What the Bible ACTUALLY Teaches about Demons (w/ Dr. Michael Heiser)

well hey everyone what is up welcome or welcome back to my channel my name is austin this is gospel simplicity a place where we're passionate about the beautiful simplicity and transform the power of the gospel the good news about jesus hey whether you're new or you've been watching for a while you just haven't already really encourage you if you're enjoying these videos go ahead and hit subscribe to become a part of what we're doing here on the channel and if you really want to stay in the loop and not miss a future video be sure to hit the notification bell as well a huge thanks to all of you that have already done this it's such a pleasure to get to be a part of this community for myself and so i hope you guys are enjoying it as well well today i have a really really fun interview for you guys it's with dr michael heiser of the naked bible podcast author of many famous books including the unseen realm and a book on demons which we'll be talking about today and look i know for some of you that just might be like a weird topic but i'd really encourage you check this out if for nothing else to learn about what was it that the ancient israelites were thinking about when they thought about the world in the supernatural realm that that might seem just crazy to you but it's a cross-cultural experience and go on this journey with us to see what it is that they were thinking about and what categories they were using and maybe just maybe what that might have to do with your life well before we get to that interview we'll be there in just a second i have to say a huge thank you to our patreon subscribers and merch buyers who make this channel possible especially to my patrons who give monthly to support this channel thank you all so much because of your generous support not only is this channel sustainable but allows it to grow into exciting and new things like the podcast we were able to start or the live streams were able to do or the church tours or these interviews so 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dr michael heiser dr michael heiser is a graduate of the university of pennsylvania with a masters of arts in ancient history and the university of wisconsin-madison with both masters and a phd in hebrew bible and semitic studies he has a dozen years of classroom teaching experience on the college level and another 10 in distance education he is currently the executive director of awakening school of theology in jacksonville florida he's a prolific writer and podcaster his books include the unseen realm supernatural angels and the book we'll be discussing today demons as well as several others he is the host of the popular podcast the naked bible podcast dr michael heiser thank you so much for being here today yeah thanks for having me well it is my pleasure and i wanted to start by asking how did you get interested in kind of the niche that you're in i mean you're in hebrew bible and semitic studies in general but i will say i don't know many other scholars in that field that have uh frequently asked questions on their website that includes do you believe in aliens and so you you researched some interesting things how did you kind of get interested in these things in the supernatural world view of ancient israel yeah i could make that stranger if i ever updated the faq oh well i i like to to say that i've always been interested in anything old and weird which is true you know i i didn't grow up in any kind of christian context i mean i became a christian when i was in high school and you know that the bible was just sort of a sweet spot you know it was old and there's lots of weird stuff so you know i was fortunate too to have my initial church context was one that took scripture pretty seriously so you know we we got a lot of content as high schoolers and on into college and whatnot and i just you know the early interest that i had in ancient studies have been anything old and strange you know i i was they didn't have ancient aliens then thank thank god but uh you know it was in search of with leonard nimoy you know i'm the kid that's watching that all the time you know and all these sorts of specials and when i when i got interested in scripture when i became a believer and actually started reading scripture it was like it was just the perfect match you know i liked all of it you know i i eventually sort of settled on or sort of got funneled into old testament and semitics because i liked languages i liked dead languages so i was i was good at that so i could have done you know new testament as well but i things like hebrew and egyptian and you know uberridic and arabic they just seemed a little cooler you know than greek so that was one thing that sort of pulled me and i i liked the idea of having you know to learn these things and being able to do translation work but i also felt that for the believer the old testament was the place where there were more problems so i i that's really what led me to land there it's like i felt like i could be of the most use you know if i went this route as opposed to some other route as far as you know supernatural beings though i had no interest in that other than just the general generic weird stuff like well that that's weird but like i never had a thought that well i'm going to make this my academic specialty you know that that never occurred to me until uh the episode that i write about in unseen realm you know that that was provoked by providence that you know directed directed my path at that point but but this is this is not an exaggeration this is absolutely true what i'm going to say next that i went through three years of bible college two more years of christian undergrad in biblical studies two or three years in seminary um and i had two master's degrees i won't count the university stuff we'll just count the christian bible college and seminary stuff i had one clock hour not credit hour clock hour 60 minutes of instruction on angels and demons in other words nobody cared nobody was interested in it and so when that happens to you you get the impression unfortunately and falsely that this can't be very important so you know maybe if i was a catholic and a priest you know i'd talk about exorcisms you know but but here here in the evangelical protestant world nobody gives a rip you know about this so that was that was it you know i never gave it a second thought again until somebody essentially forced me to read psalm 82 in hebrew and the rest is sort of history and that that provocation led to me having to find an answer for psalm 82 which led to it becoming a focal point of my dissertation which led me down all sorts of other paths you know judaism's two powers in heaven like oh i really used to teach that there was a godhead judaism used to teach that yep you know things like the deuteronomy 32 world view you know where does daniel get his theology you know we're all familiar with daniel's prince of persia prince of greece oh that's cool supernatural beings that have impact and influence over geopolitical empires ooh that's neat but nobody ever asks where daniel gets it i got such an obvious question now but i never thought to ask you like it just popped into his head it was just a throwaway line remember that's about three minutes of my 60 you know my 60 minute exposure you know to anything in the supernatural world so when you start to to see these things it provoked you know a watershed sort of moment for me that i had to come to grips with am i going to read the bible the way an ancient person you know read it and these are the people god write it right here the night and they were predisposed to embrace the reality of a supernatural world where i was a product of the enlightenment am i gonna am i gonna essentially