← Ask NT Wright Anything
Ask NT Wright Anything
What's the fine print on the Second Coming, the Transfiguration, and Michael Heiser's Unseen Realm
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Podcast Host (Premier Insight Intro)
Before we get into today's podcast, I want to offer you a powerful free resource. Many Christians have been taught that the goal of our faith is to simply leave earth and go up to heaven. But what if that's not the full story? In his remarkable book, God's Homecoming, N.T. wright traces the sweeping biblical promise that God is not abandoning this world, he is renewing it. From Genesis to Revelation, Scripture tells the story not of us going up to God, but of God coming down to dwell with us. We're offering you a free digital excerpt so you can explore this hope filled vision for yourself. Download it today@premierinsight.org resources that's premierinsight.org resources and now, here's today's podcast.
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Mike Bird
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N.T. Wright
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Mike Bird
What do I do? My refund though.
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N.T. Wright
I'm freaking out.
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N.T. Wright
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Mike Bird
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Ask Anti Write Anything podcast, the program where we try to answer your questions about Jesus, the Bible and the life of faith. I'm Mike Bird from really College and
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N.T. Wright
I am here with with Tom Wright from Wycliffe hall in Oxford.
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Mike Bird
And to everyone, whether you're in peak summer or in the bleakest part of winter, Tom and I are here to answer your questions. So please send them in. Keep sending them along. We're really enjoying the feed, the avalanche we keep getting of all these questions. And Tom, this week we've got some great questions. Some stuff on the second coming, looking at the fine print. Some questions too about the transfiguration and this whole unseen realm that is around us. So our first question is from Brandon Vaughan from Austin Texas. And he wants to know about what exactly happens at the Second coming. And this is what Brandon asks. I was raised under the idea of the Rapture and the emphasis on the second coming of Jesus with various teachings, yours included, I've come to see of how we have misinterpreted rapture passages and, and made more of them than they really meant. I mean, I believe in Jesus and in the resurrection and the promise of a resurrected body and a new heaven and a new earth, but I'm not sure what to make of second coming. I wonder how many times will God honestly just show up at some random moment to remake the world? Or could we all somehow get to know the resurrection simply through death? Could it be the Second coming is like an after death experience? Like possibly the resurrection of the dead? Could that be a second coming? It would seem a resurrected body assumes death in some way. So I wonder if a second coming necessitates some type of death. I mean, why do we even need a second coming anyway? Unless the second one is about us knowing life after death. I'm sorry if my question is probably confusing. I am mostly just very curious as to what you would see the second coming means practically, since the ideas of rapture and heaven are no longer viable options for me. Well, Brandon, I guarantee you're not alone asking questions like that. You know, why a second coming? Why a resurrection? Can't we just live with God forever and be happy and get new bodies instantly after death? Maybe rather than resurrection, can't we just like be beamed up a la Star Trek into God's new world? Tom? What. What do you have to say to Brandon about the necessity of the Second coming and the actual, the fine print on what goes on at the Second coming?
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N.T. Wright
Wow, great questions. And of course you and I, Mike, have both met these questions when we've done lectures and so on in various places. And so it's familiar territory. A couple of preliminary things. One is that the whole narrative of the Bible is about creation, the goodness of creation and creation's renewal. God made heaven and earth and said it's very good. And at the end God remakes heaven and earth with the new heaven and the new earth. So that gives us the parameters that any scheme which says that really we ought to be all about leaving earth and going to heaven must be wrong if it's part of the full biblical story. There's another very sharp but important preliminary remark, and that is that in Mark 13 and the parallel in Matthew 24 and in Luke 21, we have Jesus talking about the Son of Man coming on the clouds with power and great glory. And over much Christian tradition, people have taken that as though by coming it means Jesus is coming from heaven to earth. But of course, I say of course it isn't obvious to everyone, but I think it should be Jesus is there quoting, not just alluding to, but quoting Daniel chapter seven. And the scenario in Daniel chapter seven is very clear. Daniel's having this dream and the monsters come up out of the sea and are raging and ramping around the place. And then one like a son of man comes to the ancient of days who has taken his throne. And the one like a son of man is seated at the right hand of the one who has taken his throne. And to him is given glory and honor and dominion that all peoples and nations and languages should serve him. In other words, the coming of the Son of man in Mark 13 in Parallels is about the coming of Jesus from earth to heaven, not the other way