Jared Brock is a Canadian (who lives in the UK), a Christian, and the author of several books including A God Named Josh and A Devil Named Lucifer. The ideal guest, then, for James to interrogate on such vital questions as “Is the devil real?” “Does he have horns?” and “Is Lucifer the same as Satan?” They also do the Nephilim, obviously, about whom they have a minor disagreement… Jaredbrock.com↓ ↓ ↓If you need silver and gold bullion - and who wouldn't in these dark times? - then the place to go is The Pure Gold Company. Either they can deliver worldwide to your door - or store it for you in vaults in London and Zurich. You even use it for your pension. Cash out of gold whenever you like: liquidate within 24 hours. https://bit.ly/James-Delingpole-Gold
↓ ↓ How environmentalists are killing the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your children's future.
In Watermelons, an updated edition of his ground-breaking 2011 book, JD tells the shocking true story of how a handful of political activists, green campaigners, voodoo scientists and psychopathic billionaires teamed up to invent a fake crisis called ‘global warming’.This updated edition includes two new chapters which, like a geo-engineered flood, pour cold water on some of the original’s sunny optimism and provide new insights into the diabolical nature of the climate alarmists’ sinister master plan.Purchase Watermelons by James Delingpole here: https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/↓ ↓ ↓
Buy James a Coffee at:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpole
The official website of James Delingpole:https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk
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There is no evidence whatsoever that man-made climate change is a problem, that it's going to kill us, that we need to amend our lifestyle in order to deal with it.
It's a non-existent problem.
But how do you explain this stuff to your normie friends?
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition to my 2012 classic book, Watermelons, which captures the story of how some really nasty people decided to invent the global warming scare in order to fleece you, to take away your freedoms, to take away your land.
It's a shocking story.
I wrote it, as I say, in 2011 actually, the first edition came out.
And it's a snapshot of a particular era.
The era when the people behind the climate change scam got caught red-handed tinkering with the data, torturing till it screamed in a scandal that I helped christen Climategate.
So I give you the background to the skull juggery that went on in these seats of learning where these supposed experts were informing us, we've got to act now.
I rumbled their scam.
I then asked the question, okay, if it is a scam, who's doing this and why?
It's a good story.
I've kept the original book pretty much as is, but I've written two new chapters, one at the beginning and one at the end, explaining how it's even worse than we thought.
I think it still stands out.
I think it's a good read.
Obviously, I'm biased, but I'd recommend it.
You can buy it from jamesdellingpole.co.uk forward slash shop.
You'll probably find it right.
Just go to my website and look for it, jamesdellingpole.co.uk.
And I hope it helps keep you informed and gives you the material you need to bring around all those people who are still persuaded that, oh, it's a disaster.
We must amend our ways and appease the gods, appease Mother Gaia.
No, we don't.
It's a scam.
Lord, we love you, Jesus.
And this topic is crazy and we've had unbelievable technical difficulties, unbelievable challenges.
And you've seen us through all of it and we are grateful to be together today.
Thank you for James.
Thank you for his work.
Lord, I pray that you are magnified in this conversation today.
Have you seen what the price of gold has been doing recently?
It's been going bonkers.
I hate to say I told you so, but I did kind of tell you so.
But if it's any consolation, even though I do have some gold and bought some a while back, I didn't buy nearly enough.
It's like when you go to the casino and you win on 36 and you only put down a fiver and you think, why didn't I put down 50?
If you've got that feeling that you haven't got enough gold, or if you haven't got any gold and you really feel you ought to get some, the place to go is the Pure Gold Company.
They sell gold bullion and silver bullion in the form of coins or in the form of bars, which you can either store in London or in Switzerland, or you can have it delivered to your own home if you can work out where to store the stuff.
I think that gold, what do I know?
I mean, I'm no expert, but I've been right so far.
I think gold and silver right now are an essential, maybe even more so silver, actually, because silver, I think, is yet to take off.
Just my opinion.
I'm not a financial advisor.
I reckon that it's worth holding both of them at the moment.
And you don't want them, of course, you don't want to buy paper gold.
You don't want to buy paper silver.
You don't want to buy ETFs.
You want to buy the actual physical thing.
Go to the Pure Gold Company and you will be put in touch with one of their advisors.
And they will talk you through the process, which you want to do, whether you want to have it in bullion or in coins.
I mean, there are advantages to having coins because coins are considered, well, Britannia is anyway, considered legal tender, which means that you don't pay tax.
Weirdly, this, but even my accountant didn't know this.
You don't pay tax at the moment on your profits.
Go to the Pure Gold Company.
They will talk you through all these things and follow the link.
Follow the link below this podcast and it will give you all the details.
Go to the Pure Gold Company and they will give you what you need, be it gold or silver.
Do it before it goes up even more.
I think you'd be mad not to.
Thank you, Jared.
I do like a prayer in the podcast.
Always, always raise it.
I do events occasionally, live events.
And this is just like a preamble, because this isn't the actual official start to the Delling Pod, but this is just like, I like this.
When I do my live events now, I always start off with the Lord's Prayer.
Oh, nice.
And it is extraordinary the effect it has.
It just completely lifts the mood.
Yeah.
And it banishes the demons.
Wow.
I mean, it really works.
Anyway, let's start with the official start.
Welcome to the Delling Pod with me, James Dellingpole.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest.
But before we meet him, let's have a word from one of our sponsors.
Welcome to the Delling Pod.
Jared is what you prefer, yes.
I mean, I see a website.
It's called Jay Brock, but we call you Jared, yeah?
Yes, my official author and birth name is Jared Brock, but friends call me Jay, so it's a big mix.
Okay.
And you are American, obviously.
No.
Oh, sorry, Canadian.
Yes, I'm Canadian, grew up in Canada.
Sorry, I'm British, British by heritage, ancestry and history.
I live in the UK now.
Okay.
Well, you've already answered my first question because I was going to ask, if you're an American, what the hell are you doing here?
But Canadian, I can totally understand why you're here.
Yes.
So I am British by ancestry, DNA, and history.
We know our family's heritage into the 1700s here.
And as a 10-year-old boy, I said, I will be an old British man.
So I moved back as soon as I could.
Oh, I see.
So you aren't fleeing the terror.
Oh, Canada, if it becomes the 51st day, I do not care.
Right.
Now, I hope we're going to have a sort of wide-ranging chat today.
If you've ever listened to the Delling Pod, it's all about the digressions.
And We can go anyway.
In fact, you asked me a good question before we started.
You said, Who is your audience?
And I said, Well, I reckon they're about 97% tinfoil hat, crazy conspiracy theory loons.
They're all awake, pretty much.
I couldn't hazard an informed guess on, because I've never done surveys or whatever, but I would say that a significant proportion of my listeners and viewers are Christians of one kind or another.
And a lot of them actually have come to Christianity through being awake.
They've realized that the world is a much, much darker place than they imagined.
And they've realized that actually the only answer to that, the situation, is ultimately God.
So I think you're on fertile ground here for your message.
But I think you might disappoint me because you're going to tell me, I know you've written a book about this.
You're going to tell me that the devil is not, he's not.
