The Reality of Hell, Dinosaurs in the Bible, and Childhood Education

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of Scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the

Saints. I'm Dylan Hamilton and with me are Michael Dierb and Andrew Hudson. Before we dig into our topic we humbly ask for you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you. Today we're gonna be diving into a few questions that we've had sent in anonymously to our website.

The first off we're gonna go with is is hell a real place? Is hell a real place?

Well that's a great question. The doctrine of hell, or the understanding of hell, is in sad disrepair in the

North America Evangelical Church, and I imagine in a lot of places, for reasons that don't really pertain to the question.

The question is being asked because it's not something that we talk about or think about or are well discipled concerning.

And so people wonder, is hell a real place? When we read the Scriptures, very often we find that Jesus lays alongside the teaching of hell, the teaching of heaven.

And he talks about heaven being a real place, and he talks about hell being a real place.

So in that sense, what we believe about hell, it's realities, what it means, its specific nature, will also have an impact on what we believe about heaven.

If we believe that heaven is eternal, and if that heaven means being in the the favor and the love and acceptance of God, eternal life, knowing

God, and a loving relationship eternally, then what we believe about hell is also so informed.

Now there are some passages that certainly affirm this. For example,

I think one of them would be in Matthew chapter 25 where Jesus speaks to his return, that when he comes back he's going to raise everyone from the dead, and the goats are going to be on the left and the sheep are going to be on the right.

Those who do not know him who are in rebellion to his kingdom will be called the goats, and they're on his left.

And those who do know him and are part of his kingdom, those who are Christians born again, they are called sheep, and they're on his right.

And that's the vision, that's the the picture in vision for us. And he has two different things to say to those on his right and those on his left.

And those on his right, he welcomes into his presence and promises an everlasting fellowship and eternal life.

And those on his left, he says something very different. In verse 46 he says,

Matthew 25 verse 46, concerning the goats, or concerning the unsaved, and these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

And so you see how closely those ideas are placed alongside one another.

And while there is a great deal of instinctive belief in heaven, oh of course I believe in heaven, even though maybe the content of that belief is very fuzzy and perhaps very unbiblical, the readiness to believe in a place called heaven is apparent, whereas the reticence to believe in a place called hell is also just as obvious in our culture today, whereas Jesus talked about them side by side so often, that they are everlasting eternal places.

He also told a parable one time in the Gospel of Luke about a certain rich man and a beggar named

Lazarus, and how they ended up in very different places. The reason why

Jesus used these characters in his story is because there was a belief in his time that if you were wealthy, that meant that God loved you more, that you were closer to God, had more of his favor, and that clearly those who were wealthy and rich were those who had the best opportunity to enter into heaven.

Jesus spoke to his disciples after dealing with the rich ruler who went away sorrowful, he was unwilling to repent of his idolatry, and Jesus told his disciples that it would be easier for a rich man to get into heaven, it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven, meaning the largest moving creature you've ever seen through the smallest opening your eye has ever seen than for a rich man to get into heaven.

And Jesus was doing that for a shock value because the assumption was the rich were the ones who were up at the front of the waiting line to get in, and that everybody else had a much harder time of it.

And so his disciples said, well then who can be saved? I mean, if the rich whom we assume are being favored by God can't get in, then who can get in?

And then God said that what is impossible with man is possible with God, so salvation is by the grace and power and the sovereignty of God.

But that brings us back to this story in Luke 16 about a rich man who ends up in hell, and the poor man who they would assume was under the judgment of God because he was suffering, he ends up in a wonderful place in heaven sitting right next to Abraham.

And what we learn from the story is that the rich man who has died, the rich man died and was buried, verse 22 says.

And verse 23 says, and being in torments in Hades or in hell, he lifted up his eyes and saw

Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom. And Jesus is, you know, he's bringing a story together here.

He's not saying that there's going to be a hotline between hell and heaven and the people are going to be talking, but this is for the purpose of the story.

But let's notice that the body is buried in the ground, but the person, the real inner man, is still existing and living, and he's in torment.

And he sees that Lazarus is not in torment, and he asks simply for a drop of water so that he could have some relief of the torment and the flame that he is enduring.

What kind of flame can this be when his body is buried in the ground, and that his spirit is in torment? Well, again, we're dealing with metaphors and pictures.

Jesus is getting down on one knee, as it were, trying to explain things to a three -year -old, because these matters are beyond us, and yet even though they're not comprehensible, we can still understand them by the revelation of God.

And this rich man is reminded that there is no way for Lazarus to come to him.

There's a great -gulf fix between heaven and hell. So there's not going to be anyone in hell who's going to find an escape to get out and go to heaven.

There's no purgatory. There's no in -between state that maybe you can get out of the suffering and get on to paradise.

And there's no way for Lazarus, a saint, having a good seat in heaven, for him to get down to hell.

He's going to be perfectly preserved there. Nothing's going to happen where he trips and ends up in hell. You know, he's perfectly safe there.

There's a great gulf. So these things are fixed, we read. And these are the assumptions, these are the teachings of Jesus Christ, that heaven is a real place, a real place of comfort, a real place of peace, a real place of rest, whereas hell is a real place of no rest, restlessness, torment without respite.

So we see that Jesus makes this clear in his teachings, that heaven and hell are real places.

Now one of the challenges that we have is that the doctrine of hell is under a great deal of attack, a lot of skepticism and unbelief, a lot of denial that a good and merciful, compassionate, gracious God who forgives and loves everybody would ever create a place called hell, and how could we ever think that a loving, forgiving, and gracious, merciful

God would send anybody to hell who simply opted out of believing in Jesus, or never heard the gospel preached to them.

Why would a good, loving, merciful God send anybody to a place called hell where they will be in torment forever and ever?

That doesn't sound right. That doesn't sound right, that doesn't sound just, that doesn't sound gracious, that doesn't sound merciful, that just doesn't compute with our understanding of God.

