BibleProject - Apocalypse Please – Apocalyptic E1

Episode Date: April 27, 2020

Is this the apocalypse? Tim and Jon begin a new series, How to Read Apocalyptic Literature. They’ll be talking about the COVID-19 pandemic and how the Bible opens our eyes and changes us in our present moment. Want to share how you're experiencing this present crisis as an apocalypse? Send us an email at [e-mail] full show notes from this episode →Additional ResourcesSon of Man Podcast SeriesShow MusicDefender Instrumental by TentsSnacks by No SpiritYesterday on Repeat by VexentoShow produced by Dan GummelPowered and distributed by Simplecast

Hey, this is Cooper at Bible Project. I produce the podcast in Classroom. We've been exploring a theme called the City, and it's a pretty big theme. So we decided to do two separate Q and R episodes about it. We're currently taking questions for the second Q and R and we'd love to hear from you. Just record your question by July 21st

and send it to us at infoatbiboproject.com. Let us know your name and where you're from, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds and please transcribe your question when you email it in, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds, and please transcribe your question when you email it in. That's a huge help to our team. We're excited to hear from you. Here's the episode.

Hey, this is John from The Bible Project. And today, on the podcast, Tim and I are going to start a new series on how to read apocalyptic literature. And this is one of those moments where it's really hard to check our own language and ideas at the door, but we must, because boiler alert, the word apocalypse in the Bible does not mean the end of the world, like not even at all. This is parts of your Bible full of symbolism and imagery and lots of crazy things happening. The Book of Revelation is one long piece of apocalyptic literature written in the form of a letter at the end of your Bible. So we're going to talk about apocalyptic literature and we're bumping up this series because well, things are crazy right now. So thanks for joining us. Here we go.

So hey Tim. Hi John. We have been doing a whole series, an ongoing series on how to read the Bible. Yeah. And there's 19 videos in this series. Yeah. And the 19th video, which will's 19 videos in this series. Yeah. And the 19th video, which will not come out until, I don't know, right before the summer.

Yeah, I think late spring, early summer, 2020. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's gonna be on how to read apocalyptic literature. Yeah. It's the final video in the whole series. Yeah, the video series on how to read the Bible will have 19 parts, three years in the making, and then we've had podcast conversations,

short series for every one of those videos. It's been amazing. So, apocalyptic literature is the last one. However, it won't end up being the last podcast series because we decided to do something brand new right now in this podcast episode and for this series, John, what's the story? Well, we still have how to read the letters to do. That's right. And the letters being the small books in the back of your Bible that you've probably really familiar with because they're easy to preach. They're easy to read. They're the most used and quoted parts of the Bible in at least the contemporary Protestant church. Yeah.

Yeah. We have two videos that are going to come out on those, how to read letters in their historical setting and also how to read them in their literary setting. But we're going to skip that podcast conversation and then- We're just delaying. We're going to delay it in their literary setting. But we're gonna skip that podcast conversation and then- We're just delaying. We're gonna delay it. Delay it.

Yeah, yep. Let's skip it. So we could jump into this conversation on a poccalipic literature because right now, we are experiencing an apocalypse. Uh huh. And we wanna talk about that. And then this conversation,

talking about kind of what's happening in the world with this novel coronavirus and how the whole world is dealing with it and how it's affecting everyone by having a conversation about that and whether or not that is an apocalypse, that'll T.S. up to then just talk about apocalyptic literature for the next few episodes. Yeah. Yes. So, right. So the COVID-19 pandemic is weeks and months underway for most Europeans and Americans, obviously in Asia and China, particularly it's been around for longer.

And at this point, when we're recording this mid-April 2020, virtually no one in the world has been unaffected by this, right? Yeah. I just looked it up. There's only a few countries that don't have any cases. And so there are lots of Christians and even former Christians on the interweb who are having debates and conversations about whether this catastrophe is a sign of the apocalypse or a sign of the end times. I was telling you, John, the other day I got a mailer like a neighborhood city-wide mailer for a Christian prophecy conference, like an end times prophecy conference, that was going to be held at a hotel conference room in my part of town, but then they moved it to be online. And it was everything you would kind of expect, you know.

It was like, see how the Book of Revelation predicted the COVID-19 pandemic. That's what it said. See how current events are written already 2,000 years ago, and the last book, The Bible, this kind of thing. What do you think they mean with the book of Revelation predicted coronavirus? Oh, if you had a guest, chapter and verse, what are they referring to? Oh, there are three different seven-part cycles

of catastrophe, right? The seven seals, the seven trumpets, and the seven bowls. A number of them describe skin disease and diseases or plagues that affect the human population, but also famine and war and all this kind of thing Cosmic collapse on a global scale those three seven-part cycles of catastrophe Have fueled the imaginations of every generation of

Revelation's readers for the last two thousand years. Yeah, the number of generations that have thought they were in, the final era of the history of the world because of those descriptions is very many. We're in the long chain here. That prophecy, the amaler I got, fits into a very long chain of that interpretation of the book of Revelation. Yeah.

