NXR Podcast - THE INTERVIEW - Understanding The Divine Counsel And The Nephilim with Doug Van Dorn
Aired: 2024-03-25
Duration: 01:04:22


=== God, Zeus, and the Myth (13:02) ===

[00:00:00]  Welcome back to another episode of Theology Applied.
[00:00:02]  I am your host, Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries.
[00:00:05]  And in this episode, I'm privileged to welcome to the show for the very first time Pastor Doug Van Dorn.
[00:00:12]  Pastor Doug Van Dorn is a Reformed Baptist pastor.
[00:00:15]  He holds to the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, just like I do.
[00:00:20]  We've got a lot in common, but one of the things we have in common is not just the 1689, our Reformed theology, but our fascination, interest, some might call it an obsession with giants and the Nephilim.
[00:00:33]  And fallen angels and these kinds of high strangeness things.
[00:00:37]  And so that's what we're going to be talking about today.
[00:00:40]  We're going to be talking about it from a covenantal perspective, a spiritual perspective, a reformed perspective.
[00:00:46]  There's not a lot of guys who necessarily are within the reformed world who have these views.
[00:00:50]  A lot of them tend to be dispensational, a lot of them tend to be premillennial.
[00:00:55]  And Doug Van Dorn is neither of those things.
[00:00:57]  So we're going to be talking about Jesus, the giant slayer, slaying giants in the truest spiritual and ultimate sense, and what all that means from.
[00:01:06]  Adam to David to Christ, what that looks like for you and I today.
[00:01:13]  Tune in now.
[00:01:14]  Applying God's word to every aspect of life.
[00:01:18]  This is Theology Applied.
[00:01:23]  All right.
[00:01:26]  Well, let's talk a little bit about Heiser and some of his conception and some of the work that you've done working off of that with this divine counsel.
[00:01:36]  Can you explain that to our listeners?
[00:01:38]  What is the divine counsel and where do we find it in scripture?
[00:01:42]  Really, the main focus of his book is to talk about the divine council.
[00:01:45]  Like I said, the Nephilim, the angel of the Lord, these are subtopics underneath it.
[00:01:51]  So, the divine council is essentially the idea that there's a group of celestial heavenly beings that rule over the affairs of the cosmos.
[00:02:00]  And if you want an analogy from Greek mythology, think about the Olympians.
[00:02:06]  Now, the problem is, of course, as soon as I say mythology, people, especially in our world, they start to go crazy because they hear the word myth and they think fake.
[00:02:16]  Fiction, lies, all this kind of stuff.
[00:02:20]  And my understanding of mythology has changed dramatically.
[00:02:24]  I think C.S. Lewis has been very helpful to me to understand this.
[00:02:28]  In some ways, Tolkien as well.
[00:02:30]  Both these guys were just incredibly steeped, well versed in a ton of mythology.
[00:02:38]  Yeah.
[00:02:38]  You know, I don't know if you know it, but Tolkien gets a bunch of his names for the dwarves from the poetic Edda in the Scandinavian myth.
[00:02:47]  So, That's just kind of an example of they're taking these stories and they're just kind of reapplying them.
[00:02:54]  But my understanding of a myth is that it's really just an origin story.
[00:03:00]  It can be either true or false.
[00:03:02]  It can have, over the course of time, you can have changes in it.
[00:03:06]  So you can have contradictions in Greek mythology because they've changed the stories or they've heard them differently or whatever the case might be.
[00:03:12]  I mean, these things are so old, they go back before any kind of written history.
[00:03:17]  And they're a vehicle.
[00:03:20]  That can stand the test of time that can help people understand where their origins are from.
[00:03:27]  So that's why Heiser's original title for his book, The Unseen Realm, was actually The Myth That Is True.
[00:03:35]  He's trying to convey the idea that the biblical story is a myth in that it's an origin story and it's got mythological ways that it's working on our psyche when we read it, but it's true, it's actually history.
[00:03:51]  I think that probably, you know, I actually believe fairly strongly that Zeus was a real character and his name is actually in the Bible as either Satan or Baal, depending on the testament that you're in.
[00:04:02]  I think that these are all the same entity.
[00:04:04]  When somebody hears that, they freak out because they've been taught that, you know, mythology is false.
[00:04:12]  There's nothing true about it.
[00:04:13]  How could you possibly say that Zeus is real?
[00:04:16]  But as soon as I say, well, he's actually Satan, he's actually Baal.
[00:04:20]  Now, Baal might bother some people because they might not think he's real either.
[00:04:24]  He's just an idol.
[00:04:25]  Well, that's not true.
[00:04:26]  But it's funny because none of our people in the Reformed world would say that Satan is anything other than a real supernatural fallen entity.
[00:04:34]  They understand that.
[00:04:35]  So to make that connection, and I think that you can make a pretty strong biblical case for it, that these are all the same entity, it really discombobulates a lot of people.
[00:04:47]  So, yeah, mythology, things get twisted and turned.
[00:04:52]  But when you find certain myths, especially when you find universal myths, like every flood.
[00:04:58]  Like the flood, yeah.
[00:05:00]  Then you're probably, you know, maybe some of the details, like take it with a grain of salt, put your discernment hat on, you know, don't be naive.
[00:05:07]  But if you start finding the same story in every place and every time period and everything, then there's probably something true there.
[00:05:15]  And so the idea of like giants is, you know, it's just a universal, whether it's Jack and the Beanstalk or, you know, but like giants and one element of giants that you find universally is, That they're typically not friendly giants.
[00:05:32]  And I know an interpretation can be made, and I'm partial to it with Abraham, you know, and a couple, you know, but for the most part, they're like man eating giants.
[00:05:42]  Yeah.
[00:05:43]  You know, and then what is Cyclops?
[00:05:44]  I mean, think about that.
[00:05:45]  It's like, okay, it's just a complete made up story.
[00:05:48]  Or maybe a giant that was injured and left on an island, you know, and only has one eye because the other one was poked at.
[00:05:55]  Like, I mean, it's entirely possible.
[00:05:58]  So, anyways.
[00:05:59]  Yeah.
[00:05:59]  So the giants, you know, in the divine council worldview, a giant is essentially a Nephilim.
[00:06:08]  So that's Genesis 6.
[00:06:09]  And it's a son of what are called sons of God.
[00:06:13]  And in our, we'll just, for sake of argument, we won't go through this tonight, you know, arguing for why we would believe textually that this is the case.
[00:06:20]  But I can give you one and give you a lot.
[00:06:23]  But they're the sons of the sons of God.
[00:06:26]  And the sons of God have different titles in scripture.
[00:06:30]  One of them is a watcher.
[00:06:32]  You only find this word explicitly or certainly in Daniel 4, but when Nebuchadnezzar has a dream, the watchers come down out of heaven and say that it has been decreed upon you, Nebuchadnezzar, that you're going to live like a wild animal or whatever.
[00:06:48]  That decree of the watchers is a decree from the divine council.
[00:06:53]  So these watchers, people might be more comfortable just calling them fallen angels.
[00:07:00]  Over time, the term angel actually became.
[00:07:05]  It changed it more, like just like any word really does in the early part of the Old Testament.
[00:07:11]  An angel is really just a messenger, so it's a function.
[00:07:15]  By the time you get to the New Testament, an angel really almost becomes an ontological category.
[00:07:20]  It's a type of being.
[00:07:23]  So when people get upset with certain words that you could use for these guys, I'll just say, Well, it's a fallen angel.
[00:07:30]  And then that kind of takes it off the table.
[00:07:32]  Probably the biggest word for these guys in the Hebrew is the word Elohim.
[00:07:37]  They're called the Elohim.
[00:07:39]  This is a word that's used for God and it's used for the gods.
[00:07:42]  And again, people will say, well, the gods aren't real.
[00:07:47]  But if you understand that the gods are actually fallen angels, they're created entities, they're not on any kind of an ontological par with the uncreated creator of the universe.
[00:07:59]  He made them.