around. Now I know that this blows the mind of many people for whom Mark 13 and parallels has been the great passage about the second coming. And I sometimes think that in my book Jesus and the Victory of God from 30 years ago now, goodness that people, when I expounded that in chapter eight, I think a lot of people stopped reading after that because they thought, oh, NT Wright doesn't believe in the second coming. And no, I just, I do believe in the second coming, of course I do. It's just that I don't think that's what those passages are all about. They are about the vindication of Jesus after his death. And the vindication takes the form partly of his resurrection, partly of his ascension, very important in the early church, and partly in terms of the fall of Jerusalem as the city which had opposed him and his kingdom bringing work. So we have to park the Mark 13 stuff, otherwise it just gets confusing. And that's when we have to go to the early church who frankly were not during Jesus lifetime, were not expecting him to go away, let alone come back. That wasn't part of their messianic agenda, that he would go away and come back. But after his resurrection, according to Acts, they are waiting on the Mount of Olives as Jesus ascends to heaven. And that the ascension is itself one of the great scenes in the whole Bible. But then the angel comes and says, this same Jesus who you saw go into heaven will come in the same way that you saw him. Now I want to say very clearly, heaven does not here mean miles and miles up in the sky. We're not talking about somebody at Cape Canaveral watching a space rocket lift off and gradually get fainter and fainter. In the Bible, again and again, the heavenly dimension and the earthly dimension belong closely together. Remember that scene in Two Kings when Elisha's servant is panicking because of the invading army. And Elisha says, lord, open his eyes. And the Lord opens his eyes and the mountain and is full of horses and chariots of fire round about the prophet. That is a way of saying, suddenly the heavenly dimension is visible and it transforms the way that we see things here. And so Jesus disciples see him going into this other dimension which we don't normally see, but which is there all the time. In other words, Jesus in heaven is not miles and miles away up in the sky, as though he has to come by some special spacecraft. May should commission Elon Musk to go and look for him or something not serious. He doesn't have to come back like that. Rather, there will come a time when the veil will be lifted, when the opaque curtain which normally hides the heavenly realm from us is drawn back. That's why there are two passages in the New Testament which speak not of him coming, but of him appearing. One is Colossians 3, where Paul says, we know that that when he appears, that we will be like him. And I'm actually quoting First John, chapter three there. Let me just get the bits and pieces in the right order. In First John it says, we don't know what we will eventually be, but we know that when he appears, we will be like him, because we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope purify themselves as he is pure. And in Colossians 3 he says, you died and your life has been hidden with the Messiah in God. And when the Messiah is revealed and he is your life, you too will be revealed with him in glory. So think about the horses and chariots of fire for a minute. There will come a time when the curtain will be drawn back and that which is already true in the heavenly dimension will be revealed and will be integrated with the present world. And that brings us to passages like the great sequence towards the end of Revelation when Jesus says, I am coming soon. And that's repeated, coming soon, I'm coming soon. Be on the alert, be on your toes. I haven't left you, I'm just around. And the time will come when I will come back. And then we think of the great classic statements like Paul in Philippians chapter three, where he does say, we are Citizens of heaven. And many people have thought that, that. So one day we'll, as it were, retire and go back there. The beam me up, Scotty thing, that's not what it's about at all. He goes on at once. From heaven we are awaiting the Lord, the Savior, the Messiah, Jesus. Those are Caesar words, by the way. Lord and Savior and king. And he will change our humiliated body to be like his glorious body by the power which enables him to subject all things to himself. This is putting together echoes of Daniel 7, echoes of Psalm 110, and particularly echoes of Psalm 8. Jesus as the truly human one who is coming back in order to complete what he began in his death, resurrection and ascension. And this is the point of the second coming, that Jesus is the Lord of all the earth already. He will come back to complete the work which was done on the cross and resurrection and ascension in order, as Paul says, to make all things subject to himself. So the coming back of Jesus is the way of saying that the God who made heaven and earth will renew heaven and earth together and give us new bodies to share in the work which will then go on in the new heavens and new earth. Very clear in Revelation and elsewhere. We are to be the royal priesthood, not to give ourselves airs and to swagger around. No, the royal priesthood is to share the royal priesthood of Christ. And we know what that looked like in his humble self giving revelation of the glory of God. So those are some New Testament pointers. We've got to clear out of our heads the wrong interpretations of certain texts in order to sit within that larger biblical narrative of heaven and earth coming together and Jesus coming back with the veil finally lifted so that the Jesus who is always present close by us will become visible and real to us and we to him in a whole new way.