Yeah, plagues are very biblical. Mm-hmm, think. Totally. Yeah. Bible talks about plagues a Yeah. Yeah, plagues are very biblical. Mm-hmm. Think. Totally. Yeah. Bible talks about plagues a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Go on all the way back to the plagues on Egypt. Yeah. So, you know, diseases and plagues have actually been a repeating phenomenon for most generations, for most of human history. And so, yeah, they're widely discussed in the Bible, not just in apocalyptic literature. So essentially, the weird irony, I don't yeah, they're widely discussed in the Bible, not just in apocalyptic literature. So essentially, the weird irony, I don't know, do you call it an irony?

We just finished that five-part podcast conversation on how to read apocalyptic literature. I don't know, two, three weeks before the pandemic, really, really hit, at least America. And so what we thought we would do was in light, kind of to anticipate what's gonna be talked about in the episodes to come. We thought we would record like a real-time reflection

on what you and I have been experiencing since we had that conversation and how we're processing it, how we're trying to think about it in light of what we've learned about apocalyptic literature in the Bible. Hopefully, I think this will be helpful for you and I, John, and I, we hope that it will be helpful. For you all, and maybe kind of get all of us, John and I, and all of you listening

into a frame of mind for how these books to the Bible and the sections to the Bible could actually really help us not just make sense, but help us respond appropriately to the situation that we all find ourselves in. 1 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 So in the coming episodes, we're gonna walk through a lot of this, but let's do a bit of a crash course on apocalyptic literature. Yes. And the first point of which that we talk about is, does the apocalypse mean the end of the world? Yes.

Because in popular uses of the phrase, that's what it means. Correct. If you're talking about apocalypse, you're talking about the world ending. That's right. In English. Yes. In English. And that's because look up the word apocalypse in any English dictionary.

And it will tell you that it's an event, you know, related to the catastrophic destruction of the world. Total and complete destruction of the world. That's the meaning of the word in English. And this is one of those moments where it's really hard to check our own language and ideas at the door, but we must, because boiler alert, the word apocalypse in the Bible does not mean the end of the world, like not even at all.

Not even like a little bit. Not even close. The word has a very clear meaning. Look it up in any Bible dictionary, look it up in a concordance, and it will become very clear that it does not mean the end of the world. Okay. All right, should we die further into that point? Yeah.

We've just made a tall claim. Shall we back it up? Here's a teaching of Jesus where he uses the word Apocalypse twice. Two times. It's in Matthew chapter 11. It's a prayer that Jesus prays to the Father, a prayer from the Son of God to the Father. It's from Matthew 11, verses 25 to 27.

At that time Jesus said, I praise you Father, Lord of the skies and the land, because you have hidden these things, and in context these things are what Jesus is teaching about his true identity You father have hidden these things from the wise from the learned and you have a puck lipsed them to little children Whoa, what's Jesus doing? He's ending the world Yes, father, you were so pleased to do this. Jesus goes on. All things have been given over to be by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father

and no one knows the Father except the Son and those people to whom the Son chooses to apocalypse the Father. Okay, so our English word apocalypse is not an English word. It's one of these Greek words that spelled with English letters apocalypse is not an English word. It's one of these Greek words that spelled with English letters that has become an English word. What's that called transliteration? Oh, yep. It's a transliteration. Yeah. Like baptism is a Greek word, the means immersion.

Angel is a Greek word spelled in English letters. Okay. Yeah. I guess it's kind of more of a English letters. I guess it's kind of more of an English-sized version. Yes, yeah, that's right. Where, because in Greek, it's apocalyptic sys or something? Apocaloupsis is the noun. Apocaloupsis. And then apocalupto is the verb. That's what Jesus uses here. So, apocalipsis hidden things about himself to children, and he apocalypse is God the Father to other people. So whatever the word means, it has to be appropriate to how Jesus is using the word right here. Well, this is interesting. In this statement, the opposite of an apocalypse is for something to be hidden. Do you see that? You've hidden things from the wise and you have apocalypse them to children. So you get the picture right here. The word means to uncover or reveal, to make something visible. That's what the word apocalypse means.

To make something visible. Now when I said, does it mean even a little bit the end of the world? In that, if an apocalypse is making the end of the world visible, then the apocalypse, like let's take the book of Revelation, the word revelation, because to reveal. To reveal. Yeah, it is an apocalypse. It's the whole thing in apocalypse. Yes, sorry, just to make that clear, the first word of the last book of the Bible that we call the Revelation, the first word is the last book of the Bible that we call the revelation.

The first word is apocolipsis, in apocolipsis of Jesus Christ, that God gave to him. So it's a revealing, an uncovering. This is a revealing. Yeah, that's right. But arguably it's a revealing about the end of the world. Maybe. That's the debate of the matter. In other words, if I uncover, let's say I made a really nice dinner.

For you, let's say Jessica and I had you in Tristan over for dinner. Who would you make us? Oh, man. Do you like fennel? I don't know. What do I? Anyway, let's say I like pork chops and fennel. It's totally non-coach or meal.