take the red pill here you know and pursue this and try to read scripture like they did and begin to acknowledge these things are in the text or am i just going to go in my merry way and you know do what i've been doing you know up to that i was i was a doctoral student you know why do i want to reinvent the wheel during my phd that just sounded crazy but i couldn't let it go and so it it has now become just again the touch point for basically everything and and people you know they'll read the books they'll listen to the podcast they'll listen to interviews like this where we get into stuff that we think we know about the spiritual world the bible either doesn't say it or it's it's completely misunderstood or you're told not to see it you know as and then you get into the stuff that's actually there and it blows people's minds and i have to look at them and just say look i'm not doing anything magical here there's no secret sauce you know it's just sometimes the text actually means what it says you know and you don't need to to explain it away because it's not palatable to somebody who thinks like a modern you know sometimes just just that much honesty is all that's needed to make sense of this thing you know called the bible it's supposed to make sense but it you know it it all the dots will connect if you read it the way you know from the perspective of the writers these are the people god picked when they're writing to people who live at the same time they're not us okay they're just not us so if you're willing to do that yeah it'll it'll start to have its own coherence and log and and the data points will start to line up and connect and you'll start to build the matrix and the mosaic and whatever metaphor is useful here and and i can do that for you but it you know it it's a simple adjustment but it's it's very profound in its implications and so now what i'm one of these people again since i've seen it now for 15 20 years almost 20 years i can't unsee it you know i they're not just random data points anymore i i can see how things connect you know all over the place in scripture and and the intelligence behind it and a lot of that is deeply involved with supernatural beings in the supernatural world um you know so that that's how i sort of got sucked into the vortex you know and this has sort of defined me now and i'm i'm happily unrepentant you know that i that i took the red pill because it opened to me as a doctoral student all over again you know it which is a wonderful experience a lot a lot of people in the christian world have a lot of data points and they have a good bit of bible under the belt but they have no framework for it they have no place no means by which to connect the dots you know they filter it through creeds and traditions and whatnot and those things aren't bad but but they're not they're not the worldview or the writer and they're not a replacement for scripture they're they're they're a distillation a small list of points that you get you know from scripture so if you really if you have the nagging sense that there must be more to the bible than you know the points in the westminster confession or jesus is your cosmic life coach or something like that well your intuition is correct there's a lot more to it but you're never going to get there unless you again are willing to to put all that aside and try to read it with the predisposition of an ancient person and also try to get i'll use an academic term here try to to get that ancient person's cognitive environment into your head because once you do that you will see things from a completely different perspective and it'll lead you know your theology isn't going to you know fundamentally change like you know we thought the gospel was a and now it's b and you know it's nothing like that it's just there's a there's a fullness and a richness to it and a logic to it that enables you to understand the breadth of scripture not not just a few passages that helps make sense of the whole thing and you can see how how the parts contribute to the major point of the story which is salvation history and jesus and whatnot but it's all there for a reason and it makes sense on its own terms and so if you really want to know and really understand why your doctrine is what it is where it comes from how it's framed you know before we ever meet jesus well then you need to do this yeah well thank you so much for that and i think i mean clearly you mentioned you know you only had an hour of this experience in your undergrad and it gives you this or not just your undergrad including graduate work gives you the sense that's not that important but clearly it's resonating with tons of people your work has been immensely popular and i think people listening to all of that are going to be thinking if they're not familiar with what you've done like okay like let's see this in action and so i'm excited to kind of dive into it a little bit and show them some of these connections specifically on this topic of demons which we'll be talking about which again you wrote a book on with lexa press and you mentioned just from the beginning of the book you kind of put your cards on the table and you say that you think that we largely have pretty serious misunderstandings of what the bible actually teaches about demons and one of the sources you point to for this is church tradition now my audience is very diverse and some of them come from catholic orthodox protestant backgrounds it's kind of across the spectrum and they'll have different relationships to church tradition but i'd be curious just what you would say to people listening that might be wary like how did the church get this wrong or like how how can we what makes us think that the church went off the rails and perhaps where did they go off the rails here well hey everyone we will get right back to the interview but first i wanted to thank another sponsor today and that is faithful counseling i am so excited to be partnering with faithful counseling they are an organization that exists to help you get the help that you need you know one of the first youtube videos i ever made was titled you can 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you can find the link in my description i want to do my part as i said to end the stigma i hope that you will as well let's help people get the help they need to be on the path towards healing and hope so go to faithfulcounseling.com gospel simplicity yeah i mean and it's not that the church tradition gets everything wrong it doesn't but when it comes to demonology a lot of they're sort of playing without a net and what i mean by that is they your first couple of generations people like irenaeus you know your patristic fathers tertullian justin martyr these guys were were closer to you know the first century obviously than you know even even somebody like augustin two three hundred years later had a sense for the context of a lot of things that go on in the new testament and they had they were they were more i think um it's fair to say they were more exposed to the literature of what we call second temple period of judaism inter-testamental period judaism which is basically the serious jewish community that considers the hebrew bible the word of god they're doing theology with the hebrew bible they're trying to connect the dots just like we do they look at their old testament look at all this stuff what does it mean how does it go together that's what they're trying to do but you know the writers in the first century who are you know producing the new testament they were familiar with a lot of that material and very few christians that emerge in the next couple centuries were they're just a handful so once you start to lose your connection to the primary contexts and once you're unable to to read very count