[00:08:01]  Right.
[00:08:01]  If you can get that into your head, then you realize.
[00:08:04]  Right.
[00:08:04]  But you have to understand that we're not talking about equals.
[00:08:07]  Not at all.
[00:08:07]  There's one God who is eternal, infinite, and who created X and the Hilo.
[00:08:13]  He made these other gods.
[00:08:15]  He made them all.
[00:08:16]  And in fact, Colossians says that Jesus is the one who made them all.
[00:08:19]  And it, it gets very, very specifically that he made everything in heaven and on earth.
[00:08:24]  Why would it go, why would it care to tell you that what he made in heaven?
[00:08:29]  Well, maybe so that you don't get confused about these guys somehow being equals with him because they're not ontologically equal with him at all.
[00:08:36]  Right.
[00:08:38]  Right.
[00:08:39]  So, yeah, so that's what the divine council is.
[00:08:43]  This is found all over the place.
[00:08:45]  Some of the, Best known passages at the end of, I think it's 1 Kings 22.
[00:08:49]  It's a really good one.
[00:08:51]  This is where you have the prophet Micaiah overhears or sees in a vision this heavenly scene where God is having this argument with these other heavenly beings over what they should do with King Ahab, I think it is.
[00:09:07]  And he says, Who's going to go and be a lying spirit?
[00:09:09]  And they have a fight over it.
[00:09:10]  And finally, one spirit says, I'll do it.
[00:09:12]  So God says, Okay, go ahead.
[00:09:14]  You will succeed in doing it.
[00:09:15]  What they're doing is they're having a council meeting in heaven.
[00:09:19]  They're arguing about things over the earth.
[00:09:21]  And then once the decision is made, then they go out and do it.
[00:09:24]  And God has the final say on it.
[00:09:26]  You see this in what's another good one?
[00:09:29]  Daniel chapter seven.
[00:09:32]  This is where the really famous verse that the New Testament uses quite a bit that one like a son of man comes riding on the clouds of heaven to the ancient of days.
[00:09:41]  And he's presented a kingdom and all dominion and authority is given to him.
[00:09:46]  Well, right before that, you have this, it gives you a description of the heavenly court.
[00:09:52]  It talks about the throne.
[00:09:53]  It talks about the Ancient of Days.
[00:09:54]  It talks about a river being there.
[00:09:57]  And it talks about the thrones that are around it.
[00:10:00]  And the books are opened.
[00:10:01]  Well, what's that?
[00:10:02]  Who are on these thrones?
[00:10:04]  It's the heavenly beings, it's the divine council.
[00:10:08]  I mean, boy, there's just a ton of them that we could think of.
[00:10:13]  Would you hold all the way, like another example for you?
[00:10:17]  Would you be one of the guys who would say that Genesis 1 and 2 and the creation narrative?
[00:10:23]  Like, let us make man in our image that that's Trinitarian language or that that's divine counsel language.
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[00:11:12]  My answer is yes to that.
[00:11:14]  Okay.
[00:11:15]  I won't create an either or.
[00:11:16]  The reason why is because the Father and Son are certainly on the divine council.
[00:11:22]  So, and the Holy Spirit's always present when the Son is present.
[00:11:25]  So, de facto, the Trinity is there.
[00:11:29]  But it's bigger than the Trinity.
[00:11:30]  If I was going to go to prove the Trinity from Genesis 1, which I think you can do very easily, I'd go to the first three verses.
[00:11:36]  Even, I wouldn't even make it all the way to chapter or verse 22 or whatever that is 26.
[00:11:40]  Okay.
[00:11:42]  Because you have God, you have the spirit hovering, and then you have God spoke the word.
[00:11:46]  And very clearly, the New Testament tells us who that word is.
[00:11:51]  Right.
[00:11:52]  So, but yeah, I would say that the let us make God, man in our image is the divine council having a meeting.
[00:11:59]  So that's the first verse.
[00:12:00]  But then the second verse, it says, and God made man in his image.
[00:12:04]  So the way Heiser talks about it is that it's like if we all, if I said to a group of people, hey, let's all go out for pizza.
[00:12:11]  I'm speaking to a group of people, but then I buy.
[00:12:14]  Okay.
[00:12:16]  I'm the one who does the work.
[00:12:18]  Right.
[00:12:19]  So, talk to me a little bit about and to our listener about the idea.
[00:12:23]  So, something that fascinates me that I would love to learn more about is the idea of regional powers.
[00:12:29]  Like thinking of, you know, it's the Archangel Michael, right?
[00:12:32]  It's not Gabriel.
[00:12:33]  It's Michael who gets held up with the Prince of Persia.
[00:12:36]  No, it's actually Gabriel.
[00:12:37]  It's Gabriel.
[00:12:38]  Okay.
[00:12:38]  So, it's Gabriel.
[00:12:40]  He's like, sorry, I'd be here sooner, but, you know, I had to do battle, you know, against, you know, this.
[00:12:45]  Power that had a locale, it seems like an earthly locale, like in a particular principality.
[00:12:52]  And that word principality, so there's princes and principalities, like princes would be spiritual beings with authority.
[00:12:59]  And then the principality would be like a province or a state or a region.

=== Gabriel's Battle at Babel (09:07) ===

[00:13:03]  Exactly.
[00:13:04]  So, my question is when the fall happened, and not talking about Adam and Eve, but the angelic fall, angels fell, they fell somewhere, they fell to earth.
[00:13:17]  And it seems as though there's maybe a case to be made that they were assigned, or maybe they were already assigned by God and then fell to their various regions.
[00:13:26]  Or did they fall and then a captain among them, you know, Lucifer, appointed, you're going to be over Chile, you're going to be over Persia.
[00:13:36]  How does that work, this princes and principalities?
[00:13:39]  Okay, so the key text there is really Deuteronomy 32.
[00:13:43]  It's the paper that I talked about earlier, it's this variant.
[00:13:48]  And let me just call it up real quick so that we can read the text.
[00:13:56]  And so, Deuteronomy 32, we'll start in verse 7.
[00:14:01]  This is the Song of Moses.
[00:14:03]  He says, Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations.
[00:14:07]  Ask your father, and he will show you your elders, and they will tell you when the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.
[00:14:21]  The textual variant there says sons of Israel.
[00:14:23]  Some people might have a new American Standard Bible, will say sons of Israel, but Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint say sons of God, and Heiser makes a very good argument that that's the original reading.
[00:14:34]  The number of the sons of God there was understood throughout all the tradition as the number 70.
[00:14:41]  So you can read in the Targum.
[00:14:43]  Targum is a Jewish paraphrase into Aramaic of the Old Testament.
[00:14:49]  So some of them can be very, very strict and very close.
[00:14:53]  To the text, almost like just a really good translation that we have.
[00:14:57]  And then others can be more expansive.
[00:14:59]  And one of the more expansive ones in Genesis through Deuteronomy is Targum Pseudo Jonathan.
[00:15:05]  And it gives the number 70 there as a good example.
[00:15:09]  Well, why is that significant?
[00:15:11]  Because there were 70 nations at the Tower of Babel.
[00:15:14]  So when Moses tells you to remember the days of old, he's telling you to remember Tower of Babel.
[00:15:19]  Now, for him, that was a long, long time ago.
[00:15:21]  And Moses for us was a long, long time ago.
[00:15:23]  So this is a.
[00:15:24]  This is a really long time ago.
[00:15:26]  But according to that text, anyway, and it's really the main one that we have of the timing of it, the sons of God were given to the nations at the Tower of Babel.
[00:15:38]  And it seems to me that it's because what happened was that, and we were talking earlier before the show about the divine incursion view of how did the Nephilim get on the earth after the flood.
[00:15:51]  There's four or five different views out there.
[00:15:53]  One is that the DNA was carried through by maybe one of Noah's sons.
[00:15:58]  Another one is that it wasn't a worldwide flood.
[00:16:01]  Another one is that, and so some of the giants lived through it.