And, but let's say I like cover it, I cover the table like with a, you know, like a little cloth to surprise you. If you come into the room and I pull back the cloth, it's an apocalypse. I'm uncovering. Now, the fact that I'm uncovering a dinner, that's the thing that's being apocalypse, but that doesn't affect the meaning of the word apocalypse. That doesn't mean that the word apocalypse always means an apocalypse of food. It's just that's the thing in this moment that I might be apocalypse thing.

But when the Bible is revealing things, I'm just playing devil's advocate here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you're in apocalyptic literature, isn't the thing that it's revealing always the end of the world? What we just read of Jesus, he's saying that his own mission to announce the kingdom of God in Galilee, he says it, it's an apocalypse. That's why he uses the word.

He says, God is a apocalypse thing to people who Jesus is. So in this case, the apocalypse of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew is what's being a apocalypse revealed is who Jesus is, his identity. So that's not the end of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew is what's being a apocalypse revealed is who Jesus is, his identity. So that's not the end of the world. That's about the apocalypse of the Son of God. So in other words, an apocalypse is refers to a moment when something that was not clear or very visible to people, all of a sudden becomes clear because something has happened to open their eyes to see something they couldn't see before. That's an apocalypse. But what the apocalypse is about will differ from context to context. And I've been a little facetious about this whole other thing.

Because the other thing is that if you've been listening to this podcast for any length or watch our videos, we talk a lot about how the story of the Bible isn't about just going to heaven when you die or the earth being destroyed and us being disembodied in some heavenly space. Story of the Bible is about a recreated earth. And so there is no end of the world. There's the beginning of the world

and there's a new beginning of the world. Yeah, in fact, in the Gospel of Matthew, later on, Jesus has a word to describe what he sees happening at the culmination of history. It's in Matthew chapter 19 verse 28. He calls it Greek the Palenganesea, the being born again of creation. the being born again of creation. The new American standard uses the word regeneration, or the NIV uses the phrase in the renewal of all things. I like that. Yeah. But Jesus' vision for the end of history

is the rebirth of the universe, a renewal of the universe. And the story of the Bible is interested in that too. Correct. That's what it's all aiming towards. When the Bible talks about this, you know, pretty wild transformation of people and creation into something new, what is that gonna look like?

What's that gonna be? The language and the symbols used end up being very imaginative and are written in what we call apocalyptic style. Yeah, in other words, we haven't defined yet and we will later in the series I'm not sure we'll want to in this episode give a full description of what makes a part of the Bible in apocalyptic piece of literature, but some of the descriptions of the culmination of history in the Bible are written in a literary form

that you could call apocalyptic, and it is, it's highly symbolic. But there are also depictions about the future of the universe written in poetry in the prophets. They're not apocalypses, which are usually dreams or visions. They're just beautifully written poems. Just poetic reflection. To anticipate what God's going to do in the future. Or Paul can write in Romans 8, he's writing a letter, but he'll talk about the future of the universe in discourse style. So the future of the universe is talked about in many literary styles in the Bible, but sometimes people have dreams or visions about that ultimate outcome, but whether or not that helps us understand

everything about apocalypse is in the Bible, is yet to be determined. In other words, the apocalypse is can be about something else too, not just the future. Just not the renewal of all things. That's one of the things that can be apocalypse. What else could an apocalypse be about? That's good. Thank you for asking, John. I'm going to do a little bit of the same. Paul's letter to the Galatians in chapter one tells a short autobiography and he talks

about how, listen, I used to be Pharisee, I, you know, was like excelled everyone in my generation, in my rabbinic school. And then he says, but all of a sudden he says, God, apocalypse, his son to me. That's what he says, in Galatians 1. What's cool about that is that he's referring to something that we have a narrative about in the book of Acts. Yeah, his road to Damascus. Yeah, that's right.

Moments with Jesus. So such a great example. Paul has a vision of the world that's biblical as he's going to Damascus. I mean, it's fully inspired by a lifetime of close reading of the world that's biblical as he's going to Damascus. I mean it's fully inspired by a lifetime of close reading of the Hebrew scriptures. He believes in the God of Israel, he believes in God's promise to Abraham. He is waiting for the renewal of all things. He's in. He's in. And in particular, he believes that when the faithful among Israel get their act together

and are hyper-devoted to the laws of the Torah, then God will respond by gifting them with the Messiah and the Kingdom of God and the Restoration of Jerusalem. That's his vision. And so when the Jesus movement pops up in Jerusalem, he thinks it's a heretical sect that's going to lead Israel astray from what really needs to happen. And so he joins the team to stomp it out and he starts getting people arrested. And while he's on the road to go arrest some followers of Jesus and Damascus, the risen Jesus appears to him in a vision, but it's also some sort of event that shines a bright light because the people who are with him, he says, experience

something too. And all of a sudden Paul says, he heard and met the risen Jesus saying, you're fighting against me. I'm the one that you're hoping in. I represent the hope of Israel. And he stops Paul deadness tracks. And so the point is that the narrative doesn't use the word apocalypse. It uses the imagery of light and how he can see Jesus now in a way he's never been able to see him before.