And it's important to realize that skepticism about hell doesn't come from the

Bible. It is everywhere affirmed. The skepticism and concern about the

Bible comes from man's imaginations about who they think

God ought to be. Right, like all those all those terms you just threw out there, just, loving, gracious, we've got some problems with definitions there.

We do, and we've got some problems with some idolatry and some pride. Everybody who complains about the plain teaching of hell in the

Bible and says that that doesn't compute with a merciful God, what they're saying is that they believe that they are more merciful than God, that they have a better handle on mercy than Jesus did, and that's a very dangerous thing to think.

We don't understand enough about the holiness of God, and we don't really understand enough about the justice of God and what sin actually deserves, and that's the main problem.

But is hell a place? Yes, it is a place. It is a distinct separation from the favored presence of God.

It is a kind of exile, but it is an exile and punishment overseen by God himself.

He is the one who is bringing the hot anger of his own wrath against those who are in hell, and so we are to understand that the the place called hell is one that is warned about many, many times by Christ and his apostles, and we are to take warning and recognize that a holy

God has every right to exercise his justice against our sins, and unless we turn to Jesus Christ and find in his person and work our righteousness and our forgiveness and our reconciliation, if we go to hell, we get exactly what we deserve, and that's what the scriptures robustly testify to.

Could you maybe flesh out the differences that we get from the two terms that we have,

Gehenna and Hades, in the texts? Yeah, that's a good question, because when you read in the Old Testament, very often you're coming across a word like Hades in the newer translations, the word

Sheol, and it's an interesting thing that the translations, some of the older translations translated

Hades or Sheol as hell, okay, and then that was same

English word was brought forward into the New Testament and covered Greek words that didn't necessarily cohere with the

Old Testament Hebrew words, and so there could be a little bit of confusion there depending on what translation you're working with.

The full explanation of what hell is, is a

New Testament doctrine. It is something that you find in the New Testament, but it is fully affirmed by the

Old Testament in some very significant ways. For example, the language of fire and brimstone in regards to hell is based on Old Testament imagery of God's judgment.

The language of Gehenna, the idea of Gehenna being a valley just outside of Jerusalem where the trash was burned and so on, that is a metaphor, that's a metaphorical reference that Jesus uses to describe what hell is, but that goes back to things that were happening in the

Old Testament regarding a valley where Israelites took their infants to go burn them alive to the false god

Molech, and because of that God brought horrid judgment upon these people, and this same valley was filled with dead bodies that were rotting, and then it became a trash heap, an accursed place.

So this is a perfect kind of metaphor to use when talking about God's everlasting judgment after death.

So there are some Old Testament pictures that become very important material in the

New Testament to explain what hell is. And again, this is something that we cannot comprehend, but we are given what we need to understand.

Further, when we talk about the word Sheol, sometimes translated to Hades, in the Old Testament, questions arise when we see affirmations that not only the wicked but the righteous go to Sheol.

Not only the wicked but the righteous go, sometimes translated, Hades. So what does that mean?

Sometimes people have developed doctrines of losing your salvation based off of those passages, but we don't need to do that.

What we need to do is think about how the Bible talks about death, that Sheol in Hades is an expression of the grave, and death is an enemy, and it is not something where we should be eager to die, where we look at death and say, oh

I can't wait, or I'm really looking forward to dying, and because I love my loved ones and we know what awaits us on the other side to be with Jesus, I'm hoping that they'll die soon too.

We're not a death cult. Death is an enemy that we understand has a doom date.

Christ has been raised from the dead, died no more, and he is on the throne at the right hand of the

Father, and he is reigning until all of his enemies are placed as a footstool for his feet, and the last enemy to be defeated is death, and so the clock is ticking on death, and death will be defeated, but death is a damnable thief.

I hate death. I've watched death steal my loved ones before my very eyes, and I can't do anything about it.

Death is not something that we should look forward to, embrace, or rejoice in. We rejoice in Christ, we rejoice in the promises, we know that to be absent from the body is to be present with the

Lord. So when we read in the Old Testament about death, we need to recognize that they were looking at death as an enemy, and that the righteous had some hope, okay, they did have hope that they would yet still live after death, that they would again be raised up from the dead, they would again stand upon the earth, that after death, when

Daniel goes to his end, then he will have his rest. So there was hope for the believer, but nobody was looking to die, and death is a reality that has been brought about because of sin.

In the day that you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will surely die. Now, the difference between the righteous and the unrighteous in the

Old Testament when it came to Sheol and, you know, the idea of Hades and so on, is this.

The wicked, when they died, this was not only a judgment upon their sin, but they died without hope.

And when God brought death as a judgment upon the wicked, it was, it is a judgment in which there was no hope for them, right.

So we need to read it that way and understand that when the wicked were dying, they were dying and they were being swallowed up by Sheol without any hope afterwards, and this was an act of a just and righteous

God against the enemies of his people. So that's why sometimes when you read in the Old Testament, and you read about Sheol and Hades and so on, it sounds like hell.

Well, why? Because, well, because hell is about the judgment of God, and this hopeless death is also the judgment of God versus the righteous who still, they didn't want to die.

Lord, deliver me from Sheol. What does that, what does that mean? They're asking for deliverance from death, and truly in all of those psalms and prayers and concerns and so on, they are resolved in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

As he defeats death, he defeats the one who had the power of death to enslave men to the fear of death, he won a great victory over our enemy in that regard.

So I think that that is, you know, when we look at it that way, and we read the

Old Testament expressions in light of the New Testament, I think there's a lot of In today's culture, we still see the vestiges of understanding that who the aggrieved party is and the nature of the grievance should determine the punishment.

Even criminals behind bars, when they find out that there's a fellow inmate who harmed a child, they think that just incarceration is not enough, that there should be further punishment.