[00:16:04]  Another one is that maybe somebody like Og the giant lived by hitching right on Noah's ark.
[00:16:12]  That's kind of a jerky.
[00:16:13]  Yeah, Gilgamesh hanging on to the side of the ark and Noah's feeding him.
[00:16:17]  I've seen that one.
[00:16:18]  Not a fan, but.
[00:16:20]  It's when you tell the kids when they're three years old, right?
[00:16:23]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:16:24]  And then, you know, I actually tend to think that your view is right that there was another incursion.
[00:16:29]  And I think that that incursion took place at the Tower of Babel.
[00:16:33]  So, you have to understand what the Tower of Babel was.
[00:16:36]  So, in order to understand it, you have to go back to Genesis 2 and 3.
[00:16:42]  So, and then a little bit of Ezekiel can help fill in the gaps there, too, because Ezekiel calls Eden the mountain of God.
[00:16:50]  All we get in Genesis of Eden is that it's a garden, right?
[00:16:53]  But it's a mountain.
[00:16:54]  And why does that matter?
[00:16:56]  Because Satan is there in the mountain garden of Eden, tempting our parents.
[00:17:02]  Well, what's he doing there?
[00:17:04]  He's there because it's a divine council scene.
[00:17:06]  They're on, they're considerate Mount Olympus.
[00:17:08]  They're on Mount Olympus.
[00:17:10]  They're making, God has created our first parents to essentially have a seat on the divine council with the heavenly beings, but they get to rule over the earth.
[00:17:22]  Whereas the heavenly beings are ruling over whatever, whatever's outside the earth, however that works, I don't have any idea.
[00:17:28]  And actually, and this is the only thing I've ever read that makes a lot of sense of why Satan tempted them.
[00:17:35]  And it's because he became jealous of this.
[00:17:38]  And so you have whole books like the life of Adam and Eve in the pseudepigrapha that talk about that was at that moment that God made Adam and he gave him this dominion.
[00:17:48]  That was actually the reason why Satan fell.
[00:17:51]  So that, okay.
[00:17:52]  So the fall of Satan and the fall of Adam in this scheme would be very simultaneous to one.
[00:17:59]  Yeah.
[00:18:00]  Two birds of a stone.
[00:18:01]  Yeah.
[00:18:01]  Okay.
[00:18:01]  That's exactly right.
[00:18:03]  So, okay.
[00:18:05]  So the whole point being there that they're in the divine council.
[00:18:09]  In fact, I think you got actually, you can make a case that there's more beings there because Satan, or sorry, Ezekiel, I forget the chapter, maybe 31.
[00:18:20]  It's the chapter of Assyria being likened to a giant tree, a world tree.
[00:18:24]  And then it talks about how the trees of Eden were envious of you.
[00:18:28]  Well, why would it use trees of Eden language?
[00:18:31]  Well, that's kind of a metaphor for other heavenly beings.
[00:18:36]  And when Adam and Eve go hiding among the trees of Eden, like what is, what's going on there?
[00:18:42]  Tend to think that they're seeking refuge among the gods, if you want to call it that.
[00:18:47]  And God gets very upset by this.
[00:18:50]  Why are you running away from me?
[00:18:51]  What did I ever do to you?
[00:18:53]  And then He graciously closed them with, you know, and gives them the gospel and stuff.
[00:18:56]  But the point is, there's a divine counsel scene.
[00:18:59]  It's a mountain.
[00:19:00]  The authority is given there.
[00:19:02]  And actually, even the temptation itself, believe it or not, is when you look at what the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is, and you go to, say, Solomon, and He talks about how.
[00:19:14]  It's the duty of a king to discern good and evil.
[00:19:18]  Well, what does that mean?
[00:19:19]  It means that it's the king's job to make a judicial pronouncement on right and wrong.
[00:19:26]  Well, that's what divine counsel does.
[00:19:29]  And that's the whole point of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
[00:19:32]  Satan's temptation was incredibly subtle, and he actually tempted them with something that was very true.
[00:19:38]  But the problem is that, well, there's a lot of problems with what happened, but of course, essentially, is that they made the wrong decision, right?
[00:19:46]  They went against what God said was right.
[00:19:49]  Essentially, by eating it, they're making a judicial pronouncement that what God said is wrong.
[00:19:55]  Right.
[00:19:56]  Okay.
[00:19:56]  And so then they get kicked off.
[00:19:58]  Now, if Moses is, if we just take that verse in Deuteronomy, then what happens is that whatever happened before the flood and how that worked its way out with, you know, the fallen angels and men and authority and all, I don't have, I don't know.
[00:20:16]  And I don't know that we really can know.
[00:20:19]  But at Tower of Babel, it's really a trying to get back to Eden.
[00:20:24]  But instead of God putting us on his man made mountain, we create a mountain ourselves.
[00:20:31]  It's a ziggurat.
[00:20:32]  That's the whole point of the thing.
[00:20:33]  It's to emulate what a cosmic mountain is, what a divine council mountain is.
[00:20:39]  And then we go up to the top and we try to make communication with the fallen heavenly beings.
[00:20:46]  And God said, that's not going to happen.
[00:20:48]  It's not going to happen.
[00:20:49]  I'm going to disperse you and I'm going to make your language so you can't understand each other so that you can't.
[00:20:54]  Do this.
[00:20:55]  And that's the moment it seems that Moses is saying, Remember this, because that's the moment when I spread the nations out around the world that I also gave each one of those nations one of the sons of God to rule over them.
[00:21:09]  Okay.
[00:21:10]  Are these fallen sons of God to rule over them or righteous?
[00:21:15]  I think so.
[00:21:16]  So there's actually a really interesting passage in the Cretaceous in Plato near the end.
[00:21:24]  This is where actually he writes about Atlantis.
[00:21:27]  And man, it's so weird because he has a line that's almost exactly word for word what Moses says in Deuteronomy 32 7.
[00:21:35]  In the days of old, God gave to the nations according to their allotment.
[00:21:41]  This is what he says.
[00:21:43]  And then he goes, We got as Greece, we got Athena and Hephaestus because they were the gods that were given to philosophy and beautiful music and basically high culture.
[00:21:55]  And of course, Plato has this idea that before the flood, there was a golden age and that things were really good and then things.
[00:22:02]  Got worse and worse and worse over time to the point where Atlantis was destroyed because of the corruption.
[00:22:07]  In some ways, that's very similar.

=== Titans Bound in Old Days (18:00) ===

[00:22:10]  And so I use that to answer your question, Joel, because I think that the corruption of the angels got worse over time.
[00:22:20]  Huh.
[00:22:21]  Okay.
[00:22:21]  Just like it does with humanity, even just like it does in our civilization right now.
[00:22:25]  The last three years are the worst that it's been in our civilization since the beginning of it.
[00:22:30]  It's just gone exponentially.
[00:22:33]  Off the charts.
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[00:24:03]  That's really interesting.
[00:24:06]  I think Plato might have read Moses.
[00:24:10]  I know that it doesn't add up.
[00:24:11]  But I've got some people in my church who they're more knowledgeable than I am on the subject of, you know, but like, look, you know, it seems like, I don't know, it seems like he had somehow had access to Moses, the Pentateuch, or at least a part of it.
[00:24:29]  So when I was doing the Angel of the Lord book, I found a couple of Puritans that wrote on the angel and I started reading them.
[00:24:38]  I've got one of these guys' name is Peter Alex.
[00:24:41]  He lived in the late 1700s.
[00:24:44]  A French guy, but this dude knew.
[00:24:46]  I mean, he knew every language you could know.
[00:24:49]  He read everything you could read.
[00:24:51]  Just absolute genius.
[00:24:53]  And he says in that book that I ended up kind of republishing and putting notes on it and modernizing the English and stuff for people.
[00:25:02]  He says there that Moses knew, or sorry, Plato knew about Moses.
[00:25:08]  And then he, I think he cites Justin Martyr, who basically said the same thing.
