Blurry Creatures - EP: 377 The Dragon in Eden: Monsters, Chaos, and Humanity with Dr. Manny Arango

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

Dr. Manny Arango, New Testament scholar and author of "Crushing Chaos," joins us to explore the biblical monsters we've sanitized out of our modern understanding of Scripture. From the dragon in Eden to Leviathan in Job, Manny argues we've fallen victim to the "lullaby effect"—becoming so familiar with these stories that we've missed their jarring, supernatural elements.In this fascinating conversation, Manny reveals why the talking serpent in Eden was likely a dragon, why God describes Leviathan to Job in excruciating detail, and how Jesus' ministry was fundamentally about conquering chaos monsters. But the real twist? Manny argues that humans can become the monsters—that the Bible's greatest concern isn't external beasts, but our own potential to devolve into chaos.From ancient Near Eastern mythology to modern anxiety, this episode explores how biblical monster stories are actually roadmaps for retaining our humanity in a world designed to make us beastly. Manny's insights on chaos versus sin, the nature of humanity, and Jesus as the ultimate dragon-slayer offer a fresh perspective on spiritual warfare and what it means to stay human in a chaotic world. - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Luke 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 got, 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.

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Just cover the shipping. Go to Rough Greens.com and use discount code blurry. That's RUFF Greens.com discount code blurry. Rough Greens makes any dog food better. Chaos creature that's probably a dragon who's in the garden with Adam and Eve. And the chaos dragon is trying to recruit human agents to be agents of chaos as opposed to agents of order. And the big, I guess, maybe curveball of this book is that we became the monsters. You want to know what's scarier than Leviathan?

Humans who are full of chaos. You want to know the scariest monster movies? Zombie movies, man, because humans are the worst monsters. When humans become monsters, you get the walking dead. And I think that's the story the Bible's trying to tell, is that guess what's freaking scarier than any chaos dragon? It's humans that have been infected with chaos and then become monsters themselves.

The history of our earth is so different from what we can imagine. The Smithsonian, that if they found out about 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 and bust the paradigm, it all goes back to the fallen chair. And the problem with the modern day church, they have a very truncated view of 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. All right. Welcome back to blurry creatures. we're here in the basement with our new friend, Dr. Manny O'Rango. And you're a preacher, Bible teacher, author, and you have a new book out, which is very blurry with the dragon on the cover called crushing chaos. And you delve into monster stories of the Bible.

Nothing is more blurrier than that. Welcome to the podcast. And speaking of monsters, Manny, what are your thoughts on Bigfoot? I knew it. I knew it. Look, anything's possible. I believe anything's out there, man. Sure. I'm with it. Bigfoot. Let's go. Let's go. All right. Is he a monster or is he your friend or enemy? What is he? Definitely not my friend. Okay. Black people and Bigfoot don't go together. Okay. If there's a big foot out there, I want nothing to do with it. I put that in the category of white people stuff. And so I'm good. I'm good. I'm good on Bigfoot. All right. I'm cool with him existing. I just don't want him anywhere near me. But you wrote a book about monsters.

So what's the connection there? We got to hear this. Oh, man, I wrote a book about monsters because, unfortunately, we've demothologized the Bible. I'm a Bible nerd. More than I'm a monster's nerd, I'm probably just a Bible nerd. I got my doctorate, graduated last year, got my degree in New Testament in context. And part of dematologizing the Bible means that somehow this dragon that's talking about, talking to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden has become a snake,

which doesn't really make sense because obviously the curse on that dragon is that he's going to crawl in his belly. If he's already on his belly, it doesn't really make sense to curse him to be on his belly. And Renaissance art has kind of influenced more of what we think about Satan or the dragon that's in Genesis than actual biblical text. And so I spent a whole book, you know, kind of not just being nerdy, but if indeed this being in Genesis chapter 3 is a dragon, then it fits right in the context of the ancient near eastern world, which means it's a chaos creature, which makes a whole lot of sense

when you begin to read the Bible in context. And so to me, it's just actually pretty clear that this is not just like a garden snake, right? This is not just like a bow constrictor. This is it just like a, it's not anaconda in the garden with Adam and Eve. And actually the biggest clue is that this thing is talking, right? So it's not as if talking animals is normal in the Bible. Right. When Balaam's donkey's talking to him, it's a freaking weird situation. Like, that's not normal.