Right. So it's describing a revelation. It's describing an epiphany. An apocalypse. I mean, he calls it an apocalypse in his letter to the Christian. And he calls it an apocalypse. Yeah. And what it is is he can see something from God's point of view, from a divine point of view, he can now see the reality of the Jesus movement and of who Jesus is. He's been wrong. His current way of seeing the world is actually blinding him to the truth about reality and who Jesus is. And it took an apocalypse to reorient his imagination to truth. So this is such a great example.

This is like the quintessential apocalypse where it's not just that you're blind or that you're hidden to. It's my current way of seeing the world leaves whole parts of reality invisible to me. I can't see them and I won't be able to until there's some kind of event often that God will allow or cause that shatters and disrupts my way of seeing, and all of a sudden I can see things that I've never seen before, but that were there all along. In this case, the Jesus movement and so on.

This is the heartbeat of biblical apocalypse. And so what is apocalypse might be something about the future, but in this case, it's something that's right in front of Paul. It's about his life. Yeah. It's about what's presently happening in his life. So again, the future episodes will go into more examples and so on, but I guess real time right now, for you and I,

you've had some time to think about this, not just in the light of the pandemic we're sitting in. We can talk about that in a minute, but just, I don't know, how have you processed process that or sat with it as you've had to weeks to think about it now. Well, I think that is a really important distinction. And it's going to be hard. It's hard in my mind to make the shift from that word that's been used in a certain way in my whole life, in pop culture and in church, in Apocalypse. That's the end of the world. Apocalyptic literature then is

literature about the end of the world. Two, a shift of an apocalypse is at moment of clarity of something being exposed and revealed or uncovered. So one, it's difficult to make that switch in my mind. But secondly, it's such a ripe and really wonderful way to think about the purpose of scripture, the purpose of meditating on God's word, is that ultimately, we talked about this in the poetry video, we developed these well-worn paths of how we think about things. Literally in our brain, there are, well, warrants, it's an

apteic pathways, or what are you talking about. Yeah. And something crazy about the human brain, I think it's, it's a wonderful thing that we have, is that we're able to filter what we experience through our senses to like make a narrative out of it so that it makes sense. But when we do that, we're actually creating a paradigm for how we experience the world that might not actually be what's happening in the world. Or it might capture only part of what's really happening, right?

Or just a part. Right. How I could say something to my wife in a certain tone with certain language, and I think it's communicating one thing and she experiences something completely different. And then on and on and on. There's these moments in our lives where something happens that our filters get disrupted and suddenly you can reorient yourself. And that moment, I've called it napiphany

for a lot of my life. In fact, built a whole company around the idea of making videos that have an epiphany. Yeah, sure. You know, as a person who's been in a spiritual tradition my whole life following Jesus, that's really important. There's this conversion moment you talk about a lot.

This moment of like, oh man, I've been thinking about things all wrong. I've been to you some Christianeys, the Lord of my own life and I, you know, all this stuff and then there's this like moment of clarity of like, that has to change. I love that. I think that's so important.

We need apocalypse is, I love apocalypse is. There's something about my personality. I love it when things get shaken up a little bit. I'm just like, oh, something's getting shaken up. What's gonna set loose? Like what kind of new thing is gonna happen now that things are being shaken? Not that I love this pandemic.

I don't, this is crazy and gnarly, but there's so much now being shaken loose and things that we're rethinking and things that we're seeing from a new perspective because of what's happening. And so, yeah, I wanted to talk about that. Yes, let's kind of drill down on that one point. So in epiphany, the language of the word epiphany

describes when something, it's an idea that you feel like it happened to you. Right. As opposed to just, I sat down and thought about it and like I figured it out. You experience some new perspectives as something that comes from out of the blue.

And that's why the word epiphany is great. There's a similarity and meaning to the word apocalypse in the Bible, because apocalypse is when something is revealed to you. It's not like I just went out searching for it. Like for Jesus, he says, there are things that were hidden. And the only way you're going to see what's hidden is if my father apocalypse is it. So it has to be done to you, not something you just do for yourself. And so there's something about biblical Apocalypse's.

They're not just when a good idea hits you. It's when God's way of seeing the world happens to you. It's when an event takes place, often a dream or a vision, though as we're going to see in the book of Daniel, his apocolipses mix together both his own life experience and his dreams, all kind of fused together as an apocalypse, and all of a sudden he's able to see things from God's point of view in a way he couldn't before. And sometimes it's a one-way traffic like God just zaps like Ezekiki all the profit, you know

He calls it the spirit took me by my hair And lifts me up. He has this experience of literally being taken out of his body Whereas Daniel just describes like a dream that he has and what he's dreaming about is a lot of stuff That's like been happening into him at his job recently Yeah, but both of those are a type of new perspective that happens to you. And that's an important part of this definition of apocalyptic. It happens to you, but you're making a distinction that all sorts of epiphanies can happen to you in many different ways.