Satan is not really as we think he is.
Well, it depends what you think he is.
Essentially, everything in popular culture about the devil is completely wrong, according to the Bible.
Right.
Okay.
Well, yeah, that's quite a big statement.
I'm sure you're going to pack it up.
Yeah.
So let's start with the very most basic and simple one.
The book, it's up here on my shelf.
It's called A Devil Named Lucifer.
And I call it that not because that's the devil's name, but that's because that's what everyone calls him.
His name is not Lucifer.
That appears nowhere in the original Hebrew or Greek Bible.
There's a Latin translation several hundred years later that uses the word Lucifer several times.
And it's always to translate words like day star or morning star.
And what's interesting is the very first match that was ever created was called a Lucifer.
It means light bearer or light bringer.
And there's several characters in the Bible that are described as light bearers, as light bringers.
Jesus is described as a Lucifer.
Christians are described as Lucifers.
And creation is described as a Lucifer, as light-bringing things.
And yet the devil is never described as a Lucifer.
So it's right off the bat, we've already got the wrong name for him.
You've just reminded me.
Are you familiar with a World War I song called Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag?
No, I was not born then.
Okay.
Yeah, but it, but it's, but if you had you, had you, had you grown up, well, probably you're a bit young, but my generation is closer to the First World War.
And so we would have been around when people were alive from the First World War.
We'd have watched documentaries about it.
Anyway, pack up your troubles in your old kit bag.
Has a line.
Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile.
While there's a Lucifer to light your fag, smile, boys, that's the style.
And I hadn't made that connection before.
But yeah, you're right.
They were called Lucifers.
Yeah.
Okay.
So he's not called Lucifer, but he's also not called Satan or devil either.
Those are English words.
They don't appear in the original Hebrew or Greek Bible.
It's the same with Jesus.
So my previous book to a devil named Lucifer was called A God Named Josh.
Jesus's real name was Yehoshua ben Yehoseph in Hebrew.
And through transliteration over the centuries, it became Jesus in English.
But devil and Satan, that's not his name.
The original words are hasatan and diablos, which mean accuser, adversary.
I think we should rip devil and Satan out of English Bibles because the words are so laden with, you know, devil on your shoulder kind of nonsense and all the, you know, cape and tights.
And we can get into what he looks like later.
But we have such a picture of what devil/slash Satan looks like.
I think we need to toss it out of the Bible and use accuser, adversary, because that will help us understand who he is and what he does.
He accuses adversarially.
Do you know, by the way, I can now definitely tell you you're Canadian because of the way you pronounce out.
Yes.
Out.
Out and about.
And we also say like farmer and water.
It's very redneck.
It's so embarrassing.
If only I'd had a little longer, I wouldn't have committed that sonicism.
Yeah.
Well, that's a lot.
That's a lot to take in because what you're asking us to do is to jettison what hundreds of years of culture.
We do kind of generally think of Satan as the bad guy.
And he's got, he takes the form, well, he certainly does in sort of Dennis Wheatley books and horror movies.
He takes the form of a goat.
Although he's also represented by a bull, I think.
He's also represented in some films as a lawyer, which I think is quite accurate.
Yeah, totally.
Totally.
So at least some things are true.
Yeah.
So I'm familiar with some of your arguments.
I mean, I haven't read the full book.
I read your intro.
I know the argument about HaSatan means he's like a sort of a lawyer for the he sort of holds us to account in the courts of God and sort of presents a bad case against us.
Is that right?
Yeah.
So there's this myth in culture that the devil is sitting on everyone's shoulder, right?
That he is tempting and testing and torturing us 24 hours a day.
There are people who feel like they've been just harassed by the devil their entire life.
But I'm here to say that there's a very good chance that not a single person listening to this has ever had a face-to-face encounter with the devil.
Nothing in the Bible says that the devil is omnipresent, that he's all times and all places.
I did the math, James.
In an 8 billion person world over 100 years, the devil would get to spend 0.39 seconds with each of us.
So very, very little amounts of time.
That said, 99.9% of people who fought in World War II never had a face-to-face encounter with Adolf Hitler, but they were encountering his schemes and tactics and tricks and tests from North Africa to the Russian border.
So the Bible says that the devil, what he actually does, is that he spends day and night accusing saints before the Father.
So he comes onto earth, he tempts a human being, he tries to set up a trap, and when they fall into it, he then goes, so specifically Christians, he then goes to the courtroom of heaven and says, James is guilty.
He's a hypocrite.
He's a sinner.
Turn him over to me.
But the Bible says that we actually have an advocate, Jesus Christ, who stands up and says, No, actually, James is innocent, not because he's a good guy, not because he's perfect, because he believes that I am the Lord.
And so his faith in me is counted to him as righteousness.
And God bangs his gavel and says, innocent.
And then presumably, the devil gets furious, gets thrown out of court, and then he goes back to earth and he does it again.
It says he's darting to and fro to accuse the saints before the Father.
That's what he does.
He accuses adversarially.
I can certainly see your, I get your analogy.
He's really too big, too grand, let's say, to appear personally towards everyone.
And I agree with you.
People who claim that they've experienced the devil themselves are making pretty big claims.
But is it not fair to think of him as the sort of the CEO of Big Evil?
That's a great.
The CEO of Big Evil is a pretty solid moniker.
You got to remember that if the devil didn't exist, evil would still exist.
Sin would still exist.
The world would still be awful.
There would still be murder, rape, child torture.
All of it would still exist without the devil.
Martin Luther said that the Christian actually has three enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Or you could say the demonic realm, the satanic realm, all the spiritual stuff.
The reality is there are 8 billion free will spirits that are human.
Forget the rest of the spiritual realm, just our spirits.
And I like to think of it this way.
Was the devil really in Hitler's bunker, or was that exactly where he wanted Hitler to be?
I think he was probably way more active in the pews and pulpits of German churches to keep them quiet, to keep them silent, to keep them compromised, to keep them colluding in some cases.
The devil is not the source of evil.
He's not the cause of all evil.
Rebellion against God is the definition of evil.
The word is hamartiyah.
Sin is to miss the mark.
Here is God's perfection.
And any free will spirit, including my own, that rebels against the word, will, and way of Christ, that is the definition of evil.
So, which is pretty tricky if you don't believe in God, because there is no evil.
Evil is rebellion against God.
And so, you know, if the devil doesn't exist, or let's say if he's locked up for a thousand years, there will still be horrendous amounts of evil in this world because I exist, because you exist.
I think where my audience might slightly differ from your position, some of them anyway, is that they would think, well, the devil's not even going to be mainly in Hitler's bunker.
He's going to be in the back rooms where the people who planned the Second World War, that's where he's going to concentrate his efforts.
He works at an even higher level than puppets like Hitler.
But I do take your point.
So where are you on the fallen angels on the third of the heavenly host who rebelled against God?
Yeah, so we don't know how many angels there are, how many demons there are.
There's a description in the Revelation that says that the Lord is attended to by thousands of thousands and ten thousands times ten thousand.
So like some people have said, oh, there's a hundred million angels.
