i hate socialism like everybody else at least you know who who believes in things like private property and you know individual liberty okay but that is not the end game the end game is corporatocracy it's scientific dictatorship that's the end game so this all works the same way it did before it's just we use tech we use science we use political structures we use social structures it's all about controlling people controlling their thoughts controlling their behaviors and whatnot it's the same strategy it's the same strategy it's just the means are a little bit different so that's how i think that the whole geopolitical thing works and and you know it's fascinating to me and disturbing i mean i'm not cheerleading for this i think it's very it's palpably discernible that that we have turned a corner in the cultural attitude in the west toward christianity christianity is becoming the enemy in a more overt way i think i think it's sort of been in the crosshairs for a long time but but now it's just more overt people feel freer to express their their distrust or their hatred for it and honestly why would we not expect that somehow we think in america or the west we're immune from like every other christian group and every other part of the world that's ever existed we're not why would we think that we've just had a couple hundred years where we you know we went without it 200 years is a very short time on the scope of biblical history and just the scope of the history of humanity it's a real it's a blip on the radar okay the norm is not what we've experienced in this country or in the west that's not the norm and we have taken a turn and we're gonna we're gonna see that all of these forces are gonna be used to either expose the true believer or eradicate them or neutralize them in some way and exposure is good because now we just know where they're at more and we can target them a little more efficiently okay so if you've never read my fiction this is where i love to do this kind of stuff in fiction um you know how how how intelligent evil will work the plan i i take a specific angle in the book because it's it's sort of paranormal you know supernaturalist you know fiction but it's the same basic premise herd people how do we move herds how do we control herds how do we expose the people we want to target how do we neutralize and or eliminate them or again this is this is what i do in my novel how do we get them to believe that they're embracing what they want to believe and it's not that thing at all we will we will give them exactly what they expect you know i have an end time scenario in the books and and the main character who's who's a watcher says we're going to give you exactly what you're looking for and you're going to love it but it ain't going to be what you think it is and you're never going to know you're going to be worshiping another god and you're never going to know it god will know it but you won't that is awesome you know so again it's the same it's the same strategy same end points but the mechanisms are just different thanks to time thanks to technological advancements thanks to just you know the kind of thing so evil is so much more efficient today i want to be extremely respectful of your time and everyone else's time dr heiser i promised an hour it's 12 o'clock i want to close with one question um and the question is as follows this is also heated debate topic in the various you know groups that follow your work what if any um um religious affiliation would you say you best align with and why so you know what what denomination is probably the best term to use would you say you best aligned with and why wow this is that's actually a difficult question because i i don't i i mean i will freely admit that there's two sides of this coin you know i already know that there's no place i could go that i'm going to be completely comfortable with and there's also no place i could go that would be completely comfortable with me so i have i have dispensed caring about it okay my attitude is that wherever i am or or would go try to do something useful i mean i say it all the time in the podcast i actually mean it's not just like shtick you know we're literally just here to try to do something useful very small list of things i would shoot at you know the things that alter the gospel that alter christology again these core things that are essential you know to to what the gospel is i'll i'll shoot that stuff all day long and and you know would feel good about it you know um but i could i could function in just just about any you know situation and sort of grip my teeth and and not like it on you know in certain respects and then really appreciate it in other respects so that's a long way of saying i i haven't had an affiliation for gosh i i you know i guess the only real the real affiliation i i had that i took seriously like that i would i'm of this was right after i became a believer in high school in my early college years my initial context was a fundamental baptist church and i still have really good friends in in that movement but they also will not have me in to speak and i'm fine with that you know i i don't i don't need you to do that to know that that we can do useful things together or we can be a blessing so i i have just literally dispensed with it all so i i don't really know i mean that's that's the best way i can i can answer that and and that also tells you why you know i'm not checking my brain and at the door but i'm also not asking the church that i attend to well you got to read all my books first and then we'll talk about whether i could be a member come on you know that's that's just ridiculous so i'm looking for people who their hearts in the right place they're trying to do the great commission i mean the great commission is still the thing that ought to orient us that