the number of church fathers who could read hebrew on one hand i mean they're they're either greek or latin you know augustine was a latinist he could handle greek and confess to hating it you know you couldn't do anything in hebrew you know this once you start losing the language facility and you're further removed from the context which means you're further removed from the discussion about you know your old testament in its own context you're you're kind of freewheeling points you know you're you're guessing you know at certain things or you're you're coming up with interpretation and answers for certain passages and this isn't a bad thing but that serve the purposes at hand i mean church tradition is largely formed because of of the material that that you know christian thinkers and important you know scholars and pastoral figures what they write and what they write is is largely in response to issues they have to address in their own day you know they there's a lot of pressure you know theologically to hammer this or that point out there's a lot of other opinions so they have they enter into debates and they have discussions so they're what they're trying to do theologically is a little bit different you know than what we might do or somebody else before them might have done um and so they they go off on these trajectories and they they they reach points that help them win a debate in one area and then they become dogma okay and and so you can't depart from this now now you you gotta you gotta use what you have here and so they start to build the theological picture in this manner and again it's not like everything they say is wrong i mean they get they get lots of stuff right on the head you know they they do a good job but when it comes to you know certain things that really require a careful analysis of the hebrew text because this all starts in the old testament which has the ancient near east as its own context when when you start losing the ability to interact with that material well you're going to make mistakes you're going to you're going to have problems you're going to come up with positions that really don't fit you know they might look like they fit here in this one passage but what about the four other passages that dip into that one you know how do what do we do now so it creates gaps and it creates holes in the theological picture and so that that's that's what i'm sort of alerting people to if you want to you know if you want to construct biblical theology by definition you don't do that from church tradition you do that from exegesis of the biblical texts understood in context and so sometimes the church fathers are able to do that really efficiently other times not so much and there there are you know in this one let me just give you your audience an example it's very common i don't know about what what eastern orthodoxy's position on this is but catholic and protestant you know two-thirds of the rest you know we'll teach something like where do demons come from oh the the demons you know we get demons from fallen angels that rebelled or fell with satan sometime prior to the temptation of adam and eve you know sometime prior to what we know as the fall and that's taught as doctrine there isn't a single verse in the bible that says that there's there isn't a single story that sketches that out zero okay you know and this third of the angels thing there's no passage that even describes the angels in thirds until you get to revelation 12 where there's a war in heaven over the birth of the messiah okay well that has nothing to do with pre-fall stuff i mean this is a good example of something that's taught as doctrine that can't be found in scripture now if you ask the second temple jew where demons come from oh they had an answer for that and they had an answer that that took to christians would sound completely bizarre but it's all over inter-testamental writing and the data points for it can be found in the old testament and their answer was demons are the disembodied spirits of dead nephilim dead giant clans that extend from genesis 6 1-4 that tells you right away they're taking the sons of god as supernatural beings this is a supernatural transgression i mean this is this is a unified there are very few things in ancient biblical material where everybody has the same view this is one of them i mean second temple judaism this is where demons come from period you know and the church today doesn't teach anything like this and it isn't hard to demonstrate which one of the two views has its roots in the old testament okay that's that's easy and i do that in you know in the book but this is these are sort of illustrative points of of how there's this disconnect between you know established christian theology and what you'll actually find you know in in contemporary and primary source texts that go all the way back in the old testament and even earlier in some cases wow well thank you for that i think that's that's a really helpful example that you give there and if people want to dive into that more i definitely recommend uh check out your book on that and i'll recommend that throughout but i i want to anticipate one uh maybe comment that people might have in mind specifically from uh maybe catholic orthodox traditions when you mention the church fathers and the hebrew bible now it's true very few of them could read hebrew but they could read greek and the septuagint was around and you addressed this a little bit in your book maybe not in the exact context but how this the transition from the hebrew bible to the septuagint kind of resulted in a loss of some of these things or a lack of clarity now that that could be a long conversation but is there is there something you could point to just if people are like well yeah but they could read it in greek and wasn't that good enough yeah it's this is an important part of the discussion actually in the first chapter of the demon's book i go into the terminology for supernatural beings in the old testament and there's a lot of variety okay and i talk about okay there's three buckets here you know one is you get terms that describe what a supernatural being is you know ontologically this these this is terms like rook spirits elohim is actually one of these terms um you know it tells you what a thing is and then the second bucket is it tells you where where that thing ranks because there's rank and hierarchy sons of god is actually a hierarchical term drawn from the royal court of the ancient near east and then the third bucket is job descriptions what these what supernatural beings do what their role is and angel is actually one of these it's a messenger it's all it means both in hebrew and greek so you've got a wide range of terminology what happens is the old testament does get translated into greek and the greek translators in many cases not all because the septuagint was like any other good translation it's a committee translation so it's more than one hand so you're going to have guys that try to strike very word word for word you know literal equivalence and preserves a lot of the nuance and of old testament terminology but then you get other guys it's like oh it's a supernatural being we'll call that a a dimon okay because daimong again in between the testaments wasn't necessarily and and you know in earlier greek we get our word demon from it but originally it was a neutral term daimon was just any supernatural being it could be a god it could be a ghost it could be you know some low high ranking good bad it didn't matter it was it was the generic term like we would look at you know the population of the world and say human well okay well that that's right but gosh there's a lot of new ones thing that we really need you know beyond that so they would they they opted for daimong