If a third of them fell, that there's 33.333 repeating demons.
You know, these numbers are almost certainly symbolic.
We don't know with any certainty.
There's like about five demonic-like figures described in the Bible.
But even those, when you look into them, we don't know definitively a single demon's name because even ones like the one in the man who's living in the tombs, the demon identifies as essentially a Roman centurion.
He calls himself a Legion.
And we don't know if that's his real name, if he's lying or if he's just playing.
Legion just means a thousand.
Exactly.
Yeah, we don't know if that was his real name.
So we know very little about the actual specificities of the demonic realm in regards to names and numbers.
There is a sense that every nation has an angel.
The Bible talks about that enough that we can be pretty confident that every nation has an angel.
But whether that angel is good or bad, that remains true.
The prince of Persia and stuff like that, the ones mentioned in Daniel.
Yeah, and says that Michael is the angel of Israel, you know, that God's personal angel protects Israel.
The Revelation talks about the four angels on the Euphrates will be released, and those four nations, which presumably are Iraq, Iran, Afghan, and Syria, will unleash an army.
You know, there's enough in scripture to suggest that there are angels of nations, but it doesn't say that they're demons of nations.
It doesn't say whether or not they're fallen or not, or if they're still in submission to God.
So the whole courtroom of heaven is just so beyond our heads.
It's wild.
Yeah, well, I mean, we're seeing everything through a glass darkly, and we have to, a lot of this stuff we have to infer.
That's a given.
There's loads and loads of stuff in the Bible that leads you to ask more questions.
And then it makes you wonder, well, what bits are missing?
Because, I mean, I was looking at the story of Moses the other day.
I don't whether you've ever come across this bit of sort of extra biblical folklore.
But the theory is that Moses, when he was a baby, was that Pharaoh was suspicious of, oh, how can this be?
He didn't know about him when he found him in the rushes.
So he was hidden in the rushes.
I think, so he must have been a child at this stage.
And Pharaoh did some kind of test to him, which ended, and to fox Pharaoh, Moses was given a choice of two items, one of which he grabbed and put in his mouth, which was a burning, some sort of burning item.
And it affected his speech forevermore, which is why Aaron became his spokesman.
Now, I'm not necessarily saying that that is correct.
It could just be sort of folklore bullshit that emerged.
But the Bible is frustratingly, it doesn't give us every detail we'd like to know, which is why, of course,
you get scholars and you get people like Michael Heiser talking about whether or not there's a divine counsel and whether or not this is the audience that Psalm 82 is addressed to.
And you're right.
There are fragmentary phrases in Revelation and bits in Isaiah or Isaiah, as you probably call him because you're from the colonies.
Yeah.
So I get this.
I get this, but aren't you, I mean, there is a lot of, there is a lot of accumulated tradition about, about the devil and, and Lucifer and stuff.
And.
And aren't you kind of saying, well, everything we know is all these kind of scholars and churchmen over the ages, everything they've believed about the devil is bollocks.
I'm a sola scriptura guy, so I'm going to always go back to the Bible and see what it says.
And so, you know, what do we see?
Like, so the term the Satan or the devil appears quite a bit, like lowercase D, lowercase S, like the Satan, appears quite a few times in the Bible.
But the first person who's called a Satan in scripture in chronological order is actually David.
Like he's they're like, be careful, he might come as a Satan against us.
Like, hold on, David, you know, this godly king of Israel is a Satan.
What are we talking about here?
If we're talking about the actual person of Satan, like the being of Satan, capital S, know thee Satan, only makes a definitive, unique appearance on three unique times in the Old Testament.
And capital D, no the devil, has three unique occasions in the New Testament.
He barely shows up.
Like the Bible talks more about donkeys than it does about the devil.
There's more stories about olive oil than there is about Satan.
Satan literally ranks between cheese and bread.
You can make a Satan sandwich about how few times he actually appears in scripture.
So my goal with this book is to right-size the devil and help magnify God.
This is not an arm wrestling match between Jesus and the devil of who's going to win, who's strong, who's going to win out the end.
That's actually a Persian myth.
It's a Zoroastrian belief.
It's not a Christian belief.
The Christian belief is that the devil is one of many fallen, rebellious spirits that is living against the word, will, and way of God, and that God is actually using him and will use all his rebellion to inevitably advance the kingdom of God until the kingdom arrive in its fullness and the devil is eradicated.
So people need to really under particularly the Jewish midrashes, they really elevated the power and strength of the devil far beyond anything that you could claim is biblical.
The bit in John where he describes the devil as the prince of this world, who do you think he means?
Yeah, like, I mean, most scholars think that he is the prince of this world.
Notice he's not the king of this world.
Jesus is the king of the universe.
The good news of Jesus, the gospel that he pronounces, is that the kingdom of God is here.
And he is making kingship claims about this.
This idea that like his rule and reign in Imperium is going wider and it's going deeper.
So like it's going into my anger.
It's going into my gossip.
It's going into my addictions.
It's going deeper into me, but it's also going wider into the world.
It's reaching more people.
And that is inevitable.
It is not going to stop.
The kingdom of God is coming.
And that's really good news, particularly for the poor, because it means more justice, more love, more generosity, more kindness, less hate, less evil, less violence.
So the kingdom advancing is really good news.
The devil has some sort of principality role in that this has been his domain for a while, but that was broken at the cross.
Those days are over.
We're not living in that anymore.
What you're saying kind of undercuts Revelation.
I mean, my reading, insofar as I can understand, Revelation, which is pretty much nigh impossible.
I mean, you need a kind of a lecture course, I think, to even to get all the illusions and metaphors and stuff.
Is that there's going to be a reckoning and it's going to be a real thing.
It's not just going to be, I mean, things are going to get pretty biblical.
Things are going to get, we've got horses waiting up to their bridles in blood.
We've got the Antichrist.
We've got all sorts of, or the Antichrist.
I mean, lots of Antichrist, maybe.
but lots of bad stuff is going to go down before Christ returns.
I'm getting the feeling that you're being a bit sanguine, a bit Pollyanna-ish.
Let's back up and look at what the revelation is.
It's actually a series of apocalyptic loops.
There's at least five of them, like quite easily identifiable.
And they follow the same cycle.
Rebellion, destruction, remnant, and renewal.
Rebellion, destruction, remnant.
There's a judgment cycle that happens.
And the Bible describes it like birth pangs.
They get harder and harder and harder.
But eventually, the birth pangs do cease and it gives birth to new life.
And that is exactly what the human condition, we are caught up in this cycle of rebellion, judgment, destruction, remnant, renewal.
And we've been doing this again and again and again.
You can read the Revelation, and some people do, as just about ancient Rome.
You can map over stuff.
You can, oh, that sounds like Nero.
Oh, that sounds a lot like so-and-so.
You can absolutely do that.
And it maps quite well.
You can also do that about the Greek Empire.
You can do that about the British Empire, the American Empire, the rising empire of China and Islam and the coming AI Empire.
You can absolutely take Revelation and apply it to all these things because it does apply to all these things.
It is telling us a story about the birth of a new world.
And it is a cycle of rebellion against the way of God and God renewing all things.
