BibleProject - What Does it Mean to be Evil? – Chaos Dragon Q+R 1

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

Did God create disorder and chaos? What does it actually mean to be evil? And how do you tell your kids that in the Bible dragons are actually the “bad guys”? In this episode, Tim and Jon respond to your questions from the first half of the Chaos Dragon series. Thank you to our audience for your incredible questions!View more resources on our website →Timestamps Did God Create Disorder? (2:29)What is God’s Relationship to the Darkness? (15:05)What Does it Mean to be Evil? (21:41)Does God Use the Dragon for His Own Purposes? (33:49)Does the Dragon Theme Give People a Way to Justify Violence? (47:49)How Do You Tell Your Kids Dragons Are the “Bad Guys”? (52:57)Referenced ResourcesInterested in more? Check out Tim’s library here.You can experience our entire library of resources in the BibleProject app, available for Android and iOS.Show Music “Defender (Instrumental)” by TENTSShow produced by Cooper Peltz with Associate Producer Lindsey Ponder, Lead Editor Dan Gummel, and Editors Tyler Bailey and Frank Garza. Mixed by Tyler Bailey. Podcast annotations for the BibleProject app by Hannah Woo. Audience questions compiled by Christopher Maier.Powered and distributed by Simplecast.

Hey, this is Tyler at Bible Project. I record and edit the podcast. We're currently exploring the theme called the Chaos Dragon, which is a huge theme. And so, we decided to do two separate question and response episodes about it. Right now, we're taking questions for the second Q&R and would love to hear from you. Just record your question by November 1st, 2023, and send it into us at infoabiboproject.com.

Let us know your name and where you're from. Try to keep the question to about 20 seconds, and please transcribe your question infoabivalproject.com. Let us know your name and where you're from. Try to keep the question to about 20 seconds and please transcribe your question when you email it in. That's a really big help to our team. We're so looking forward to hearing from you. Here's the episode. Hey Tim! Hey John, hi! We're in the middle of the series on the chaos dragon. Yes. And we're going to do a question and response episode because we've gotten so many amazing questions.

Yeah. Come in already. Lots. Lots and lots. It's wonderful. It's wonderful. So we've gone on quite a journey so far and we've got a lot of material to get through. But let's stop and let's see kind of how people are processing this. Yeah. One of the major sets of themes in the questions was around the meaning of the chaos symbol, meaning of the waters. What are we actually talking about? The meaning of the dragon as a symbol and what it actually talking about. So we should, since word can kind of talk real time, we recorded this much earlier in the year 2023. Recorded the Chaos Dragon. The Chaos Dragon conversations. Now we're near the tail end of 2023. And you're all listening along. Yeah. But one thing that made the Chaos Dragon conversations

unique was John, you and I gained a lot of clarity about how these symbols work and how we wanted to describe them in the video. And going back, conversations one through ten have a whole bunch of ambiguities in them that you discerned before I did. And that you were constantly sniffing out and asking questions. And so episode 11 was a crucial like watermark kind of conversation where we developed a new level of clarity about the symbol of the dragon, at least in our conversation. Right. So a lot of people ask questions for clarity because that episode hadn't come out yet. Hopefully, if you're following along and you got to that episode, hopefully that helped. Yeah, and then if not, hopefully this Q and Arcan helped.

Okay. We'll hit it one more time. Yep, yep. So we got a bunch of questions that are gonna begin like that. And then as always, I'm looking for the most repeated question. And an interesting one, so we'll get to it, is about the meaning of that bronze serpent that

most this makes in the wilderness and numbers, chapter 21, Jesus refers to it. Yeah. What's going on with that? Great. So all that and more in this Q and I episode, should we start? Let's do it. Let's do it. Sweet.

We're going to start with a question from Chris in South Africa. Hi, John. Hi, Tim. My name is Chris and I Chris in South Africa. Hi, John. Hi, Tim. My name is Chris, and I'm from South Africa. In the podcast, you mentioned that creation was first in the state of disorder and then God formed it into a state of order. So my question is, did God create this order then? And if so, why?

Because of the clear antagonist of the story, is the serpent, and it's his goal to bring creation back into a set of disorder, then why did God create the world instead of disorder in the first place? Yeah. Yeah. If God created disorder, that is a great question. Do you think this question gets us too far out of the Bible and into just philosophy?

Or do you think the Bible gives us a really good grounding to answer this question? Yeah. I think the biblical authors are doing heavy-duty philosophical lifting by means of these stories and symbols. Okay, let's get into it then. Yeah. God create disorder. Well, I think it's fatically no.

Not because such an idea is offensive. It's an incoherent thing to say, because for the biblical authors, disorder is non-creation. It's the opposite of creation. So, creation means to create a realm of structure, order, life, stable patterning, in which there's for the biblical authors, dry land, for humans to live on. So this was a really helpful introduction to concepts of creation and nothingness and disorder, even if you don't know anything about the ancient backgrounds of the Bible. It's the work by John Walton, the Lost World of Genesis 1.

Yes, a bunch of books in his Lost World series, but the one in Genesis 1, helps modern Westerners imagine a way of viewing reality where you don't have a concept of no thing. Your basic categories are disorder or order of stability of instability. Walton calls it his technical term for it is a functional ontology. Ontology is a philosophical word meaning discussions about the nature of being and the nature of existence.

And in a modern ontology, we tend to assume that creation means bringing physical material into being. Something this. Something exists if it has material reality. And that material reality is in contrast in our modern imaginations into nothing, nothing. So, yeah, yeah. So, that's our modern categories.

