Field notes on the biblical text, divine council, and the ancient world. Working-class IT guy in Ohio. Door open. https://xitter.cf/t.co/TjBA0UrbJS
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The Bible does not leave the Nephilim in a fossil layer or a lab. Genesis 6 ties them to the sons of God before the flood, and then Numbers 13:33 has the spies seeing them in Canaan, the sons of Anak among the Nephilim. The Anakim and the other giant clans in Numbers and Joshua are the legacy of that rebellion, and the conquest sets out to end that line. The text puts the giants in a land you can walk.
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Halfway through the book of Job, Job asks for something he thinks he can never have. Of God he says, "For He is not a man as I am that I may answer Him," and then, "There is no adjudicator between us, who may lay his hand upon us both" (Job 9:32-33). He adds a condition: "Let Him remove His rod from me, and let not dread of Him terrify me" (9:34). In chapter 13 he asks again: "Move Your hand far from me, and let not the dread of You terrify me" (13:21).
Twenty chapters later a young man named Elihu speaks up, and when he turns to Job directly in chapter 33 he answers that request. "Behold, I belong to God like you; I too have been formed out of the clay. Behold, no dread of me should terrify you" (33:6-7). In Hebrew, dread and terrify in 33:7 are the same two words Job used in 9:34 and 13:21. Elihu is offering himself as the man Job said did not exist: someone who stands on God's side, is made of the same clay as Job, and will not frighten him into silence.
Elihu is the strangest figure in the book. He turns up without introduction, speaks for six chapters, and when God rebukes the other three friends at the end, He says nothing about Elihu at all. Readers still argue over whether he succeeds. What is plain is that he heard exactly what Job asked for, and he answers it in Job's own words.
More on the book of Job and what it is really asking: jayms.com/what-is-the-book-o…
Yes, and Psalm 1 maps it in what the blessed man refuses. Walk in the counsel of the wicked, stand in the way of sinners, sit in the seat of scoffers. 3 verbs and a man has gone from passing through to settling in.
Yes, P52 is worth using, mostly for its story. A late date for John was built on philosophy, and a scrap of John 18 copied in Egypt, far from Ephesus, turned up in 1934 and pulled the date back. Some still date it later, which is worth saying first.
No. Paul says it in the present tense about the Israel that rejected the gospel: enemies for your sake, but from the standpoint of the choice of God still loved for the sake of the fathers, for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. Romans 11:28 to 29.
Father Ripperger: "The big mistake that people make is still thinking the Jews are the chosen people, they were, but they rejected their inheritance."
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Yes, and he wrote it against men who denied Jesus had real flesh. In Smyrnaeans 7 they skip the Eucharist because they will not confess it to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins. For Ignatius the table and the cross stood together.
Here's that story, from 1 Enoch 6 through 16. Two hundred divine beings called Watchers swear an oath together and come down on the summit of Mount Hermon. They take wives. Their children are the giants. One of them, Azazel, teaches humanity weapons and sorcery. The Watchers are bound in the earth until judgment, and when the giants die, their spirits become the evil spirits that afflict people. In that telling, the demons of the Gospels are the spirits of the dead giants.
No, I think the best horror does the opposite. The King in Yellow came out in 1895, and what it dreads is systems built to look away from evil. The characters who survive are the ones holding on to someone. That is how do not fear gets practised.
Christians shouldn’t be a fan of horror.
You shouldn’t be reading books, or watching movies, or listening to true crime podcasts that make you scared.
How many times do we read throughout Scripture: “Do not fear.”
And yet, we purposefully consume content that makes us scared. This is a direct contradiction of Jesus’ commands to not be fearful or be anxious about anything.
The lawyer in Luke 10 asks Jesus who is my neighbor. He wants a boundary. Who counts and who does not.
Jesus tells the story and then asks a different question. Which of these 3 became a neighbor to the man who was robbed?
The lawyer asked who he had to love. Jesus asked who he was going to be. And when the answer is a Samaritan the lawyer cannot bring himself to say the word. He says the one who showed mercy.
The rich ruler story just ran backwards. In Luke 18 the ruler hears the cost and becomes very sad, for he was extremely rich. This man had the business, the family approval and a marriage lined up, and he walked toward Jesus. Jesus answers right after, many times more at this time and in the age to come. xitter.cf/RealShahriqKhan/status…
Let me be honest. I wanted to stay Muslim so badly.
Not even because of God or faith at first, but because of the life attached to my faith.
My dad’s businesses were waiting for me - all signed and ready.
My mom’s community surrounded me: doctors, lawyers and politicians.
Bro, success was laid out in front of me. There was even an arranged marriage lined up for me. She was on track to be a doctor. Beautiful future with the house, the wedding, all of it.
All I had to do was say one sentence:
“Yeah, I still believe.”
That was it. If I said it, I could keep the money, keep the family approval and keep the life I had always known.
But here’s the problem, once I met Him, I could not unsee Jesus.
When I really read the Quran and compared it to the Gospel, I couldn’t force myself back into pretending Islam was the truth.
Honestly bro, knowledge becomes heavy at that point. I didn’t leave Islam to rebel, despite what many believe about me.
