You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, click at NakedBiblePodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at NakedBiblePodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, Episode 174, live from Lubbock, Texas. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's a scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Hey, Mike. Welcome to my college hometown. Yeah, yeah, you've told me about that a dozen times. The home of champions, just like I am, huh? Of course. No, but we want to give a quick thank you to Nathan for organizing this event and for Wayland Baptist University for hosting the event. We appreciate it, and we're back doing another live Q&A, so we're ready for y'all's questions, if y'all are. Yep, so how are we going to do this? What's the procedure? Whoever wants to ask a question, raise your hand, and Nathan will bring you the mic. I'm Clint, and I'm from Malikoff, Texas. In Revelation 12, does the reference to one-third of the stars falling to Earth indicate that at that time those angels had enough understanding of the Messiah's purpose and attributes to decide they didn't like God's plan, and so they rebelled at that time? Yeah, so that question, I don't need to repeat the question, I presume. I think we got everybody on the mic here. The question in part depends on whether you think the angels that are referred to were good guys, because you prefaced it by saying they rebelled, or whether they are bad guys already. In other words, what's their state? So, let's just read through it a little bit. It said, Another sign appeared in heaven, Behold a great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth so that when she bore her child he might devour it. Now, the way you worded your question, did a third of the angels know enough about the Messiah is the way I think you put it, so that they would rebel? Is that how you frame the question? Now, like you say, the gospel was hidden, had to be revealed, and if the rulers had known, they wouldn't have crucified the Lord of Glory. That kind of track. Yeah, I don't know if we can really read this as a rebellion. You could read it as an attack by the dragon on good guy, good guy angels if we want to put it that way. And so a third of them are defeated or cast to earth. It's conceivable to me that you could read it that way. That question is in part related to what comes later. Now, war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon, the dragon and his angels fought back. Are we to assume in verse seven that the dragon and his angels, the his angels there are the same that were swept down in verse four. And the way you word the question, you know, assumes that I don't actually read it that way. I don't think that we have to read one particular group between verses four and seven. And so we don't have to read angels in rebellion in verse four. It could be the terminology of conflict where you have God's God's servants, God's side suffering, you know, in the conflict suffering a defeat of some sort. So that's the way I tend to read it. So that's a long way of saying, No, I wouldn't I wouldn't go that direction with it. But but you could, if you did, you know, and say that this was sort of a seduction of a third of the angels, the swept down is really a language for a third of the angels were convinced, okay, to join the side of the dragon. I think it's reading a lot into the passage to sort of fill that gap. You know, well, what convinced them? Well, it was, you know, it was this Messiah about to be born. Well, why would that have bothered them? I mean, again, you can read it that way, but it seems, again, for my taste, it requires a little bit too much front loading of that kind of information to read the passage that way. But if you, you know, if you have answers that satisfy yourself as far as, you know, answering those questions again, you wouldn't be alone reading it that way. I just I don't and I don't think you have to somebody else. Robert from Hobbes, New Mexico in Genesis three, verse 14, where it reads the so the Lord said to the serpent, because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle.   Do those two words for the dust that the serpent is going to eat and the dust that men's going to turn into is that the same word? Is there any correlation between those two words? Well, we can we can look it up right here. So the one verse was verse 14. Okay, right here's dust. That's afar in Hebrew. And then down to verse 19. Same word. So yes, they're the same word is and there's something you want to build on that. I guess the second part of that is that is the serpent. I mean, are we going to be ingested by that by this entity being when we return to dust that they are corporal bodies are going to be there. Yeah, I, if you remember, have you read Unseen Realm? Okay, in Unseen Realm, I talk a little bit about this particular passage. I take the language here since since I don't take the Nakash, the serpent as being only a member of the animal kingdom. I take the Nakash as being a divine being in rebellion. And again, depending on how you take the term, it could be a divine being that, you know, manifests itself in this way. Again, this is very common. Guys like Walton and others have discussed at length that you can have, it's common in ancient Near Eastern literature to have divine communication happen through animals. And everybody knows that, well, animals don't really talk. If we run into a talking snake like in the, in the tale of Sinua in Egypt, everybody knows that's a divine being because snakes don't normally talk. So I think, you know, there's certainly a lot to be said for that here. In Unseen Realm, I talk about Nakash being, if it's a noun, it's actually Hanakash. So it's the word plus the definite article. If it's a noun, then you can legitimately translate it as serpent. If it's a participle, if it's a verb from the same verb, verb of the same root, then it would mean