Apocalypse is when God pulls back the curtain and shows you from his divine perspective what's going on. And in a way, that's the type of epiphany that we should be most interested in. Totally. When the God of the universe tells us, here's what's really going on. Yeah, if somebody believes that God exists, and especially if somebody that somebody believes that God is generous and good and wants to help us or share with us or do something with us. That person would be interested in what God thinks and sees, so they can align themselves with it. So, that's very much the depiction of the biblical God,

is that he wants to guide us and be with us and share and give us responsibility. So, I want to see what that God sees. And if I'm not seeing the world correctly, I want God to do something to me, to make me somebody who can. And this is what Apocalypse does. And Apocalypse is being able to see what God sees, to have an Apocalypse is for God to allow you to see what he sees. So we'll explore this in greater depths in the series to follow. I thought real quick, we would take a quick tour of some chapters of Daniel and get

kind of a unique angle of vision on this perspective on apocalypse, and I think it might help us just have some fruitful reflections on the current world crisis that we all find ourselves in. At least these are some perspectives that have been helpful for me. these are some perspectives that have been helpful for me. So the story of Daniel begins with a city being destroyed. The city of Jerusalem was besieged by a Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, a whole, whole layer of government officials were arrested, taken captive and hauled away to a far distant

land. And the story follows four of these figures who are all a part of the royal line from David. They were all like in the royal kingly line. And they're made like high status slaves to serve in the government because they can read and write and they're smart. That's how the story begins. I've never experienced anything even remotely as traumatic or disruptive as that. But that's how the story begins. I've never experienced anything even remotely as traumatic or disruptive as that,

but that's how the story begins. Yeah, I am trying to imagine and I have no categories. Yeah, I can't imagine either. So the story goes on in Daniels chapter 2 where the king who just took Daniel prisoner and his friends has this dream about a gigantic statue, metal statue made of four different metals, and then a huge stone, a rock flies out of the sky, destroys the statue, the stone plants in the ground, and becomes this cosmic mountain. This famous dream of Nebuchadnezzar. It's like a comet that's a mountain sea.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. So, you know, it's a well-known story. Nobody can interpret or understand what the symbols of the dream mean, except Daniel, in whom is the spirit of God. And so, he goes and he prays to God to reveal to Apocalypse. And again, the Apocalypse language comes into play here. Can't figure it out.

So, he prays and he asks God to reveal the mystery. That's what he says in his prayer. And we're told that that night God revealed to Daniel the meaning of the symbols. And so he goes to the gang and he tells them, yeah, you know this big statue is an image of all the empires of the world. You're first, you're at the top.

But you know, there'll be another empire after you, another after that, another after that. And eventually, the kingdom of God, which is the rock, is going to come, topple all the empires of this world and rule forever and ever. And this is the apocalypse. You revealed the dream, the meaning of the dream. In other words, the meaning of the dream was covered or hidden. And God, apocalypse is the meaning of the symbols to Daniel, and then Daniel Apocalypse is them to the King.

And what it's about is what we would call political history. Yeah, there you go. Current events or events in generations to come. Okay, now follow the story. The next chapter, the King of Babylon, apparently inspired by his dream, actually goes and makes a gigantic statue. Yeah. That is a symbol of his empire, Babylon.

And he summons all the nations to come, worship and give their allegiance to the statue. And here begins the testing stories. Yeah? The famous Shadrach, he's talking about it ago. It's like one of the most famous story in the Bible. Oh yeah, you'd put this as like a top five. Maybe because of edgy tales, that's all.

I don't know. It is very famous. They have to bow before the statue, You'd put this as like a top five. Maybe because of edgy tails, that's all. I don't know. It is very famous. They have to bow before this statue, swear allegiance to Nebuchadnezzar as their god, essentially. And if they don't, they're gonna be thrown in the fiery furnace into the flames. Tuck that away.

A few chapters later, there's another story. Oh, Babylon falls. And overnight. And then the next kingdom, which is the kingdom of the Meads and the Persians rises, and there's a guy named Darius, who's the king over that. Daniel still got his job in the court, and there's a law made that anyone who prays in the land has to pray to the king as their God. And Daniel is seen praying to his God Yahweh of Israel. And so it's a similar test where he won't obey the decree. And so he's not thrown into a furnace, but... The lines are dead.

Which are called in the narrative, very specifically. They're called sometimes lions, but other times they're called beasts, thrown to the beasts. Throwing to the beasts. It's fascinating, by the way, that the first set are thrown into a furnace where idols are made. When, in the biblical imagination, humans already are. God's. That's idle. Image.

Yes, yeah. That's good. And when they're thrown in there, they don't get destroyed. They're fine. Are they glowing? One is there with them, who looks like a son of the gods, which means that he has some kind of appearance that is surprising. Yeah, they see a human image.

And these human images in the biblical imagination rule the beasts. Yes, they're supposed to rule the beasts. Yeah. They're supposed to. And Daniel is, he's thrown to the beasts. He's thrown to the beasts. And ends up, he's fine.