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Mike Bird
That's very well put time talking about what the second coming really is, why it matters, and how it tells us about the, the nature of the reality that we already live in. I just want to press into one aspect, Tom. This is some of the mechanics. When Jesus returns, at least initially, does he simply come to one place like Jerusalem? Like, you know, the Lord will come to Zion, so does he appear in Jerusalem? Because we're told, you know, every eye will see him. And I remember one tele evangelist said, well, every eye will see him. Because I intend to televise the second coming. I'll have all the cameras set up in Jerusalem, you know, great angles and everything. Does just Jesus return to Jerusalem? Does he go to Washington D.C. where Satan has his throne, some would say, you know. Or does he? Does he? Is there an apparition everywhere? Do you think there's a, A one space time location where it happens and it somehow spreads to the whole world? I mean, this might sound like a weird question, but it's one that people ask.
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N.T. Wright
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And this has to do with the continuity and discontinuity between the present world and the future world. And there I think we are at the borders of language, and possibly tripping over the edge of the borders of language, that we simply don't know how that new heavens and new earth will, so to speak, work, or how that visualization of Jesus will happen to everybody all the time, or whether it will happen in a flash in one place and then word will spread quickly around everywhere. That's to do with the almost impossibility of giving sort of account, almost a quasi scientific account of how the new heavens and new earth will work. And I think we have to take very seriously that the fact of renewal, the new heavens and new earth in Revelation 21 will be a whole new reality. There will be no more sea. But we already remind ourselves that the sea in biblical language is regularly the dark chaos monster out of which evil comes. So when it says there'll be no more sea, it means there'll be no more source of evil, no more chance that there will be no snake in the new garden, if you like. But that already means that we're not talking about the present Earth with its geography of the Mediterranean or the Indian Ocean or the Pacific Ocean or whatever. We're talking about a renewal of all creation in a way for which we don't have good examples. I mean, I've often said in terms of the resurrection body, the only model we have for that is Jesus own resurrection. But in Jesus resurrection body, he was able to come and go through locked doors. He was able at the same time to break bread with the folk at Emmaus and to eat broiled fish in the upper room, and then to vanish and descend, disappear or whatever. And so there's a mystery about it, and I don't think we should be too eager to probe and say what precisely will happen. But as sure as we believe in heaven and earth as God's domain, God's intended domain, and then the new heavens and new earth, I think we have to say there will be continuity as well as discontinuity, even though at the moment it's hard for us to say what exactly that will consist in.
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Mike Bird
Yeah, well, Tom, there's a good, there's a good sequel to that, the the Mystery of the Second Coming. Then we've got a very mysterious episode in the Gospels which is the transfiguration. And I remember for a long time I think it was Rudolph Boltman called it a misplaced resurrection story that they took a resurrection story and they just dunked it in the middle of the gospel like Mark 9 or somewhere. So we've got a question from Keith Holmes of London who asks, he says Jesus meets Moses and Elijah on the mount of transfiguration. Were they physical people pre resurrection resurrected? God is after all the God of the living, not the dead. Many thanks. And then after that we've got a question from Keith Andreotta, another Keith, he says this another resurrection question. If Jesus is the first fruits, the first to be resurrected, how is it that he appeared at the transfiguration with what appeared to be a resurrected Moses and Elijah? Now this is odd, Tom. I think the Society of Keiths have had their annual general meeting and part of the minutes they've said we need two Keiths to send in questions to NT Wright and they both have to be about the transfiguration. So to, to our two Keats, thanks for sending your questions in about the transfiguration. But Tom, if I get down to the. The essence of this is a. Is Moses and Elijah appearing before Jesus as resurrected persons? Is this an anticipation of the resurrection body? I mean if, if Jesus is the firstborn from among the dead, then what are Moses and Elijah? Are they the first firstborn? Are they the premium born or the proto firstborn? I mean, yeah, what, who, what is Elijah and a lot Moses doing on the mountain? And what type of bodies do they have? And how does this relate to personal eschatology? That what happens to people in the afterlife?