So there will be a final birth pang.
It's going to be the worst.
It's called the Great Tribulation, is how the Bible describes it.
Metaphorically, literally seven years, we don't know, but there is going to be a deeply trying season.
There's going to be an Antichrist, which the Bible describes as essentially a conglomeration of 10 nations.
And they are going to essentially rule the world.
If you read it, if you read Revelation, goodness me, it sounds an awful lot like artificial intelligence technology talking about, you know, the economy.
It's either like a chip in your wrist or a chip in your head.
Market the beast.
Yeah, yeah.
There's all sorts of like wild weaponry that sounds like, well, even like the beast, the beast is described first as an image, and then the Antichrist gives life to the image.
So is that going to be like a Winston Churchill hologram or is it going to be like a humanoid?
We have no idea.
Project movie.
Yes.
That's what it's going to be, isn't it?
But it's going to bring this sort of temporary dystopian type peace and it's going to hunt Christians.
It's going to do all this stuff.
There is going to be that final cycle in the Revelation cycle.
And then Jesus is coming back on a white horse with what sounds like tattoos on his legs that say, King of kings and Lord of Lords.
And what's interesting about how it all ends is the wedding feast, the celebration feast actually happens before the final battle because it's so in hand.
It's already won.
They have the party first, and then it's over like lightning.
It's over in second.
So the story is already finished.
We just have to live it out now.
Gosh, that's an echo of Psalm 23.
Thou hast set a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.
Do you think that's a sort of prediction of the pre-battle feast?
Well, we don't know how much John the Relevator, we don't know how fluent he was with Psalm, but I think he pulls enough from Daniel.
What was that?
How can he not have been familiar with the Psalms?
I think he does.
We don't know how familiar he was, but yeah, I think, come on.
I don't think that's John we're talking about.
Yeah, he quotes.
He does not know the Psalms.
He quotes, they estimate over a thousand Old Testament scriptures work their way into the Revelation.
So all I'm saying is we don't know if that if he read Psalm and was like, yeah, let's put let's put the feast before the fight or if that was part of his revelation in the moment where that's actually what he saw.
We don't know.
No, I agree.
We don't know exactly what he saw.
I mean, it must have been a pretty crazy trip.
I don't know what he was on when he went to.
Right?
Yeah, for real.
He's on Patmos.
What was he smoking?
Oh, my goodness.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what do you reckon?
What's your best guess about what happens when Christ returns?
Yeah, describe the scene.
Well, so it sounds like this isn't, it's not like it's not like Return of the King in Lord of the Rings, where it's a big final pitched battle and who's going to win this last battle.
Because Gamboff is on a white horse, isn't he?
Yeah, the battle comes before.
There's battles before, you know, potentially the Battle of Armageddon, which might be the field of Megeddo.
There's all sorts of wars and rumors of wars that are going to happen between now and then.
But it does sound like at the very end, it's feast, lightning, fast, return.
And then the books are opened.
The judgment tape, you know, God is there in judgment of the living and the dead.
He separates the goats from the sheep based on how they treated the poor.
The Lamb's Book of Life is open.
The Bible says, you know, if you believe with your mouth, if you believe in your heart and confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, you will be saved.
But it does seem that loving the poor is actually the proof that that belief was real.
It's almost a proxy for true faith.
So we're not sure exactly how those books are going to work, but that's when the judgment happens.
It's important to remember that like the lake of fire was not prepared for humans.
The Bible says very clearly that it was created for the devil and the Antichrist.
But people who've chosen to live in rebellion against God will not spend eternity with God.
But that's all post-earth, so to speak.
Right.
And so we then come back from the dead and live on Earth, surrounded by the...
I'm hoping there's going to be that God will destroy every single wind turbine and uproot their concrete bases.
Do you think he'll do that?
Well, like, I mean, the Bible does say that there will be no night time because the presence of the Lord will light the whole place.
So maybe we don't need electricity and light anymore.
So maybe we don't need wind turbines or we don't need to.
Maybe we don't need oil rigs anymore either.
Who knows?
No, I would have thought that's probably that's probably the case.
I mean, I'm not sure what I believe about Tesla anymore.
I think he may be he may be another psyop.
Who knows?
But but yeah, whatever.
As long as he destroys.
I'm just thinking about like when Christ returns, because the earth, I think we can agree, is a very beautiful.
Well, God made it.
So obviously it's incredibly beautiful.
But it has kind of been ruined in the last, well, I mean, since the beginning of time, hasn't it?
It's been steadily steadily.
But they've accelerated the despoliation of the I was about to call it a planet.
I don't believe it's a planet.
They've despoiled the earth with wind turbines and solar farms and other monstrosities, and they've cut down the forest and so on.
Do you think that when Christ returns, we're going to get a sort of it's going to be like being in Eden again?
Uh, well, let's let's remember that that from the fall, all not just humans are under the curse of sin and death, but so is creation.
Because that, because of our rebellion, because of free free will rebellion, that everything is under that curse.
So, you're absolutely right that we have been compounding that, and that's that's to do with capitalism and its requirements of compounding shareholder returns.
We have to extract more and more resources in order to create profits.
So, we are speeding up our destruction of this planet or this earth, as you'd call it, um, if you don't believe it's a planet.
Um, but um, we the Bible says that that God is going to make all things new.
It whether that means he's just going to like do a big tree planting mission, I'm doubtful.
My sense is that like the whole universe will be renewed, maybe beyond the universe.
We are we're going to be spiritual beings, you know.
We doesn't necessarily say that we're going to have bodies anymore.
So, do we need food production now?
So, okay, so now we don't have the plow anymore.
So, now the soil can regrow.
Like, we don't know what that's going to look like.
But what we do know is that the presence of God will be there.
And wherever the presence of God is on full display, there it just radiates evil.
There's just nothing but goodness.
Like, um, so I'm to me, the there are some things that are just like so esoteric and beyond us that they're like not really worth thinking about.
For me, the bigger thing is, what do we do with the devil now?
What do we do with evil now?
That's the conversation that I'm more interested in because it has effects for my children, my marriage, my friendships, the economy here in Britain.
It has effects on immigration, it has effects on housing.
Um, the that to me is what's more interesting: is what does it mean to bring the kingdom of God into the here and now and resist the devil so he will flee?
Knowing that God in his fullness will absolutely have it all in hand, and we will be rejoicing at the beauty.
Yes.
Um, I was I thought there was a stage in my sort of Christian journey when I was um veering towards sola scratura, um, and I have a lot of sympathy with it.
I sort of understand why the sort of the the Protestant Reformation happened, or the Catholics just get this, they think it was the work of the devil, yeah.
But I, but I very much see the importance of getting the Bible into the vernacular so that the common man could read scripture without the mediation of priests or whatever, who might necessarily might not necessarily give them the full version or might sort of skew the message, right?
So, I get all that, and I'm I totally respect Bible scholars, but it's funny, talking to you makes me slightly less sola scriptura because I, because I have a lot of sympathy with the traditions that have evolved over time.
I mean, I, of course, I have a healthy skepticism towards all the established churches, and I can see that Rome was to a degree a sort of rebadged Roman Empire.