He's at peace with the animals. Yeah, he's no ox with the animals. He's at rest with them. Yeah, he's like Noah in the little ark and like like Adam and Eve and Eden. Yeah, he's like a new guy human. The point is is, you know, Daniel's job is rough. He's like putting life in death situations every day. Well, not every day, but the whole point is his life is traumatic, very disruptive. There's all this stuff happening to him. And in Daniel chapter seven, he finally has his own dream. We've talked about it at length in different podcast series.

The Son of Man series in particular, right? Yeah. But what he sees is a dream filled with images connected to things that have been happening to him and his friends. So he sees the chaotic dark ocean, which, you know, is an image familiar to Daniel from, you know, the first page of the Bible. It's the dark waters of disorder in chaos. And out of it are belt-stup for mutant monsters, beasts. They're called beasts, actually. Maybe it was the day after the lions, Dan. I don't know. He was having a lot of nightmares

about it. Beasts of the brain. But there's four of them, four of them. So just like there were four medals of the King's statue. And they are terrible and they are violent and they kill people and trample everybody. And the fourth and final beast is the worst. And it like just havoc and tyranny and violence. But then he sees a divine, some divine throne set up

on high, and he sees the God who he worships, who he calls the ancient one, the ancient of days, comes, and he holds the fourth beast accountable and throws it into the flames, throws it into the fire, a beast thrown into the fire, which it's the two testing stories of the furnace and the lion's den mixed together into one now. Instead of being thrown into the fire and to the beast, the beast is being thrown into the fire. And then what Daniel sees is a human figure who's raised up on high. He goes up to the divine throne on the clouds, and he has seated. A human ruler called the son of Adam, the son of humanity, is called the rule, and he rules over the nations and all the nations,

give allegiance and worship, not the idol, but the real human one who sits on the throne with God. And that's his dream. It's the apocalypse of Daniel. Well, is a dream written in apocalyptic literature? Is it written in poetry? The dream is written in just kind of a narrative style, but again symbolic dreams that offer a divine perspective on something. That's the definition of a biblical apocalypse, some kind of

vision or dream, disruptive experience where you see something often symbolic, but that gives you a fresh vision, a God's point of view on whatever the thing is about. So he's told that the beasts are the same thing as the four metals of the statue. It's the empires of the world, a sequence of empires, except this time, instead of starting with Babylon as the most important, it's the ultimate one to come, that's the worst.

That empires are gonna keep coming one after another, after another, doing their violent work, but that God won't allow these beastly human empires to last forever, he will bring it to an end, and install, not take humans away, but install an ultimate human-led kingdom that will be God's kingdom over the world together. Not led by a monster or a beast, but by a human who's retained his humanity and reflects

God's image. The point is that Daniel has a dream, but his dream is very connected to his actual lived experience that we see in the narratives. And so this combination of things happening to him, things he's thinking about, and then a dream. These all become the apocalypse of Daniel. And Daniel is one of the most like clear forms of apocalyptic literature in the Hebrew Bible, because it's about this figures apocalyptic dreams. And so are they about the end of the world? Well, what they're about is the story of what God is doing to bring history to its climax, to install the humans as the image of God ruling over creation.

If you're babbling on it's the end of your world. That's right, totally right. So, it's through this apocalypse that Daniel can now go back to work on Monday morning. Doesn't he go back to work on Saturday night? Oh, it's a good point. Yeah, I guess so. I was merging him into my calendar. My gentle calendar.

But the point is that he goes back to his job and this apocalypse gives him new hope. It challenges him. And all of a sudden, he sees the king in a different light. He can see the policies that the king is enacting in a new light, because he knows that these policies are probably going to crush some people. The point is that, like this prophecy conference, may I learn that I got, if all of the book of apocalyptic is about, it's like the Bible's hidden code that will tell you how the world's going to end.

Predict bad events because of the ultimate bad event we want to be prepared for, which is the end of the world. Well, it's giving you comfort. Comfort to say, God's got this. Like, the world's still in control. It might be out of control, but from God's point of view, it's in control, and it's all going according to God's plan, even though I may not understand it. I mean, that's the kind of comfort that that view of apocalyptic gives you. But this biblical view of apocalyptic, it gives you that same comfort,

but not in an escapist way. It gives you that kind of comfort, and at the same time calls you to go out the next day, and do something about what you now see. You can't unsee what you've seen. That the Empire I live in is a beast, and there's people getting trampled that I've never seen before, but now I can see them

What am I gonna do about it? That's what biblical apocalyptic? I think that's the effect that it's supposed to have 1 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1, 1 you read Biblical apocalyptic literature, we'll get into that. And so that's what the next episodes will be. I love this framework that you're giving, which is when God does reveal what's going on in the world, whether that's in the dreams and visions that we get in the Bible, or maybe in some personal way that he does with you or your community, that's in the dreams and visions that we get in the Bible or maybe in some personal way that he does with you or your community, that's an apocalypse. And what we should be after is we want to see the world the way God sees it. We want an apocalypse. And we have a whole bunch for us in the Bible, too. Daniels and Johns included. So with that definition in mind,

the question is, are we experiencing an apocalypse? So, you know, just set the table really quickly again. There's a virus. It's, you know, you know, of what a virus is actually. It's just, it's not a living organism. It's a, it's a string of code, like DNA or RNA or whatever, I think it's RNA, and then just encased in protein, and it's super, super small. And it's not alive in the sense that if it's, it can't reproduce by itself, but when it's in a host body, it's one, the only thing it wants to do is like, hijack a cell and then reproduce its code.