There's something which we think of as maybe the material universe and once we drill into that we realize the material universe is... Very fluid thing. This weird quantum thing. Yeah. So that would be a materialist ontology. Okay. And then so nothingness means the absence of anything.

Even though it's actually almost impossible for us to imagine. We have a category for that. That's what we mean by nothingness. We mean by nothingness. But the ancients didn't think that. They didn't use that language or use those concepts. For them, the binary, like opposition, was between creation, which was order. And the opposite of creation is, and the biblical authors primarily use images to talk about the opposite of creation.

And there's a network of them. One is darkness. The other is the waters. The abyss. The abyss waters the Tahom of Genesis 1, verse 2. Or the desert. The wilderness. The wilderness. And those are the three chaos realms, or the three realms of disorder, that if you look in the literature of Israel's neighbors, and you can go south, Egypt, you can go to Canaanite or to Mesopotamian literature, and it's a very common trope to begin creation stories by describing a disordered land with the desert or with the waters. Okay, so the desert, the abysmal waters, the darkness, they represent this idea of disorder. Yeah.

Yet they conjure up images of settings. Of something material in our imaginations. It's something material imaginations. And so then the question becomes who created that. How did that come to be? Right, right. And that's a question here. Okay, if there is a disordered realm, you know, it's not the wilderness,

it's not darkness, it's not the abysmal waters, but that's how we can get to it. That's right. Well, it is something. So then who created it? Or am I wrong? It's not something. It's not something.

It's actually nothing. It's the opposite of creation. Okay. Let's just, let's use our modern imaginations. If we, let's say, we use's the opposite of creation. Okay. Let's just use our modern imaginations. Let's use the materialist ontology. So if we're saying God created something out of nothing, then for us it's incoherent to say, well who created nothing? It's a contradiction in terms to say who created nothing.

Well nothing is the opposite of creation. Creation is the thing that's the opposite of nothing. Right. So that's why it's a contradiction in terms to say who created disorder. Who created the disorder? Who created the dark chaos waters? Well, that's the opposite of creation.

So. But it feels like something to me. To our imaginations. Okay. Or something. Okay. But that's because we have a different way of imagining what existence is.

And so, for the biblical authors, the way for the opening line, in the beginning God created the skies and the land. If you take that as a narrative action that God created everything, in that moment, however, longer, whatever, then when you come to verse two, if you take that to be the next narrative action,

now the land was wild and waste and darkness was over the surface of the deep. If that's how you interpret the relation of verse one and two, you do have a problem because you're like, oh God created everything, verse one. But now everything's in a state disorder. So God created the disorder in which she's going to burn the order. There's a whole bunch of interpretations that fall if you take that view. If you take the view that I think is more persuasive and is actually not even just a widely held view, it's a consensus view if you look in scholarly treatments of the relationship of verse one and two. That verse one gives some kind of summary introduction to the whole of the chapter.

This is what you're going to read about, God creating the skies in the land. In the beginning, God created the skies in the land. Wow, amazing. I want to tell me what the title of the book is. That's right. And so, verse 2, the land was wild and was in darkness, this was over the surface of the abysmal waters. That is a depiction of nothingness.

So, if I were to write this in modern vocabulary, let me tell you a story about in the beginning, God created the entire cosmos and universe that we know. Okay, so in the beginning, God showed up and there was nothing. Mm-hmm. God began with nothing. He began with nothing. And out of that nothingness,

he said, let there be something. And God spoke. And he spoke. And he created something. That's how I would tell it. But the ancients say, well, there was the to-home, the abyss. It was wild and waste. But what they mean is nothingness. Yeah. And even to say the English sentence, there was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's hard for us. So it's hard for us to imagine other ways of viewing reality. But God did create the dragon.

Okay, so here's the thing. This is where the biblical authors pull their move. Okay. So in ancient literatures around, the dragon slang myth was one of the most popular tales, most well-known stories. And so in almost every other version of the Dragon's Lang myth, this was episode two, where I tried to summarize some of this, is that the Dragon and the Sea are almost equal symbols. The Sea represents the disorder of the nothingness. That's the T'Home that we see Genesis 1 and verse 2.

Yeah, and then the C monster is a way of depicting that nothingness taking on an aggressive stance towards creation, which means it can crawl up out of the ocean. The Godzilla. Yeah, the Godzilla. Yes, actually. It is Godzilla. Godzilla is working this trope. But it's essentially what it does in the land and how it works is equal to what the waters represent. So you can talk about the waters of the flood

overwhelming creation, or you can talk about the sea monster on dry land. What the biblical authors want to do, is the waters retain their cosmic chaos, simple meaning. It gives them a boundary. God puts a boundary on it. But the biblical author also wanna say that there is no creature in heaven and earth

that isn't ultimately subject to God's will. So to whatever degree chaos becomes a creature, that thing is God's. Yep. So it is ultimately subordinate to gods will in some way. Unless God decides to set up creation such that it goes on a journey from nothingness into union with God's own beauty and allows a degree of freedom for other wills to exist in the world.

And this is what's happening in the seven-day creation narrative with the rulers above and then the rulers below. I was so happy with the clarity, I feel clear. We achieved with the idea that the dragon and the biblical author's minds is like a costume. It's when a creature with a will and intelligence puts on or decides to take upon itself the power of chaos. The power to do what is good in its own eyes and so becomes an agent or an unleashes chaos on the land. And when creatures do that, the biblical authors use the dragon symbol applied to heavenly rulers, their spiritual beings that do that, or to human beings who do that.