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N.T. Wright
Yeah, I get that. I mean the transfiguration scene is so extraordinary and I mean it took the disciples by surprise. It takes us by surprise as we read the narrative of the Gospels because here is Jesus going about teaching, telling parables, healing people, even walking on water. But nothing prepares us like nothing prepared Peter, James and John for what then happened. And it's such a strange story. It's actually quite unlike the resurrection stories. So the whole bulk Manion idea that it's a misplaced resurrection narrative simply won't work. This is not how those stories sit. But we have to remind ourselves there's another passage which goes with this in my mind when Jesus is asked after he's come in the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, the Sadducees ask him about the resurrection and Jesus final crunch answer is that Scripture describes the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. That's Luke 20:37 and parallels. And he says God is not God of the dead, but of the living, because they are all alive to Him. Now, that doesn't mean that they're already raised from the dead. What it means, and I and many others have argued this out in detail, is that if they are alive to God, they are in the presence of God, but they are not yet raised from the dead. But they will be. And that's how people would have understood. Jesus answered. It's a tricky passage. Of course, Jesus answered to the Sadducees, but it's like a game of chess. They say, well, how does this work? And supposing this happened, et cetera, et cetera. And Jesus says, well, go back to the Torah, which the Sadducees agreed. The first five books, they are authoritative. And God describes himself as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. He's not the God of the dead, he's the God of the living. Therefore they are alive. They are in God's presence. They are alive to. But within the resurrection discourse of the time, the Pharisaic teaching, et cetera. That didn't mean they've already got their resurrection bodies. It means they are alive at the moment. And when God renews heaven and earth, then they will be raised from the dead. So I would say the same about Moses and Elijah at the transfiguration. And we're not told, I mean, Peter, James and John didn't come up and touch them to see if they were tangible. They didn't ask them to break bread or eat fish or anything like that, which is what Jesus does when he's raised from the dead. So I think the answer is here we are seeing into the heavenly dimension, where actually Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, all the prophets are, but the ones we are allowed to see at the moment, the ones Peter, James and John are allowed to see at the moment are Moses and Elijah for very specific reasons. They represent the law and the prophets. And according to Luke, in his version of the story, in Luke chapter nine, they're talking to Jesus about his departure and the word is Exodus in Greek, which he is to accomplish in Jerusalem. In other words, this is part of that whole Lucan sequence where everything is pointing towards Jesus going to Jerusalem to die and be raised as the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Now, that's not to say that the Moses and Elijah appearing is only as a sort of hint of a hermeneutical sequence. It's to say that for Luke, that's part of the significance of this very rich and dense episode. So I would say, no, they are not yet raised from the dead. They are alive to God. And if the curtain has been pulled back just a little bit and we can see Moses and Elijah, that's what's happened. They are alive to God. They are in God's space, in God's heart, in God's life. Not that they have been raised from the dead, but of course, like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they will be raised from the dead at the appropriate time. The rule on that, by the way, which I think you alluded to, is 1 Corinthians 15, when Paul says that the Messiah rises as the first fruits, then at his coming, those who belong to the Messiah. Which strongly suggests to me that until Jesus comes back, nobody else other than Jesus himself has been bodily raised from the dead. There are other questions which arise as a result of that, of course, in terms of church tradition, about Mary and so on, but it seems to me that here we've got a glimpse into the heavenly dimension. They're not yet raised from the dead, but they are alive and they will be raised from the dead. They are waiting as we will be waiting.
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Mike Bird
Okay, well, that's a very interesting way, I think, to situate it, Tom. And that answers a number of people's questions that, you know, Moses and Elijah, they're not resurrected.
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N.T. Wright
They.
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Mike Bird
They appear in some way, they're recognizable, but we're not yet at the resurrection.
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N.T. Wright
Yeah.
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Mike Bird
Well, at this point, I think we're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to try see into the unseen realm. What if engaging scripture could be both deeply informed and beautifully accessible? With the Filament Bible app, your print Bible becomes a rich interactive study experience. Simply scan the page number and Filament opens thousands of expertly crafted notes, devotional reflections, interactive maps and videos, plus audio scriptures to help you explore the text with greater insight and context. It's a seamless way to go deeper into God's word, wherever you are. Learn more@filmamentbibles.com. Welcome back. We have a final question for the week about the unseen realm. And this is a question from Chadwick Kellenbarger of Greeley, Colorado, and he writes this longtime listener and reader of Tom's content. Thank you for increasing my knowledge and faith. I Am currently reading the Unseen Realm by Michael Heiser. It's sort of blowing my mind. I do see a lot of overlap between Heiser's views and Wright's eschatology. Eschatology is the study of the final things. I am curious if Tom has read Heiser's book and what is his take on it? Thank you. Now, for those who don't know, Michael Heiser is a biblical scholar. Was a biblical scholar now of blessed memory. He specialized in the ancient Near Eastern background of the Old Testament and looking at the Second Temple Jewish literature as the background to the New Testament. And he was into cosmology, the understanding of the. The divine world, angels, demons, all that kind of a thing. And what Heiser was doing, Thomas, is for the benefit of our listeners, is that he would go through some of passages in the Old Testament, like when it says yahweh is God of gods. You know, you find that in Deuteronomy 10 or, you know, in Psalm 82, where it says, you know, I said you are gods. And he would point out that the heavenly realm was populated with divine beings of which Yahweh was the highest or the greatest, or the. The uncreated creator who has no peer and no equal, which is not all that different, I would say, Tom, from what Paul says. He says, look, you know, there's many lords and many gods, but for us there is one God, the Father and one Lord Jesus Christ. Now, when a lot of people read this stuff by Heiser talking about all the various gods of the. The heavenly realm, people took him to be like a polytheist. I've seen videos on YouTube, people accusing him of being agnostic and all sorts of weird things. And, you know, the poor guy's no longer around to defend himself. But, Tom, have you had any exposure to Michael Heise's work? Because it's on YouTube, on the Internet, it really is a big deal. There's a lot of people who read this or watch the videos. Have you encountered any of his work or heard people commenting upon it?