[00:25:12]  So the idea seems to be that you can account for it through his ancestor Solon, who came down to Egypt.
[00:25:18]  Right.
[00:25:19]  And that's where he heard the story of Atlantis from the priest there.
[00:25:22]  And then it's not that he's taking a boat back to Greece.
[00:25:25]  He decides to take the long way around.
[00:25:27]  And of course, in order to do that, you have to go right through Israel.
[00:25:31]  And so there's every reason in the world why he could have brought back at least the Torah.
[00:25:37]  And Plato could very well have read it.
[00:25:40]  Yep.
[00:25:41]  That's, I couldn't remember, but that's what I heard.
[00:25:43]  Yep.
[00:25:43]  Yeah.
[00:25:44]  It was through, how do you say his name?
[00:25:46]  Solon?
[00:25:46]  Solon, yeah.
[00:25:47]  Yeah.
[00:25:48]  Solon.
[00:25:48]  His ancestor, Solon, went to Egypt.
[00:25:50]  That's where he heard about Atlantis.
[00:25:52]  Yeah.
[00:25:53]  Yeah.
[00:25:54]  It's possible.
[00:25:55]  It's a wild world.
[00:25:57]  Yeah.
[00:25:58]  Okay.
[00:25:58]  So, yeah.
[00:25:59]  So, one, so we're saying fallen angels, 70 of them.
[00:26:04]  And you think it's a symbolic number.
[00:26:06]  So, it's not, yeah, yeah.
[00:26:08]  That's what I, that's, yeah.
[00:26:09]  So, like 70 regions, 70 nations.
[00:26:13]  And it, but it could be 500 each for each of these 70, right?
[00:26:19]  Yeah.
[00:26:19]  You can have under, maybe a chief guy.
[00:26:21]  Yeah.
[00:26:21]  That's what I was.
[00:26:22]  Why would the heavenly bureaucracy be any less than?
[00:26:26]  Complicated than earthly bureaucracy.
[00:26:29]  Right.
[00:26:29]  Well, maybe because they're trying to be more efficient.
[00:26:34]  Maybe because they want a bureaucracy that works.
[00:26:37]  But yeah.
[00:26:38]  But yeah, okay.
[00:26:39]  So 70 regions, nations, and we would say that that still exists today.
[00:26:44]  We have more than 70 nations, but there's still in a spiritual plane.
[00:26:50]  Would you agree that there's still a sense in which the world would break up into those 70?
[00:26:57]  Different regions, and there's still.
[00:26:58]  It's a great question.
[00:26:59]  And some of them, like Jude or Peter, may have already been locked up in gloomy dungeons, but some of them may still.
[00:27:05]  Well, okay, so the gloomy dungeon part is talking about before the flood.
[00:27:12]  So if you want to think about it, you can think about it this way.
[00:27:15]  I found it helpful.
[00:27:16]  I don't know if it's right to do this or not, but when you go to the Greek myths, they have a flood, and at the flood, they have a great war between the Titans and the Olympians.
[00:27:28]  The Titans are the elder gods, you know, Kronos and Rhea, and these 12 Titans.
[00:27:34]  12 interesting number, and then the Olympians with Zeus and and uh, with Zahara and and the other 12 Olympians again, you have that same number.
[00:27:43]  The Olympians basically lock the Titans up into Taurus, it's the exact same thing.
[00:27:48]  Have you seen Clash of the Titans, the remake?
[00:27:51]  First, I think it's the first with Liam Neeson, second, the one with Liam Neeson, yeah, yeah, it's probably the second movie where they're actually let out of there, release the Kraken, yeah, so it's the second movie because that's the first movie, the Kraken, okay, yeah, and that's what we're talking about, and um.
[00:28:07]  So that's what Peter and Judah are referring to as the pre flood lockup of the pre flood antediluvian watchers that committed the original sin of the Nephilim thing.
[00:28:21]  Those guys were locked up.
[00:28:22]  And you find this in the book of Enoch that kind of expands on that.
[00:28:28]  And they're actually locked up for 70 generations, which is a whole nother topic.
[00:28:32]  But when you're talking about the post flood, I think that that's a different story.
[00:28:39]  These were in my mind, we're dealing with the Olympians, not the Titans.
[00:28:43]  It's the Olympians who were somehow put over the nations of the world because Titans are gone, at least for a while.
[00:28:50]  I see.
[00:28:51]  Okay.
[00:28:51]  So the pre flood guys, they're the ones who created the demonic hybrid offspring, Nephilim, and they got punished severely for it, locked up in Tartarus.
[00:29:05]  And then you have.
[00:29:08]  A different group, still fallen angels, but a little bit more hinged, guys who at least had the good sense not to try to corrupt the messianic line by marrying human wives.
[00:29:21]  And those guys are the ones who are appointed at Babel over 70.
[00:29:26]  Right.
[00:29:26]  Okay.
[00:29:27]  And then those get, well, if that's the case, then it's possible, we don't know, but it's possible that those guys might still be in some level of operation today.
[00:29:38]  Yeah.
[00:29:39]  I have a, do you know who Brian Gadawa is?
[00:29:41]  No.
[00:29:42]  So Brian is a Hollywood film writer.
[00:29:46]  He's written a couple of movies, but a good reformed guy.
[00:29:51]  He's a partial preterist, takes 70 AD, fall of Jerusalem, really seriously.
[00:29:55]  He takes the view that the watchers were kind of done in 70 AD, that that was actually a judgment upon them.
[00:30:02]  So I can't say definitively that they're gone.
[00:30:05]  My view is that, or that they're not gone, or that they are gone.
[00:30:08]  My view is that he's wrong about that, that it was kind of an already not yet judgment.
[00:30:16]  For them.
[00:30:17]  And I think 70 AD probably had something to do with a lessening of their power.
[00:30:23]  But I think Pentecost had much more of a lessening of their power than 70 AD did.
[00:30:28]  Right.
[00:30:29]  And clearly, between 30 AD and 70 AD, these watchers, these powers, principalities, thrones, dominions, all these words that Paul throws around that we didn't even know what were like, what is this?
[00:30:42]  You know, well, that's what this is.
[00:30:44]  And it's very clear that they're around.
[00:30:47]  At least in those 40 years.
[00:30:48]  And my view is that they are still around and that what has happened, and this is my all millennialism coming out, but I believe that the power of Satan to deceive the nations is really what the binding of Satan is all about in Revelation 20.
[00:31:07]  So, in other words, they're not in the full force of their power that they were prior to the cross and the resurrection and Pentecost, but they still do have power.
[00:31:17]  And so I can say, I have a way of understanding that Satan can prowl around like a roaring lion seeking whom he may destroy at the same time that I can say that he's bound, because I don't view that bound as an absolute binding like a premillennialist would.
[00:31:35]  I view it as a very specific kind of binding so that God, if he wants to save his elect out of any nation, he can do that without them having to become Israelites, be circumcised, move down to the line of Canaan, and all that kind of stuff.
[00:31:49]  Right.
[00:31:49]  Yeah.
[00:31:49]  He's on a leash, and he was always on a leash in the sense that, you know, the.
[00:31:53]  The Satan, you know, with the sons of God is before the throne of God, Job, you know, and even then he has to ask, you know, permission.
[00:32:01]  And God sets very clear boundaries.
[00:32:03]  You can do this and that.
[00:32:05]  And then, you know, he comes back.
[00:32:06]  All right, round two, you can hurt, you know, pound for pound, flesh for flesh.
[00:32:09]  You can hurt his flesh, but you can't take his life.
[00:32:11]  So Satan has always been on a leash because every created creature, ultimately, because God is sovereign, God is the only being in the universe that has what we would call, you know, autonomous libertarian freedom.
[00:32:24]  We have, you know, creatures have a degree of freedom, but God is the only one who is truly autonomously free.
[00:32:31]  And so Satan always was on a leash, is my view.
[00:32:33]  It was always on a leash, and Job, you know, shows us that.