and so you get things called demons you know in an english tran are called demons in hebrew so you gotta you got a significant not only a disconnect but but kind of a a meaning or vocabulary change where where all this nuances sort of gets funneled into and then eventually the daimong become the bad guys and then the angels become the good guys so we actually get all this vocabulary sponsored funneled into two terms and then the new testament inherits a lot of that but they're you know the septuagint is is uneven i mean i can you get septuagint of psalm 82 for instance it says sons of god it doesn't say dibone or daemonion or angoloy it says sons of god and there's a lot of these things so in the in the second chapter the book i go through and show you know how this funneling occurred and where the outliers are and this sort of thing but but the church inherits that for exactly the reason that you said that the church widely could read greek and so that's what they went with but their their theology then is based on a translation that may or may not be a really precise render and that affects again the way they articulate and expound and then solidify or codify tradition as well so you actually have two sources for where christian theology comes out that that largely exclude it's going to sound bizarre but that largely exclude the hebrew bible in doing so you know three quarters of our bible is this thing you know we know as the human violence so it you know some of it is just a factor of translation there's nothing sinister going on here there's no conspiracy or agenda it's just this is the way things happen you know it's it's boots on the ground this is just how things are uh and so if if you want to again a more precise understanding like if you brought an old testament israelite into the first century and started talking about you know endeavor and ketam you know from psalm 91 to that israelite these are these are foreign gods these these are gods that come from the dispersion of babel so the first century guy they're demons you know what's that you know we don't even have a word for demon in hebrew that that equates to what you think of it like the demon in the gospels there are two if people you know look up in the concordance they're going to find in english translations the word demon two times in the old testament it's a translation of shadeem which as i discussed is actually a territorial entity term and it makes wonderful sense in deuteronomy 32 17 because again these are the fallen gods of the deuteronomy 32 world view the babel you know disruption of the battle babel rebellion that where the sons of god are put over the nations and then they become corrupt and adversaries to yahweh this is the old where the old testament explains why the other nations have pantheons where they get their gods it's a result of a judgment of babel again we're not taught any of this but the israelite knows this stuff you know but if you'd have a conversation with a first century person it's like i don't quite know what you're talking about what that term what do you mean by it like what is that they wouldn't really quite know how to do you know what to do with it and if the old testament guy starts talking about other gods you know the chances are that the later christian would think you mean other gods like where are you getting that vocabulary you know they would end up talking past each other because of again the translation issue and then how that works its way and gets codified in tradition yeah you know i think for people out there who maybe this is the first time they're coming across all of this and granted their minds probably blown at this point but but i what i want them to hear that you've mentioned several times is this is all about reading the text in its context and i think as christians of various stripes we all we're all for that and we might do it differently and we might you know emphasize different things but part of reading the text yeah but part of reading the text in context is reading it in light of the ancient worldview how would this original audience have read this and received this and i i get the sense of that being kind of at the core of what you're doing so i just want to say you know for those that are maybe saying this this sounds a little strange that that's what we're working at and i think that's a common goal that we can work to even if you're a little scandalized and you know why it sounds strange because the biblical writers weren't you yeah and you're not them okay the way they think about the world is dramatically different than the way post-enlightenment you know catholic or evangelical or charismatic or non-terror anything post-biblical okay that's that's a different cognitive environment especially in modernity than than they had just outside the demonic how many times have you read through you know the the pentateuch okay leviticus i mean and i'll assume people actually read liberty because instead of just skipping it okay but you get all these weird laws you know like like what's up with why why is you know a couple who after they have sex they're they're unclean why is it a woman is unclean after she has a child you know like this concept of uncleanness and if if you read in these laws uncleanness is associated with the loss of blood and the loss of you know semen okay for the man what what this isn't that i mean what's wrong with him are you saying that's a sin or something no the idea was that blood and semen this is these are life forces this is where life comes from again this is an ancient person that you know they know what they know by experience okay if you if you go out to battle and you get your arm cut off or something and you bleed enough you're gonna die so if you lose enough of that red stuff you're dead so that must have something to do with the fact that you're a living being okay so they know that much they know where babies come from okay and so the idea was that the light where do you get the life force you get it from the life giver that would be god and so if you if you lose the life force then that must mean that you're you're sort of going down the trajectory toward death okay now we don't like that that's bad we want to we want to be whole and complete we want to be we want to conform to the order that god created him and be full of the life force that he gave and so we're not fit anymore to be in his presence in sacred space we haven't done anything morally wrong but we're not whole and so we need to wait a certain number of days and do do a certain procedure because the procedure will teach you about the difference between you and god between the space where you live and he lives it's it's designed to teach these to teach these concepts that reflect a certain way of looking at the world and our place in it and god's place and reinforce these ideas the whole system has its own internal logic that would never occur to us because we're you know again we're from the modern world of science okay we're technological we're science driven we don't think about the world in these terms and so when we go to read these texts we just think they're totally bizarre and totally random there's nothing to learn here well actually there's a lot to learn here conceptually theologically if you contract with with their thought patterns and their thought processes there's a lot to learn here they can they can teach us some really good things some very you know sound concepts in our relationship with god but we never we never really quite know what questions to ask or even in some cases it's sad to say we never even bother asking [Music] why would they think that way they're just they're weird or or we just you know we say things like well it must be about jesus we'll find jesus somewhere in this verse no we