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N.T. Wright
Yeah, last year sometime. I forget exactly when. I had a message from somebody urging me to read Michael Heiser and to engage in discussion about him. This may have been even more than a year ago, I can't remember now. And so I got hold of the main. The main book on the unseen realm. And I've looked at one or two other of Heiser's things online, actually, but that's the only book of his that I'd read. And I think a few years ago At a conference, some people tried to get me to meet him, but for some reason it didn't take place, we couldn't coincide. So. And I regret that now, so I'm not an expert on Heiser. Let me start off by saying that. But I do think, at the very minimum, that he has alerted ordinary Western Bible readers like me to a phenomenon which many of us may easily have kind of glossed over or regarded as a bit off limits or slightly extreme, whatever, because there are passages, and you quote I said you are gods from Psalm 82, and there are other passages like that, but I'm thinking also of things like the first two chapters of Job, where the heavenly council is the there, and the true God summons his counsel like a king, summoning 50 people who are in charge of all the different departments. And then one of those departments is the one that deals with people doing wrong things and it's their job to accuse them. It's the Director of Public Prosecutions and his name is the Satan, which means the accuser. And so God asks the Satan what he's been up to, and then the whole book of Job flows out from there. And that conversation between God and the Satan is one of the more mysterious passages, as indeed the whole book of Job is one of the more mysterious passages in the Old Testament. The time that I was reading Heise, I was also preparing to do some lectures on Isaiah 40:55, which I did last year and which I've been developing. And of course, Isaiah 40 begins with a heavenly scene with different voices calling to one another. And God says, comfort, comfort my people. It's as though God is saying that to somebody. It seems to be a member of his heavenly court who has to go and assure Jerusalem that she's served her term, that she's received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins. And then Isaiah 43, a voice cries out in the wilderness, prepared the way of the Lord, etc. And then another voice in verse six, a voice says, cry out. And I said, what shall I cry? This is the prophet responding to some angelic voice telling him to cry out. And then get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings. It's as though there are several different characters here and God is giving instructions to different angels to tell the prophet what to say. Now, of course, there are many prophetic texts in which God simply tells the prophet himself what he is to do. Why Isaiah 40 does that? I don't know. I'm not an expert on Isaiah But I've read several commentaries on this passage, and most of them seem to agree that this is a reflection of that belief, which is that somehow there was a this heavenly counsel and that God gave specific tasks to specific angels or messengers. The other passage which comes to my mind, which just to show my support, as it were, for the basic picture that Heiser was drawing is in 1 Kings 22, when after Ahab has done what he did with Naboth's vineyard, then Ahab wants to get together with Jehoshaphat and go up and fight a battle. And he calls one of Yahweh's prophets, Micaiah Ben Imlach and says, shall we go up? And eventually they persuade Micaiah to tell the truth, and he says, actually it's all going to be a disaster. And then Micaiah, by way of explanation, this is 1 Kings 22:19. Micaiah says, I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, with all the host of heaven standing beside him. And the Lord said, who will entice Ahab so that he may go up and fall? One said one thing and another said another, until a spirit came forward who said, I will go and be a lying spirit in the mouth of his prophets. And Yahweh said, okay, go and do that, because that will seal the deal as far as Ahab's concerned. And then there's a debate with other prophets coming up and saying to Micaiah, how come you have an inside track on this one, etc. But it's clear that we are to assume that there is a larger heavenly host, that it isn't simply there's God upstairs and us downstairs and nothing else. The problem is, of course, that much of scripture doesn't tell us very much about that. So I think what Michael Heiser has done, I know what he's done, is to locate the belief which seems to emerge at these points, like Job 1, Isaiah 41st Kings 22, locate that within a larger ancient Near Eastern context of speculation about divine beings, divine forces. And I'm not averse to doing that. That's how we locate all biblical thought within its historical context. But I worry about when he then draws on some of the later Judean writings and things like first