[00:32:37]  But in the cross and resurrection, it's like Christ, you know, who's always been holding that leash, wrapped it around his head and pulled him in a bit.
[00:32:46]  Like, so the leash got shorter.
[00:32:48]  Yeah, exactly right.
[00:32:49]  He's still not thrown into the lake of fire.
[00:32:51]  That will come later.
[00:32:53]  So Satan's still prowling around, but he was, he had more walking around room.
[00:32:59]  You know, he had a little more slack in the leash pre Christ.
[00:33:03]  But I, you know, I would put, for me, I would put most of the happenings of Christ binding Satan, you know, the strong man like Christ even gives that parable, you know, you're going to plunder the house.
[00:33:14]  And I think that's what we're doing.
[00:33:15]  That's the New Testament church.
[00:33:17]  Yeah.
[00:33:17]  For 2,000 years, it has been plundering the house of this world through conversion and gospel preaching.
[00:33:23]  And I think even beyond just conversion and the Great Commission in that regard, but teaching the nations to obey all of Christ's commands.
[00:33:30]  In markets and in art and in governments and all these different things, and through righteous legislation, this is kind of all of that has been happening because the strong man has been bound.
[00:33:41]  And now, you know, we're going in and plundering the house.
[00:33:44]  And with a strong man, I think, you know, a certain bind, I think that implies some of Satan's minions also being in various degrees bound.
[00:33:53]  Yeah.
[00:33:54]  And then for me, 8070, I don't, I don't, I've never thought of it before.
[00:33:59]  I'd have to give it more thought, but I've never thought of.
[00:34:01]  Uh, demonic binding in 8070.
[00:34:03]  I've always put that on like cross and resurrection, right?
[00:34:05]  Um, and then and then 8070, I put that as a post mill guy, I put that as the fulfillment of Christ's prophecy.
[00:34:12]  You know, Matthew 24, Olivet discourse.
[00:34:14]  This generation will not pass away, right?
[00:34:15]  Just this type of generation, but you know, 40 years of generation in Jewish terms, like you guys, some of you will fall asleep, but a lot of you are going to be awake.
[00:34:24]  And um, this is the generation that rejected me that you know, I came to my own, but they knew me not.
[00:34:29]  Um, you said, you know, crucify him, may his blood be on us and our children.
[00:34:34]  And so, before your eyes and your children's eyes, I'm going to come back and coming on the clouds, Joel 2 clouds signifying a sense of judgment.
[00:34:43]  And Josephus even has multiple eyewitness accounts of seeing silhouettes of chariots going back in the billows of smoke in 87.
[00:34:54]  So I think 8070 was the wrapping up of a garment, the interim 40 year period between the work of Christ, but then now the old covenant is really rolled up and completely done and gone away.
[00:35:07]  Yeah, I agree with that.
[00:35:08]  Yeah, that's where I'm at.
[00:35:10]  But I think the binding of the demonic powers, a lot of that.
[00:35:14]  Maybe 87, but I don't know what about the sacking of the temple in Jerusalem.
[00:35:19]  Yeah, I think he's getting that really from the demons.
[00:35:23]  He's getting that probably from Gentry's view of Revelation, who's going to come out one of these decades with his magnum opus on Revelationist commentary that's supposed to be so good from a post mill view.
[00:35:34]  Yeah, I've heard the tales.
[00:35:36]  Yeah, I know.
[00:35:37]  Everybody keeps hearing them.
[00:35:40]  But it's the idea that when you take that early writing date of Revelation, Revelation being prior to 70 AD, then now all of a sudden it allows you to be able to see that almost all of the book has been fulfilled.
[00:35:52]  And so if you do that, then you kind of have to start going, well, did 70 AD do something to these watchers?
[00:35:59]  Because you're reading Revelation different than like a futurist would do.
[00:36:05]  Or, yeah, a historist or futurist.
[00:36:07]  Yeah.
[00:36:08]  Yeah.
[00:36:08]  Well, and I mean, and I do, yeah, I date Revelation.
[00:36:11]  I think it was written moments before.
[00:36:15]  8070.
[00:36:15]  I think, you know, these things soon to come to pass.
[00:36:18]  8080, I would put it 8065 to 8069, you know, something right in there.
[00:36:23]  But it's painted even the way that I read other books of the Bible now, like, you know, like Romans, you know, and some of the things that Paul talks about, you know, with the future revival of Israel, not being in their future, but perhaps in our past.
[00:36:38]  And that's all, that's a whole nother conversation.
[00:36:40]  But anyway, so back to the, you know, seven, so 70 regions and 70 honchos, and they could each have dozens or hundreds or thousands of minions under them.
[00:36:49]  And for what?
[00:36:51]  For what purpose?
[00:36:53]  So God assigns him.
[00:36:56]  It's as punishment.
[00:36:58]  It's punitive, essentially.
[00:37:00]  Okay, explain that.
[00:37:01]  So there are several different passages in Deuteronomy that talk about this.
[00:37:05]  There's one in Deuteronomy 4, one in Deuteronomy 17, one in chapter 29, and then the one in chapter 32 that basically talks about some of them talk about how I gave them to you, and then some of them talk about how basically I gave you to them and why.
[00:37:23]  Well, it's because you got it.
[00:37:25]  Essentially, it's you deserve each other so bad.
[00:37:29]  I'm going to let you just have each other and see how well that goes for you.
[00:37:32]  Okay.
[00:37:33]  All right.
[00:37:33]  Okay.
[00:37:34]  So it's punitive, like babysitting.
[00:37:36]  Like you're stuck with these people.
[00:37:37]  Yeah.
[00:37:38]  I mean, if Adam was originally given dominion, and then he, I think what happens is he abdicates that dominion.
[00:37:45]  Again, I don't know how it worked prior to the flood, but however, it comes to fulfillment.
[00:37:55]  It's called an inheritance for the sons of God.
[00:37:57]  So somehow they're actually inheriting because they're sons.
[00:38:00]  Sons are inheriting things from their fathers.
[00:38:04]  And so this becomes the inheritance.
[00:38:06]  And I actually think that the reason why God ultimately does this is not just purely punitive.
[00:38:12]  That's the myopic view or the view of just why does he do it for in relation to the people or these fallen entities?
[00:38:20]  That's punitive.
[00:38:21]  But there's a much bigger storyline that's going on.
[00:38:25]  If you read the very next verse, It says, but the Lord's portion is his people, and Jacob is his allotted inheritance.
[00:38:36]  Now, this is a really crazy verse because it uses the word Yahweh.
[00:38:42]  Yahweh's portion is his people, but it's his allotment.
[00:38:49]  And so there has to be a distinguishing mark between the Most High in verse 8 and Yahweh in verse 9.
[00:39:01]  And my understanding of it is that the Most High, to put it in Trinitarian terms, is the Father.
[00:39:07]  Who's giving this inheritance to his sons?
[00:39:12]  And the Lord, Yahweh, in this particular verse, has to be the son who is inheriting Israel as his allotment.
[00:39:23]  And what's so interesting, of course, is that Israel is not actually among the 70 nations at the Tower of Babel.
[00:39:29]  God creates them out of nothing many, many centuries later.
[00:39:35]  Because the whole point of this is that the Son of God is going to, at first, Get this miraculous nation that God creates out of nothing.
[00:39:46]  It's going to come through the promise of the impossible promise of the seed of Isaac, through the natural birth that comes from a woman who can't give birth and a man who's almost 100 years old.
[00:40:01]  Right.
[00:40:02]  Right.
[00:40:03]  And then the promise then expands so that you come to Psalm 2, for example.

=== The Promise of a New Nation (05:46) ===

[00:40:11]  This is really kind of the way I just give people kind of a three passage rundown of really the worldview.
[00:40:18]  The first one is verse 9 that the son is inheriting Israel.
[00:40:21]  Then, if you go to one of the most famous passages in the Old Testament about Christ, Psalm 2, 7, and 8, I will tell of the decree, the Lord said to me, You are my son.