So even ostensibly criminals understand why an eternal punishment through their own actions, they understand, they can't for it, but they can understand and demonstrate that this eternal punishment is just because who the aggrieved party is and the nature of the grievance.

Trying to, as someone might have called it, the great controversy, trying to say

I am the driver, I'm the master, I am the one who will determine good and evil,

I am the one who will say this is how it should be. What what greater grievance could there be than to seek to throw

God off his throne? I can't think of it, I can't think of anything else, and yet that's what our first parents did.

Right, too, it doesn't sound, it doesn't sound egregious to our ears when we read, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Sounds like we, you know, we tried but we fell a little bit short because we can't jump as far as God can jump.

Well, who can blame you? But the reason why it doesn't, it doesn't sound egregious to our ears is because we are not holy as God is holy.

We are not as concerned about sin as He is concerned. We are not as passionate about the glory of His name as He is for the glory of His name, because He is

God and we are not. And the main reason why we don't understand the necessity of an everlasting punishment called hell is because we don't treasure

God as much as He treasures Himself. And if He didn't treasure Himself in the way that He did,

He'd be an idolater. There's a weightiness to God. The word glory, kabod, in the

Hebrew means weightiness. And that's the idea that you have in the New Testament about glory, is weightiness.

If you were to take all of the character and attributes of God and multiply them all together times in eternity, and this was done in a measure of weight, you'd have an idea of the weightiness of God.

Think about the, think about the science teacher in the classroom trying to teach his students about gravity.

And he has suspended a sheet, a bed sheet, from various points in the room.

And he gathers everybody around this dark blue sheet and he wants to show them how gravity works in the solar system.

And so he takes a bowling ball and he places it in the middle of the sheet. And what happens? It goes down and the entire sheet goes down with it and you can see the slope of the gravity visually and everything goes towards that bowling ball.

And that's the, and if you were to put, you know, a golf ball in there or a baseball or whatever, they all go rolling straight to the bowling ball because that's the weightiness.

And when we think about the weightiness of God, His glory, to fall short of the glory of God when we have been made in the image of God, we have broken the standard by which

He has made us. So it's falling short of the glory of God isn't, well,

I jumped as far as I could. Who can blame me that I couldn't get farther? It's, I'm wearing the uniform of God Himself and I am betraying that uniform every day and in every way.

I am not only AWOL, I am a traitor. And that's what it means.

And then to be under the wrath of God is to be under the weightiness of that offended glory, a white -hot fiery glory that's been offended.

And to be under that, the wrath of God abides upon the sinner.

And without a mediator, without Christ, without someone else, a substitutionary atonement, without Christ bearing that wrath upon Himself, satisfying the justice of God as our propitiation upon the cross, then without that, without Him, then we will bear it ourselves.

And that is the everlasting expression of God's judgment called hell. This may be a little bit tangential, but it still has to do with the doctrine of hell and those who adhere to annihilationism.

In the text that we've been going through in your Sunday school class, in Revelation 14 verse 11, "...and

the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever. They have no rest day and night, those who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name."

Now, I'm going to focus on the smoke of their torment going up forever and ever. When we have sacrifices made in the

Old Covenant, and the smoke rises up, it's seen as a savory, sweet smell, correct?

And something that is supposed to... Propitiate?

Propitiate, right. So this eternity in hell is actually an eternity of something that is going to propitiate for their continued sinfulness in eternity, is it not?

Or am I reading this oddly? I would say that that God is certainly satisfying

His justice regarding their sin, right? There is not any indication that these sinners go out of existence, though we may think that, you know, well certainly there's got to be an end to it, otherwise

God isn't merciful. But again, that's us projecting upon God, rather than us submitting to Him. So certainly, as we see pictures in the

Old Testament about the sacrificial system and the sweet -smelling aroma coming up to Him, but those are the shadows of Christ, because those were substitutionary atonements.

There are other passages in the Old Testament that deal with smoke rising up before the

Lord, and even the expressions that there's smoke rising up forever and ever. A passage in Isaiah 13 about Babylon and her smoke rising up before the

Lord forever and ever is an expression of God's justice being satisfied regarding some judgment that He has brought to pass.

But the judgment of sinners for their sins, and they have no mediator,

I don't know if that's ever called a sweet -smelling aroma to the Lord, who does not take pleasure in the death of the wicked.

Okay, so we find that in the Scriptures, that it isn't something where He...we

see the substitutionary atonement in shadow throughout Israel's history, and those are sweet -smelling aromas which are fulfilled in Christ sacrificing

Himself for us. But we also see other kinds of smoke rising up, and that's when there was no mediator, and there was no salvation, and it was the judgment of God, and He is righteous and good, and there is a satisfaction there.

So, satiation. Yeah, there's a satisfaction there, but the question is, is there a delight -filled pleasure there?

And we're not given that language. We're not given that language. And there's something there that's, you know, of course beyond my ability to grasp, but there is a delight and a joy when we do something for somebody else that didn't need to be done.

Right? Where we do...when we give a gift and we show kindness, or we put some effort into doing something for somebody that they never saw coming, and it was a huge...and

there was a joy, there's a savoring and delight in that. But then there's also a different type...I

don't take a sweet, savory, delightful joy in perhaps doing something that needs to be done, that has to be done, and I've got to do it.

And I may, in my preference, desire something else, but I know this is the right thing to do, and I'm gonna do it.

And when it's done, well, that needed to be done. And these, of course, are not what we project upon the

Lord, but I think there's something of...God reveals himself to us having a right hand and sitting on a throne and so on, even though he's a spirit and does not have a body like man.

He also reveals himself to us in man -shaped words having to do with affections and emotions and so on and so forth, so that we can understand him.

Again, he's accommodating to us in that. Though I'm not trying to put our emotions onto him, but I'm saying there's something reflective of God, us being made in the image of God, being renewed in Christ, godliness being worked out in us, that we can kind of understand the difference between the smoke rising up as the substitutionary atonement of Christ versus the smoke rising up of hell.