the one who dispenses divine information, the one who gives divinatory knowledge. And that's certainly in play here too. If it's an adjective that's substance device through the article, then it means the shining one, which is a stock description for divine being. So in Unseen Realm, I talk about all three of those. And I think that the readers are really led to think all three of those things, not just one. So since I take it as a divine being, having a conversation in Eden, Eden is the divine abode, the cosmic mountain, the abode of the divine council in ancient Near Eastern thinking. Gardens and mountains, Eden is referred to both ways in the Old Testament. Since I look at the passage that way, I take what is said in the judgment terms to this quote unquote animal, to the serpent. I take metaphorically because of what's done to the serpent. The serpent is cast down to Eretz, to the ground. Yeah, it's ground, but Eretz is also the one word that can mean shield. There's reference in Isaiah 14. There's the passage in Jonah that clearly uses the term for shield. So I think the point of the cursing language is that you want it to be above the most high Isaiah 14. But now I'm going to put you below or put you underneath all of the animals of the earth. In other words, you're going to be down in the realm of the dead, the underworld. So I take the curse as metaphorical and since I do that for the serpent, I don't think we have a literal kind of, we die and we return to the dust and then the serpent eats us kind of thing, you know, kind of a literalism going on. So I would tend to not read it that way for those reasons. My name's Nathan. Yes, sir. Yes, this is Nathan the organizer. My name's Nathan. I'm here in the Lubbock and I was curious and I've actually got two questions if you don't mind in San Antonio live Q&A with David Burnett. You had mentioned an article coming out about Romans one and how it all ties into Genesis three and Genesis six and Genesis 11, and how Paul is kind of weaving all three threads into that short little deal of Romans one. But you said you were skeptical. But I was just curious if you had had a chance to read it and what your thoughts on it were. He has not produced the article itself yet. This is not Burnett. This is the person Burnett and I were talking to. That was a conference paper which we talked to him afterwards and he didn't want to give me the article then because he thought, I mean he didn't use these terms, but typically when grad students don't want to give you their conference papers, it's because they think it's still half baked. And they often read papers at SBL to get feedback like, okay, what am I missing here? Am I going off in La La Land? Somebody tell me that kind of thing. So he didn't want to give me the paper. He said he was going to keep working on it and possibly submit it for publication, but he has not done that, so I haven't read it. Roger that. And my second question was, you remember back in March or April you had your guys on Faithlife defending you in the book from Heresy when Lexham released it for two weeks on a 45-day reading plan. Are you talking about the forum? Yes, sir. Okay. I can't claim to know or recall who those guys were, but yeah, I know there were people jumping in there. Yes, sir. On one of the threads, there was a missionary talking about how in the ancient, original Chinese, the character for righteousness is a man with a lamb over his shoulders and a tree, and the word for prohibit is two trees in a garden and things of that nature, and that got tied into a conversation of Act 17. And I was just curious, how do we parse the disinheritance of Babel in Act 17 with 1 Timothy 4-10, which says, for this end we toil and strive because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the savior of all people, especially those who believe. So what do we do with that? Yeah, let's go back to the Chinese thing. I don't know Chinese, so I can't really evaluate that. I can tell you what I would want to see to think that there's any significance between the biblical story and the Chinese character. I don't think generally that we would, and I'm not saying the source would say this either, that a claim like, oh, the Chinese language, the character-based language, is based on Christian theology or the Bible or anything like that. So let's wipe that off the table. What I would want to know is, was this character introduced in a post-Christian era? Because, you know, Chinese has lots of characters. If the character was introduced well before the Christian era, well, then I would say that you don't have a Christian connection. If it was introduced afterwards, well, then maybe there's something to that. I don't know. I don't know either the historical question to be able to answer that or Chinese in terms of characters, though. But I'm just telling you, that's what I would want to know just right off the bat. Does that have anything to do with, you know, this, again, coming from the Deuteronomy 32 worldview, how do we parse something like that? On the one hand, if the character is post-Christian, well, then that sort of answers that question. There might have been some Christian influence there. And then somebody could have invented a character to convey a specific concept based upon something maybe a missionary taught. Who knows? That's one trajectory. I don't think, since we don't have a clear picture of what you described in the character, even in the Old Testament, I doubt that the Chinese people got a clearer picture than the Israelites did. So I don't think we can really track fruitfully on that trajectory. If the question is about how are the nations saved? How are they made acceptable to God? That sort of thing. My sort of paradigm for this is that God, this is ultimately for God to decide. God provides information to whomever he will. If this is outside the believing community, in other words, what he considers his