[00:40:33]  Okay, so here we have more father son stuff.
[00:40:35]  Today I have begotten you.
[00:40:36]  Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance.
[00:40:41]  And the ends of the earth, your possession.
[00:40:44]  Okay, so now the promise has been given that it's not just going to stop with Israel.
[00:40:48]  I'm going to give it to, I'm going to give you all the nations.
[00:40:51]  And then you go to the great divine council psalm, Psalm 82, that starts off God has taken his place in the divine council in the midst of the gods, he holds judgment.
[00:41:04]  Next few verses are about how they judged wickedly.
[00:41:08]  Then he says, I'm going to punish you.
[00:41:10]  You're going to die like men.
[00:41:12]  And then the last verse, arise, O God, judge the earth, for you shall inherit all the nations.
[00:41:19]  Who's the God of that verse?
[00:41:20]  It has to be the Son, because that's what the promise was in Psalm 2.
[00:41:24]  And so the New Testament comes into this and it takes all of this predictive language of the Son of God now becoming, you know, in Daniel 7 and gets fit into that.
[00:41:35]  I'm going to give you the kingdoms of the world and all this kind of stuff.
[00:41:37]  And then what happens, you know, when Jesus rises from the dead and his very last words to the disciples, like in Matthew, 28.
[00:41:46]  All authority has been given to me in heaven on earth.
[00:41:50]  Now go and make disciples of all nations.
[00:41:53]  What's going on there is that Jesus is now receiving his inheritance, and it's up to the church to kind of start bringing the people in.
[00:42:02]  But the whole point of this worldview is that it's not an end to itself, it's that Jesus is the focal point of the whole thing.
[00:42:11]  So, you know, you brought up Michael earlier, and In our book on the angel of the Lord, Matt and I disagreed on this.
[00:42:18]  And we still do, although I'm moving in more in my direction.
[00:42:21]  But I believe that Michael is the angel of the Lord because he's called Israel's prince.
[00:42:29]  And unless Israel has two princes over them, which is theoretically possible because Plato said that they had two, but it's not what I ordinarily think.
[00:42:39]  If Michael is Israel's prince, then he would be the angel of the Lord.
[00:42:44]  And that fits totally with this worldview.
[00:42:48]  Okay.
[00:42:49]  Hmm.
[00:42:51]  And so you don't hold to the Christophany, which is, you know, the view that I'm familiar with that, like, The angel of the Lord, you know, so like three angels appearing to Abraham, one of them being the angel of the Lord, that one is Christ pre incarnate.
[00:43:04]  No, I do believe that it's Christ pre incarnate.
[00:43:07]  Yes.
[00:43:09]  But I believe that he's the angel of the Lord and that that's the same, that's the same second person of the Trinity.
[00:43:16]  That who is?
[00:43:17]  The angel of the Lord.
[00:43:19]  That the angel of the Lord is the second person of the Trinity, Jesus.
[00:43:22]  But then where does Michael come into play?
[00:43:25]  He, that's a proper name for him.
[00:43:26]  He's just a different name.
[00:43:27]  So if, just like angel of the Lord or Lord, Yahweh, or name, or glory, or right hand, or word, the word of God in John 1 1.
[00:43:43]  These are all just different ways of speaking about who this person is.
[00:43:47]  And I think Michael's the same way.
[00:43:48]  It's a proper name.
[00:43:49]  Who is like God?
[00:43:50]  That's all that it is.
[00:43:51]  And the answer is no, who is like God.
[00:43:53]  Right.
[00:43:54]  But why Michael?
[00:43:55]  I mean, that's the only thing.
[00:43:57]  I'm following you until that.
[00:43:58]  Like, why would Michael be a proper name for the second member?
[00:44:03]  Of the Trinity, you know, like I, why not just call him Yeshua as he's been called?
[00:44:08]  You know, like I've just always imagined Michael as because I mean, frankly, it's like it gets a little close to what is it, uh, Mormonism or Jehovah's Witness, where they, you know, they believe that Jesus is the Archangel Michael, you know, and that he's a created being and that he's not actually a member of the Trinity, right?
[00:44:26]  Yeah, so I think that the Jehovah's Witnesses are they're right and they're wrong.
[00:44:32]  The Jehovah's Witnesses, in my view, are right that.
[00:44:34]  Jesus and Michael are the same thing, but they're wrong because they make Jesus a created being.
[00:44:40]  Right.
[00:44:41]  And he's not a created being.
[00:44:42]  So, why would they use the phrase?
[00:44:44]  I think there's some early antecedents to this.
[00:44:47]  And probably the biggest one is in Exodus 15.
[00:44:51]  This is the other song of Moses.
[00:44:53]  And early in the song, you know, he's celebrating the Egyptian and the Pharaoh being thrown into the sea.
[00:45:01]  And in verse three, he says, The Lord is a man of war, the Lord is his name.
[00:45:06]  And then in verse 11, he says, Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?
[00:45:13]  Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?
[00:45:19]  This is not a passage that's talking about God in his oneness, his bare essence.
[00:45:25]  And it's not talking about the Father, it's talking about the Son, the Lord who is a man of war, the commander of the armies of the Lord, the one who Joshua saw when he fell down on his knees and.
[00:45:37]  And the commander said, Take off your sandals because the place where you're standing is holy ground.
[00:45:42]  Well, that comes straight out of the Burning Bush story, where Moses was told the very same thing by, guess who?
[00:45:48]  The angel of the Lord.
[00:45:50]  So when it says, Who is like you among the gods? All Michael is, is a play on those three English words.

=== Fallen Spirits Seeking Bodies (14:37) ===

[00:45:57]  That's all it is.
[00:45:59]  Okay.
[00:46:01]  I've never heard that before.
[00:46:02]  Yeah.
[00:46:03]  It's interesting.
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[00:47:12]  All right, so to back up, so you're saying post flood, Tower of Babel, 70 different, you know, regions, principalities, and 70 maybe chief fallen angels, all their minions over each of these regions.
[00:47:30]  But then the Lord Jesus, second member of the Trinity, also referred to as Michael, but not the way that Jehovah's Witnesses would say it.
[00:47:40]  He is eternal, sharing in the one triangle.
[00:47:44]  The one who created these guys.
[00:47:45]  Yeah.
[00:47:45]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:47:47]  And to him was a portion, not one of these 70 regions.
[00:47:52]  Right.
[00:47:52]  His portion came later, centuries later, but he was going to get a nation as well.
[00:47:57]  And as the only begotten son, the favored son of the Father, he gets.
[00:48:03]  The best inheritance.
[00:48:05]  It starts off small like a mustard seed with Abraham, but grows into this tree that ends up filling the whole earth and finds its ultimate fulfillment, not just in the nation of Israel, but in the church and becomes an all earth encompassing tree that gives shade to the beast and rest to the birds.
[00:48:26]  And is that what you're saying?
[00:48:29]  That's the storyline of the Old Testament.
[00:48:32]  Yep.
[00:48:32]  That's pretty cool.
[00:48:35]  It is pretty cool.
[00:48:35]  All right.
[00:48:36]  So, last thing, because you wrote a book on giants, I feel like we got to get there a little bit.
[00:48:40]  You know, we've already taken some time, but how do giants come into play and what's their relevance?
[00:48:46]  And is there a sense in which we can say Jesus is, among many things, a giant slayer?
[00:48:54]  He's Jack, climbs the beanstalk, chills, you know, like.
[00:48:57]  Right.
[00:48:58]  So, when I wrote the book, I wanted to make a book that was.
[00:49:06]  Not going to focus on the second coming because there were already a few sensational books out there, and it's really the dispensationalists who have written those books.
[00:49:17]  Right.
[00:49:17]  And they've really capitalized on the whole Nephilim thing the last, I suppose, 10 years or so.
[00:49:23]  It's become big in those circles.
[00:49:25]  And I wanted to write this as a reformed guy trying to do a biblical theology of the giants.
[00:49:31]  And I wanted to end it at the first coming.