They took Christianity and they used it to their ends.
And I get all that.
And I look at the Church of England.
What is your church, by the way?
So I go to a non-denominational local community fellowship.
We don't put any badges on it.
Yeah, yeah.
I was talking to a fellow Christian about this the other day.
And I was saying, so where do you go to church?
And he said, well, I've got this lovely Anglican vicar who lets me use his piano, but he believes everything he reads in the Guardian.
And I think, yeah, tell me about it.
I mean, that's it.
Whenever I hear a vicar preaching a sermon about Ukraine or even mentioning Ukraine, I want to walk out of the church.
Whereas what I find, when I've gone to certain other churches, for example, sort of when I talk to the Reformed Baptists, for example, I find that they're very into their Bible and there's lots of kind of discussion.
There's normally a very good talk on a particular passage, very erudite talk, which I really, really like.
So I totally get all that.
But at the same time, I am drawn to, for example, the Orthodox Church and the monks on Mount Athos.
These are people who spend their lives just thinking about God, communing with God and stuff.
And of course, in the Orthodox Church, they say it's not just about the scripture.
It's also about tradition.
It's about stuff that our holy men have inferred through by having a sort of maybe a more direct line to God than us those of us who live in the world say.
And I'm thinking that probably in the last 2,000 years, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, they will have picked up stuff that is not necessarily traceable to the Bible.
You're saying, well, everything they've inferred is just basically woo, it's made up shit.
Well, let's back up for a second.
So my first book, top one on the shelf here, it's called A Year of Living Prayerfully.
I did a 37,000-mile prayer pilgrimage around the world.
And for one of the chapters, I went to Mount Athos and I spent time in three monasteries: the richest, the oldest, and the prettiest.
And talked to them.
Tell me which ones they are.
Miguel Lavra?
Is that the so Grand Lavra is the oldest?
Ivaron is the oh, what was the third one?
I say that.
Vatopeti was the super rich one.
Russian oligarch money, I think.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
It was really wild.
Anyways, so, and I have a good friend who's an ex-Greek Orthodox monk.
And one, like, one of the huge problems with the monks on Athos is they genuinely believe that the Holy Spirit is only in the Greek Orthodox Church.
Whereas I go to scripture and it's very clear that the Holy Spirit is in every believer.
And so I say, you are wrong.
Now, I love Greek Orthodoxy.
I love all the Greek Orthodox Christians I've met.
I'm not discounting their salvation in the least.
I'm not discounting the benefit they've been to this world.
None of that.
These are my brothers and sisters in Christ, but they are still fallen.
Baptists, fallen.
Pentecostals, fallen.
Catholics, fallen.
We are all missing the mark somewhere.
And so they're missing the mark in different ways than you and I are.
For me, though, it's always going to come back to scripture.
If any denomination, if any tradition believes something that is not in line with scripture, if I can point in my Bible and say, you're saying A, but the Bible says B, we have to, as Christians, submit to what Scripture says.
Now, obviously, there's lots of nuance.
There is no mention in scripture about atomic bombs, heroin dealing, pornography.
There's, you know, these things are not covered in scripture, but as we read the Bible, we can discern with the Holy Spirit what the word, will, and way of Jesus is.
And it makes it very clear how we should act economically, how we should act sexually, how we should act to our enemies based on the Bible.
So that's what I'm when I say solo scripture, I mean we do not build new theologies that do not, that we can't show from scripture.
So like, for instance, what the devil looks like, we have these pictures of him with like horn, red eyes, cape, fiery sulfur breath.
If you actually go to scripture, that's not what he looks like.
So we've got to always go back to the Bible and go back to the source.
That's, it is, it is God's gift to us.
So the Bible doesn't have, the Bible doesn't have all the information that's available in the universe.
It has enough to know how to live and be godly in this world.
May I say that was a very lengthy, lengthy swerve that you just did there.
So I totally agree with you that what you described about the Greek Orthodox people, for example, they think they are the only thing.
It's no good.
You get that from Catholics as well.
The Catholics, I love my Catholic friends, and they're God-fearing people and some really good people, especially the Latin mass ones.
But they do genuinely believe that they are not just the mother church, but also the only church.
And that basically they even think that if you die outside the Catholic Church, you're basically a heretic.
As far as they're concerned, it seems to me we are not, you and I are not Christians, for example.
We're just not in the game.
I accept all that.
But it's a long way from going there.
Yeah, and clearly, I think I spot moments all the time where I look at the different doctrinal positions of the various churches and go, yeah, I'm not sure that's right, actually.
That's a cultural accretion.
No, hang on.
I mean, look at the Zionists, Zionist Christians in America.
I mean, just jilally.
They just believe some crazy, crazy stuff.
So I get all that.
But just because somebody is wrong about something doesn't mean they're wrong about everything.
I mean, after your swerve, you did go, you did come around to restating your position, which is quite a hardcore one.
You actually, it's the Bible or nothing.
But then that makes me start thinking about things like, where are you on the book of Esther?
What specifically about the book of Esther?
I mean, what's it even doing there?
You think the book of Esther should be in the Bible?
So the canon of scripture that's come down to us from our forefathers, we, you know, as at least as Protestant Christians, we believe that this is the word of God that in its original translation, in its original form, which has been corrupted and is fallen because it's the product of human hands partnering with the Spirit of God.
That our English translations, we don't have the whole story necessarily.
Even the copies we have of the original, the point here is that God has been communicating to human beings, and for whatever reason, he has allowed this body of scripture to come down to us.
What's really interesting is Paul actually references another letter he wrote specifically on sexual ethics.
We don't have that letter.
If a version of that letter survived, should it be canon?
Should it not be canon?
That would open up a wild can of worms.
This is so far beyond my pay grade of choosing the canon of scripture.
All we know is that the Bible says that all scripture is God-breathed.
And our faith for thousands of years has put Esther in the Bible.
So I look at Esther and I go through, okay, what are the lessons to be learned from Esther?
Well, it's that God can redeem horrific situations, like in her case, teenage sex trafficking.
Like, let's be really honest about what happens to Esther.
She's kidnapped by an evil king to be part of his harem, right?
It's not like a beauty pageant.
You can put Red Riding Hood into the Bible.
It jars so completely with the rest of the Bible.
Tonally, it's just, it's there by mistake.
See, this is where you lose me slightly.
Because I'm thinking, I can't.
I mean, I respect your rigor of your position.
But at the same time, I'm thinking, this is just another, for me, this is just another superstition, essentially.
The idea that the Bible, as in the, presumably you mean the Protestant Bible as opposed to the Coptic Bible or the Roman, yeah, because as you know, the Roman Catholic Bible is the same.
They have Jubilees and yeah.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
If that is your position, that this is the word of God and it all has equal merit because it because God let this happen, then I'm, you've lost me on that particular point.
Yeah, so one thing that's super important.
So James, I grew up in a tradition, a closed brethren tradition, originally came out of Ireland, where they believe the Bible literally.
So like every word from Genesis 1 to the end of Revelation, they believe it literally.
That is not a great way to read the Bible.