don't have to think about it anymore you know that's just laziness okay there is it's there for a reason it does contribute something to the fuller you know theological picture but it takes work to try to think like they did and we're fortunate and i was especially fortunate being at logos for so many years that we live at a time now where there's so much data that is accessible to us the problem isn't that we don't have enough data to learn how to think like an israelite or think like you know a first century jew the problem is there's so much of it you know how do you wade through all this to you know to to be able to do it in the time that you have you know we we have so much material that can help us think like the biblical writers did and therefore be able to understand what they were trying to communicate and how it communicates to the things that are more obvious okay you know the core items of the faith how the whole thing you know is has a design to it it makes sense that we we can do this it's just you gotta you gotta sort of take the leap you gotta have to see the value uh in in uh being able to read scripture on its own terms in its own context there's a lot of payoff to it in any number of ways ethics theology just principles for life and there's a there's a lot of things like that yeah and i think what this will do as well is like and you mention this in your own story it will kind of bring bible reading to life in a new way as you begin to investigate these things that you thought you knew or maybe like let's be honest with leviticus like you said we're gonna you made the assumption people read it that might be a bold assumption for a lot of people but maybe now when they're equipped with this way of thinking of this you know i got this uh from tim mackey who i'm sure he got it from someone else uh but talking about you know it's a cross-cultural experience and we have a category for that at least today and so if we think of the bible like that which is not only cross-cultural but cross-temporal in like 2 000 years then we can begin to say hey let's read this on their terms and then it begins to show us new things and i think that's going to be exciting for people and one thing that i think might be really interesting for people from your book on demons is you talk a little bit about satan in the book or some prefer the satan which maybe you can talk about a little bit but this is another area you mentioned demons in the fall as one thing that's a common misconception but when you talk about satan in the book i imagine it's another thing that a lot of people might go whoa that is not what i had in mind when i think of what does the bible teach about this figure could you speak a little bit to that yeah and let me preface it by saying that this is actually an important question because you know i've i've actually i've actually run into people that you know christians that you know they went off to college they have to take a religion as lit class or something or they're in a philosophy class and this is actually one of the things that i've i have had people relay to me that their professors almost couldn't wait to tell them just so that they could undermine and destroy their faith okay and and it goes like this so you know we're we're taught to think a certain way about satan capital s satan and when we get to passages like job the first two chapters of job job one and two and zechariah 3 is another one where we we have capital s satan and he comes to a meeting in the sons of god and he gets into this tit for tat with god and job has to suffer because of it and all that well those professors love to point out that you know what have you ever noticed you know those of you out there in my classroom that read this silly thing called the bible have you ever noticed that when you read the story of the serpent in genesis 3 he's never called satan is he no he's not you can go check that okay well and then you think that that the guy from genesis 3 the serpent now is in job one and two you think that's you think those are the two the same two dudes but they're not and you say well how do you know and then he'll he'll start whipping a hebrew at you you'll say and this is all true you know hebrew is like english it does not tolerate a definite article the word the before a proper personal name and i'm not the mic just sounds ridiculous okay we don't do that in english neither does hebrew so if you have ha which is the hebrew definite article in front of satan that tells you by definition it's not capital s satan it's not a proper personal name and guess what every time satan occurs in job one and two and zechariah three it has the article and your professor can show you that he can run a search you know because now he he's man i got you in the crosshairs now i'm gonna destroy your faith here what have we got five minutes left you know so and and all of that is correct we have hasatan everywhere it's not a proper personal name this isn't the devil of genesis 3 and in fact he's not even called devil there either it's the serpent and he's never called satan he's never called the devil so what are you going to do with that your church your sunday school teachers your parents they didn't tell you this they didn't want you to know you know they'll use this to undermine you know people's confidence so i i spent a good deal of time talking about this it's actually kind of a it's a common but dumb trajectory let me be so bold as to call it dumb all right what it's asking you to believe is that your theology and the bible's theology about an original rebel in eden depends on which terms we call that rebel why why why does it who cares if we have the story okay there's there's a serpent there serpents don't talk snakes don't talk everywhere else in the ancient near east egypt mesopotamia when animals talk what do the readers know well the gods must be up to something because animals don't talk well the israelites aren't the you know the ancient idiots of the world okay they know the same thing so they know that there's something supernatural going on in here and it ain't good because this character this serpent whether the supernatural being comes in the form of a serpent or however it works is trying to get them to disobey god that's not good okay so we have we have a supernatural conflict and it's going to lead to an earthly rebellion you know the supernatural being is obviously not doing what god wants he's opposing what god's will is for these two humans and you got a mess real early but you have a rebellion well who cares if in genesis 3 the rebel is called satan he might get called satan later and that's in fact what happens as in the inner testamental period as as again jewish writers are thinking about what do we do with this material you know how do we understand it they begin to come up with all sorts of names for the original rebel they don't like it so they call him lots of stuff satan is one mastama is another belial the worthless one is another diablos okay that's where you get devil in greek all of these terms fit the devil is the the liar you know the slanderer they come up with lots of terminology that reflect the character of this rebel if the shoe fits wear it and that doesn't answer the question of what what's the satan in job one and two okay when it comes to that what you have is you don't have a proper personal name you have a title you have a role it's a role term it means the adversary the challenger the inspector the prosecutor you know things like this and you can actually see look at the conversation he shows up for the meeting god says hey where you been and the satan says running to and fro throughout the whole earth you know and this is actually one of one of one of the tasks of certain members of the heavenly host it's actually