family, Israelites, and then now, of course, the church, the circumcision neutral thing we call the church. Prior to that time, prior to there being a gospel to give to people, could people be rightly related to Yahweh? Well, sure they could, because we see that in the Old Testament. We see it with Naim and the Lepper. Jesus holds him up as an example of faith. Now, for those of you who have listened to the podcast, we had Gerald McDermott on a few months ago, and we specifically talked about what the church fathers sort of did, how they debated and talked about what we call the Deuteronomy 32 worldview. And Jerry seemed to think that the faith of a pagan like that, a Gentile, was somehow not salvific. I don't know if listeners caught that, but I might have read him wrong or heard something there that he wouldn't have intended. But I got that impression. I don't take that view. I think when Jesus recommended Naaman as an example of faith, if he's good enough for Jesus, he's good enough for me. In other words, he responds correctly. He responds well to the information he had, and he had one thing. I know now that Yahweh is the God of gods, period. That just settles the question. His faith is in the God of Israel. He's never going to learn the Torah. He's never going to learn the Jewish festivals. He's going to go back to Syria. He'll never do anything in the temple. He'll never eat a Passover meal. He'll never do any of that.  And in sort of this Deuteronomy 32 context, and I would say just generally in the Old Testament, that is what salvation is about. How does an Israelite, how are they saved, you know, prior to the cross? And frankly, prior to progressive revelation about the plan of salvation. Well, they're saved if they believe that Yahweh is the God of all gods. Is Yahweh who he says he is? Okay, and if he is, we believe that this God, the God of gods, entered into a covenant relationship with us. We worship only him. That's what we do. We do what he tells us to do. We believe what he tells us to believe about himself, and we do what he tells us to do, and we don't worship another God. It's that simple. And Naaman falls within that. So I'm of the view that God can treat. This is going to sound a little goofy, but I'll try not to chuckle with it. But I'm of the view that God still treats unbelieving people today like he treated unbelieving Gentiles in the Old Testament. In other words, they're still not in the family of God. They're still outsiders as opposed to insiders. And so it's up to God to give them information about who he is. About what he wants. Whether that includes the gospel or not. If they respond correctly to that the way Naaman did. And there are other examples besides Naaman. If they respond correctly to that, then it's up to God to accept that person or not, or give them more information or something like that. In other words, that is above my pay grade. I am not going to presume that I can answer that question for God. If I get to heaven someday and find out some guy in China is there because he just believed that Yahweh was the God of God and that's all he knew. If he's there, I'm happy. And I don't think God blundered. He didn't commit a theological error. So that's kind of the way I look at these sorts of questions. I don't feel either capable of thinking for God on such matters. Nor do I think that I'm tasked with deciding that. Anybody else? This is Forrest for Bamarello. No, it's not. Anyway, so kind of going back to the first... He whose name shall not be mentioned. Going back to the first question regarding the third of the angels that fell. When John is writing that it seems like he's kind of chronologically jumping around a bit. He kind of goes from the birth right to the death and ascension pretty quickly. Is it possible that fall that he's talking about happened at a much earlier time? Because when the shepherds witnessed the angels at the birth of Christ, there's no hint of any kind of major battle going on unless that's the after-party. You know, I don't know. Is it possible that that happened? Well, I would say if we're saying that, well with God time doesn't mean anything and all this chronological talk is really meaningless to God. Well, if you're going to look at it that way, well sure, then it's possible. I don't read it that way. I don't think we have to have the same elements in every passage when a passage is about the same topic. So it doesn't bother me that the passage with the angels doesn't have this element in it. And Revelation 12 doesn't say anything about shepherds either. I don't have to have all of the elements in both passages for them to be about the same thing. You know, you have these scenes in Scripture where they try to encapsulate a bunch of ideas in a very short amount of space. We even have this like in Philippians 2, or is it Philippians 2 or is it the first Timothy? It's one of the passages that is considered sort of a creedal statement that Christ was risen from the dead, seen by angels. You have this whole list of things that aren't precisely in the right chronological order in the sense that something is omitted that you would expect to be there. But it's considered sort of an encapsulated form of the Gospel. And you have a handful of these in the New Testament. They're not always the same, but they're still talking about essentially the work of Christ. I'm okay with that. I don't think that they had to pass notes around. Now, if you include a creedal statement, make sure it's got these five things in there. I think they're just sort of encapsulating things as it occurs to them to do it. So that's essentially how I look at John, you know, what he's doing here. Because he goes from the birth to then the woman is being pursued. Now, if you look at the woman as Israel, and that is the way I take it, and lots of scholars do, it's not a specific reference to Mary, but it's Israel. Israel is the woman, God's bride who gives birth to the