Re: Naked Bible 156: Ezekiel 40-48 Part 1 and Naked Bible 157: Ezekiel 40-48 Part 2

If you think of Ezekiel's vision in chapters 40-48 as something more or less literal, you will miss the point entirely.

Heiser punches another big hole in Dispensationalism here. It's common to see Ezekiel's final vision (40-48) as a depiction of the Millennium. That's simply not possible. Given a genuine knowledge of Hebrew prophetic literary conventions, the "millennium" refers to the long period between Christ's Ascension and His Second Coming. Heiser also ties this passage to Revelation 20, pointing out how it's the same event. Revelation is written in cycles, not chronological sequences. What's in Revelation 19 does not come before Revelation 20 in chronology. Further, there is no literal millennium anywhere in Hebrew thinking.

In his previous podcasts on Ezekiel 38-39, Heiser had already shot down the idea that Gog/Magog had anything to do with Russia; it referred to people living in modern Turkey. Heiser talked about how the Valley of Dry Bones (AKA Travelers' Valley) refers to some place on the eastern ridge above the Dead Sea. It's the same place fire and brimstone fell on a previous occasion (Sodom and Gomorrah). The entire eastern ridge above the Jordan Valley all the way up to Mount Hermon is the homeland of the Watchers and the Nephilim clans, but the valley with the bones is a place also dotted with various shrines for death cults. It will become the graveyard of Satan's army. It won't be much of a battle, and nobody who understands Hebrew traditions could possibly take it literally.

The New Earth Kingdom is after the Second Coming, not some alleged Rapture followed by a literal Millennium. That's an interpretive system, not the Bible. There will be no new Temple built in Jerusalem. Ezekiel's description here cannot be taken literally. Why not?

1. The proportions are unbalanced, with the doors being half the length of the room inside.

2. There is no height indicated, no roof.

3. There are no instructions on building this thing, only measurements of something God Himself builds (for Eternity, not some resurrected Jewish kingdom). The whole point of this vision is to record symbols that would convict Ezekiel's listeners of their sins.

4. There are no furnishings for a priestly offering, no place to wash, etc. The water flowing out of the Temple is a mere trickle at this point. This cannot represent a restored OT Temple with sacrifices.

5. After the Cross, there can be no purpose in a sacrificial system in a Millennium. Either Christ paid it all or He accomplished nothing.

Reminder: The OT sacrificial system was never about covering individual sins in the first place. Quoting Heiser --

Quote:People think this is about getting moral forgiveness and having your sins wiped away as an individual. In other words, they're superimposing the talk about Jesus onto the Old Testament sacrificial system. If you have listened to our series on Leviticus, you know that doesn't work because that's not actually what Leviticus says ninety-nine percent of the time. The sacrifices are really about purifying objects and purifying sacred space and that sort of thing.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm ET. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

Re: Philosopher's Corner (Jack Bowers) -- "The Drama Behind the Darkness"

Jack Bowers addresses a frequent objection people make to the gospel message:

Quote:Ask almost anyone why they find it difficult to believe in God, and the answer will come quickly: just look at the world. Childhood cancer. Genocide. The slow disintegration of a mind swallowed by dementia. If a God of unlimited power and perfect goodness exists, why does evil not merely persist but often appear to go unchecked, senseless, and grotesque?

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm ET. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

For after the upgrade. Testing 1 2 3...

Re: Heiser Lake of Fire

It has become trendy among American evangelicals to question whether Hell actually exists. Some go so far as to slip into universalism, but most just kind of edge away from historical evangelical theology about Hell, what it is, and who ends up there.

Review: The Hebrew language itself is first and foremost symbolic. Thus, no one should be surprised when Hebrew discussion of eternal truth is in terms of parables. It started out using expressions common across the Ancient Near East, but as the Lord continued revealing more about His realm and His ways, the Hebrews developed their own imagery. Sometimes they captured the ideas of competing religions and claimed all glories for Jehovah. At other times, they reworked the ANE concepts more thoroughly, along with having their own unique expressions.

Some of their lore was published as Scripture. A substantial amount of it remained oral for a time, then was eventually committed to writing during the Second Temple Period. Some of that lore was heavily embellished, and so those books were not accepted into the canon. Yet those materials was still either referenced or even quoted in the New Testament. Thus, we have Jude and Peter echoing some wording from the 1 Enoch.

Once you become aware of the core themes in 1 Enoch, you can find them echoed in more Scripture. As Heiser explains in the linked video, the notion that Hell is a place of fiery punishment first appears in Hebrew writing in Enoch. It's not in the Old Testament at all, but it shows up in Enoch. Jesus Himself echoes the theme of fiery punishment when He mentions the term gehenna, pointing to the flaming trash heap in the Valley of Hinnom to defile the old shrine to Moloch.