Enoch and so on, as though then the New Testament writers are liable to be agreeing with some of the, I would say more wild speculations about these intermediary beings, etc. Now, as you say, there is that passage in Paul that there are many so called gods and many so called lords, although I think there he's referring to all the altars that you might see in a town like Corinth or Athens or somewhere, not necessarily to the biblical idea of the heavenly host. But for Paul, there may not be an exact either or. There, there's a sort of continuum. And I think one of the takeaways for me is that, yes, God's world is more multiplex, if you like, than Western Christianity has often imagined. And that there are angelic beings, angelic forces. We find them cropping up in the New Testament. There is Gabriel who comes both to Zechariah and then to Mary. We find the angels at the tomb, we find the angels in the Mount of Ascension and there are angelic visitations elsewhere. An angel comes and gets Peter out of jail free and all that sort of thing. And it's as though at special times and for special purposes, humans at key moments are allowed a glimpse or a touch or a sense of angelic activity. At the same time, I think in the New Testament Testament, with the arrival of the Holy Spirit to fill God's people with God's own life, there's a sense of declining away from any need for that kind of direct angelic intervention all the time. Because it's rather like the medieval cult of the saints that if you want this kind of question, you go to Saint so and so. And then the reformers come along and say, look, look, according to the New Testament, we have peace with God and we have access through Jesus to the very throne room of God. So why go through some court flunky when you're told you can go straight into the throne room and speak to the King yourself? So I want to say, let's just be careful about too much of a concentration on angels. I want to say, yes, angels exist, they're important, they do God's will. Well, the good ones do anyway. I'm not at all an expert on the evil angels. If you want to go and read Paradise Lost, you'll see plenty about them there. The wonderful 17th century speculations of John Milton and there was lots of stuff in the air at the time about that. But I want to say, yes, it's there, yes, it's not unimportant, but actually the New Testament, by shining the light of the triune God on the whole heaven and earth relationship. Relationship. It's rather like if you have people standing out in the street on a dark night with candles and then somebody suddenly turns a bright light on, the candles are still there, they may still help you read something in your hand or whatever, but the bright light is too dazzling for that. And I think the bright light of God's full revelation in Christ and by the Spirit means that the importance which angels assume in books like First Enoch actually is diminished and is put on one side. Not that it's totally wrong, it's just not where we should be concentrating. I hope that makes sense, Mike. I mean, you and I have never discussed it before.
- [38:12]
Mike Bird
I think it does. But you, you can understand how people get confused when Heiser is talking about, well, you know, Paul says that, you know, the God of this age has blinded people and they go, what do you mean? The guy thought, I thought our God is the God of this age. Well, you know, Paul says, and then he expands a whole theology and cosmology out of. And he brings in ancient Near Eastern cosmology and, and you know what? B on the fall of the angels. You know, for a lot of people it can be a bit confusing. Overwhelming. And if you're normally thinking, well, there's only one divine being and there's God and there's not much else, and all of a sudden Heiser is going into all these different tiers of angels and the, you know, the God over there, you can understand how it could get confusing. And then you add dialogue with like Mormonism or something where they've got some, yeah. Other peculiar eccentricities in this realm. So yeah, I think that's a, that's a good take on the unseen realm. I think that's about as far as we're going to see into that realm for today, Tom. So we'll have to put a pin it for now, but we're very grateful for our listeners for sending us in their questions. In our next episode we're going to deal with some juicy topics. Can you lose your salvation? Is there a good way and a bad way of preaching about hell? And what about the perils of Hyper Calvinism? But if you like our program, you should know there are some other good programs as well in the premier network shows like Unbelievable. In fact, I was on Unbelievable recently debating Doug Wilson about Christian nationalism. So go read out or check it. Our sister podcast on Unbelievable. Otherwise it's goodbye from me, Mike Bird
- [39:58]
N.T. Wright
and goodbye from me, Tom Wright.
- [40:01]
Mike Bird
And we'll see you all on the next episode of Ask N.T. wright. Anything.