So the biblical authors have taken up the C-serpent and reappropriated it in light of their conviction that there is nothing in heaven on earth that's actually arrival to Yahweh. But nothingness is arrival to creation because we came from nothingness, which means that we could potentially return back to it. And we can actually unleash nothingness on each other. And so does that? Yeah. Is that roughly the

the really quick answer is God did not create disorder. He created order. Yeah. And anything that counters that order to drive it back to disorder, that's the chaos dragon. Yeah. The biblical authors use the symbol of the dragon to describe how intelligent creatures that have a will. The God allows an agency and will in creation when they unleash chaos and reduce it back to disorder. The Biblical authors use the dragon symbol to describe those creatures, which is why rebel spiritual beings

are described as snakes and dragons. And it's why rebel human beings are described as snakes and dragons, which means that they have changed the meaning of the dragon symbol within the biblical story. That's not primarily the meaning of the dragon symbolism in ancient and Eastern literature. So they've pulled a fast one. They've, they're innovators. Yeah. Yeah. But in day five, when the dragon when the dragons put in the sea, that humans don't exist yet. Oh, nor do this for the beings. Are there no spirits? No, they, yeah,

they do. Oh, well, so they were back to the dragon-taming strategies. Okay. They've reduced what is in their neighbor's literature. The rival god. The rival, Deidre, or cosmic rival, to the creator God and... Just another creature. Yeah, Robert Dacquira, a dangerous one. And it's with Genesis 3, then, that the dragon or reptile symbol gets applied to a spiritual being. And then, in the next story, with Cain, he becomes an agent of that spiritual being, and you get the image with cane then of people acting like snakes. Yeah.

Right. So, hopefully that clarifies Chris. And actually we got another question that is looking for clarity on maybe some of these earlier ambiguities. And this comes from Danielle in Kansas. Hi, this is Danielle from Kansas. If the chaos dragon is a darkness, is the darkness a created being, or an eternal force of some kind, and if it is an eternal force of some kind,

what is its relationship to God the Father? Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Daniel. This is an important question. Important question to clarify what kind of God is being talked about in the Bible. But there's this really sophisticated move happening here that's kind of hard to wrap your minds around. So we've talked around it. It's talked about really directly. God created

order. He didn't create disorder. He created order. But there is an opportunity for that order to become disorder. And that opportunity can be God's creatures, humans and spiritual beings, Creatures, humans and spiritual beings can become agents to do that. And so that opportunity and the agents that pursue that opportunity are the ones creating disorder. That's right. Creating darkness. Yeah. In other words, darkness is an image for nothingness or disorder, darkness, the chaotic waters or the desert. Those are realms or

images to describe the nothingness. So the cast dragon is not darkness. What the cast dragon is, is it's a symbol used to describe when intelligent image bears of God, spiritual or human, behave in ways that reduce the order of creation back into nothingness. Okay. Yes. And then at a level below that, doesn't it also just represent the fact that in reality, I'm an experienced chaos and darkness, you know, like the things wrought, the ocean will pull you in, destroy you if you're hanging out in the wrong spot. Sure. And we are all returning to the dust. And we are outside of Eden. Yeah. And we are returning to the dust. Outside of Eden.

And so that is that de-creation force. So that de-creation force. Call it darkness. Call it whatever. It does exist in some real way. Well, yeah. It's a parasite on existence. Maybe think of it this way.

So again, we're back to the biblical authors doing heavy duty philosophical work. So their most basic assumption is the meaning of the God of the Bible's name. Yahweh, he is. He is the one who is. Yahweh's existence doesn't depend on any other thing, just he is the I.M. So that God is reality. So whatever creation is, it's something that came into existence out of nothingness, and that existence is conditional, dependent. And that like you and I have not always been here. Like our existence depends on all the contingent things that came before us.

And we're... So, for something to exist and to share in ultimate existence, it needs to enter into some kind of union with God. That's the basis of the biblical story. And so you're saying then what I experience is just normal, which is that death drives us all to the ground. You're saying that's a... that's a parasite on reality. It's the result of what happens when creatures are not in union,

participating in God's infinite life. We are coming out of the nothingness. We live short little lives of borrowed existence and return back to the nothingness. That's the fate of a creature that's not in union with God. I'm just trying to take the logic of the biblical story of the few first two pages and kind of paint the picture. But yet God's creatures are made to participate in God's own life, which is why the biblical story ends with a depiction of heaven and earth

with God's creatures and God's own life. Yeah, and there is no sea together. And there is no darkness. Exactly. And a dragon is slain. Exactly, right? Dragon's gone. It's all garden.

It's all light. And it's no more ocean. And so what? So no more disorder, no more nothingness, everything has become and has sustained into its full thing. So the darkness is not a rival to God. It's not a created thing. It's the opposite of creation. And what God wills is to bring something out of the nothing so that something can share in the beauty and gift of existence and share in God's own life.

That's the arc of the biblical story. So whatever the darkness is, whatever the cast, waters are, as C.S. Lewis famously said, Parasite. Did he also have the shadow metaphor? Oh, yeah, play that out. Well, what is a shadow? Is it a thing? Yeah, right.