Both show us the justice of God. Both show us that God is holy and that he does not sweep sin under the cosmic rug, but he deals with it.

Yet in Christ, there is a delight there that is not there when it comes to hell.

Right, and maybe propitiation wasn't what I was looking for. I was looking for satiation. What has to be quenched there is the need for God's justice.

Yes. And if you have annihilationism, that need is not satiated, right?

And so that smoke doesn't go up forever and ever as it should, signifying his justice forever and ever.

Yeah, so the annihilationist argument focuses in on man, okay, and talks about the limitations of man, the nature of man, and it's very man -centered.

The doctrine of eternal hell, the reason why it's eternal, and I think that the scripture is just easily testified to that, focuses on God, his immutable holiness, his everlasting nature.

Well that's good. We'll take a quick break from the heavy questions and we'll go into our book recommendations or media recommendations, whichever you so choose.

Start with you, Michael. Okay, well I am reading about Bitcoin right now, and I've finished up one book.

I think it's called Layered Money, which is interesting. It was basically a distillation of somebody else's more heavy academic work about the nature of finances and the role that Bitcoin is currently playing in that regard.

And that was interesting read because I not spent a lot of time thinking about what currency is or what money is in its nature, and even though I'd heard a lot about Bitcoin and messed around a little bit with it,

I didn't really understand it, you know. But then through that book I learned how complicated the

American dollar is, and I kind of, oh I thought Bitcoin was complicated. The American dollar is like even more complicated.

That's crazy. That was a book that you actually lent to me, Dylan. I appreciated that. And then I got barely started on another book called the

Bitcoin Standard, and we had a lot of disruption in our life. So I'm just now getting back to that.

But in between those, and talking about media, I wanted to teach my kids about what

I had learned. So as part of our part of our homeschool, we do some history slash science focus throughout the week.

And so I wanted them to learn about the science of economics. What is a dollar? How does finances work?

What does it mean? And so on. So we watched some stuff on that, and that was great.

And then we made our own, we made our own cryptocurrency and played around with that for a little bit.

And they were, you know, trying to hire each other to do their chores and stuff like that. So that was fun as we kept track of our own public ledger together and experimented with that.

What about you, Andrew? I'm gonna talk about The Seduction of Christianity by Dave Hunt.

And the premise of The Seduction of Christianity is a departure from biblical

Christianity into self -helpism and how psychology has played a large role, not only in society but also in infiltrating what some would call

Christian counseling. The idea that you're not credentialed and so therefore you have nothing to say regardless if you're a pastor or not.

Oh you don't, you don't understand these matters. So it was a really, it's a really good book to help you to understand the origins of where psychology coming into the church arose and then also some of the ramifications.

Now I will say that he does talk a little bit about how, you know, like in end times type things and this is a, these are signs of the end times.

And I'm one of those people that it's like it's been the end times since Acts chapter 2 at the very least.

Very explicit there but yeah it's it's a great resource to understand the infiltration of pop or psychology in the church.

Yeah very interesting. I will go ahead and recommend or talk about something

I do kind of in my spare time as far as reading through different types of books. I have talked to Michael about this before but I'm going through a sort of a study of dragons and how they've been dealt with through literature throughout time, where they originated from.

That serpent of old we as we know he he was there in in the garden so that's where I first take my cue of dragons and and how to understand them as a as a character.

But I've I've gotten to the point to where I've taken different different texts like Jason and the

Golden Fleece, Beowulf, Epic of Gilgamesh, Belle and the

Dragon, which you recommended to me, and juxtapose them to the types of literature that we have today like the

Reluctant Dragon, Aragon, Tolkien, which he's to me the

Tolkien and Lewis are kind of special characters because they don't take the same the same view as a lot of modern literature does on dragons.

Tales of Earthsea as well has a lot of dragon stuff in it as well and just looking at oh and the the

Eon Trilogy which I was forced to read the first book of and I do not think

I was forced to read it in college for a fiction course and I do not think I'll I'll read the other two but that's that's besides the point but just seeing how we've gone from the dragon and understanding the dragon as opposition to the king in any given situation most of the time in classical literature even in pagan literature mind you like you know

Gilgamesh he's he's an enemy of the dragon and Jason is an enemy of the dragon but today we we have the

Reluctant Dragon that we cozy up to and there's supposed to be this big fight but we as main characters in those that literature we cozy up to the dragons and watching it kind of morph into a to the point to where now we attach consciences with dragons and Aragorn and they're a part of our conscience and I find that a little bit worrying especially if you're supposed to view dragons in a certain in a certain way with certain typology and I know that maybe that may be getting a little too meta for certain people but I see it as especially in the trilogy

Aeon where they they use the dragon in a sort of transgender leading towards an exception of transgender mindset and ideology but all these all these texts of about dragons have been especially the classic literature have been real fun to read and understand the difference between the pagan view of what the purpose of the dragon serves and narrative versus a

Christian view whereas in Beowulf the dragon comes to the king provokes the king before his face and the king is even though he may win glory in fighting off the dragon he's doing it to free his people and his and his land from the scorch whereas in pagan literature

Gilgamesh and Jason and the Golden Fleece they're actually going to seek out dragons it's not self -sacrificial necessarily it's not risking something whereas in Beowulf obviously he risked his life and so did a

Wiglaf with him but the the pagan use of the dragon as a mechanism or as a character versus the