So the Bible doesn't try to set itself up as if animals talking is a normal thing, which means it's a mythological thing. Like this is something that should grab our attention. But in the biblical studies world, we kind of talk about this thing called the lullaby effect, right? where, you know, a lullaby is, you know, rock a bye baby in a tree tops, when the wind blows, a cradle will rock, and when the bow breaks, it will createable fall, and down will come baby cradle and all. Okay.

Well, those words are crazy. Those words are ridiculous. Any normal person would have a lot of questions, like, who put the baby in a tree? Why would you put a baby in the tree? Are you trying to kill the baby? Did the baby die? Okay. There's lots of questions, but the melody lulls us into not paying attention to the lyrics.

and a lot of times that's what happened with the Bible, right? You're so used to these stories from Sunday school or from Children's Church that, you know, I realize it's pretty wild that an animal, well, I would say a dragon is swallowing a prophet named Jonah. You don't realize that that's kind of crazy. You just kind of lulled into knowing that story from when you were four or that, you know, Noah's world is in golf, by a flood like that like we're kind of lulled we don't realize there's monsters in these stories we just

don't see that because the bible's been demethologized and anyway so uh yeah it seems real natural to kind of help put these stories back into their ancient near eastern context when you put them back in their ancient near eastern context they're actually way more fascinating than they are in the western modern american versions of the stories that i think a lot of us are used to love it man i mean that's a lot of what our show does right we we we we kind of go back. I think for us, of course, Dr. Michael Heiser was real seminal and what we did. And to your point is what he said. It said, like, we have to, the Bible is written for us, but not to us. It was written in an ancient near Eastern context. And in that context, we read it differently. I think

you made a great point. Medieval art, Renaissance. We talk about the Enlightenment and Descartes and all these things that shifted thinking to what we consider Western thinking now. Then we just read this as it's all allegory or it's all metaphor. As you say, it's all myth. It just sort of is this like, it's representative, right? But then, you know, to your point, you do have dragons. You talk about the garden.

You talk about Leviathan and Job and we talk. Or you go to- You're a New Testament guy. You did your doctorate on that. You talk about the dragon in Revelation. There is a dragon. Someone with the name the dragon as a personish. There's creatures.

That's what we do here, Nate. Do you think he looks like a dragon? Or do you think he's just called? the dragon. Oh no, I think, I think that it's a dragon, like for real, for real. Yeah. I'm going to, I'm going to go like, yeah, no, I think Leviathan's a real creature. I think Jonah was really swallowed up by something. Yeah. And there's a bunch of clues that it's not a whale, right? So I think modern English translators, because we don't understand the word myth, the same way that the ancient audience understood myth, that word makes people kind of nervous. And the reality is that

the ancient authors are trying to solve a problem that modern, you know, Westerners are not trying to solve and vice versa. So for modern Westerners, you know, I'm a Christian school kid from kindergarten all the way to my doctorate, okay? And so it got drilled into me that like evolution's wrong and creation is right. So that's the problem we're trying to solve. the only issue with that is that there were no atheists when Moses was writing the Bible, and there were definitely no evolutionists. So, like, that's not the, that's not the, that's not the variable that Moses is solving for when he is writing the first five books of the Bible.

So for the ancient world, God doesn't make something out of nothing. That's actually not how they would have read Genesis 1. They would have read Genesis 1 as a God that's making order out of chaos. And when you read the Babylonian creation account, or when you read the Assyrian or Mesopotamian or Egyptian creation account, all of those deities, you know, defeat a chaos dragon and then begin to establish order from chaos. And the big curveball in the creation story that we have in Genesis is that God makes the dragon. Like he makes it. He creates it. He says this is a good part of my creation.

And that would have been, like, I mean, jaw drop. But what modern English translations have done for that, you know, Tainin is the Hebrew word, they've put that as like great sea creatures. But the NRSV and sometimes even some other translations really translate it the way that should be, which is great sea monsters, great sea dragons. Like God makes these mythological creatures. And I think that modern, they're not evil. These modern translators aren't evil.

They, they want, they're, instead of just translating the Bible, they are also interpreting the Bible. Right. So the translations that they're offering, it's not that they are wrong. It's just that they have a, they have a lean and they're leaning to the audience that they're written for. They're leaning towards an American, modern Western audience, which is trying to take myth out because if it's mythological, then that means it can't be trusted.