We have to read it literately.
We have to understand that this is 66 books compiled over 1500 years and that has very different genres.
I always say to teenagers in our Sunday school classes, don't read Harry Potter like history.
Don't read Proverbs like law.
Don't read Revelation like history.
Don't read Genesis like total fiction.
We have to understand that different books and different sections of different books have different genres.
So in the case of Samson, for instance, was Samson a real literal, was that a literal story?
Maybe.
Does it take the exact form of a Greek solar myth?
Yes.
So is it a story to say like, hey, Israel in a tough time needs people like this potentially fictional Samson to be strong and courageous?
Or is it saying, hey, we've been living in a time where everyone does what's right in their own eyes.
And when you live like that, you end up blind.
Maybe it's a fiction cautionary tale.
Maybe it's a literal historical document.
We don't know.
But it's important to like understand both of those things as you read it.
So you can let the Holy Spirit explain to you the truth of the Samson story, which is, man, oh man, submission to the word, will, and way of God is so important.
Otherwise, you end up with chaos in the world.
The Samson, Samson is not a hero.
He is a bad dude.
And the Philistines are everyone in the story is just absolutely rotten.
And the idea here is that, oh my goodness, this is what's going to happen if we disobey God.
And so we always come back to Jesus.
We always come back to what is he trying to communicate.
How then shall we live?
Yeah, I get that.
My problem is: well, obviously, number one, I am fallen.
Yeah.
And two, I make podcasts in which I talk about the Bible and conspiracy theories.
So it's very hard for me to just go, well, this is great, Jared.
I'm just going to go and imbibe the message of Jesus and live my continent life and focus on what's important.
And I agree, yeah, I agree.
That is the most important thing.
But I'm afraid that I kind of ask questions.
I look at the world as it is, and it seems that your line for me is just too simple.
It's like when I read the Bible, which I do every day, and I'm thinking, okay, Moloch, Baal, the evil gods are named.
It seems to me that they're kind of the Bible's constantly telling us that there is only one God, and he's the God with the capital G, and he's Yahweh, and so on.
I get that.
But nevertheless, it does acknowledge the existence of these kind of junior gods who seem to be they appear in Greek and Roman myths.
They've been given, but they're all ultimately the same.
They are the fallen angels.
Do you accept that there are fallen angels with particular names which are wreaking havoc on the world that we live in?
Or do you not do you not buy into that?
Yeah, so the whole demonic realm, we know very little about it, but my strong sense is that it is real.
The names in scripture that we have, like names like Azalel, Belial, Beelzebub, Legion, Mammon, these aren't necessarily demonic names.
I know Pentecostals, particularly, who say, like, Jezebel is a real demon.
You're like, you can't show me that from scripture.
Now, is there a Jezebel spirit?
Like, this, like, this, like, kind of whorish desire for power and twisted sadism.
Absolutely.
That absolutely exists in the world.
My best friend runs a demonic deliverance ministry, and every single week he has people come to his studio and they do deliverance, and he has wild stories.
But one of the things that he's learned is like, you can't trust any of these entities, to be honest, and tell you the truth.
And like, who named them?
They didn't have parents.
Did God name them?
Like, we just don't know.
Like, I do believe the demonic realm is real.
My bigger thing, though, is that the Bible says that the devil is the father of lies.
And it's the lies that humans are believing that is causing the most devastation in the world today.
I believe that humans believing lies is what's causing the most pain in this world.
So it's lies like not believing that all people are created in the image of God in Mago De theology.
When you don't believe that people are eternal spirits, that God loves, you treat them like garbage.
It's beliefs like thinking interest is okay, that sex, that you can do whatever you want with your body, that we can choose right from wrong, that we are the definition of morality.
These sorts of big, big lies are.
These are all post-Enlightenment ideas you're talking about here, really.
So if you go back to scripture, you can actually trace a direct line through scripture on interest being just deeply negative for humanity.
You can trace a line on sexuality, you know, from Genesis, it's one man, one woman for life, all the way to the bridegroom of Christ.
You know, like these, you could say post-Enlightenment, but if you actually go back to the Bible, you can see a thread through the whole scripture on a number of these topics, economic sexuality, et cetera, parenthood even.
So I would say for me, the bigger thing is, what are the lies that we are believing?
What are the lies that I am believing?
And what does the Bible say?
What is the word, will, and way of Jesus telling me about how I should think rightly and then live rightly?
Okay, I'll qualify that.
I'd say that the Enlightenment was a way of entrenching the, well, you can't really entrench rebellion, but entrenching the modern mindset, which makes it feel not just legitimate, but actually inevitable.
To reject God's command.
I mean, I'm not saying that bad behavior didn't pre-exist before the Enlightenment, but people knew in the medieval mindset, for example, people were aware of their place in God's schemata.
When they were doing wrong, they knew they were doing wrong.
And nowadays, we live in a culture where, I mean, we're discouraged from even believing that the supernatural is a possibility.
Yeah.
And what's interesting, James, is that teens are waking up to this and realizing how stupid that is.
Like the idea that the material world is all there is and there's no, they've all seen the spiritual penetrate through and they just can't square it with.
So they're told in school, you know, like you are atoms, quirks, quarks, bacteria.
You are physical, right?
You're just physics.
And then they experience love or hope or hopelessness or hatred.
They experience these spiritual things.
Maybe they even have an encounter with the demonic or they encounter an overwhelming love and they can't just chalk it up to chemicals.
They can't just chalk it up to hormones.
They can't just chalk it up to field, to quantum theory.
And so they're pushing back.
And, you know, so you're seeing a growth in kids believing in God, not necessarily Jesus or the Christian God, but just the idea that there's this spiritual realm.
Even physicists, like I've been listening to a lot of interviews lately with physicists who are, they're essentially at the point that they're like, oh, this reality is definitely not all that there is.
We're like getting close to like having a formula for that to like show that we're like living in a headset reality and that someday we'll take the headset off and be in the real reality or maybe it's nested in another reality or whatever.
Like people are starting to wake up to the fact that the materialist mindset just doesn't work for several reasons.
It gives you no hope beyond this life.
It gives you no legitimate foundation for right or wrong.
It doesn't give you any real community or friendship because you don't believe in spiritual concepts like trust or love or whatever.
There's so many problems with the materialist mindset that people are realizing how bankrupt it is.
Before I forget, because I know you've got a limited amount of time in your busy schedule, whether he's called Jesus or what, tell me what you call him.
So Hebrew, Yehoshua became Yeshua in Aramaic, Yesus in Latin, and then Jesus in English.
I see a lot of Yeshua going.
It's quite a thing at the moment.
And I don't, I haven't got a nothing wrong with that.
But what I'm thinking is names change over time.
The fact is that the name Jesus is quite culturally embedded.
And I don't believe that when people call on the name of Jesus, Yeshua is going to be going, well, that's not my name.
I'm not going to be able to do that.
Absolutely.
No way.
I got it wrong.
And we know that demons flee at the name of Jesus.
When people have got sleep paralysis, which is basically demonic presences, and they call on Jesus and it's all God, isn't it?