That's all it does. That's what we're dealing with here. You know, but I've never heard it described as, it's not a living organism. Would that get to the whole conversation of like, what not a living organism. Well, that gets into a whole conversation of, what is a living organism? But I think in terms of what scientists would define, it's not.

We're like a cell or a bacteria is, because a bacteria is a cell that can reproduce itself. Yeah, it's a lot more complicated, it's a lot bigger than a virus. So anyways, we got this virus and it's really contagious. So basically, it's made the world just sit at home for the most part. That's what I'm doing, that's what my family's doing. So I think here we're getting into it. I think, yeah, this whole series of events has certainly been

apocalyptic in the way we've been talking about it for me and in a big way. One of my own personal, I don't know if it's a weakness or a strength. I think it's both. I think that's probably how most of our strengths and weaknesses are. It is real high empathy. And there's been a very disruptive month in my sleep habits and in my news consumption habits that I've had to work really hard to get control of. For people who get rewards and like indoor-fin charges, you know how the whole thing about gamification of apps and stuff like this is all about hitting those reward things. For news junkies, the last 30 days have been like

jackpot every day, because it's almost every couple of hours, there's something newsworthy related to this. It's crazy, man. I mean, even just today, has the new unemployment as of April 16th, is 22 million people out of work in the last 30 days. In America, just America, 22 million.

You know what, you just think every single one of those millions represents somebody who doesn't know how they're going to pay for their food and their rent right now. And that is so... I mean, Daniel went through something disruptive. I've gone through some disruptive things, but this is just a poccaliptic man. In that sense, something's happening that if my way of seeing the world remains the same after this, I'm just really not paying attention.

Hmm. You and I have had different experiences, but it's been a really difficult month for me personally, just watching catastrophe happen to the lives of so many people. That's only one side of it, right? There's also a lot of things that are going to shaken up and rethought and reimagined that I think 10 years from now will have a positive outcome. Yeah, there's all sorts of epiphanies happening. People are realizing whether or not they can work from home. Some people are like remembering like, oh yeah, I'm married. We live so much of our lives outside our house and doing different things. And now we're just home. And just we're home with our families all the time. And

we're like, I really need to make this work better than it has been. And there's people like you said who've lost their jobs and they don't know how they're going to pay for things. It's just turned everything inside out, upside down. And in those moments, there's an opportunity for you to have some new perspective on life. But then the question I guess becomes, how do we make sure that we're seeing what God sees in this moment? Yes. And not just some reflection that I have, because I have all sorts of reflections now

and work from home. Or we're homeschooling our kids. So I have a bunch of new reflections on homeschooling and all these different things. And they're revelations of sort or uncovering things. But what should I be seeing if I believe in the kingdom of God through the person of Jesus. What is supposed to be becoming more clear to me because of this pandemic? I know. I've been thinking about that a lot too. I mean,

I think it seems to me for a follower of Jesus, the ethic of the kingdom of God as condensed and summarized by Jesus is kind of ground zero, you know, for of all her Jesus. So, sermon on the Mount. It's kind of the most condensed form of that, but throughout his teachings. What he says he's doing is also condensing the heartbeat of what he said the Torah and the prophets. The Hebrew scriptures were all about, which is radical devotion which is radical devotion to your Creator that's expressed through radical love, expressed to your neighbor, which includes your enemy, or people you don't like. And in a way that Jesus grounds it upon the biblical vision of the humans as the image of God. What humans are destined for is to be dignified, noble kings and queens, taking responsibility of creation, harnessing its potential in a way that everybody flourishes.

And how you apply that ethic, followers of Jesus have been working out for 2,000 years, right? Different moments, different cultures, different ways. But I think that's been, for me, the number one set of issues that this has apocalypse for me. And a lot of the stuff that's keeping me up at night. And listen, I'm not an economist. I don't know a lot. I'm not certainly an ox expert on the American health system. Something like this pandemic is an Apocalypse and it's making visible things in my culture and society that were there all along, that are making them more visible to more people. And I think there's things that Jesus would care about. I was listening to this really interesting story on when COVID, like testing centers popping up all over the

country, these drives through or whatever testing centers. And up all over the country, these drive-through or whatever testing centers. And if you get out of map and just place them on a map of the order and priority and timeline of where they were set up, you can just watch them happen faster in areas where people have higher per capita incomes and slower or still non-existent in neighborhoods, areas where per capita there's lower income. That's not something that actually is surprising, but in a moment of crisis, where you think like people's health,

like why should your income matter? You know, in a moment like this, there's so many inequities in my culture, surfacing the proportions of people who are dying from the virus and their demographics, their race, their income. I mean, it's a damning story on what America says as its dream. And I'm not a political commentator, I'm not trying to be one. It seems to me Jesus would want his followers to care a lot about what is surfacing, about the inequities in American culture. That's the culture I'm in.