[00:49:33]  So that's what I did with the first edition, I ended it at the first coming.
[00:49:36]  And the way I did that was I took the Again, the universal view of the early church with regard to what an evil spirit is.
[00:49:46]  So, an unclean spirit or an evil spirit in the New Testament, these are unclean because just like other things that are unclean, the mixing of different fabrics or those kinds of laws in Leviticus, that's what a Nephilim was.
[00:50:02]  It was a mixture of heaven and earth.
[00:50:04]  It was by definition unclean.
[00:50:07]  And so I have, I think I have an appendix, or at least I have some quotes in the book about this that it was the universal understanding of the church fathers that when a Nephilim or Rephaim, whatever you want to call it, when it died, because it didn't belong to heaven or earth, it became a spirit that roamed the air, and those spirits became the demons of the New Testament.
[00:50:36]  So, when Jesus is casting out demons, confronting demons, doing anything at all with demons, he's literally continuing the battle that Moses fought against Amalek, that Joshua fought against the sons of Anak, that David fought against Goliath.
[00:50:59]  Believe it or not, that Esther and Mordecai fought against Haman, because if you look at the names and you look at the genealogy of Haman, he comes from the lineage of the Rephaim.
[00:51:11]  He's carrying out this storyline that is predicted all the way back in Genesis 3 15 that there's going to be this seed war.
[00:51:19]  And he's doing it now because in the New Testament, at least in Israel, you know, we could talk about whether or not there's giants of the places, but in Israel, they had all been conquered physically, but now their spirits are still lingering and tormenting and creating havoc like crazy.
[00:51:37]  And so he deals with them, showing his power over them in a way that no other exorcist or anybody like that walking around.
[00:51:44]  It could even come close to.
[00:51:46]  And they're also the ones who recognize that He is the Christ.
[00:51:50]  Nobody else does that.
[00:51:51]  It's the demons that do it.
[00:51:54]  And sometimes He tells them to shut up and not tell anybody else.
[00:51:57]  So, all right, let me pick your brain about this.
[00:51:59]  So, that's fascinating.
[00:52:01]  But with that, Legion, I think it's Legion.
[00:52:04]  Yeah.
[00:52:05]  Is Legion the one that asked to be cast into the pigs?
[00:52:08]  Right.
[00:52:09]  Right.
[00:52:09]  So, and I'm thinking also, I'm going to pair that with something else.
[00:52:12]  So, Jesus, you know, He says, You know, he gives this explanation of what, you know, when a demon is cast out, it goes through arid places, goes through the air, waterless places.
[00:52:21]  And then, you know, and then it's going to circle back eventually.
[00:52:24]  You know, the house can be swept clean and put in order.
[00:52:26]  But if nothing's filled, if the house remains empty, then the demon will come back and bring seven friends worse than itself.
[00:52:32]  And the latter state of the man will be worse than the former.
[00:52:34]  Right.
[00:52:35]  It seems as though these disembodied spirits, one, it seems as though they would like to be bodied.
[00:52:42]  Right.
[00:52:42]  They would like to have a host.
[00:52:43]  Yep.
[00:52:44]  Because they had one before.
[00:52:46]  That's what's so important about it.
[00:52:48]  They lost their body.
[00:52:49]  So, so many people confuse fallen angels as if they are demons.
[00:52:55]  And that's wrong.
[00:52:57]  It's biblically wrong and it's historically wrong.
[00:52:59]  And nobody believed that.
[00:53:02]  Angels have their own bodies, they don't seek to embody anybody because they already have a body.
[00:53:07]  Now, they can certainly torment or they can insinuate or they can talk to or whatever, but they don't possess people in the same way that an evil spirit does.
[00:53:19]  Right.
[00:53:20]  So when Jesus casts, he grants this request.
[00:53:24]  He obliges the Legion to cast them, you know, this host of demons, many demons, into the pigs.
[00:53:31]  And then the pigs immediately commit suicide.
[00:53:33]  They run into the water.
[00:53:36]  And I've heard different things about that.
[00:53:37]  I've heard theories about, well, like, well, the Nephilim were drowned in the flood, you know, and that has something to do with it.
[00:53:44]  Or, or they, you know, when they're disembodied, they're cast into waterless places.
[00:53:50]  And so, yes, they had the body of the pig, but that's not a body of a person.
[00:53:53]  And so, they use the pig to get them to the water.
[00:53:56]  So, it's not a water.
[00:53:57]  Like, what?
[00:53:58]  I don't know.
[00:53:59]  What do you think is going on there?
[00:54:00]  Why did they cause the pigs?
[00:54:03]  I do think that there probably is something to the fact that they were destroyed in the flood.
[00:54:07]  You know, of course, you're assuming that the demon, that Legion was a pre flood demon giant.
[00:54:14]  He could have been a post flood giant.
[00:54:15]  So, if there's multiple incursions, he could have been someone that Joshua killed.
[00:54:19]  Right.
[00:54:20]  But there's something more going on, which actually with the pigs.
[00:54:23]  So, remember, a Jew would never raise pigs.
[00:54:26]  This has to be a Gentile doing this.
[00:54:28]  And it's in the land of Bashan, essentially.
[00:54:31]  And the pagans would offer pigs.
[00:54:34]  To the gods at their dolmens, which is their grave markers, all around this area.
[00:54:41]  And so there's a whole bunch of weird stuff going on with the very fact that there's pigs.
[00:54:45]  Like, what's that all about?
[00:54:47]  Well, it's kind of a sacrificial animal for a pagan ritual.
[00:54:55]  And then so it's the whole thing is ironic, really.
[00:54:58]  And it's not a satire, but I would say irony is probably the best word for it.
[00:55:02]  These guys go into the pigs, which is the.
[00:55:06]  The creature that would be offered to them anyway, but the pigs are alive.
[00:55:09]  Pigs have their own minds and the pigs go out of their minds.
[00:55:12]  And I don't think that the plan of the demon was that it would die.
[00:55:15]  I think that was, I think that the pig itself, it went so crazy because think about how mad Legion was, the man who was possessed by him.
[00:55:24]  Things went nuts.
[00:55:26]  And so then they ironically again jump into the Sea of Galilee, which is called the deep in the, in, in, Canaanite literature, and it's a symbol of chaos.
[00:55:40]  It's a symbol of the home of Leviathan.
[00:55:43]  All kinds of weird stuff going on there.
[00:55:44]  And the same way that Revelation talks about that heaven, there will be no sea.
[00:55:50]  Because the sea is symbolic.
[00:55:52]  Like, yes, in the Genesis narrative, the spirit is hovering above the waters and brooding above the waters.
[00:56:00]  But the sea, the earth is without form and void.
[00:56:03]  And it's the sea.
[00:56:06]  Represents chaos, it represents and death, you know, that the sea will give up its dead, you know, it's like it's.
[00:56:13]  And then there's something to be said for it's not just that the fact that the physics are being, you know, supernaturally breached, but, you know, pointing towards Christ and his deity, but it seems like there's something symbolic to, you know, to Jesus walking on water, tramp, treading on the sea, you know.
[00:56:33]  Oh, yeah, 100%.
[00:56:34]  Yeah, that's a whole other discussion.
[00:56:36]  I have lots of thoughts on that.
[00:56:38]  I'm preaching through Luke right now.
[00:56:39]  And I think that when Jesus is on the sea, that, and, you know, whether it's calming the storm or having Peter walk on the water or whatever he's doing, even with the pigs jumping into the sea, there's always satanic overtones going on because Leviathan is the dragon, is Satan.
[00:56:59]  To think about John 12 and John 20, those are all being connected.
[00:57:03]  And so when Jesus is doing stuff around the sea or on the sea, he's showing that he has power over Satan.
[00:57:12]  The creature who lives in the sea, which is represented by a Leviathan, which is therefore represents Satan.
[00:57:17]  It's an attack directly on Satan himself.
[00:57:22]  Okay.
[00:57:23]  Yep.