We have other terms from Hebrew and Greek, translated into English words that may or may not come very close to the same ideas -- Tartarus, Hades, Sheol, the grave, etc. There seems to be very little differentiation between them. To the Hebrews, Mount Hermon in particular, and the Bashan region in general, were somehow connected to this dark realm. Indeed, the entire eastern ridge above the Jordan Rift Valley was considered the home of the Rephaim and other clans of Nephilim, marked by all sorts of death cult shrines, plus Sodom and Gomorrah.

The writers, and many readers, of the New Testament are clearly familiar with the Second Temple literature in general, and 1 Enoch in particular. We don't get wholesale copying from it, but certain core ideas that appear to represent the older, unembellished oral lore included within the ancient tale of Enoch.

The primitive notion of the underworld was depicted as a dark and foreboding place that was connected to the world we know. You can go there from here, but can't come back. The whole concept was symbolic of everything people don't like: dark, inside the ground with no fresh air, etc. Hebrews used various terms for such a place, including Sheol, with which we are most familiar. Only much later, in the Second Temple Period, does the theme of fiery torment get added.

In theory, Hell exists solely for the Devil and his allies. It was not made for humans; it was made for the elohim class of beings who had rejected God's commands to His staff. It is not eternal. The space/time limitations apply there in some sense, likely as part of the punishment effect for the confinement of eternal beings.

In broad general terms, Heiser tells us that the Watchers are confined in the same realm, but it seems in their own peculiar dungeon within that realm. We get the concept that the Nephilim come and go, but we have no idea on what terms. Recall that the Legion of Nephilim infesting the Gadarene madman didn't want to be sent back to the Abyss, as if it were hard for them to get back out.

However, there are no sharp definitions for any of this. In general terms, the Devil is Lord of the underworld, but he also seems free to wander this world. He reports to God on a regular basis regarding his new mission after demotion. If you recall the Fall in the Garden, the Devil was allowed to go there and make his bid for human submission. Once that submission was secured, humans were ousted from the Garden and forced to live in a world that has not been conformed to God's image as the Garden is. East of Eden is not a pleasant place in symbolism, and one of Satan's titles is Prince of This World.

One thing for certain is that Hell is virtually nothing like common American conceptions. Western mythology is alien to the Bible. The western notions include the skin-tight red suit, horns, tail and trident for the Devil. And strictly speaking, the Lake of Fire is not Hell, but the symbol of the final destruction of Hell, death, the Devil and his allies, both human and elohim.

Part of the problem with common understanding is the western concept of retributive justice. It presumes without saying so that humanity starts in a more or less neutral situation instead of already belonging to the Devil. It goes all the way back as early as Eusebius reasoning that sins create a debt to be paid due to misreading of the New Testament -- "wages of sin" became "debt of sin". It depersonalized our standing before God, introducing an intervening system of justice between us and God. That's another rabbit we've chased often enough before. But it produced an image of Hell as a punitive prison, rather than a simple continuation of one's default slavery to the Devil and his realm.

At it's most primitive conception among Hebrews, Sheol was simply the grave. While there were exceptions, people there did not come back to this life. They were confined, constrained, not in a position to operate with any degree of freedom as we do here in this world. But it wasn't exactly Hell, either. It was a sad confinement from which a faithful servant of the Lord would hope to be freed, redeemed by God as His family.

It was the basic concept carried over from the Mesopotamian roots of Hebrew culture. The Egyptian mythology didn't think of the grave as a bad place; it was privileged a existence for some. That's why we have the symbolism of great figures buried in pyramids with what they might need in the afterlife. But the concept of afterlife as paradise waited until Persian exposure (Zoroastrianism). Regardless of the source, Jesus reaffirmed that concept (using a Persian word) from the Cross, telling the confessing thief they would meet together in paradise that very day.

The key was that the dying thief confessed Jesus as innocent and appealed to Him in submission. Not everyone declared their allegiance to Jesus. The New Testament flatly says that certain types of people would never see paradise after death. However, the portrayal is not that people failed to do certain things, but that they did those things because they weren't the right kind of people to submit to God. The underlying cause was a matter of loyalties.