No, it's the opposite of a thing. It's derivative of a real thing, and it has the shape of a real thing, but there's nothing actually to it. Yeah, it is nothing, but we call it a thing. And so that is the idea I play. Yeah, exactly. That's going to get us into the next question. But I appreciate your question, Daniel,

because there are religious worldviews where evil and good, order and disorder are rival powers at work. Constantly in a cycle back and forth, and neither one has ultimate power over the other. That's very different than how the biblical authors and Jesus see reality, which is that what is fundamental is goodness, that is God, and that all creation is on a trajectory to participate in God's goodness and what we experience as evil and death and disorder is creation being like

recalcitrant, rebellious, refusing to participate in the thing that God is inviting us in. And God being patient. And God being very patient and letting us sit outside of Eden as long as we want to, apparently. Okay. Andrew is wondering how these images relate to conversations about the nature of evil. We haven't talked about evil. Yeah, evil. Andrew, help us talk about evil. Hi, I'm Andrew, and I live in Washington, DC. The Chaos Creatures series introduces a range of language to describe the forces of chaos

and disorder. To what extent are these ways of talking about what followers of Jesus have traditionally called evil? Is being an agent of chaos different from evil? And has your research into chaos creatures given you a more nuanced understanding of evil? Thank you Andrew. One of the things I've heard from a number of people was how helpful your rabbit story was with your son. Oh, when it scratches. When it scratches. Yeah.

You're like, the rabbit's not being evil, but the scratch is bad. Yeah, yes, it's bad. It's bad. Yeah, okay, and why is it bad? Well, because it injured you. And now your relationship with this rabbit is, you know, not the same, you gotta be more careful.

So it's bad. You're bleeding, but the rabbit wasn't being to be more careful. So it's bad. You're bleeding, but the rabbit wasn't being evil. The rabbit was just being the rabbit, and it has sharp claws. And I guess in the same way, it's like, if I swim in the ocean and the ocean drowns me, was the ocean evil or is just drownings bad. Right.

And so that was helpful for a lot of people to have more nuance. Not everything that's bad is evil. Yeah, we reserve the word evil, at least in modern English, to describe the intention or the effects of an intelligent creature. Something that has moral intelligence

to choose to do something that has a bad result when they could have chosen to do something that a good result. In other words, it depends on the agent's ability to discern between good and bad. And it's the result of a choice, and then we call it evil. What's fascinating, for the biblical authors, they, in the beginning of the biblical story,

they use one word to describe what you could say as both. Mm, raw. Raw, Hebrew word raw, which is the binary opposite of Toe, which is good. So, raw could mean bad, and raw can also mean evil. Yeah, but even raw gets first introduced in Genesis 3, the tree of knowing good and bad. And it depends, it kind of like assumes you already know what that might mean. Tove and raw.

Yeah, so you have to go back and look at the development of the word tov or good in Genesis 1, which we've done many times over the years. But God assigns goodness when he establishes a new boundary of order or implants within creation's order, the ability to reproduce life and to flourish and to generate more life and abundance. In the word good, it describes seven times God saw that what he made, and it was good. And then the first time you get a concept of the opposite of good, it doesn't use the word raw. It's when God says, and God saw the human alone that it was not good. Not good.

Not good. Not tove. So the opposite of tove is a human alone who can't fulfill the purpose for which God has made the human, which is to be fruitful and multiply. So God splits the atom and that whole thing. So there, the opposite of good is when there's something that prevents a creature from fulfilling the destiny and purpose for which God made it. That's the opposite of good. In other words, that's bad. It's teaching you what the opposite of good is.

When a creature can't fulfill its purpose, which means that goodness is when a creature can experience all that God made it to be an experience. And the opposite of goodness is not a thing. It's the absence of goodness. Not good is the absence of goodness. Not good is the absence of goodness. So that when you get to this tree in Genesis 3, what God says, you can know the difference between how to fulfill your purpose and how to thwart your purpose. Knowing the difference between what is good and bad is about making distinction. Hmm, discernment.

Discernment between that will lead to the flourishing and fulfillment of my purpose as human. It will lead to the absence of good, the opposite of that purpose, some other purpose. And what God is saying is, listen, I'm really good, I can teach you. I'll teach you. Let me teach you. And the first thing I want to teach you is to depend on my wisdom and not take it into your own hands. Yeah.

So that's the portrait. So evil, the same word, you- There's no Hebrew word for evil. Well, a more developed vocabulary kind of evolves as you go throughout the biblical story. But the basic category is teaching you that if the rabbit scratching you, evolved as you go throughout the biblical story. But the basic category is teaching you that if the rabbit scratching you, the tree not producing fruit, and the human stealing fruit to keep it from other humans, all of those can be described with one word in Hebrew, which is raw.

Okay. Bad. Whereas in English, we have different words. We might call it like a tragedy a natural tragedy a disaster. Yeah to describe an earthquake to distinguish it from Evil which is we'd say like a human murdering so as being an agent of chaos different from evil And I guess in one sense yes being an agent of chaos is definitely bad But what was your intention? Yes, intention. That's exactly right. Because every day I'm an agent of chaos, this has actually been really helpful in my marriage.

It's like, what's... What's... Are you every day an agent of chaos? Yeah, I told me to. Totally. I constantly feel. And that's sometimes how I experience other members in my family.

And for some reason, it's human condition to immediately go, you are meaning to do that. You are more trying to create chaos in my life. We assume the attention. We assume the attention. When really they're just trying to cope. They're just trying their best strategies to make their life work. They're not trying to cope. They're just trying their best strategies to make their life work. They're not trying to create chaos for me.