Messiah. Then it would refer to the persecution of that community, either the Jews or the believing community that ensued that was connected with the Messiah, under Roman persecution or something like that. I'm just not troubled by not having the kind of full description in all the passages that we might want, because I still kind of know what the topic's about, and I know how the elements are relevant to the topic. I just don't look for something exhaustive. I don't know that you'd ever really find it. If you, again, if you take what's being said out of a first century context, either abstractly like this is something that was in the mind of God, and then angels knew that it was going to be in the mind of God, it was in God's plan at some point to birth the king, the Messiah, and then the forces of darkness wanted to oppose that. In other words, if you take it out of the first century and abstract it like that, well then, by definition, the time doesn't matter. So you could say things like that if you did that. Follow-up question? Sure. Rob from Pops. Choosing a Bible version, is there a version that you recommend? I always recommend the best Bible to use is the one you'll actually read. I didn't say that. But yeah. I always recommend that people have one kind of translation that sort of reflects that the two major approaches to translation. There's two schools of thought when you have translation projects. One is referred to as formal equivalence. That is, the translation team feels that its task is to look at the original text and then in the target language account for each word as much as possible from the original language to the target language. In other words, we sort of refer to this as literalism, but it's really about word for word correspondence. No translation does that perfectly. In John 2, even the King James, which is very literal, very much formal equivalent word for word correspondence, it'll say, Jesus said to his mother, woman, what have I to do with thee? Well, literally in Greek, it's what to you to me. That's literally what's there. Those are the only words that are there. So even something that tries to do word for word correspondence can't get away from having to try to explain that a little bit. The other school of thought is what is called dynamic equivalence, and there the goal is not word for word correspondence. It's thought for thought. So we look at the original language. Okay, what is the thought that they're trying to convey? And then when we put it into the target language, we can use whatever words we want to capture the same thought. So I recommend, and all English Bibles will tell you in the preface what approach they took. So my advice is always use one of each just so that you can kind of get a feel for how each sort of approach would account for what they're seeing in the text. And you're always wise to use more than one translation because if there ever really is a significant translation sort of problem where there's a real elasticity to what something could mean, or if there's a manuscript difference, chances are if you look, and this is what's great about software, you can do this in a couple seconds, you could look at four or five translations, and if they all differ at some point, or like a specific word, then you know there's an issue there. And that's where you should drill down and get another tool to study that. But just generally apart from that, try to get one that's word for word correspondence, one that's thought for thought, and use them both. I should add, I prefer in the first category it's mostly trying to strike formal equivalents. I prefer the ESV, but really only for one significant reason, and that is it is more texturally up to date in places than other translations are. The big one is Deuteronomy 32, there are several places there where the ESV decided, the committee decided to use Dead Sea Scroll material in the running text, not just put it in a footnote. I think we ought to be doing more of that, and ESV decided to do that at certain points, so I give them a thumbs up for that, so I kind of, I like that. So I just got into it for that reason, and it's sort of grown on me, but I'd use other ones too, yes sir. Hi, I'm Michael from Lubbock, and my question relates to your, I guess you call this an astral prophecy back in for the, and maybe I'm reading into your designation of this in Matthew for the birth of Jesus, September 11. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. How is that more related to this idea of the signs in the skies then, for instance, that maybe Matthew is just using Isaiah 7, in which this is a much longer tradition, historically in the history of the Christian Church that we have thought more likely this is, you know, the sign of Emmanuel more so than it is some sort of an astrological signage. Does that make sense? Yeah, I would say it's the answers of both and not an either or. I don't think that we have to pick, John focuses on this or that aspect of the birth. You know, we have the birth of a divine king. He wants to try to communicate the idea. Again, I think in concert with Paul that people could have known a divine king was born. They're not going to get the gospel out of that, but they know that we had a significant event here. It's also not a fulfillment of prophecy. It's a looking back. It's a hindsight kind of thing. So that doesn't exclude Matthew's description of what's going on there as, you know, drawing on Isaiah chapter 7. I think he does see an analogy pretty clearly with Isaiah 7. Also, Hosea 11 out of Egypt. I have called my son. It's not to exclude the Old Testament. I think different writers introduce different ways of looking at the event for their audience. So I would be an inclusive guy when it comes to that, not it's this, not that sort of approach. This is Cletus from Amarillo again. I got a question regarding Jude 1. And I know you've probably answered this, but when Jude is talking