that you know it's not our political involvement it's not really good programs that we have it's not starting schools it's not you know producing curriculum it's not producing music not if these things are not resulting in being more efficient fissures of men they're a waste of time and resources to be honest with you so you know that's just the way i look at it that's the way i look at church it's the way i look at denominations i'll tell you what i miss uh i i miss liturgy i'd like a little liturgy because i don't have it where i'm at now so i kind of missed that um like this past easter you know i've just grown used to coming into church on easter morning and you know it's the it's the time worn thousands of years you know he has risen he has risen indeed i didn't hear that this year it's just not part of this tradition so there are little things like that that it's like i wish i wish i could tweak this or that but at the end of the day you can't i can't tweak that and if i'm gonna obsess over that then then that's gonna be a distraction you know directed against me that will prevent me from doing the next useful thing that that's literally all i'm about just you know it's it's got to be evangelism it's got to be discipleship it has to be useful to the church and useful to the church means not bringing in lots of revenue so we can go build this you know build an ark or something i don't you know we're not doing that we're doing the great commission it's real simple so i'm kind of a victim of my own suicides you know in that regard it i i can remember in grad school right you know when i i determined that i need to write i wasn't calling it unseen realm and had a different title but i remember thinking and i it wasn't you know an appeal to my own vain glory here it's like if you do this you're gonna lose friends you're gonna lose jobs it's gonna be hard to land somewhere it's like are you sure you want to do that you know i couldn't shake it i couldn't shake it people ask me why did i write unseen realm i have a one word answer for that guilt it's that simple because i i knew i'm sitting there my little cubicle as a doctoral student rediscovering my bible again for the first time and being hit with the thought 99 of people in church will never see this stuff they will never have this experience there's just something wrong with that so yep we're going to do that it'll it'll hurt you know it'll hurt but i i'm gonna assume that the lord has some plan here and that will be okay amen simplistic assumption but that that's just kind of where it was awesome thank you dr heiser thank you for your candid um very pastoral answers contrary to how you position yourself this has been awesome i will ask that both michelle and benjamin handle michelle and benjamin handelman sorry email me at info biblehacking.org email me your actual address so that i can send you out the box today both of you are getting bundles of the companion to the book of enoch volume 1 and volume 2. so please email me your address so i can send them immediately this has been awesome dr heiser thank you thank you thank you so much several people in the comments have been surprised to hear that you also have fiction so we dropped links to the portent and the the the facade um down in the chat as well so um is the first one the portent is the sequel and i'm i'm into the third one right now so i would ask you to pause on that and do unseen realm 2 first but that's just me i i actually it's interesting you bring that up because i i the realization has struck me over the last couple weeks that the only the only way unseen realm two is ever gonna get written is if that's pretty much all i'm doing and so i i'm trying to come up with uh in my head it's a two-year plan to sort of finish and shed everything else so that i can start down that path and what i what i what i'm going to do over the next two years i can't tell anybody what it is but it will be it will be a thing that contributes it sort of is a is a good prep or lead up to to jumping into that but yeah if that's going to get written i pretty much have to be writing a hundred percent of the time or well when i say 100 of the time i mean i mean like 20 hours a week 20 25 hours a week for that to happen it's just there's so much material but it's on my radar you know i i tend to look for low-hanging fruit you know what what can i do in the next week in the next month and the next year and just start picking stuff off but i'm i'm getting to the point now where i have to stop doing that i have to i have to focus a little bit more so a lot more but we'll see can't thank you enough dr heiser thank you for the work you're doing in my opinion for the kingdom of god like your work is very genuinely advancing the kingdom you're opening people's eyes to better ways to study the bible better ways to get the full context of it and the full weight of what it was trying to say it's not just about hey yay i can do all things through christ which means i can get me alexis um so thank you thank you thank you thank you and you're laughing but i've heard that preached exactly that way but it is what it is um a little bit of my soul just died yeah you can up left you know to keep going yeah exactly awesome thank you dr heiser thanks audience um this was amazing bible hack remember to share it subscribe like the whole kitten caboodle and go follow the naked bible podcast and dr heiser's other work it's good for your soul it's good to just help you understand the bible better this has been bible hacking we are out

Channel: BibleHacking

Views: 7,077

Keywords: demons, bible, bible study, enoch, jubilees, New Testament, unclean spirit, 1 enoch, deuteronomy 32, divine council worldview, psalms 82, heiser, michael heiser

Id: VfDhagfdzY4

Length: 72min 35sec (4355 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021