tied into what we call the the heavenly books motif in in scripture book of life is the one we know but there's like five or six other books heavenly books you know and the lesson to be drawn is not that god is a bad memory or he has alzheimer's or something the lesson to be gained is that nothing is ever overlooked nothing it's all taken down it's all recorded it's all going to be brought back at some point that's what you're supposed to learn from it and so god says where you been and he even if he listen you know the time tells him and god says okay have you have you checked out job that dude's awesome i love i love that guy you know he's righteous he's blameless and and here's where the lines crossed the the reporter the prosecutor the inspector you know the snitch says to god yeah yeah i've seen him but you know what if you took away everything he had and you heard him he would curse you to your face now we have a problem because god has a choice to me god could just look at him i don't know if any of your audience has ever seen time bandits but this is always the thing that pops into my head or the evil one of the movie you know one of his henchmen gets up and he and he looks at him and he says don't ever talk to me like that again it blows him to bits you know but you know god can do that god can just destroy this the satan but you know what happens if he does that the question is left unanswered what question is god correct about job is god telling us the truth is god wrong see that the question prompts an uncertainty about god's ambitions and his integrity and so god doesn't blow in the bits he says okay here's what we're gonna do you can do anything you want to job except for killing it and the reason that that condition's there is so that you can't come back later and say oh well he'd have broken he'd have broken down i'd have been right if he'd just let me do this but he died okay no you can do anything you want anything you want and we'll see who's right and now job doesn't know any of this you know the reader we know the whole box we know why job is suffering job doesn't know why he's suffering because he is righteous you know and the whole book is about again sometimes there's there's supernatural conflict that leads to human suffering we don't really know what the context is but there's there's a reality there and a reality on earth they intersect this is the this is what i do in unseen realm i show from genesis to revelation how how both both sides the unseen world and our world intersect intentionally in god's whole plan what god wants how it's ruined how god gets it back the whole thing and so this is what job is really about you know one of one of god's supernatural employees gets up at it and must be dealt with but unfortunately it's a job's expense but that figure is not the devil of genesis 3. he's not he's not great like you you know he's not the guy you want babysitting your kids okay but he's not this guy and so you know the people who know hebrew they they know this because we don't have the definite article before a proper personal name and so jews who want to upset christians will often bring this up and you guys you know you're you know this is three quarters of your bible you don't even understand it your christian guys are making up your doctrine or his church father guys didn't know what they were doing they're just making stuff up and you know all that stuff but maybe they made stuff up about jesus and they didn't tell you that either you know this becomes fodder to to you know christians in their faith and it's totally unnecessary you know if the shoe fits if the vocabulary fits later good good you don't need to rewrite the bible for that it's just a new term that applies to this rebel back in genesis 3 and we understand what's going on in job you know one and two there's no conflict here they're two different things so big deal you know but again the average undergrad in a philosophy classroom not able to do that they're not able to because they haven't read the primary text and whatnot so i get into the stuff like this you know in the book as well because when when the church doesn't interpret passages like job one and two in their contexts they do make believers vulnerable to attack and criticism like this that is completely unnecessary and completely incoherent but it's still effective because they don't really have a defense against it yeah i'm glad you were able to show because i can imagine for some people being like what's the big deal but then seeing like this this can be a real thing for people one i mean it's the bible so it matters what we believe it's a lot dumber it's a lot dumber in pop culture today i mean you know now you get stuff like you know ancient aliens in its 16th season or whatever you know just you know trying to to say things like you know that the plurals in genesis 1 let us create humankind in our image well those are really aliens because we've got this sumerian text over here that has the anunnaki creating humans even though it doesn't there that text actually doesn't exist the anunnaki are onlookers they never participate in creation but of course they're not going to tell you that on the show they're going to try to to say we we have proof of ancient aliens and oh this is what the bible really talks about you you're just you know the church it tells you this it just gets goofy but but because people aren't acquainted with their own scriptures and they're not acquainted with again the world in which those scriptures operate mesopotamian material they're just sitting ducks they're sitting ducks to some of the dumbest ideas you know you'd ever hear you know i get emails maybe not every week but every two weeks you know people are struggling with their faith because of something they saw on the history channel or ancient aliens or you know this newsweek magazine of course now it's easter so they got to truck out all these things on the impulse shelf it's just a bunch of garbage you know it's every year they do it so you know people struggling with their faith and and i don't i mean i never say this at least an email but it's like this is the dumbest reason to leave the face the faith that i've ever heard i mean if you want a good one i can like i could do better you know but like they're they're people are really in pain and they they they're in conflict over the evil in the world i mean i get that you know i don't i wouldn't say those are good reasons to leave the faith either but but they're understandable because they're they do represent a real genuine struggle this cartoon stuff over in the ancient aliens you got to be kidding me but but they're not kidding me this is this is why i've been in the fringe community for almost 20 years it's just it's just the same old recycled nonsense but but we don't it's very sad that we don't equip christians in our own churches to be able to think better about primary sources just asking intelligent questions critical thinking bible's part of that mix to be able to hear something claimed on the history channel and just you know flick it away for what it is it's like that the dumbest stuff troubles people completely unnecessarily and and that's really what eric i think you can tell it irritates me but you know if there's anything that that floats my boat you know i i want people to read scripture in its own contexts you know its own worldview cognitive environment its own literary conventions the biblical writers are very intelligent in what they do you know how they write i mean god picked all these people from a specific time and place and environment and the culture he knew what he was getting you know and and what he wants them to do they're perfectly capable of doing they do a great job of it but it's produced on their own terms in their in