about, he's talking about the angels that have been chained in gloomy darkness, et cetera, et cetera. And then he makes the analogy to Sodom and Gomorrah and their immorality. Is there some kind of connection between Sodom and Gomorrah and angelic sexual intercourse? I mean, is that why the men of Sodom and Gomorrah were trying to beat on Lot's door to have their way with those men? Because they recognized them as being angelic? Right. So what you're really asking is, are comments like going after strange flesh, is that really not about homosexuality? Is it really a reference to this Genesis 6 kind of stuff? Is that what you're... Well, that seems to be what Jude's alluding to there. I mean... I think, yeah, the short answer is, yeah, you can read it that way. And this paper that Nathan brought up in his question, that was one of the trajectories of that paper, which is why I was interested in it. The guy was basically making the argument that this is sort of a literary motif that you see the Genesis 6 kind of thing sort of echo in other passages, including the Genesis 19 episode here in Judah. And also what he was interested in tracking on was, is this what's behind Romans 1 in Paul? In other words, what this guy was trying to do in the paper was argue that this is a literary pattern, a conceptual pattern, where these things are associated together and then once establishing that idea, going back to Romans 1 and then arguing that that's really what Paul is discussing there and not necessarily homosexuality in that particular passage. So as Nathan suggested, I'm aware that people do that and read it that way in Jude and those associated passages. I am still, again, because I haven't looked at the guy's textual work. I'm still a little skeptical. To me, the verdict is out there. Can you take that to Romans 1? But if it just relates to Sodom and Gomorrah, that idea, that approach does have a pretty solid history and scholarship. You can read it that way, which some people would say, well, Mike, that helps you make the point about the Genesis 6 stuff and whatnot. And I guess it would on that point, but I don't know that, you know, it's a little hard for me. Again, I try not to do too much thinking for biblical characters and writers, because while I could probably come up with a good case at the end of the day, I don't really know. In other words, the men of Sodom, can I really get inside their head and say, okay, they knew these guys were angels and that's why they want them. I don't know if I can really say that from Genesis. You go back and read the story. How would they know that they're angels? And I realize that's a little different than the way the writer is crafting things, because maybe the writer does want us to think of Genesis 6. To me, that's possible, but I think there's a better case to be made if there was actually something in the narrative about their reaction to the two men that would sort of take you that direction as well. Well, it seems like they must have been somehow markedly different because even Lot recognized them as being different as they were coming in the gate and then clearly rumor had swirled around the town at these different kind of guys. Why do you think Lot recognized them as different? Well, either because God wanted them to or visually they were different. Right, and see both of those thoughts could be thoughts coherently thunk about. I just don't know where you're going to get them from the text. In other words, somebody could turn that around and say, well, it was news to have visitors in town. Hey, we got some visitors in town. They're kind of good looking too. Maybe it wasn't local because of that. Since we don't know the circumstances of that event and since, again, I could argue that the view you're articulating pretty well, I could argue some other view pretty well too, but at the end of the day, I don't really know which one is correct because I wasn't there and there's really nothing that I can see in the text that really turns one against, makes one more likely than the other. So to me, it's kind of a stalemate. Now, if this guy who was doing the paper, if he comes up with all sorts of second temple material, let's just say, and other external material, well, this is really a distinct pattern. Like, this just shows up in other places a lot. Well, see, to me that could tip me because I view the biblical writers as solidly in these streams of tradition. In other words, they're not just lone wolves they're writing stuff because they're bored. They're writing something intelligently as part of a, at least a reasonably learned part of their culture that they can produce books. So I view them as literate, I view them as knowing what they're doing intentionally and so if I see evidence for, again, a motif like that that they should have known, if they're literate people, they would have run across this because it's in popular text or something like that. That's going to influence the way I look at it. But I don't have that in the can right now. So I'm still kind of stuck where I'm at. So does this also, is this a potential point for a post-Diluvian, like angelic incursion? Like kind of we have the, you said the four apkalu, one being two-thirds human. So I assume the other three were full deity. The other three, we don't have textual remains for them in the Mesopotamian stuff. But if this holds weight like we're talking about, like this was some, because I think a lot of people think because of what happened to the angels being sent to Tartarus, that was kind of an incentive for other angels not to do this later. But it sounds like it's possible. I mean, we're not directly told, it seems like they're kind of potentially... I was Gandalf earlier, so now I'll be an angel. Again, if I were an intelligent being and I looked at what happened here, yeah, I would probably think that was a bad idea. Probably not a good idea to make God mad.  