In other words, people end up in Hell because they never left the Devil's domain in the first place. The route out is open to anyone who claims it. As previously noted, we use the Doctrine of Election to help us set our expectations for the kind of response we get from our efforts to portray what freedom from slavery to the flesh looks like.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm ET. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

What would we say is our gospel message? It's certainly different from the mainstream. Because we strive to understand the biblical Hebrew outlook on things, we don't see the fundamental human need the same. For us, it's not about sins, guilt and penalties, but a mortal nature that enslaves you to our Enemy. We typically say something like this: "Embrace feudal submission to Christ as Lord. You must grasp the necessity of vanquishing your fallen nature to enslave it to a higher purpose. This higher purpose is that you love His people the way He does; that's the whole Covenant."

Those three items are difficult to separate. It won't sound like what anyone else says. I realize that this calls for a bit of explanation that might not easily fit in a tract like the "Four Spiritual Laws" or something similar. The beginning point is simply assuming that most people can understand the notion of kneeling before Christ and declaring Him Lord. That's the foundation of redemption in terms of the individual experience.

Whether or not that can really take hold in the hearer's life is a matter for the Lord to handle. We can help explain what's entailed, but we cannot make it happen, nor can the person trying it. Only the Lord can enable that kind of faith. It's a free gift from Him to His Elect.

We should never get the idea that we can talk someone into this. It's not conversion; it's the birth of a whole new existence.

When the Apostles spread out across their world, virtually everyone shared certain common assumptions about reality. The early believers knew that their message was commonly accepted in form, if not in the specifics. Everyone understood a universe populated with spirit beings as the ultimate powers over human fate. Thus, the terms of their message was already well understood. It was just a matter of announcing a fresh offer from yet another deity. Any miracles were an acceptable proof for their contention that Christ was the ultimate ruler in Heaven.

But the greatest miracle, of course, was that people would respond. It was not always compelling against the testimony of other deities and their alleged miracles. Everyone believed in at least one deity already. The only question was whether they would shift their loyalty to Christ. That such a shift in feudal loyalty was also viewed as a threat by some governments was taken for granted.

That common public understanding is long gone. We aren't dealing with a world where everyone can grasp the deep background of Hebrew cosmology. There are no common elements. Worse, that background is now foreign to just about everyone who claims to follow Christ, as well. Somewhere along the path, the philosophical assumptions shifted dramatically. If you quote English language Scriptures as your gospel message today, it's guaranteed it won't mean what the Apostles were sharing in their day, neither to the speaker nor the hearers.

We are compelled to distinguish our message from the mistaken one already standing everywhere you go now. I would suggest that the starting place is your life under the Covenant, demonstrating the power of your message before you even open your mouth. People need to see that we are different from the rest. They need to see the fire of commitment, AKA faith, to Christ's law of love. Our sense of purpose and aplomb in the midst of any chaos is the strongest testimony we can have.

Should anyone ask, you should be ready to start with the simple message of feudal submission to Christ as Lord. That in itself would probably take some explaining. The primary issue is that you avoid the westernized worries about sin and guilt, and lean more toward the issue of overcoming a fleshly nature that will not play along with genuinely following Christ. It requires conceptually distinguishing oneself from the mortal fleshly nature.

You need to address the issues that hinder the individual to whom you are talking. There's no way we can make this a memorized spiel. Submission to Christ is not democratic; everyone has different struggles with the Devil.

Submission to Christ means you'll pay any price, go anywhere, and do anything He demands -- sight unseen. Serving Christ is a black box before you get inside. The entrance is nailing your fleshly nature to the Cross. There is no peace otherwise, because the whole world is Satan's turf. You aren't entering an institution with rules, but the personal submission to someone who loves you and knows you better than you know yourself. Faith defies human logic. People come to faith because they can't ignore the calling that burns in their souls.

I can't give you a snappy little pamphlet. You need to be able to keep it simple. Let them ask questions and be ready to answer them. Your best answers will always be how you have handled things so far. You can always talk about the Unseen Realm and Three Rebellions later. Not to hide it, but to prevent overwhelming them. Don't be afraid to address those things if anyone asks. They aren't joining an institution for personal growth, but an eternal covenant family to reclaim stolen lives. There are no shortcuts.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm ET. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

I found a monster torrent file of all the transcipts from Heiser's Naked Bible podcast -- close to 30GB. After I finally got it downlaoded, I found the folder contained a bunch of different file formats, mostly stuff none of you would even recognize. However, it also contined the conventional PDFs, so I got them separated out. Now I'm going through them to ensure the file names are uniform and give you clue what they are about. Then I'll bundle them back up and place them on the library, since they are open source files publically available to everyone.

Frankly, I prefer the transcripts for most episodes. Only with guest interviews do I gain anything from the audio track. Hearing the sound of someone's voice is meaningful.