Blurry Creatures - EP: 273 Biblical Branches with Doug Van Dorn

Episode Date: October 12, 2024

In this members episode, we sit down with Pastor Doug Van Dorn to explore the fascinating role trees play in the Bible. From the Tree of Life in Eden to the Cross at Calvary, trees hold deep symbolic meaning throughout Scripture. Pastor Doug takes us on a journey through these biblical references, unpacking their spiritual significance. We also delve into a fun, imaginative comparison—could the majestic trees in the Bible have inspired the Ents, the ancient tree-like beings from The Lord of the Rings? Join us for a thought-provoking discussion that blends theology, nature, and a bit of fantasy lore. become a member: blurrycreatures.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Luke's so often, people email us, and they have this story, they're out in their woods, and they're looking in the bushes, and they go, what's that? And when you are pouring your dog food and your dog's bowl, that's the last thing you want to say, what is that? What is the stuff coming out of this bag? You know, I don't think a lot of us think about maybe what we feed our dogs, and that's why we partner with rough greens. Most of us would love to have our dogs, you know, live as long as possible. I just lost my dog in December. And I would have just, I would have loved more time with Carl. And one of the things you, can do to get more time with your dog is to feed them better. Dog owners don't usually realize that

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But the point here seems to be that the trees are somehow playing apart in the battle. Absalom is the guy who is overthrowing David, who's the chosen king of Israel. The narrator talks about these trees doing this. And then he doesn't even comment on what he's saying. He's leaving it up to your imagination to fill in the gaps. And at the end of the day, you're just left there thinking going, wow, even God's forests are coming to the aid of the king that he has chosen to lead Israel. And Absalom's son is not, you know, come on, this guy had to have been a master horseman.

He had to have been going through forests hundreds of times. And his head just gets caught in an oak. I mean, how does that even happen? The point is that the trees themselves do, in fact, seem to do the bidding of God in that story, in a way that, yeah, maybe Tolkien is, you know, fantasizing about it in a way that makes our mind think, okay, the trees are moving, you know, a thousand miles to go and fight a war over at Eisengard. And sure, that isn't what happened. But nevertheless, there's something more going on here than just saying, you know, people just got lost in the forest.

I think that that's not doing justice to what the text is telling us. The history of our earth is so different from what we can. can imagine. The Smithsonian, if they found out about a large skeleton somewhere, was to go get it. I'm going to assume at least one person is right, because if one person's right, it's right to bust the paradigm. It all goes back to the fallen church. And the problem with the modern-day church, they have a very truncated view of the supernatural.

This backdrop that's just pregnant with all kinds of meaning associated with this Mount Herman event. And this guy defects from the kingdom. That's a big deal. Sometimes it feels like when you get that phone bill, it's like the crash site document. You can't read it. There's a bunch of numbers, random fees, vague language,

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until the beat drops in Bose clarity. And the baseline transforms boring into maybe the best part of your day. Your life deserves music. Your music deserves Bose. Find your perfect product at Bose.com. All right, welcome back to Doug Week. We are doing a special episode with Doug for members only. We had our main feed episode talking about McKisledek.

And now we're going to talk about these ancient trees that are, this whole concept that maybe the trees, are a little bit more than just would growing in the woods. And Doug's going to be at BlurieCon. And so those who are coming, you can watch a lot of Doug and a lot of all the other guests that you've come to love on our show. Go to our website, Blurraycruches.com, and click on the banner. You can get a digital pass for two days.

It's going to be an awesome experience. Doug's going to be there. And we're just, we're talking about what we're going to present there at BlurrayConnor. So hope you enjoy Doug Week and this one's gonna be fun Luke. I enjoy the lot of fun yeah into the blurry con note that every once in a while tickets will pop up so keep checking back if you'd like to join us in person but the vast majority of it's been sold out since we launched the tickets so if you'd like to join us virtually so have a blurry creatures blurry con party on your couch grab yourself a

streaming ticket you can watch it at any time we don't have to watch it live so you if you want to watch it two days later it's it's a digital playback so you don't have to fall on real time but it will be fun if you do you have to join it on your bCR and then you have to go back and play it again remember those days but i love yeah this is a fun episode though Nate because we've talked a lot about about symbolism and literalism within the scriptures right so the idea of mountains we talked about with dr. Joel monomalo who actually had nauseam with with all of our guests around the events around Mount Hermon and cesarea philippi but mountains themselves and what they mean and trees are fascinating

There's a lot of mythology. Of course, we have modern day stuff like Lord of the Rings with tree beard. And what's going on with the tree? What's going on the forest devouring armies? Narnia as well. Like all those ancient writers, ancient, I said, old school writers, you know, worked trees into their stories. And as you can see, there's trees at the heart of all these biblical stories as well.

And so we'd have this sort of out-of-the-box conversation. I love that's what we get here in Blurry Creatures is you guys have allowed us to kind of explore some these ideas and have some fun combos of like, okay, what's going on here? Can we think about this in a different way? You know, there's more going on here than just, like I said,

in the beginning, just some wood growing in the forest. But if you want to become a member, Blurraycreatures.com slash members, I'll produce the podcast. You get so much more than just extra episodes. You get tickets, chat rooms, and we're moving over to Supercast soon, so all Spotify listeners

are going to be able to listen to this there's a reddit style chat in the back end you're going to be able to up vote we're going to be doing Q&As and ask me anythings for members um lots of extra perks for members coming any any move in the studio to as move the studio Nate we're also going to have full video extras for all of our our members as well yeah you guys really are the heartbeat of this show it's what helps make this thing go and we're just going to keep building on on what we can offer but this is one of the main perks right you get ad free episodes but you also get these extra episodes one blurry is not enough for you in a week if you're up to date on on episodes so here

here is a a double dose of Doug van dorn and in this fun Doug week we're doing with one of our oldest and best friends in the space let's bring on Doug