But at the end of the day, you know, you have statements in Job about God not trusting his holy ones. I mean, he says that two or three times. Does that mean that he doesn't... Is that statement that he puts no trust in his holy ones or whatever the exact wording is there? Does that mean something sort of neutral like, well, God kind of knows what he's getting. He knows they're not infallible. And he sort of knows what he's dealing with here. He's not going to expect perfection. Is that really what it means? Or is it a little darker than that? That we should read a statement like that and think, okay, God knows that they're not infallible, but given that, maybe God also would... Right. Maybe we're supposed to take that statement about God and the way he looks at them, and maybe we are supposed to conclude that they might just be willful enough to rebel in the future. See, I don't personally see anything in Scripture that tells me divine beings can no longer rebel. That's an assumption.  So I assume that he would give people the nations that he trusted like, hey, you're my top guys. You're going to run this place. They're either inept or corrupt or both. So that's another good example. Where I just don't see any... The way we're taught in Christian circles about angelology is we have the fall and then everything's just decided. Nobody can like move. There can't be any more rebellions. Everything's just sort of set in stone now. Those are all assumptions. And I think you do have a good contrary example there with Psalm 82. I don't know if Genesis 19 is one of those because I'm not... The angels aren't the ones who are rebelling in that passage anyway, so it's a little bit different. You get these sorts of episodes and I'm very willing to think that God knows that since they are not me, they could mess up. They could rebel. They could make a mistake. If we can't say that about them, then why aren't we calling them God with a capital G? It just doesn't make sense to me, but again, that's the way we're sort of reflexively taught angelology and demonology in a Christian context. And I think those are weak points because they're guesses at the end of the day. That's what they are. Clint from Alec Hof again. I attended a Bible church and a very literal interpretation of the scriptures. And just until a month ago, I was right there with him on everything. And then your book just kind of ruined everything for me. I get blamed again. Well, Tray can edit that out. So my question is, thanks, Rob, this is so radical and we're starting a study of September 10th on 1 Peter. So right out of the gate, we're going to run into stuff that ties into Enoch. Then you got verse 12 that mentions that the angels want to look in some things. Who is we? Is this your church? Our church. We have a Sunday morning Bible study. All right. And it's just all the adults together. So we're going to be in 1 Peter. And you got Enoch that needs to be brought into the context. And you got in verse 12, I already see. Good luck with that. In verse 12, you see where it's talking about even the angels long to look into these things. I could camp there for two or three Sundays in a row. Just unpacking that. But just even bringing Enoch up might be like an uproar for these people. And I love them. They're my family. Right. How can I, just attending that class, how can I bring things up in a thoughtful way so as to not cause someone to stumble or to look at me as a heretic? Right. You know, you should not feel guilty over not telling people all of the things you know or would like them to think about. So that's the first sort of bridge to cross. In other words, you dumping exhaustive knowledge on them is not a moral issue. If you understand their context, it's a good bet that God does too. And so I think you do need to be cautious. You need to be loving. There will be times that you would be wiser to just not say anything. Other times that you're going to have to know your people, whether you can interject this or that. I think what would be a moral issue is if you sort of pretend that there's nothing to see here, citizen, you know, move along and you just sort of do things that way. But ultimately, you just have to know your audience. I have found that if you can introduce people to new things like this in a problem-solving way. In other words, we're going to talk about something now and it helps solve this problem of interpretation or what maybe unbelievers would think is a contradiction. In other words, it helps them come away from the discussion feeling good about Scripture, feeling affirmed in some particular point. You've helped them to defend something they do believe and they know well using this point of information. If you do that a few times, it builds trust. It's constructive for them. So I would say if you can do that kind of thing with the content, solve a problem for them, build up their faith, you're wise to do that. This is why I don't go into churches like on Sunday mornings. Because I've had people come Sunday and do this. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Because all that's going to do is just create a problem for you because I'm just going to leave and then you're stuck with the problem. We're not going to do that. So I'll do things like two powers stuff, like the Godhead in the Old Testament, because that affirms a Trinitarian belief system for them from their Old Testament. And people love that. It's scholarship given to the person in the pew, but it's very constructive. I'll do something on what an imager is, the whole concept of imaging God. The image of God isn't something plopped into us. It's a status we have. And I may throw in a little Hebrew grammar there. Because it has a basis. I'm not just making it up. It actually has a basis. Nobody's going to remember that, but it's good for them to hear it because they know that, okay, Mike's, it's Dr. Mike and he does Hebrew and he read this somewhere that somebody else said