Christian one is definitely interesting to watch and juxtapose one to the other yeah whereas dragons in more classic literature were used for contrast now they're used to synthesize and mix things up and bring everything together into one and in actually like you are to in most of these cases the consolation of the stories in modern literature with with the heavy emphasis on dragons is harmony with dragons right every you're brought into one with dragons your conscience becomes one with the dragon and we all rule together now and we bring peace on earth through demon possession and that that's that's kind of the point where I'm getting towards it and I know that maybe oh you're just nitpicking but I'm I'm seeing this kind of push from modernism to post -modernism this push to give way or give a little credence to dragons being reformable if you will so that that's those that's my recommendation and although all the classic dragon stuff and if you're able to go through the new stuff without being tempted to and enjoy that to too much of a degree go ahead and go after it but I it's a it's a dragon study that is not an obsession with dragons we'll say that but I actually think my recommendation leads into the next question quite well oh good or at least my understanding of the good segue the next question it is what does the

Bible say about dinosaurs oh yeah so what does the Bible say about terrible lizards okay well we have language in the

Old Testament concerning Leviathan and behomoth that God uses in humbling

Job so God describes you know beasts that he has made that man can even begin to figure out how to tame or remember that God you know told

Adam be fruitful multiply fill the earth subdue it you know take dominion over the beast of the beast of the earth you know and to exercise dominion over these creatures and we have

Adam naming the animals and so on but when God talks to Job he talks about these animals these creatures that man obviously doesn't know how yet how do we exercise dominion over these beasts that are so far beyond our capacity and and of course

God is making a point with the descriptions of behomoth and Leviathan that you can't handle these you know and I made them that's the that's the point of the passage is to humble

Job and kind of put Job in his proper place and then when we read the passages we say okay well these descriptions of Leviathan having no scales and breathing fire and you know good luck taking him with hooks and we read about behomoth with the tail it's like a like a tree trunk and you know all these descriptions and that do not don't fit a hippo and don't fit a crocodile and so usually the fashionable thing to do today is to associate the descriptions of these two with pagan mythos the gods of various other people groups and to talk about how there's pagan mythology in the book of Job and how this this worldview is so incompatible with other parts of the scripture and and so on and that's the fashionable thing to do is to is to run with it to show the tension yeah the tension in scripture where clearly things in the you know there's their contradictions in the

Bible and so on that's it that's a interesting little distraction from God saying

I made these creatures you know and you don't even know how to handle them in that God answers

Job out of a whirlwind which is another thing that God made you can't handle and so on and so forth so yeah they're dinosaurs in the

Bible sure yeah we call them dinosaurs terrible lizards and these are these are massive creatures of God's creation that you know that are far beyond our ability to handle we have plenty of evidence in the fossil record of large animals and creatures that have been preserved and show that God made a whole lot of stuff that we don't have around currently in great abundance though we haven't been everywhere yet and I think we're in the single digits of exploring the oceans but we pretend like we knew everything so there's been a lot of species that the experts have told us 100 % have been are extinct and then they find they find them living and thriving in other places so you know

I don't know I'm somebody who thinks there's plenty of reason to believe that what we would call dinosaurs today some of them are still around probably and if if anything they only recently were all taken out by various for various reasons but the fossil record is not something that supports you know millions and billions of years either there's too many holes in that theory if you use the scientific method and and stress the the the hypothesis that you know this sediment layer was was this eon and the next sediment later was this eon and so on and if you use the scientific method to to investigate that and then you have fossils running you know vertical through hundreds of millions of supposedly of years of sediment and then you have things that were supposed to be extinct on higher levels and things that weren't supposed to have evolved in lower levels and so on you come to say

I don't think that the hypothesis holds up over time and to which people say trust the science but yeah

I think there's plenty of evidence that the Bible it says the Bob the world was created about 6 ,000 years ago great lizards were a part of it there was a massive flood and we live we we have the evidence of that all around us did any of them survive the flood though well sure yeah absolutely because Jobe Jobe came after the flood right right

I mean I like this like the idea that you know we find his we find his name his longer name

Jobab in the list of Esau's descendants as one of the kings of Edom in Ezekiel in Genesis 36 and it makes sense that when his compatriots come to talk to him and they talk about certain subject matters it doesn't really fit you know kind of the individual rancher kind of guy but it really fits somebody who has had a rulership on his shoulders and he's responsible for all kinds of things and then they're and they're dealing with him along those terms so God's talking to Jobe about dinosaurs in the days in which

Israel was living in Goshen and perhaps experiencing some of the first vestiges of their enslavement to the new

Pharaohs and so on I mean that time frame God's talking about dinosaurs so yeah the reason

I thought it would be a segue from dragons to dinosaurs is because I've heard recently that they judging by the

T -Rex's short arms and the way his fingers are set that they actually could have had massive wings attached to them and there's your dragon right yeah well that makes sense

I mean they also had hollow bones and they were light and so on and so forth so I did find some

T -Rex bones up in was it Montana or where'd they find it they still had the blood in it so you know people were getting excited like it maybe they could have a real life drastic exactly exactly yeah well since we had that light -hearted question we'll go right into another light -hearted question you're big on family and education will you ever have any of the kids in here on the podcast to see what they've learned test though the small young minds well that would be interesting to maybe interview some of the children

I have found that when you're not necessarily setting up a formal interview they tend to do better I'm always more impressed with what comes out under a little bit of pressure or maybe just off the cuff that the things that they remember it's are so surprising to me the way that they interpret situations and maybe say something that's based on something that they learn

I'm always encouraged when I have been teaching or trying to or my wife

Beck has been teaching the kids and especially the boys their attention is all over the place you know and they look like they can't sit still but then they've been listening the whole time and they process it and are able to talk about these those things even applying the truths that we've shared with them later on so those are the things that I think are most encouraging

I like to read a proverb a day and though one of those proverbs that you know they run two sentences long and each one is an image right each one is a picture it it's it strikes the imagination in like a like a match right it just just flares up in the mind of a child and then you just talk with them about it and ask them simple questions about the image and before long they get it you know and that they can all kind of discuss it together and my kids are you know 15 11 10 8 or I'm getting wrong 11 10 how old are they 8 and 5 and so on so I can and of course