[00:57:24]  Going back to the garden, real quick.
[00:57:26]  So, the serpent.
[00:57:32]  So, do you think that when Satan is tempting Eve, and it's this talking serpent, but a serpent with legs, right?
[00:57:41]  Because the curse is that it would then.
[00:57:43]  So, I don't think so.
[00:57:44]  I don't think that's what's going on.
[00:57:46]  Okay.
[00:57:47]  I was going to ask, is that it seems like Eve is talking to someone that she's maybe seen before?
[00:57:54]  Yeah.
[00:57:54]  She's not caught off guard.
[00:57:56]  But go ahead.
[00:57:57]  Go ahead and give me your view.
[00:57:59]  Okay, so when you go to extraterrestrial literature, Jewish literature, and this appears in two or three places.
[00:58:09]  Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls had this.
[00:58:12]  A book called, I think, The Apocalypse of Abraham has this.
[00:58:15]  When they describe the Watchers, they describe them as serpentine in appearance.
[00:58:22]  So I think that what's happening there is the serpent is actually, it's more than a metaphor.
[00:58:29]  It's not just a metaphor, but it's a picture of.
[00:58:33]  Of evil in some really strange ways.
[00:58:38]  The word Nahash can mean a serpent as a noun.
[00:58:41]  It can mean a shining one as an adjective.
[00:58:44]  And as a verb, it means divination.
[00:58:47]  Heiser says that the Nahash could be a substantival adjective there so that you could actually translate it as the shining one spoke to her.
[00:58:56]  And the reason I say that is because if watchers are associated with serpents, but they have humanoid.
[00:59:03]  Uh, appearance and I think like I, I think tend to think of in the UFO world like reptilians.
[00:59:09]  I don't know that they are the watchers, but that's a good way of thinking about their humanoid, but they're serpentine.
[00:59:16]  And I, I, I think that's that Eve is not talking to us to a possessed serpent or a talking serpent, but she's talking to a watcher.
[00:59:26]  And she wasn't surprised because this is where he belongs because it's the divine council, they're all over the place, and this is just the one who happens to come up to her to.
[00:59:35]  To test her the same way that the Satan does in Job 1 in that divine council scene when the sons of God go with the Satan to talk to the Lord about what they should do with Job down on the earth.
[00:59:47]  Right.
[00:59:48]  I just, I think it's a, it's just much, it's much, it's, this is not something that should cause people to lose their faith in the Bible because Eve is talking to a talking snake.
[01:00:01]  Right.
[01:00:01]  You know, you hear that objection from atheists all the time.
[01:00:04]  No, there's something very different going on there.
[01:00:08]  Right.
[01:00:08]  So then, how would you explain the curse, though, of the curse towards the serpent, not just the water?
[01:00:13]  That kind of language is used all the time.
[01:00:15]  It's used in Isaiah 14, it's used in Ezekiel 28, it's used in Obadiah that you will fall from the heights and you go down low as you can go.
[01:00:25]  It's a way of metaphorically describing that you are at the highest place that there could be, and now you're going to run around in the dirt of the earth.

=== Explaining the Serpent's Curse (03:47) ===

[01:00:34]  Got you.
[01:00:35]  Eat the dust.
[01:00:36]  You're going to eat the dust.
[01:00:37]  Exactly.
[01:00:38]  Yeah, we have that metaphor in English to this day.
[01:00:41]  Right.
[01:00:41]  Bite the dust.
[01:00:42]  Another one bites the dust.
[01:00:43]  Exactly.
[01:00:44]  Yep.
[01:00:45]  All right.
[01:00:46]  Okay.
[01:00:46]  That's very interesting.
[01:00:48]  It's piecing together a lot of different things for me as I'm just personally looking into some of these different views.
[01:00:56]  And it's fascinating.
[01:00:59]  I mean, it is fascinating.
[01:01:00]  It does make sense of so much, especially like mythology.
[01:01:05]  And it's like, oh, man, like the world really is, like there really is a spiritual battle.
[01:01:12]  The world really is a magical place.
[01:01:15]  And And it was, I mean, I just can't imagine, like, you know, I think of like Noah and like, man, it was probably pretty crazy to live in the antediluvian world.
[01:01:27]  I mean, you probably, like, I mean, from my understanding, you've got dinosaurs, right?
[01:01:31]  It's, I'm, I'm, I'm a young, you know, six or a six day young earth creationist.
[01:01:36]  So, I mean, I don't think you got dinosaurs for millions of years and then man, but so Noah, like, you know, you've got dinosaurs, you've got giants, you've got fallen angels, you know, that are, Had their hand in all these things that are visibly showing themselves.
[01:01:52]  Visibly showing themselves, and you're trying to build a boat, and God's going to flood the whole world.
[01:01:57]  I mean, that's a crazy time.
[01:02:00]  It is.
[01:02:00]  It would make for a good movie if some crazy guy named Aronofsky didn't already ruin it.
[01:02:05]  Yeah, someone could do it well.
[01:02:06]  Yeah.
[01:02:07]  Okay.
[01:02:09]  Any final thoughts you want to leave the listener with?
[01:02:12]  No, not on these topics.
[01:02:13]  I mean, we could talk.
[01:02:14]  I could talk about this for forever, really.
[01:02:16]  So, cool.
[01:02:18]  There's no way I'm going to go with it.
[01:02:19]  We're just going to have to have you back.
[01:02:21]  That's the solution.
[01:02:22]  Okay.
[01:02:23]  Well, thank you so much.
[01:02:24]  How can our listeners find you?
[01:02:26]  Do you want to reference one of your books and where they could buy it if they want to go check it out?
[01:02:30]  Yeah, I mean, you can go to my church web or well, to my website first, douglasvan dorn.com.
[01:02:37]  And I have all the books linked there and have a whole bunch of other stuff there, too.
[01:02:41]  I've done tons of podcasts, so those are all linked on there.
[01:02:44]  And I redid the site last fall, so I think it looks better than it did.
[01:02:51]  That's where you can go.
[01:02:52]  All my books are on Amazon, so I just do the print on demand through Amazon, and that's been good to me so far.
[01:02:59]  They haven't censored me or anything.
[01:03:00]  So just look up Doug Van Dorn.
[01:03:03]  Amazon.
[01:03:03]  Yeah, on Amazon.
[01:03:04]  And then also, people can go to our church website.
[01:03:09]  It's rbcnc.com.
[01:03:12]  So just the initials for Reformed Baptist Church of Northern Colorado.
[01:03:17]  And you can check out our church there.
[01:03:19]  You can see what we believe.
[01:03:21]  And it's funny, Joel, because as crazy as I am, our worship service is totally conservative and like a Michael Horton kind of a URC sort of a thing.
[01:03:33]  And it kind of freaks some people out because they hear about me from.
[01:03:37]  Glory creatures or whatever.
[01:03:38]  And then they go to the church service and like, well, this isn't what I thought it was going to be like.
[01:03:43]  Right.
[01:03:43]  I mean, that's what I am.
[01:03:44]  I'm a reformed guy.
[01:03:45]  I'm a reformed Baptist.
[01:03:47]  And we have all of our sermons for free on the website.
[01:03:51]  Most of them are in PDFs.
[01:03:53]  You can download those, do whatever you want.
[01:03:55]  If there's a weird topic, I mean, I've been preaching for 22 years.
[01:03:59]  I've gone through a lot of books of the Bible.
[01:04:01]  I don't skip verses.
[01:04:03]  If it's weird and it's there and I've preached on it, chances are that I've talked about this.
[01:04:08]  So it's a great resource for people to.
[01:04:10]  Be able to dive into all kinds of these subjects.
[01:04:15]  Great.
[01:04:16]  All right.
[01:04:16]  Well, thank you so much for your time.
[01:04:17]  Appreciate it.
[01:04:18]  Yeah.
[01:04:18]  Thanks for having me on, man.
[01:04:20]  Absolutely.
[01:04:21]  God bless.
[01:04:22]  You too.