their own context and a lot of that disconnects with us because we're just not them and if we don't if we don't learn scripture better then we are vulnerable to stupid stuff we are vulnerable to misinterpretation we are vulnerable to poor translation you know for the life of me i don't understand well i i do say this in public so i'll say it here i i view my ministry if i can call it a ministry not as trying to convince christians to be interested in their bible i'm gonna let somebody else do that and it's a pathetic shame that there are people who have to do that to get a christian interested in something that they call god's word i view my ministry as aimed at people who already are interested and they sense that they're missing something they want to know they don't have to be convinced you know to want to know they already want to know okay that's the sweet spot and again there's nothing secret and mysterious about it i don't do magic it's just you have to get the israelite in your head you've got to get the first century jew in your head and commit yourself to reading in context and the scriptures will open up to you in amazing ways that you have to be able to process it and just take it for what it is yeah what a what a great thing and i love your comments there about it what a shame it is that we have to convince people that to read their bible but i'm grateful for the people that are engaged in that work and i'm really grateful for your voice and the space that you're in because what i really appreciate is you're willing to talk about the weirdness of the bible but you're not going down these crazy rabbit trails and i think for many people they take an inch on this and then they you know they go a mile and it's ancient aliens and they're having those troubles but if you have time for one closing question and if not let me know but i would awesome um i would love to know so for some people they're in danger of that they they take this inch and they go a mile but i think for a lot of other people they're they're able to see these things and be interested on them in like a literary or sociological anthropological history of religions level it's like okay this is interesting this is what these people thought but they struggle to really make sense of these things in our post-enlightenment context to have any meaningful categories for angels and demons and what that's supposed to mean for their life so to what ex so how should we take these things seriously and to what extent do we need to appropriate these things into our modern lives in other words do we need to become ancient israelites and act like the enlightenment didn't happen what what are we to do next in light of all that you've uh kind of talked about it's it's actually a yes and a no um and what i mean by that is if people want to go up and get get this probably in a more comprehensible way at least i hope if they go to my website drmsh.com and hit the faq it's this is the last question in the faq so i'm gonna tap it you know into that here in my head there are i think the the no part is no we don't we don't need to be thinking like like israelites when their observations about the natural world okay are completely unscientific all right there's a difference between propositions truth propositions that we are told by scripture to believe and the means by which those propositions are communicated or articulated you know going back to the to the blood and the seem in the life force thing again that's a that's a non-scientific or a pre-scientific worldview but it's serviceable to communicate certain truth propositions you say well isn't that cheating like no it's not because in the in the creation mandate we're told that the reason god even put humans here was to be his imagers and their task was to subdue the earth okay they didn't need to do that in eden the description is actually different but they need to to bring the rest of the world in conformity with the you know the perfection or near perfection of eden and so the the idea was that you're to to accomplish the commands of genesis 1 28 to be fruitful multiply subdue the earth you know go out there and do list of that to to civilize it you're going to need help so have kids okay and and to be able to do this you're going to have to come to understand the natural world as it's created the science is a theologically virtuous thing okay by definition god wanted humans he shares his his attributes with them creativity intelligence you know problem solving all these things so that they're equipped for the task of being him on on the planet of imaging him and it means that their knowledge is going to progress and develop they're gonna they're gonna find out what makes the world tick and that's a good thing it's what god wants to accomplish the ends to which he's put us here and so god already knows this he already knows that as human life progresses and goes on the way humans look at life and everything the natural world is going to be variable and changeable it's going to develop and so he's not going to tie troop propositions to that stuff because that stuff constantly changes i mean god is a little more intelligent than that let's give him some credit for it so when it comes to the natural world things that we can test with the tools of science and our five senses which are wrapped up in the tools of science and all this stuff that stuff we would expect to leave the israelite behind just out of the gate by definition and god expects it as well now here's where it breaks down that that's the no part we don't need to follow them here's the yes part when it comes to what scripture tells us about the supernatural world by definition those things cannot be tested with the tools of science they cannot be evaluated using our five senses which again are tied to the tools of science we don't we don't have any means by which to judge those things with the tools given us because we're not of that world that is other than we are and so we have no basis other than to test the truth propositions given to us in revelation okay in in these areas so we can't test these things with the tools of science the only thing we can do is test them for their coherence so this is where humility comes in at the end of the day all of these things and all the things scripture says about the supernatural world extend from one proposition and that is there is a god okay if there's a god and and that god is we're talking about bible here and that god is what the bible says he is well then he doesn't act randomly he ha things that he does he does with a purpose he's intelligent we had all these basic attributes so on what basis would we deny that god could create other spiritual beings can't evaluate that with the tools of science would it make sense given you know his you know his authority his powers sure well and if he made them could he give them creative ability like we have like why couldn't he again these these are truth propositions that can be probed philosophically what makes sense all of these things the whole panoply of the heavenly host and their jobs and who they are and what they where they rank and all these things that scripture tells us about it they all make sense if there is a god like the god of the bible because they're all derivative from that one proposition so you know and i realized that that doesn't comfort some people because again it requires some humility you know when people ask me well how does this work how does that work i don't know i'm not a deity how would i know you know i i don't know i mean that's the honest answer but but here's the flip side of that honest coin you know can i ask you the same question christian about the virgin birth about the trinity about the deity of christ is the holy spirit really a person i mean all these