Jackson's little infant but we we ask ask him questions and they can do they can grab hold that image and they can talk and they can kind of go back and forth and so those are the things that I think that are enjoyable

I don't know how he would do on an interview you know give him a topic you know yeah

I don't know it's like when they take a test it's like freeze up and get all nervous and that kind of thing so or we could just do what

Joel did to us earlier and he just hits record without telling us right in the middle of conversation yeah there we go yeah

I don't think killing him would do real well and a seat let alone with a well these these spins so yeah these would be very popular right just not a lot of room in here to the calisthenics yep yep gotcha

I don't know what to say to the question per se

I think it might be an interesting thing to explore one day however

I'll just go where my mind went with this question my son who's seven was sitting in the church sermon time and there was made mention of a floating goat yeah trampling and it really caught his attention

I and I I really think that there are times where when we're reading Bible passages we're not necessarily seeing it for what it is because really how do floating goats trample anything right but it drove a great conversation when we got home that where he left off from his understanding of what was being talked about to my daughter who is 12 now and us being able to talk about the empires of the time and well who are who is this floating goat that then has four subordinates that takes over afterwards mm -hmm of course you have

Alexander and his generals and then really you only room we had a hard time remembering the other two generals but the

Seleucid yeah and Ptolemaic empires really took ascendancy and it was something it was a great point of discussion for not only the sermon but to really weave in a lament that my wife and I had about how in public school learning world history doesn't have any meaning hmm it's meaningless it's just one thing happens and the next thing happens and the next thing happens right cuz who cares every every culture or every generation is tabula rasa a clean slate that you're you should chart your own destiny who cares what came prior or or whatever is spoken of prior is done so in the sense of what a shame right what how awful was that because we have this sense of superiority of the now you know we're so far more advanced and we're much better people than what came before those idiots we're moderns now yeah you know the moderns from a hundred years ago they said they were moderns yeah but we're there they were idiots we're very civilized and we don't do barbaric things anymore well

I mean that's just that's the that is the language of the service of the state when you're teaching history went with a presupposition that the state gets to interpret the taboo when the state gets to interpret whether Calvin Coolidge was better than FDR or vice versa they're the ones that are gonna put that out there for you they're gonna write those textbooks for you

Calvin Coolidge was better oh I agree it's just you don't hear anything about Calvin Coolidge in public school right because that would overturn the almighty dollar and in FDR is the one who kind of propped propped up our dominance in the world and in the economy and we have to hold on to that we have to grip that so tight and so we're gonna have the 400 experts the 400 priests right 400 textbooks 400 prophets of bail on on payroll yep and we are we're gonna go disseminate it out to the people and this is what

I experienced lived under and public schooling and was never really taught to read outside of or to think that you could read outside of that right like you were you were taught that that is the only thing that matters is the language or the learning that serves the state it's mythos it's a narrative and that's exactly it's a good lament to have on a car ride home but that's what you have to we have to be brought back to is the understanding of that's that's a presupposition built upon the state as God yeah and and even

I mean we have we have a lot of homeschoolers here and of course Oklahoma being one of the best states it's not the best state in in these

United States for thank God for Oklahoma yes for homeschooling and of course this stretches back to the 80s when it was you know a very difficult thing to do and my parents homeschooled my brother and I here in the state of Oklahoma but we also need to recognize that even even as Christian families often not always but often as we're trying to homeschool our kids even when we're using curriculum that has been designed by our fellow fellow brothers and sisters in Christ that they are that they are constructing education as a parody of what the state has forged already so why do we separate subjects the way that we do why do we do grades what grade are you in why do we do that why when it comes to our older children why are we trying to match their high school education with state education standards when we have quite properly exited the the cult and the in the temples and brought our children out of that because we don't want to render our children to Caesar we want to render them under the

Lord to raise them in the third dimension of the Lord why are we modeling our education based on the paradigm offered to us by the state this was a question that was really actually it was burdensome to me

I don't even know it I want my children to be able to read and to write and do arithmetic in the fear of God that's that's what

I want them to do and there's all sorts of things in God's good creation to learn about the animals he's made and the way that that he's created things like you know the atoms and molecules and and the created you know things on a galaxy level and on the molecular level and things about the laws of logic and the laws of arithmetic and then what about what about history what about the way that and what about the shape of the earth and well here's this country and there's this history and but but reading things in light of the the spread of of the gospel these last 2 ,000 years and the the hope that was built up for the arrival of Messiah the previous 4 ,000 years and doing education in such a way using curriculum and curriculum is great but using it not to see how close

I can get to the state standards so that what I can look kind of acceptable and that my children if someone was to look at my my child's train high school transcript that they would recognize it and put the state seal of approval on my children education

God never gave the education of my children to the state he gave it to me and my wife were the ones you're supposed to educate them and if and the state doesn't have anything to do with it the state has nothing to do with it

I don't want their seal of credential upon my kids now if if some employer says you need to have some sort of paperwork saying that you've graduated high school you need some kind of this well that's your household that's your business that's the way you want to make sure that you if you're gonna hire somebody gonna do so okay fine

I have no I have no problem they're not gonna they're not gonna fail a GED they're not gonna have any problems with that if they need to go get some training or whatever that that's fine but I am not raising up my kids so that they can be formed in such a way that they can that they can go through and get a bunch of state accreditations that are just full of an unapologetic flaming pagan agenda that is not why

I'm raising my kids to me that's a very important part of this whole thing you know when we talk with our kids and we train our kids and we raise up our kids it's not that we're trying we shouldn't be trying to pigeonhole them into the patterns that have been established by pagans well don't you see

Caesar wants to hold the keys to the financial gravy train and so therefore these these credentials are being dangled in front of you whoa if you want success you're gonna have to submit right that's where I think that we have to begin to think to begin to think differently about how we're raising our kids and there's been like this huge question mark hovering over the church and Christian families and so on for a generation or two you know why are our kids all you know acting pagans you know even before they leave the church they've left the church before they head to college they're already gone all these different things well how are they being discipled right what what structure is being handed to them about how the world works and what's the world all about when you read the scriptures and what is what is rejoiced and celebrated in the fear of God fear