Yeah, Jesus, like, this is the God of grace.
He is the definition of love.
If we name him by a different name than his human name, he's not going to worry too much about that, I don't think.
You know, again, Jesus is, that's English.
It's not in the Bible, but that's okay.
Like, Yehoshua means the Lord saves or God saves.
Like, his name is what he does.
And it's the same with the devil.
God saves, accuse your adversary.
That's just what, that's what they are here to do.
It's so archetypal.
We can't even imagine.
Where are you on Yahweh?
So Yahweh, the first discovery of the name in archaeology, he's the name of a Canaanite God.
Like, it's a name that, like, predates Israel, potentially, and predates, certainly, Jesus'arrival on the scene.
Yahweh is...
To predate Israel, what?
What predates Jacob?
Like, as in potentially predates Abraham.
We don't know.
Because we don't have a date on Abraham on when he lived exactly.
So Abraham could have lived 3,500 years ago.
He could have lived like 30,000.
We have no idea.
We don't know how long there was a small group of people who identified as Israel.
The earliest stele, it's an Egyptian stele.
It's from, I think, 1420, something, 1400s, I think, BC, is the first definitive proof that we have that the Israelite people were living in the land of Canaan.
So, you know, roughly 3,500 years.
So depending on how you date the Yahweh stone, that would determine which came first or if they came at the same time.
The point is, to me, it's quite silly in the sense of like, we actually don't know God's real name because they started using a tetragrammaton, YHVH.
They took out the vowels because God's name was so holy that they took out the vowels and we actually lost the name of God.
So we actually don't know, was it Jehovah?
Was it Yahweh?
But to me, God is, he's not a human like we are.
Does he even need a name like we like when they ask like, who are you?
He's just like, I am who I am.
Like, I am.
I am being itself.
I am existence.
If there is something that can create a universe and probably a multiverse and who knows how many multiverses, he's so far beyond our fathoming that to even give him a name is almost a silly endeavor.
But I don't know.
Because, I mean, you seem to think it matters what Jesus' real name is a bit, don't you?
A bit.
I'm not saying we need to change it in Bibles to Yahoshua.
It means it's Joshua.
And that's what Yahoshua is, Joshua today.
It's just interesting, right?
I just love random stuff.
I think it's more important with the devil, though, because accuser adversary is way more helpful to me than devil or Satan, and certainly not Lucifer.
Lucifer's nonsense.
Right.
Okay.
But on the Jehovah thing, or Yahweh, I mean, if we were interested in the name of Jesus and he's the Son of God, surely we should be interested in his dad as well.
I mean, I know?
Yeah.
The name appears a lot.
I think about this when I recite the Psalms and stuff, and I'm thinking every time I use the word Lord, actually, it's a translation of the word Jehovah.
YHVH.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
The tetragrammaton.
And would it be better if I don't know?
Some people think this stuff really matters.
For example, some people think the Sabbath is absolutely.
I mean, there's a whole chunk of the Bible which goes on and on about the Sabbath.
So you're sick to the back teeth of it.
Presumably you think Sabbath is absolutely important.
Well, Jesus says that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
And I like that line.
Yeah, the Sabbath is actually, it's a tripartite piece of God's rest for humanity.
So every seven days, there was, this is in the Israelite law, there was to be a day of rest from work, not just for the top dog, but for their employees and for their animals.
It was just a day of rest.
Then every seven years was a Shemitah, and this was a debt release.
So everyone who owed debts was released.
And then every seven, seven years, every 49th year, they had a Jubilee.
They blew a horn called a Jubilee.
And they had something called a Daror, which was a liberty.
And that was a liberty, not just from the land, from money, but also from land, where everyone got their ancestral lands back.
So that each new generation would have a reset to equality.
And so that was God's intention for the people of Israel: every seven days you have a work rest.
Every seven years, you have a debt rest.
Every 49 years, you have a land rest.
And so that was just this beautiful rhythm that God said, if you practice this, I will pour out so much blessing on you that it will evaporate and you'll have no need among you, which is just beautiful.
And so Sabbath economics is beautiful and important, but it's not the way I was raised in this literalist transition that like I wasn't allowed to pick up a basketball on Sunday because like the Lord's going to punish you for breaking the Sabbath.
You're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
It's not like that at all.
It's a quote that line back at them.
You could have done.
Yeah, I didn't know it.
I was seven.
But when you were eight, though, when you were there, I should have known.
I should have been more biblically literate.
But yeah, no, the Sabbath is part of God's economic blessing on humanity.
It's beautiful.
Right.
Now, I'm not sure, Jared, how far down the rabbit hole you are.
I mean, I can see you're pretty deep down the rabbit hole on Christian stuff, but I don't know where you are on the kind of the rulers of the darkness of this world, the Illuminati, the Satanic bloodline families.
But I mean, anyone who's spent any time in the conspiracy space, let's say, knows that the people who run the world are basically working for Satan and they worship.
They worship Satan and they worship Lucifer.
Now, you're saying these characters don't exist.
Well, who are they worshiping?
I'm not saying that at all.
I believe that the devil is a real being.
There are some people who believe that the devil is just like a metaphor for evil.
Jesus talks to him by name.
Now, even so, Jesus' temptation in the wilderness may have been a literal vision that he had.
I know, like the tradition I was raised in, they believed that the devil literally took God to the highest point in the world where he could somehow magically see all the kingdoms of the world.
That doesn't make sense from a geographic perspective at all.
My sense is that.
Unless you believe in flat earth, of course.
Of course, of course.
Yes, that's true.
But even then, the distance of the flat earth, it's too far for the human eye to see, even if in flat earth, it wouldn't be possible.
But with Jesus, come on, Amy.
Supervision.
Okay, sure.
So where, so what I think happened was that John the Baptist, I think he was likely an Essene or related to the Essenes.
He's living in the desert near the Jordan.
And Jesus goes out and he spends time with John, his kinsman.
He's baptized by John in the Jordan.
He then has this spiritual, these 40 days in the wilderness, this monastic type experience near John's community.
And during that time, you know, he hasn't been eating.
He's in the desert.
He's really communing with God and he has this vision.
But what's interesting is the, again, read the Bible literally.
It's set up like a Jewish midrash.
So they would, what they do is Jews would write a fictional story about a famous rabbi where the devil would come and he would misquote scripture and then the rabbi would smack him down with like the real scripture.
And it would take a lie truth, lie truth, lie truth.
It was typically in threes.
And that's exactly how that story is set up.
It is set up like a Jewish midrash and it's also set up to reflect that Jesus is the new Moses, that he's the fulfillment of Moses.
Everything is very Mosaic in there.
So you're like, okay, is this a literal story or is this a midrash?
Could it be both?
We don't know, but it's important to keep those things in mind as you read it.
But all that to say, Jesus addresses the devil as an individual spiritual being.
I believe that the devil is an individual spiritual being.
There's certainly nothing in scripture that says he is not.
So that's where I mean solo scriptura to say, oh, the devil is just a metaphor.
You can't make that case biblically.
You can't step beyond scripture and make that case.
I understand that people do, but for me, the devil, the demonic, these are individual spiritual beings.