And they're actually probably creating a version of order. For themselves. Within their own experience. Yeah. Whether it was a good strategy or not. Yeah. Totally. So there is some nuance here.

There is this clear moment though, where the Biblical authors are like, look, the monster's there, you can rule it like, and if you don't, you were, that's kind of evil. Yeah, but there's this ambiguity, I think that we need to give more space for it when it's like, I'm offended by someone. I don't have to jump straight to there being evil.

Yes, you know, not to bring it forward to sermon on the mount, but a little bit to bring it forward to sermon on the mount. This is surely what Jesus is going after in Matthew 7. We talk about, don't judge. Or you will be judged. So then you walk away from that short line going, oh, I guess I'll never evaluate another person's actions ever. And then the next parable is about, well, about the spec and the log and the eye.

A judging moment. Which assumes that you are gonna see specs in other people's eyes and help them. And this purpose is not, don't ever help people. It's recognized that you're likely going to project your own issues onto other people. Yeah. And that probably you should just assume your issues

are way bigger than the other persons. Yeah. So do your work first before you try and help other people. And they probably should just assume your issues are way bigger than the other persons. So do your work first before you try and help other people. And there's more to it than that. But that's take the log out of your own eye. Yeah, that's right. But the default is that we tend to project a higher degree of intention on the other people's actions that result in raw, when in fact that may not be what they were trying to accomplish. And think for the biblical authors, their way of honoring that within the wisdom tradition of the biblical laws is all the murder laws are all these case laws about intention. Let's say in Deuteronomy, let's say two guys are chopping wood and the

axe head like flies off and strikes another guy and he dies. So that's a totally different situation than if he was like, hey, let's go chop some wood and then you hide behind a tree and then chop guys head off. Like obviously, and we have legal categories for that man slaughter, accidental injury versus meditative murder. But it's all about intention. And what is intention? Intention is an expression of a human who has made value distinctions and said,

some purpose or end is good. And in the name of that good, I think that it's probably like that that justifies doing this other thing, which might include killing human to accomplish that good, in which case all human behavior is based on some vision of what is good. Like humans don't actually... Yeah, everyone's trying to get to a good life. Yes, very rare is the human who is actually trying to do evil, really. And even you could probably philosophically argue that for a human

whose moral compass has become so distorted, even if they're doing evil, but in their distorted moral economy, they're doing evil because they think evil is the good for them. You know, like we're all trying to do the good. Yeah. It's just we have really different value systems of the good for them. You know, like we're all trying to do the good. Yeah. It's just we have really different value systems of the good. What a dangerous place to be in though. Yes. To mix those up. Mm-hmm. And how easy is it to do? It becomes really obvious when it gets really crazy. Yes. Intense. Yeah. But it becomes very easy to be deceived when it's simple. I've had

Yeah, but it becomes very easy to be deceived when it's when it's simple. I've had I've I've had those moments where I'm so frustrated with someone and I just feel like they've wronged me so much or something that I actually have a moment of thinking like how I could get back at them. And that series of thoughts. I'm trying to think of how to keep them from fulfilling purpose. And that, like it's kind of squarely in the realm of evil, like an evil thought. Yeah, sure. Yes. And underneath that is a desire for something good, namely a world where things are just

and right. Right. So I'm not having that thought because I am inherently evil. Yeah, this is what's underneath the long tradition in Jewish and Christian thought that evil isn't a thing. It's very real. Not saying it's not real, but if you look at its nature, its nature is always a deprivation or an absence of what is good or a taking away of what is good. And it's usually done in the name of some vision of good, however distorted. So that back to CS Lewis's image, the evil is essentially a parasite on the good. It's like a shadowy parasite, which is why the waters, the chaos waters, or the sea dragon is such a great metaphor for creatures who in their

distorted value systems, you know, spread death, chaos, raw, or just disrupted relationships. You know, most humans are going to kill another human, but we will, with different levels of intention, deprive the people around us of good, through our actions. And those are manifestations of the Chaos Monster, to use the biblical symbolism. So I guess this is a long answer to your question Andrew. Yes, the Chaos Monster and the Chaos and Disorder, I think don't just help us understand

the biblical concept of evil. I think they are. This is understand the biblical concept of evil. I think they are. Like, this is how the Bible is trying to teach us about what is good and what is bad. It's through these stories and symbols. Cool. Hey, can we talk about the bronze snake? Yes, let's talk about Numbers 21 and to do that, let's hear from Ajika in Washington, D.C. Hi, Tim and John. My name is Ajika. I'm from Washington, DC. My question is, in Numbers 21, God instructs Moses to play snakes on a staff

and hold it above the people. So if they look upon it, they will be healed. I'm wondering if this is a moment of God using the snake or the sea dragon as an agent for him rather than an agent of chaos. Let me know what you think and thanks for all you do. Mm, yeah. You're onto it. What a mysterious image that we've had with us in our Bibles that Jesus even refers to. Yes, yeah.

The bronze snake on the staff that Moses uses. That's right. Yeah, Jesus brings it up in his conversation with Nicodemus. Mm, that's right. In the Gospel of John 3. Right after the most well-known Bible verse. Yeah, it's true. Where's it right before?

Yeah, it's right before the John 3.16. He's kind of chiding Nicodemus for not understanding images of rebirth and recreation from his Bible. He's like, what? You're a teacher of Israel. If you are into the Hebrew Bible, this is your jam. And why, why are you? And then he goes on to say, you know, no one has ascended up into the skies, except the one who descended from the skies, the Son of Adam. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so must the Son of Adam be lifted up so that whoever believes in him will have eternal life.