God is beginning of wisdom the fear of God is beginning of knowledge the fear of God is the beginning of understanding the fear the

Lord is to depart from evil that a fear the Lord is life okay it's the fear of the Lord again and again and again and it's the the wisest men in the scriptures are the

God fearing men and they do math and they and they read on our learned men and they know all sorts of things about all sorts of subjects but but it's it's controlled and organized and and and brought into harmony by the fear of the

Lord you know these are not idiots these are not dumb lazy men a lazy man is a brother to a destroyer

I don't want my kids to be lazy I want them to be educated and that begins with the fear of the

Lord when you have these state accreditations from top to bottom when the state goes or its apparatuses leave your your papers are largely useless now you know the one the ones that you had to go prove

I did my time in this institution of yours and in this institution of yours when they go how is that applicable how well how do those pieces of paper how are they going to be in in general how are they going to be used when that state goes and another one takes its place

I sure hope that state has a reciprocity agreement right otherwise it's going to be useless but also also

I think we need to recognize that the education system that the state has been so heavily invested in is failing on a public level it's always it has been failing for a while but it's failing in a public way more than it than it has been previously all of these kovat lockdowns and so on and then oh we're going to do distance education digital education and so on and so forth and this is just demonstrating what a failed system that the whole thing is and it's become very very humorous now that every time there's a problem the school says well if we just had more funding you know what

I've noticed yeah what I think is happening right now is the education is as we know it and I'm talking about like you know kindergarten through 12th grade

I'm talking about your four -year bachelor's and so on and so the whole gambit this is an analog system in a digital world this is a

I've this is like a brick -and -mortar blockbuster you know in in in an

Amazon Amazon Prime Disney Plus world because like you're talking about about YouTube being the library of Alexandria and so on you're wanting to give me an analog credential and I can go find out what

I need to know to succeed by being diligent and I can get to the information and I can go talk to people

I can I can make contact with people that I never could have before because we live in a digital digital world

I can contact people I can talk with them we can we can chat we can I can learn from others I can find people who will share and and will mentor me even if it's a for five minutes in 4k exactly and and so I think that the whole system is crumbling

I don't know why anyone wants to hold on to it I mean I think that education

I think if you fear the Lord if you fear a man then it's oh we have to imitate everything that they are doing if you fear a man that's a snare if you fear

God then whatever is true and good and beautiful you are free to pursue because you're not being tied up about what what a man think about if I don't get my credential right so yeah instead of how does my work look before the eyes of God yes and and we can we can talk about how it mirrors a lot of the happenings of round Rome when centralization starts to become decentralization which is

I believe what we're starting to watch absolutely very distrust of the central planners is it an all -time high yeah and that that means education that means it means political whatever it's well -earned they've done a good job earning our distressed and I think

I think one other thing too that we're gonna see is all this decentralized learning digital learning is gonna create more decentralized cultures but it's also gonna allow us to live more analog

I believe I think the more that we can learn about analog things digitally we can decent since that knowledge is decentralized we can apply it and live more analog outside of it than we have with things like the brain rot that is

Facebook Twitter Instagram so having having this information disseminated in a decentralized fashion is actually going to reverse that a little bit but that's just my personal hypothesis and we can we can go on to the next segment in this week in witchcraft and I actually have brought my own oh good because I'm seeing it all over the place people griping about it the word health and we can go we can go a number of different ways with this but the two that I've kind of focused on or I've seen focused on most recently and and one is actually further in the past that we heard a lot but we didn't really always catch was what what women's health care is so the first one women's health care we we use women's health care to explain child sacrifice human child sacrifice that's exactly what it is and even to me abortion seems like a bit of witchcraft in itself just to call it abortion because what's really actually happening is a baby is being sacrificed either for the convenience or the satisfaction of the mother to to get whatever she wants or the father to get whatever he wants and even even the abortionist to to get what he wants which is usually the dollar but the other one for the side of health is seeing pop magazines or ads pop up that are it says health and you have somebody doing some sort of athletic motion but they are not the picture of health themselves and almost all of our health

PMS administrators in the state are the exact opposite of health if you look at the

German health official administrator I think he's maybe or she is maybe like she's bordering on 400 pounds and just puppy and just it's just out of control

Canada's is the same way and then ours is a man posing to be a woman so like this type of witchcraft is being brought down from health officials who are obviously first of all lying to themselves about themselves being healthy and then they're they're they're taking it back out as experts into the world to everybody else obviously the real health crisis here is being a sizist right yeah that's my that's my problem and and being transphobic and that is of course where the real health crisis is as Joe boot was commenting about the situation in Canada as they are locking things down and Quebec is showing itself as a an example to Trudeau about what he may want to do for the rest of the country in shutting down all church services finding churches if they've tried to meet putting pastors in prison and so on why to promote health if you don't get your if you don't get your vaccine and all the boosters that go with it then you are creating a health crisis and therefore they're going to change all the rates on the insurance and so on and so forth you're not going to be able to get the health care that you need because you didn't get your vaccines so you get bumped back and down off of the socialized health care that they have there in in Canada but even though they're gonna charge you more and penalize you for not taking these the the two -shot vaccine plus the two boosters for 99 % survivable virus there is no penalty if you contract all manner of sexually transmitted diseases living a sodomite lifestyle if you weigh 400 pounds you're not being penalized you're being celebrated because you have positive body image and this is the kind of thing going on where it's if it was something where they're saying we have a health crisis on our hands what kind of health crisis well people are eating too much they are they're being very promiscuous in their sexual lives and nobody's like careful around everybody else or sneezing on each other and everyone's just really selfish and this is causing all kinds of health problems in our society it's not consistent