I left because I could not betray what I believed was true. No business opportunity, no relationship, no comfortable future was worth denying the King who gave His life for me.
So yeah, my life would have been easier if I stayed. But when Jesus says, “I am the way,” you don’t answer with, “But the other path feels safer.”
You pick up your cross and walk.
Follow me for more conversations about Islam, Christianity, Scripture, and how we can reach Muslims with the Gospel.
Every time the Old Testament calls something a thorn in your side it means people. Numbers 33:55 and Joshua 23:13 say it of the nations Israel let stay in the land. Paul calls his thorn a messenger of Satan and 2 Corinthians is full of men attacking him.
Elihu is the go between Job asked for. In 9:34 and 13:21 Job begs that the dread of God not terrify him. When Elihu turns to Job in chapter 33 he says no dread of me should terrify you, the same 2 Hebrew words, and that he too was formed out of the clay.
Psalm 82 does hold rulers to account, but the ones God judges stand in the congregation of God and are called sons of the Most High. Then He tells them they will die like men. That sentence only bites if they were not men to begin with.
When Jesus tells Satan not to put the Lord your God to the test He stops halfway through Deuteronomy 6:16. The rest of the verse says as you tested Him at Massah, the camp in Exodus 17 where Israel wanted proof that Yahweh was among them. Satan on the temple roof was asking for the same proof. Jesus had gone 40 days without food and still would not ask for it.
In Isaiah 6 God asks who will go for Us, and the plural makes sense once you see who is standing in the room. Seraphim stand above Him, and in 1 Kings 22 Micaiah sees the same kind of scene with the host of heaven on both sides and one saying this and another that. The odd part is that a man answers. Isaiah only volunteers after the coal touches his lips, and then he is the one who says send me.
The Gospel of Thomas gets passed around as the secret Jesus, but the early church used the Thomas of John against the Gnostic teachers. When they said Christ had no real flesh, Tertullian and Cyril of Alexandria pointed to the man in John 20 who was invited to handle a body. His demand for evidence became their proof of the incarnation. His answer was My Lord and my God.
The crown of thorns was a joke when the soldiers made it. They put purple on Jesus, hailed him King of the Jews and knelt. By the third hour the same words were the charge written against him at the cross. The mockers got the title right.
Have you heard of the Crown of Thorns relic?
Top 5 things to know about the relic said to have been worn by Jesus:
1) In Paris, France, Notre-Dame Cathedral keeps a circlet of rushes venerated as the crown of thorns, which members of the Paris Fire Brigade carried out of the burning cathedral on April 15, 2019, and which returned to Notre-Dame in December 2024.
2) The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John describe Roman soldiers weaving a crown of thorns and placing it on Jesus' head to mock him before the crucifixion.
3) A crown was being venerated as a relic by around 400 AD and was later said to have moved to Constantinople, and over the centuries individual thorns were separated and given away, including by French kings, so one scholar counted more than 700 holy thorn relics.
4) In 1238 Baldwin II, the Latin Emperor of Constantinople, with the relic held by the Venetians as security for a loan of 13,134 gold pieces, offered it to King Louis IX of France, who acquired it in 1239 and built the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris to house it.
5) The circlet is made of a rush that grows in northern Britain and the Baltic, while thorns kept elsewhere appear to come from a thorny shrub native to Africa and southern and western Asia, and critics, including the reformer John Calvin, have questioned both its authenticity and the practice of venerating relics.
Learn more: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_…
The rabbit hole goes deeper at blurryreport.com
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Revelation alludes to the Old Testament more than any other New Testament book and quotes it formally 0 times. John never writes as it is written. He weaves Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and the Psalms into his own sentences and trusts you to hear them.
The Nephilim show up on both sides of the flood. Genesis 6:4 has them on the earth in the days when the sons of God came in, and in Numbers 13:33 the spies report Nephilim in Canaan, with the sons of Anak counted among them. xitter.cf/DisrespectedThe/status…
The Bible got there first. Job 38:7 has the sons of God shouting for joy when the earth was founded, so the nonhuman contemporaries were watching before we existed, and they are still creatures made by the same God.
I recently asked a friend of mine, a deeply committed Christian who had been “read in” to the Legacy Program and the alien presence, how he reconciled the existence of nonhuman biological life with his theological worldview.
He considered the question for a moment before answering with a single word: “Contemporaries.”
I asked whether he meant contemporaries of mankind here on Earth or contemporaries in the broader universe.
“The universe,” he replied.
I find this to be a refreshingly simple answer, unencumbered by theological baggage or speculative assumptions.
No, Jesus never says he is not God, and Son of Man is the title that got him condemned. At his trial he claims to be the one coming with the clouds of heaven, Mark 14:62, a role the Hebrew Bible otherwise gives to Yahweh, and the high priest calls it blasphemy.
Dan Bilzerian tells SNEAKO he's struggling with believing Jesus is God as a Christian 🤔✝️
"Jesus specifically says he's not God. He says he's the Son of man 190 times in the New Testament. He says, Why do you call me good? No one is good except God. Do I take the guy for his word, or take what other people's interpretations are later on?"