So the Son of Man is the way Jesus refers to himself, and so he's saying, I am the serpent that Jesus lifted up in the wilderness. Now that story real quick. Yeah, yeah. That story reminds us what's going on. It's the last in a series of stories where the Israelites are going on the camping trip, road trip, gombad from Mount Sinai to the Promised Land. It's told in the middle third of Numbers, chapters 11 to 21.

And it begins a section of seven stories where the Israelites rebel, grumble, and they resist God's efforts to get them through the wilderness and keep them alive and bring them into the garden. Speaking of not knowing the difference, doing good and bad, God's trying to do good for them and they keep thinking that God's trying to do bad. So the first and the last stories are symmetrically matched. Fire comes out from God and consumes the edges of the camp, this is at the beginning of chapter 11, and the place is called burning because there was a burning in the camp. The last story, the seventh story is the Israelites grumble against God for bringing

them out into the wilderness, and so God sends fiery snakes. So it's the word sarafim, which means snakes that have a venomous bite that makes it feel like your skin's on fire. But it's the word burn. It's the root word for this word. So it begins and ends with fire. And the snakes bite the people. And the snakes are disorder. The snakes are chaos creatures from the desert crawling up out of the underworld, from holes in the ground. So in one case, it's the fire that comes and Moses cries out to God and God stops the fire. Here, God sends fiery venomous snakes that crawl up out of the chaos realm. And can I just stop real quick?

When we say God sends, you had a great moment, a few episodes ago just helping us just remember that God lets creation go back into disorder. And so we get this language of God sends the flood or the fire, you can kind of get this image of like, a God who's like, I'm going to punish. I'm maliciously like retribution where the biblical framework is more that God sustains everything. And at some point God allows de-creation to take back over.

Yeah. Yeah. If you're trekking through the wilderness, but you've got the fiery glory protecting you of God. The snakes are going to stay away, but if the people are consistently saying, why'd you bring us out here? We don't want you with us anyway, Yahweh. Let's get our own leader. Let's go back to Egypt. It's giving you what you want. Then Yahweh says, okay, I usually hold back the snakes, but if you don't want me to be who I am today, then that's totally the image.

Also, when you remember, the Israelites in the wilderness are people called out from among the nations to be God's unique covenant partners in a kingdom of priests, and that singling out what God did to demonstrate his character to them in the Exodus from Egypt, in forgiving them for the sin of the golden calf, like all that's in the past. My point is that the wilderness narratives and numbers show God as being very more severe in his responses to the people's rebellion than a four-mount Sinai. But they're uniquely culpable in a way. So they've entered into a covenant commitment with a God who said, listen, let me teach you the way to life. If you don't follow the way to life, you're going to kill yourselves. It sounds familiar.

Sounds like on the day you eat, of the tree of snow, and good and bad, you're going gonna die. Don't do that. And if you listen to my word, you'll live. Like that. That's the storyline here. So the people don't listen. They reject their God and so they end up with snakes biting them. That's the end of the story. They all die of snakes. So the people come and say, oh my gosh, we've sinned, we've spoken against the Lord and against you. Moses so intercede for us and this is so Moses goes and does what he did. What he's been doing all along in the wilderness. And so God's instruction of Moses is to make one of these fire snakes, but to make a bronze version of it and the word bronze

rhymes with word snake, a nakhash nakhoshit. A fiery nakhash nakhoshit. Yeah, and then he is to set up this bronze snake on a staff and hold it up. So all of a sudden, we're mixing together the symbolism of Moses' staff, which previously was a... It's been both a snake and a sea monster? Yeah.

That he used to hold up. That's right. It could front Pharaoh and confront the sea. And do you remember our puzzle when we're considering the splitting of the sea? Yeah. Was that he uses the staff. Right. That represents the sea monster.

Yeah. But God's human image of God is using a symbol of the sea monster to split the tame the sea monster split the chaos waters Using the dragon against the dragon using the dragon against the dragon and so similarly here now the dragon in the form of these snakes is the source of death but then Moses puts a version right in image of the snake on a staff and holds it up. And then anyone who looks at the staff with the snake are saved from death. So it's another image of Moses, the image of God. Look up to death to be saved from death.

And then, okay. And so here's this crazy riddle. This story is a full on riddle. That's why it comes last. It's really short, but because you're meant to meditate on its hyperlink relationships to all the stories that came before. To be safe from death, you need to gaze upon death. Yeah. And the same God who will hand people over to death, if they refuse his gift of life is the one who wants to give life.

And so the death is like it's on the leash. Death can only do its thing if people let death overcome them through their choices. Okay, but the riddle remains. But the riddle remains. Why not put a symbol of life on the staff? Mm-hmm, right? Mm-hmm. It's a symbol of death on the staff? Mm-hmm, right? Mm-hmm.

It's a symbol of death. Yeah, that's right. The thing that you associate with death, God turns into the vehicle of life. But that's also true for the sea waters. The sea waters that are split with the staff that was the sea dragon. Those waters are deadly.