I mean it's not like that if they are picking certain things that they want to be demonized or they're picking picking certain things they want to be protected and they're using the term health to cover those things and that's why you can see it's it's very witchy and they're declaring war on it too right like it's a perpetual war that they continue to pull out more debt in order to pay themselves for fighting as well yeah it's very much like and you'll notice the pattern of the state to gain more power when you you go back and just take the the history of of the

United States okay just go back to right after the of course World War two was his own thing but right after World War two we have what the

Cold War and there's this massive horrendous scary threat schoolchildren are practicing getting under their school desks and hugging their knees because this is the way you prepare for the atomic blast and everybody is really really really scared of of the communists and hey they're pretty evil but this gives your state government all kinds of leeway to start taking away all manner of freedoms we feel unsafe please take some of our liberties and keep us safe Eisenhower warned about the about the military state and all the military industry and so on and they spend gobs and gobs and gobs of money in their arms race against the communists they get all this money they get all this power they take more of the liberty and the freedoms away from the people and then the

Soviet Union collapses in 1989 it's no longer really a threat the Cold War doesn't seem as so now what do we have now we have the war on drugs exactly war on drugs and we're gonna run this for a little while and everything's about the war on drugs money money money here's all the power so on and so forth and then the war on drugs you know goes away and terrorists and then we have some terrorism starting up with some wars in the

Middle East and getting a little bit more intense and then 9 -11 really the war on terrorism and again this never ends this never ends and the state keeps on saying you're unsafe we are the only ones who can keep you safe in order to keep you safe we're going to take this that and the other and then once the war on terror begins to kind of wind down now what now hell now it's health now we've got this we have this pandemic of a flu -like virus that you know it's the end of the world folks and so we're gonna print 80 % of all

American dollars that have ever been in existence in the last 23 months well why are we gonna do that why are we going to steal 40 % of your dollars and never call it a tax well because we're keeping you safe mm -hmm right it's an emergency we have to do this so the beast is always hungry the beast is always hungry it always wants to eat it will use witchcraft to call things what it needs to call things to in order to get that done and we're seeing the cracks and some of the kovat stuff come to light which

I think that's I think it's a good thing I think we've seen some light shown out of the darkness some of the stuff we've seen so what's the what's the next war does anybody what do we think war on what well if I were to detect a theme it's all about the fear of death right well it is isn't it that's just the the base level of protecting you know we're gonna keep you at ninety eight point six degrees all these are promises to just continue you yeah and really they've been trying to start the they've been really really wanting a climate change to be that great nebulous threat that justifies you know taking people's liberty and so on you're gonna die right the only problem is you've got so many really really the experts man trust the science man but they keep on saying you in ten years you know

Florida's gonna be underwater and ten years later Florida's just going along just normal as ever and all of these experts that claim absolute perfect data we have 500 people saying the same thing we're all expert climatologists we have all of the data you don't understand it you're not an expert and here is what's gonna happen in 15 years you better believe it and if you need all these people are gonna die and it's your fault because you're doing

X Y & Z and then it doesn't happen they've been doing this for 40 50 years they've been saying this over and over and over again and then people get a little upset when we don't trust them when they start talking about a virus

I'm like there's a reason we don't trust you is because you keep lying and lying and lying and the thing that makes it work again like Andrew says is the fear of death yeah which is slavery you guys have pointed out where they've they've been in the analog still right like they've been all these issues are analog my view of it is the next is the digital realm

I think the war on internet terrorism or internet threats or you're gonna have to have an internet pass if you're not on our fully vaxxed list you don't get to access our servers and you do you do not get to access the internet if you're if you're not in line with us and so I see the

I see that next war being internet internet terrorism slash internet viruses whatever language whatever language works about you know keeping the internet going because again that's where people have their lifeline they feel safe they need their entertainment and so on I think they're already behind in it yeah but I do think that's where they'll go next or it could even just be a wrong thought or wrong speech on a specific platform obviously we have platforms out there who are already you know putting you on their naughty list well what's to say that you're in it your internet service provider is not also one of those companies that gets eaten up or through a conglomerate and now you know

Google owns fiber networks and they also own all these social media sites now you're no longer gonna be getting on the net or all you have to do is host your website with AWS right like so if you're hosted by a central a central server like that government can come in and say or even just that that central server can say you're done see ya and what we're seeing that actually happened a lot more but it's it's been mostly some somewhat of a fascist controlled thing where it's incentivized to take people off like that yeah but eventually it's gonna be it's gonna turn from incentive to out -and -out force forced yeah yeah but yeah

I think that's I think that's where the witchcraft's going because they're still behind they're still in the analog and they haven't hit the digital yet but when they when they get there that's what we're gonna start kind of seeing a little bit of coming up coming up forward well after all that talk let's hear what we're thankful for Michael we'll start with you

I'm I'm thankful that Sunday and today my whole family was able to sit together at the table and have a meal right

I just have a meal together where everybody could be there because we get a little Jackson and his bouncy seat on the floor you know making his grunting little man noises you know yeah and he doesn't have like these soft little purrs and coos he's just like you know down there but we just we just hang out as a family and that we can eat together and pray together and read

Proverbs together those kinds of things we just we've missed that with you know sicknesses and difficulties and problems and it's just a grace that we really

I'm really thankful for yeah man I'm thankful for the strength to labor there will be a day that my strength will fail and while the

Sun is still shining and there's work to do yeah yeah that's great I like that a lot me too I'm thankful for my friend

Robert Foster who passed this afternoon he was a great friend of me and went a long way with me and a lot of my learning sanctification refinement and was a dear friend right up until the end and I'm gonna really miss getting to debate him on all manner of subjects and then have a little breaks here and there talking about Polyponnesian Wars and Persian history and all that stuff because that's where he was that right before he passed but it was a it was a wonderful friendship to enjoy and I am happy that he's gonna be there when