things that we accept theologically without getting into the weird stuff guess what they're only testable by the same means as the other stuff and they come from the same source so on what basis christian are you going to say well i accept as intellectually okay this you know category a theological stuff but category b freaks me out and i'm not buying that if they both come from the same source and they're both only testable in the same way you got a problem okay you have a coherence problem you are selectively supernatural and the honest answer i'll answer my own question too is you don't have a basis for making that call all you've got is i like this pile and i don't like that one this pile makes me feel you know really if you think this pile makes you feel okay you know what the re the brutal reality is that nothing that you hold dear in your christian faith the concept of salvation that can't be tested with science okay nothing you hold dear conforms to an enlightenment worldview that excludes god nothing that is the brutal truth so it is very inconsistent for you to embrace this pile and not that pile because the very things that you think undermine this pile can be used to undermine that one all it takes is an intelligent enterprising atheist to realize this and they're you know there are some of those out there okay you know but all they're capable of is is arguing you back to the single proposition was their god or not and that proposition has done quite well okay that's done quite well for millennia it does quite well today thousands maybe tens of thousands of phds and hard sciences talk at the same universities published in the same journals they had the same advisors you know they they write and use the same textbooks as as the atheist you know it's not a question of intellect okay it just isn't it's not this one's smart and this one's dumb it's just that there are tens of thousands of people mr atheists that know all your arguments and know them well because they have they went to the same places and had the same professors okay they know all the arguments just as well as you do and you know what they don't find them persuasive at all why is that you got two choices either somehow you single person you are smarter than everyone else in the conversation or b those christians are just lying they really aren't believers they're just lying they're just lying to themselves really where's the empirical research for that show me the data it's a nice way of saying you got nothing because there is no data like that there are no data you know it it's really a coherence test on the supernatural the spiritual world side you test these things philosophically you know with with logic the tools of sound thinking but in the other side we can test things with the tools of science so we don't need to follow the israelite and the first century jew in the areas where god expects us to develop and grow it would be abnormal if we didn't both in his eyes and our own but where we are dependent on the knowledge god gives us through revelation we can't do that we have to accept it and the only thing that we can do is prove it for its coherence so it's a yes and enough whether we accept it or not whether it really is real life or not sometimes we are sometimes we're not it just depends which category these things fall into that's really helpful and i hope people find that as helpful as i did and thank you so much for your time today i think there's going to be a lot for people to go back and listen through and really do some interesting and at times hard questions i think especially with that last one you bring up kind of the point that many of us might be kind of functionally like these deists like we say we believe in god but we have no space for the supernatural you know i don't want people to stay there but but i it's a it's an understandable intellectual struggle i mean i i had to go through it myself you know but am i going to presume that there are things that only god can tell me as opposed to things that i'm just smart enough to learn through some other means you know so again there's there's just this humility factor that that's really hard for people who grow up in a in a technological society you know we just tend to reflexively think that we have the answers for everything and the reality is no we actually don't you know and sometimes we're just on a path and other times like we got no idea you know this is it's it's a guess and it's to sort of get to that point i think is just mentally healthy you know to sort of surrender your your own omniscience that's really what it comes down to come to grips with the fact that you're not omniscient your culture isn't domination and nobody in the culture is our mission either and this is how we have to approach these things and do the best we can but faith does not operate like it's an antagonist to reason again just if you're testing faith claims supernatural worldview stuff with the tools of logic and good thinking that's not irrational that's the rational thing to do but again at the end of the day you it's gonna it's gonna bring you to the point where you realize that i can't there's there's a barrier here i have to surrender my own either what i thought was my own omniscience for my hunger to be on a mission i'm never gonna get there yeah let it go and and and you gotta realize that you know life operates this way even in science you know science can only take you so far and then and then we have we have pioneers that are brave enough to guess or just to wing it they go on faith and it works but they don't necessarily know why but there it is you know and and that life is just like that in a lot of ways yeah well thank you so much i love that surrendering your omniscience i think that's a beautiful way of putting it and once again thank you so much for your time today this has been a fantastic discussion i have thoroughly enjoyed it and i'm sure there's people out there that have enjoyed it and are thinking man i want to learn more about this guy so could you close us by just letting us know where people can find uh more of your work sure the the nerve center is drmsh.com that's dr as in doctor and then my initials um you can find basically anything i'm into on that website whether it's academic stuff you know fringe you know community stuff like you know the podcaster already mentioned nakedbiblepodcast.com um i have a three two one that's sort of aimed at again the pop culture fringy kind of you know topics but the goal is still the same let's think better about primary sources and try to think you know just better in general about you know some question so i i you know the the the pop culture fringy side is largely you know funneled in that direction but drmsh.com will pretty much get you anywhere you need to go and then all the books are available on amazon so that's easy wonderful well thank you so much and thank you to everyone watching this whenever it is that you watch this i do not take your time lightly and really appreciate that until next time be on the lookout for more videos and as always go out and love god and love others because truly above all else that will change the world [Music] you

Channel: Gospel Simplicity

Views: 241,127

Keywords: mike heiser, michael heiser, dr michael heiser, mike hiser, michael hiser, heiser demons, bible demons, demons in the bible, are demons real, what do demons do, where do demons come from, demonic attacks, demons in the ancient near east, naked bible, austin suggs, gospel simplicity, michael heiser interview, understanding the bible, hebrew bible background, masoretic vs septuagint, church tradition is wrong, church is wrong about demons, wrong about demons

Id: uACZyPLDeak

Length: 71min 48sec (4308 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021