Like, they'll kill you. But they actually become the vehicle of life. Path of life. This is the same thing of what the great fish represents in Jonah. The fish is belly. Yeah, the thing that normally kills people getting swallowed by sea beast becomes a strange vehicle of life. And Jesus uses both the belly of Jonah's fish and this killer snake that becomes a vehicle of life

to describe what's going to happen to him when he dies. Okay, and so yeah. Yeah, so then Jesus says, basically, I am that. Yeah. That thing, that symbol. Yep. So what does Jesus mean? He's not death.

Jesus is not death. No, no. What does it mean to gaze upon Jesus? It's to gaze upon the snake? Yeah, let's see. So just as the snake Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man will be lifted up.

That's code language in John. To be crucified. To be lifted up and exalted on the exalt. Jesus is gonna experience death. Yes. And we need to gaze upon that. That's right. So the snake represents both death and the gift of life simultaneously, because God is the one who can take away or give life.

And so, in the same way, humans unleashing their evil, becoming agents of the snake to take the life of the Son of Adam, will actually in God's plan and purpose become the way that he gives life. Moses is holding a symbol of the chaos, creature. Jesus is like nailed to it. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and remember what we're talking about is an innocent man a innocent man who was publicly executed by an imperial right occupier because of a completely rigged trial. And the cross represents both the fruit of the most distorted human structures of power and injustice, and they are simultaneously condemned by God and turned into the vehicle through which God regifts eternal life to his world. It's remarkable. It's a remarkable claim to make.

The thing that you associate with death becomes God's power. The way to life. The way to life. Path of life. Yeah, and Then Jesus will say, you know take up your cross Mm-hmm, you know you said something to me this summer that I haven't been able to shake and we It was in coffee. Yeah, wow. There's a context of Talking about AI and Artificial intelligence. Well, we were just talking about how um,, you know, some people have this vision of the potential of AI to create what we would think of as eternal life.

Right. Solving mortality. What if our genes could be changed? What if we create nuclear vision and resources are abundant and we all just learn to share and heal our bodies and like there we are. Does new creation come that way? That was kind of that conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember it now. But what you said was the vision of the Bible is that the way to life is through death. Only way to life, to true eternal life now is through death. That's the way.

And here we have that symbol. Jesus is the one who said that. I was quoting Jesus on that point. Just to me, this is not on the authority of Tim. This is, you know, whoever wants to follow me must take it for a cross. That kind of thing.

Okay. That's why it's landed. But we'll not cannot inherit the kingdom of God. But the way to life is through death. Yeah. So here's a symbol of death. Yeah. Look up and be saved through death.

That's right. Yeah. This story in Numbers 21 is so deep. It's a riddle. It's surely why Jesus quotes it. So ask me and let's have this conversation in another year, and I think we'll have discern another couple of layers here. But we're also meditating on the snake in the garden

that was a creature of God, but became a vehicle of death. But then, through the riddle, the God says to the woman, that's the seed of the woman that will come and crush the head of the snake while also being struck by the snake on its heel. Even there, the deadly strike of the snake on the heel of the seed of the woman actually is simultaneously part of the seed of the woman's victory over the snake, doesn't life. So right from the beginning of the biblical story, what the snake unleashed is going to become

the vehicle through which God restores life. And the... He's got to go through the belly of the chaos, could you? Yeah. The ways that we have taken the agency given to us by God to discern between good and bad and the upside down distorted nightmare of good and bad that we've created in human history. That's all got to go through, it's all got to die so that it can discover the real life

that God hasn't store for us. Which doesn't mean it's all like, whatever the resurrection means, it's something of what we know as reality now will pass through. Life is on the other side of death. But also a lot of it's got to die for us to be able to participate in the gift of life that God wants to give. We're kind of back to the first question.

We have got a great question from Rebecca in Kentucky. This is Rebecca from Kentucky. I'm concerned that this theme could lead down a dangerous path of its taken out context. By saying that individual human beings can become actual chaos, dragons, you might be giving people a convenient label for their political enemies, which could be co-opted to increase hatred or even to baptize violence. Without getting into politics, could you address this from a biblical perspective? Yeah, I'm really glad.

Yes, that question was raised. Yeah, thank you, Rebecca. Super important question. Yeah, and I feel that tension with the story of David and Goliath while it's such a cool story. And then the imagery gets even amped up more and we think of Goliath like a snake.

Or remember the stories we looked at of Cicera, the captain, sure, of the armies that Barack and Debrafon. Right. What a shame if those stories become fuel for me then to go, okay, who are the people who are snakes in my life? And I'm gonna go chop their heads off. Yeah. And not just what a shame.

Let's just name the fact that these stories have been used and inspired people to do exactly that. Okay. Through about 200 years of their kind of interpretive history. We just have to name like these stories have been read. Yeah. That way. And so what we need to then ask is what is a biblical perspective on that? And so that's a long conversation, but I probably the most succinct way to go, that if you're a follower of Jesus and you care about the Bible and what it says, it's, I think, morally irresponsible and impossible to derive a view from this that some people just are the seed of the snake and they need to have their head smashed

by other humans. Jesus explicitly rejected that view. And Jesus actually called people seed of the snake. When he saw down the Baptist and he did certain religious leaders that accused him of being in league with the powers of evil. So it's not to say that people can't become chaos agents. They can. Yes, but the point is that we all can. Yeah. Like that's one thing. The cane.

But other people a little bit more than me. But that's what's so wonderful about like the David and Glyast story, for example, is that David becomes a dragon slayer. But then also he becomes a dragon in his own family with the story of David and Bathsheba, and he actually becomes like Cain to Bathsheba's husband. So the biblical authors, what do you say, they take, no, they don't play favorites. They're trying to show how Eonia and every human can and will be co-opted by the dragon at some point.