They don't have physical bodies necessarily, and they're certainly not immortal.
They're certainly not all-powerful, all-knowing.
They can't read your mind and whatnot.
But no, I'm not saying that I don't believe in that.
Please don't put those words in my mouth.
No, well, no, I want to clarify exactly what you do think, because I think it's really important.
And if you say what you like, I'm curious.
So where are you on the Nephilim?
So the Nephilim, you know, it's a very simple passage in scripture.
People have come to believe that the Nephilim are like half humans, half God, half humans, half demons, whatnot.
It's all speculation.
The word Nephilim means giant.
There are still people who have DNA.
I didn't.
I don't think Nephilim does.
It was translated in the Greek as gigantis, but it doesn't actually mean that.
I think it means something like the fallen ones.
Yeah, I have not seen that in reputable sources.
For a demon to breed with a human, they would have to have a body, and they don't.
So that's very tricky to me.
As far as we can tell explicitly, the only spirit to human pregnancy in all of scripture is Mary's pregnancy.
There's nothing that says, all you can say about the Nephilim is to say that a human bred with a demon and made a baby.
You can only say that that is speculation.
You cannot say, you can't make a biblical case that that actually happened.
Now, to your point about you're saying, you know, these powerful families that rule the world are all worshipers of Satan.
The Bible says very clearly that we are not fighting against flesh and blood.
We are fighting against principalities and powers in the heavenly realms.
So a great example would be Islam.
You know, 1.8 billion people.
This is not a religion.
This is a murder cult.
If you read the Quran, if you read the Hadith, incredibly violent ideology.
In every cult, there are wonderful, kind, loving, gentle people.
There's tons of Muslims who are wonderful, kind, gentle, loving, peaceful people.
But it doesn't mean the cult should still exist.
Love speaks truth.
It speaks the truth.
And so, you know, you look at something like Islam and you go, you know, this isn't actually about the people.
It's about the father of lies who's planted a lie that says A, B, C, or D. So we need to be truthful.
We need to be loving and we need to be not focused on attacking human beings.
There's absolutely people in this world that God is using for evil.
And obviously, if you're down the rabbit hole on who these powerful people are, that's one thing.
But you're right.
At the end of the day, it's actually the powers behind powerful people that really matter.
What is the animating spirit in this world?
And that animating spirit is our fallenness.
It's our rebellion against God.
That is the definition of sin.
Yes.
I'm still not persuaded by your position on the Nephilim, because it seems to me that it's fairly clear in that passage in Genesis that the Nephilim or whatever they're called find the daughters of men attractive and basically bred with them.
Which would seem to me to explain those otherwise bizarre passages in the Old Testament where God enjoins the children of Israel to destroy these rival tribes, not just the babies, but even their livestock.
Yeah, it is creative speculation to say that demons bred with women.
When the Bible says that the sons of God bred with the daughters of man, sons of God may have just meant Israelites.
It may have meant godly human.
It could have meant human beings.
All I'm saying is that it's speculation.
That's all I'm not.
You're taking the fun out, Jared.
What was that?
You're taking the fun out.
I know.
i'm sorry because you're approaching this in a kind of like like i mean no on the one hand you're as as a as a fellow christian you accept that we were made by this extraordinary unfathomable fathom fathomable being that whose name we can't even we don't know yeah We don't know.
And he sent his son to redeem us.
And this is not just a myth.
This is real.
This is absolutely real.
And then at the same time, your position is, well, of course, we can't.
This is pure speculation.
We can't.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The verse says, sons of God.
It doesn't say demons.
You can't make a theology about something that isn't in the Bible.
Sons of God.
What does it say?
What is the line?
I think we should move on from this.
I'm not going to convince you.
You're definitely not going to give me a question.
No, you're not.
My bigger point, my bigger point is always going to be, what does the Bible say?
Don't step outside the bounds of what the Bible says and say something else is fact when it's actually just speculation.
That's the meta point for me.
And then, of course, the biggest point of all, and I will always come back to this, is that the good news is that the kingdom of God is invading and advancing.
It's sort of like during World War II, Charles de Gaulle escaped from France to England and he built the free French army, 1.3 million soldiers.
And France had fallen, right?
It was in fallenness.
They had a Vichy regime, these Nazi sympathizers running the country, exporting Jews to their death and all that stuff.
And the good news was that true France was coming.
The kingdom was invading.
And you got the French resistance spreading the good news that the kingdom is coming.
And then what happens on D-Day is the Allies land, and within weeks, Paris has been liberated.
And the nation is now in the fullness of France again.
That's what we're in.
We went Eden, fallenness, and then we're going to be the heavenly Eden, the garden city.
We're in fallenness, but we celebrate the fact that the kingdom is here and it is growing.
And so all of scripture from Genesis 1 to Revelation, we read it through the lens of Jesus.
That's what makes Christians Christians, is that it's Christ-focused.
And so we look at the character, the person, the word, will, and way of Jesus.
And that is how we read Esther through Jesus.
We read Moses and Abraham through Jesus.
We didn't read Esther at all, Jared.
Sorry, I didn't.
James, in all seriousness, I would encourage you to go back and in the Holy Spirit, read Esther through the lens of Jesus to say, how is this informing the kingdom gospel?
And just see what the Holy Spirit pulls out for you in it.
Put aside your cynicism and all that stuff.
You're not the first Christian to recommend that I use, to correct me by inviting the Holy Spirit to enter me and give you the lens.
Read it through the lens of Jesus' gospel of the kingdom of God and see what is revealed.
Put aside your cynicism and see...
No, it's funny.
You and I are both skeptics, but in slightly different variations of our skepticism.
And I totally respect your position.
Well, it makes for an enjoyable conversation.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Of course it does.
Absolutely.
I mean, I suspected there were going to be bits where we bumped into each other and bits where we agreed.
I'm always interested.
I'm on a journey.
And my position is always I'm up to be enlightened on particular issues.
I was wrong about loads of stuff before.
If we've nailed it all, we've made it.
We're perfect.
We're God.
Yeah, exactly.
It's much more interesting finding out more stuff.
So I've really enjoyed talking to you.
Thank you.
And tell us where we can get your books and where we can see your stuff.
I mean, you're a hardworking boy.
You've done loads of stuff.
You've made films.
Yeah, if people go to jaredbrock.com, they can download my first book, A Year of Living Prayerfully, for free.
And they can watch all my documentaries there.
We've made one on human trafficking, one for parents on teenage addiction and pornography, one on slavery.
You can watch all the films there for free.
Pro-slavery, presumably.
It's about a slave who escaped from America to Canada before the Civil War and then went back and rescued 118 people.
He's an amazing man.
Made into a movie by Danny Glover.
We made a documentary.
Yeah, he narrated it.
Yeah.
So yeah, you can read the book and watch all the films for free there, as well as download a free first chapter of all the other books.
Yeah, that's all at jaredbrock.com.
JaredBrock.com.
Thank you, Jared.
It's been great talking to me.
And dear beloved viewers and listeners, if you've enjoyed this podcast, as of course you had, do consider supporting me.
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