That this is making plain and obvious. For anyone with eyes to see, there's probably some people who would have some other, you know, statistics might want to offer a different point of view, but it's really worth looking at. Anyway, that's the stuff that's been keeping me up at night. It's interesting that the best way to fight back this pandemic right now is just a stay at home. And the people who can work from home are predominantly more fluent, white collar type people.

The people out there still delivering our packages and packaging our food and growing our food and harvesting our food and doing all those things that we need are low paying jobs, many of which now have gone away. So many of the people who are now unemployed are in like service jobs that have gone away. Or they're out there just still risking getting infected because they don't have a choice. And so it's time to to your point that, you know, we've always known there's inequities in how we work and different things, but this really just clearly shows how much more dangerous it is to be poor. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah, it's not just an economic bracket issue. In this case, it really is about your risk level of being able to stay healthy. I was reading this interesting article about transit workers, public transit workers, bus drivers and train drivers. And those aren't super high-paying jobs, and they are sustaining the transportation pipeline

for many of the essential jobs in our cities right now. It's just this crazy moment. And I've had this moment too, where after waiting in the line to go into the grocery store, that's Firehouse, I just wanna hug all of the grocery store workers, but it's like it's against the law. But I'm thanking them, you know?

And I'm noticing all these people who I actually see weekly, but I see them now in a way I haven't seen them before. That's a pock-liptic man, at least for me. Yeah. And so, you know, as a follower of Jesus, I think what you said is really important is Jesus and his ethic and the ethic of the kingdom of God is to care for the poor and care for

people who are oppressed or marginalized. Just your neighbor. And your neighbor. And if there's no other time for us to make sure that we have that filter on, is who's my neighbor, who's in need, how can I be generous right now? Especially if you didn't lose a job, but just regardless, like how can we be generous in the way that we live? If that's the only apocalypse that happens, I think that's a beautiful one. Yeah, apocalypse is like Daniels.

That was a very painful period of his life. His dream made him sick. His apocalypse is making him sick with grief when he wakes up from them. And they're not pleasant But you can't unsee what you see when God shows it to you in these apocalypsees and I don't know man my prayer right now to God as I just I don't want Look back on the season and feel like nothing shifted in me because of what I'm seeing and

I pray it for our world and for my neighborhood and my city. And I don't know, man, I think this kind of biblical apocalyptic actually transformed people. Certainly transformed Daniel and I think as the potential to change us to. And so many ways, things have been shaken up, and this is an opportunity for us to see things in a new perspective. And whether we're going to do that through our own wisdom or also somehow have God do it

for us. And those two aren't always different things. They're off on the same thing. Yeah. I think there's so much to learn. Tim, thanks for sharing your heart with things that you're processing. I know everyone's experiencing other things. I'm thinking so much about family

and being a teacher now, my kids. I feel like I'm more married than I've ever been. I feel like that makes any sense. I feel like everything I've taken for granted is now like surfacing in the household and saying like deal with this. And all those are moments for an apocalypse. And I'm sure we all have our own stories.

And so I guess what we wanted to do in this episode is just set the stage for, this is not the end of the world. It might be the end of a world as we've been familiar with it. Yeah. And this may be an apocalypse and hopefully it can be. Biblical apocalyptic is actually the kind of thing that's often painful but it's you need it to see rightly. Yeah that's a good way of putting it. I like how you just said that. I'd love to hear if other people are having what kind of apocalypse people are having that God kind of apocalypse people are having that God is giving to them in light of this.

So if you do wanna share that with us, that'd be wonderful. We don't ever do this, this kind of live, talk about current events, we may never do it again, but we've done it. And next week, we're gonna start into the real beginning of the apocalyptic conversation. And there will be some redundancy, but not a lot. And we're going to dig deep into how

to read the apocalyptic literature. To all of you listeners and supporters of the Bauer project, thank you. Thank you. So many of you have reached out to us in the last month to check in on us and to give us encouragement and support to keep creating the videos and podcasts during this time. So we're grateful we're gonna keep chugging away. Our mission is to help people experience the Bible of the unified story that leads to Jesus. We're a nonprofit animation studio and we're gonna keep doing this as long as you all want us to. So thanks for your support. Hi, this is Paul Mackie.

I'm Tim Stiat from Vancouver, Washington. I first heard about the Bible project about 40 years ago when I was raising Tim and watching him create a world that made sense to him. And then I watched him in Bible school draw out his learning experiences. And so to me this is just an amazing fruition of a lot of his early life culminating together. My favorite thing about the Bible project is how art and the Bible converge in an amazing language. They seem to be two separate ideas, but honestly, art has its origin in the heart of God, and so we find that there are a lot of artistic expressions and biblical expressions that

are saying the same thing. So we believe the Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus. We're a crowdfunded project by people like me and you can find free videos, study notes, podcasts, and more at thebiboproject.com. Alright.