this, who knows Hebrew too. And that's good enough. It's a constructive sort of thing to do rather than just go in there and create the impression that I'm going to be novel today and you have to listen to me because I have a PhD. There's just no point to that. So my advice would be try to anticipate some questions that people would have normally about the passage. And then if you can introduce elements of this quote-unquote new stuff to them that helps address those questions, that would be really helpful. But you're still going to have to pick your spots. First Peter's pretty thorny in this regard, but I wouldn't just go in there and dump a whole lot of stuff on them because there are people who will be patient. I mean, I've found just with books and stuff, there are people who will be patient and will read the book and they'll come out okay. There are a lot of other people who won't have any patients at all for it and just you could have a month with them and they're not going to listen to it at all. So you're never going to be able to perfectly navigate that, but you just want to try up front to be constructive about it and not pick fights. Do what you can to get them interested in Scripture. That's a big hurdle. Once you give them reasons to be interested, they'll come back to you and want more. And then you build up a little trust there and so then you can progressively unfold things. But don't just go in there and dump on them. It'll just be kind of productive. Kenneth from Fort Polk, what are some good resources for understanding logic and coherence to better interpret the Bible? Oh boy. A good dose of listing to graduate student papers. You know, that's really a good question. I just, I don't know that I have a good answer for that. I don't know that you can, and I know you can to some degree. I was going to say, I don't know that you can teach clear thinking. I mean, you can, if it were me, if I were forced to give an answer to this, I would say go get a homeschool, like middle school, high school curriculum book on logic or something at that level on logical fallacies and then try to teach people the categories and then illustrate all those things, not just from the book examples that the textbook would give you, but even in things like Bible interpretation.  You just use the problem that you have come across and help them think through a passage. But you can actually go a long time. They're just the difference between correlation and causation. These two things are like each other. So one must have caused the other, really? I mean, it's a logical blunder and a fallacy that happens all the time, not just in sort of novice Bible studies, but I can show you that kind of stuff. Like I said, in a graduate student paper or even a journal article, I actually said this one time in a graduate seminar, a doctoral seminar, I thought that I said out loud it must have been a moment of weakness or stupidity, that I thought we would all be better off as graduate students if we were forced to take a course on logic. And it's like I didn't win hearts and minds that day. But I was serious about it because you just run into this. So I think that would be a good start, but I don't know that there's any, there's nothing you can just read or study and it just flips the switch on. You more or less have to know what the categories are and then see a good dose of poor thinking and have somebody really guide you through that so that people have their senses exercised to seeing that sort of stuff. Or if you can take what the textbook offers you and then reduce it to like, here's a set of questions you should ask about every interpretation. And again, it's the logical fallacy stuff. Just to try to weed it out like that. One slightly different question. You've written the facade and the portent. What are you trying to accomplish with stories and why are stories so important? I like to try to piggyback theology on fiction. In the case of the facade and the portent, it's science fiction. You could also call it paranormal fiction. I do that because there's a general utility about it. You can sort of illustrate certain things if it's put in a scene or an episode in a book, just broadly speaking. But there's another purpose in it and that is people who are really outside the church and I don't mean only those who are estranged from it. I mean people who have no context or no interest for Bible stuff, Christian stuff. You can often get them to the table to at least have a conversation if you do it through something like a novel or fiction. It's why I do new age interview shows. It's why I was on the guy who's the pagan who lives in PA. I've been on his show twice. Those people will just never darken the door of a church or anything remotely Christian. But if you get invited to do that, it just presents an opportunity. I view fiction as just another opportunity to get people who otherwise would not get any exposure at all. Why do I do ancient astronaut stuff online? That kind of thing. It's for the same reason. I don't like the Bible abused or any primary text abused in such discussions. There are lots of caricatures about the Bible in these shows and on these websites and there ought to be at least somebody out there saying, well, you might want to think not only about not only this topic but the way the Bible is used for this topic. So I'll do coast to coast. I'll do these kind of shows. That's really why I do it. There's really no other reason to do it.  I've been on the show over 30 times. I've probably sold a couple hundred books and all those appearances. Because most of the audience is going to be hostile and I know that going in. So I do it so that they get to hear a Christian voice that not only isn't sort of the lunatic caricature that they have of Christians but also to disabuse them of the notion that they're thinking well about the Bible. If I can do those two things, it was a good visit. It was a good show. Ultimately I don't know. Unless I get an email from somebody afterwards, I don't know. Maybe I could do better things with my time. I just don't know.  