So it levels the playing field. human, can and will be co-opted by the dragon at some point. Right. So it levels the playing field. And then when you say Jesus explicitly, love your enemy. Yes. And then Jesus explicitly forbid his followers to use violence as the means for spreading and caring forward the kingdom of God. Even violence with good mouth, like whatever we would call propaganda or like just spewing hatred towards someone.

That's right. Love your enemies. Bless them. Do not curse them. Whatever that means, it means not. Calling someone a fool is bad as murdering them. Yeah, that's right. So that's one angle.

Okay. Is to say, if I'm a follower of Jesus and I'm reading the Bible, whatever meaning I'm going to get out of these dragon slang stories of a human to another human in the Hebrew Bible, it should not lead me to label other humans and think I need to somehow deal with them through physical force that explicitly goes against the teachings of Jesus. And not just physical force. And also, thank you, even widening the forms of violence to verbal abuse and contempt.

I mean, Jesus said we are to love our enemies. Actually love them. And engage them in creative, non-violent forms of resisting whatever destructive behavior they're unleashing in the world. So that's one piece. Another kind of important way to go at that is Paul the Apostle's line in Ephesians where he says, our enemy, that is enemies of a follower Jesus, are not flesh and blood. But rather, principalities and powers and the rulers, he gives a list of spiritual powers of this present darkness. So in Paul's mind, you want to crush some heads? Yeah, pray.

Crush some spiritual heads. Yeah, pray and love your neighbor and do justice and goodness in the name of Jesus. And your crush on head of the snake. And serve the poor. And be unified across boundary lines. That's how you crush the head of the snake. Nice.

So thank you, Rebecca. That's super important. It requires some interpretive sophistication to know how to read these violent dragon slang stories in the Hebrew Bible with a messianic lens. But I think that's what it means to read the Bible as a Christian. And we'll get there a little bit more in the series. We will.

Yes. Okay. Thank you, Rebecca. Last, but not there a little bit more in the series. We will. Yes. Okay. Thank you, Rebecca. Last but not least, let's end with actually a really sweet question from Colin in Vancouver. Hi, Bible project. My name is Colin and I'm from Vancouver, Canada.

My five-year-old daughter loves dragons. Some of her favorite movies are How to Train Your Dragon and Raya in the Last Dragon. So how do I break it to her that the Bibles that count of dragons are chaos monsters? And what is your response to more positive receptions of dragons than the wider culture around the world? Yeah.

I know. What a wonderful question. The same thing for surfers in the ocean. Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah, sure. The fact that there's no longer any sea. Yeah, then the Bible was like, I got we're getting rid of that thing. What? That's my favorite part of creation. Yeah, sure the fact that there's no longer any see yeah Yeah, the Bible was like I were getting rid of that thing what? That's my favorite part of creation. Yeah totally getting rid of the way yeah calling my kids loved those movies too

Mm-hmm, so I agree Yeah, so how do we break it to our kids that dragons are Entirely evil in the Bible. Are they are they entirely evil in the Bible? There's the serpent and Isaiah that the kid plays with. Yeah, but that's a pretty defanged. It's a defanged. It's still a serpent. Still a serpent? Yeah, okay.

All right. That's a good one. That's true. Tamed a dragon there. Moses tamed a dragon. There's the kids are going to play with dragons. So maybe what do we do with the fact that the Bible's portrait of the dragons is almost entirely negative. Maybe it's a good opportunity to talk about how cross-culturally symbols can have different

meanings because I think actually the dragon, the reversal of dragon perception, story lines are actually really beautiful. And there's a number of children's books that we read to our kids over the years that are about that too, about the night who becomes friends with the dragon instead of slaying it. And that's so Jesus style, like your enemy actually. It's probably more like you than unlike you. And so in that sense, I love this twist on the dragon symbol.

But it's just that that twist doesn't fully happen within the Bible, with the dragon symbol, but the idea happens within the teaching of Jesus about enemies. It's real close. It gets close. It kind of tees it up for you. It's just kind of, yeah, totally. Go with it from there. Yeah. So the fact that the Bible doesn't fully transform the dragon image, I think is okay, because it also helps us teach our kids that the Bible comes from a time and a place and that it's doing one thing with

these symbols, but that the symbols are about ideas. And the ideas undergo development and so in the sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaching you to love your enemy is a way forward for us to even the dragon. We had to do this series, but we lived in a culture where dragons were only good. Yeah, that'd be really hard. That's this whole methodology of the Bible is ancient literature. So we have to come and we have to first recognize how did the people who wrote composed, organized the Bible, how did they think? And so there are things like that in the Bible, we have to reorient ourselves too. Yeah, that's right. And so. And the dragons, the dragons, one of them.

Cool. So great question, Colin. I will now think that through for how to talk to my kids. Dragons in the Bible. So there you go. Everybody, you send in such a great, intelligent, thoughtful questions. Thank you, thank you, thank you. We love hearing from you, and we love hearing more questions. We're going to do another Q&R.

Yeah, there's still ground to cover, so there'll be more opportunities to address some questions but for now That's it today's show was us sitting down talking with Some questions from our amazing audience But it's made possible also by our whole podcast team That's our producer keep propelts and associate producer Lindsey Ponder our lead editor Dan Gummel That's our producer, Capri Peltz, and associate producer, Lindsay Ponder, our lead editor, Dan Gummel,

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