This is Nathan again. Returning to the Romans one and what Chandler from Amarillo was talking about. He changed his name again. You become a meme. I recognize that we are purely speculating on a paper that no one has ever read. You were talking about the strange flesh. He asked a question about Sodom and Gomorrah. I'm wondering if maybe there isn't some Hebrew poetry going on where it might be a both and kind of thing. One on the surface and something below the surface simultaneously going on. What I'm thinking of is along the lines of 1st Enoch 9.9, Nicholsburg says it taught hate producing charms and those hate producing charms, the word there is sexually extremely lewd in its nature. Anyway, you compare that to the pottery that we have of keep this clean for anyone who's listening around family. You have an extremely excited pan chasing after a soldier. You have Zeus sodomizing a gentleman who's holding a phallic object in his hand. I'm just wondering if it might be a both and thing rather than one or the other. I think, pardon the pun here because it would be a really bad pun. I think the conceptual connection is that since homosexual behavior in general was viewed as contrary to creation order, therefore it would also be associated with the forces of chaos which are ultimately, you're going back to episodes like this. The transgression of heaven and earth, that's a chaotic thing. It messes with God's order. So this is the same kind of thinking. So I think on that level, sure, they're kind of going to put those things at the end of the day in the same bucket, but the bucket might have lots of compartments. I just don't know if, you know, I'm interested in there being, again, a discernible pattern. I like patterns in ancient texts. So again, if he ever produces the paper, we're actually going to hunt him down in November, Burnett and I, because he's Burnett's friend. We'll corner him at some point, but I will try to extract either the paper or maybe an interview out of him to try to see what he's actually using for the idea. I mean, I'm familiar enough with the idea. I just want to know what material are you using? What are you working with? What are you tracking on? I just want the raw ingredients. I want the primary text source references. So if I can get those, then I can run the rabbit trail myself. I may not do as good of a job as this guy has because his head's been in it for a while. He's doing it for something. I don't know if it's his dissertation or not, but I would just need, again, to sort of retrace those steps to say any more. But on just a theological sort of worldview level, yeah, you know, it's all going to be contrary to divine order, which is chaos. Things aren't running the way God wants them to run. Yes, sir. And then my last question of the evening, bearing in mind, I've read both your most recent articles on angelic redemption after the most recent Fern and Audrey episode. So no need to recreate the wheel there. How the angels of the churches are more human than they are angelic and how they're described in the letters to the seven churches. Is there a specific verse or verses or ideas that you're tracking on that overtly forbid the notion of angelic redemption, where if you screw up, you're done. Yeah, to me, the biggest trajectory is the link between the atonement and the incarnation. And since we've landed in the book of Hebrews now on the podcast, we'll be getting into that really early, actually, in the opening chapters of Hebrews. But if it was necessary for, you know, in God's plan for the second person of the God had to become a man to effect redemption, that tells me that humans are the target of redemption. So I think that link is what suggests to me that it provides a logic for why there's no clear statement positively about angelic redemption. You get negatives for sure, but you don't get positives and people say, well, the positive might still be out there. You know, we can't take these other statements as being sort of dual purpose statements. Well, okay, but again, this link creates a logic for why that situation is what it is. And that to me is the foundation, you know, to the argument of, you know... Because there is no atonement for them. They must remain holy, essentially. Well, they would remain in a... They would not be forgiven. Those that are in rebellion, you know, would not get the opportunity to change that circumstance. They don't get a chance to have their sins forgiven and covered or whatever language you want to use. So again, for me, the big trajectory there is the link between the saving work of Christ and the incarnation, becoming a man as opposed to becoming something else. So that for me is kind of an orienting point. And we'll say more about it as we get into Hebrews in the podcast. Yes, sir. Thank you. Well, we appreciate it again. We want to give thanks to Nathan for organizing it and Wayland Baptist University again for hosting it. Thank you all very much and thank you all for coming out and thank Mike for answering our questions as always. And we appreciate it a full day of listening to Mike. I'm sure everybody will agree with me. We can listen all day. So we appreciate his efforts. With that, I just want to thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. That's how the sauce is made. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www.brmsh.com.


Find out what your soul loves and give it more. If you're going to have a prosperous soul, you need to find out what your soul loves, not what someone else thinks your soul should love, not what others tell you as they paint your life with another layer of their identity for you, not what do they think you should love, what does your soul love? Find out and give it more.


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