Yeah. And so the reality is that the ancient world, myth wasn't fake. Myth didn't mean fairy tale. Myth didn't mean a made-up story. Myth met a story that's grounding us in reality and teaching us things about our identity and our world that are actually really, really, really, really important. So I'm not mad about, I'm not mad at the English translators. It's just, we got to read the stuff in the original languages so that we can actually

kind of get a sense of what's going on. Well, it's a worldview, right? So they're writing to this worldview, to ours. We take 21st century Westerners, right, for the vast majority of the English translations, right? And again, to your point, this isn't the worldview or the paradigm, or however you want to,

you sort of want to semantically qualify that. That isn't what the writers, readers of the Old Testament would have even understood, as you said. They wouldn't even understood some of the things that, there was no context for atheism. There was nobody who didn't believe in anything. There were no nihilists then. You were like, you believed, you followed Yahweh or you followed, you know, bail, or you followed

the gods of Egypt or the gods of Babylon or Samaria, you followed a god. The same way that we see, honestly, now in developing world or so, you know, sub-Saharan Africa or South America, everyone there believes in something. Nobody, nobody has the, I always say the luxury of believing in nothing or that somehow this is all accidental. That isn't even a worldview. 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, stuff's blacked out. You're like, what am I actually paying for? I don't know about you, but I like keeping my money where I can see it. I like to be simple. I like to be easy. I'm going to be thrown away money on big wireless carriers.

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of theological conversations because that is the most sighted scene interacted with creature that helps you realize, like you said, the mythology surrounding Bigfoot, doesn't mean it's fake, right? And so we started there, but then it moves into this storytelling realm. But I think after doing blurry creatures for five years, like when you talk about the garden, there's multiple supernatural interpretations that you could have. Like, either a snake could be possessed. It could actually be a serpent. It could be a reptilian creature. You know what I'm saying? But it's, no matter what, now that we've done this podcast, it's strange. It's a strange blend.

It is designed to grab your attention. Yeah. It's designed. That's why the lullaby effect is so sad when we talk about Genesis is because this stuff is designed to be jarring. I agree with you 100%. Yeah. So let's start with there then. What's your take on the garden then?

What do you think is sort of the event? Oh, gosh, I could talk about this for hours. We don't even have enough time on the podcast to just. tackle that one question. Okay, number one, okay? First misconception that I hear with Christians just on a day-to-day basis. As people will literally say, and you guys have probably both heard this said, well, the garden was perfect. It was paradise. It was perfect. Adam and Eve jacked up a perfect situation. So the word perfect gets used a lot for the Garden of Eden. Well, you know, sorry to be the bearer of bad news. There's nowhere in the text of Genesis that's

says that the garden of eating is perfect. Like, that is literally, like, been made up. That's not true. There is a word that God uses for the garden, and it's the word good. It's good. Like, so the first- So what's the difference between good and perfect, you think? Like, oh, a perfect garden would have made Adam and Eve lazy. A perfect garden doesn't require work. A perfect garden definitely doesn't have whatever this creature is that's in there to tempt them or to test them. A perfect garden doesn't have, get this, the knowledge of good or evil. So a perfect world is, you know, the Bahamas is vacation on the beach, right? And a lot of people assume, yeah, man, Adam and Eve are just like naked on vacation.

Like, that's what they're doing. And the reality is that we bring that unrealistic expectation to a lot of areas of our life. We assume that God's going to give us a perfect spouse or perfect employees or a perfect job or whatever. And I think God's always interested in giving us a good spouse, good kids, a good job. And then it's our job to realize that that must mean an adversary is good for humans. So conflict is good. You know, temptation or testing is good. This stuff is good.

A struggle against good and evil. That is good. So Adam and Eve are not given some world where they don't have to work or they don't have to be on guard, or they don't have to practice faith. That would be the realm of fantasy or perfection. They are living in reality. And reality is good, which means that God places a dragon in there with them because that's good. It's not good for humans to not have something to combat or conquer. It is good for humans to have a problem to solve.

like and I think if there's a big big message and I know I'm doing a podcast and we're talking about the book but I don't like to just plug the book but for real for real if there's a big massive mind shift that I think a lot of people have to make is the way that people define good is actually like not reality and people need to know like no no no having something to conquer waking up and having a job to do like having difficulty in your life that is good that's really good for humans. And if it wasn't, God wouldn't have put something in there. That's a good, Mani.

That's such a good word, though, because, right, I mean, what does you tell Adam and even do? Subdu the earth and all that's in it. Exactly. If you have to subdue something, then the inherent implication is that it's wild or chaotic or... Exactly. It needs to be tamed, right? Subdued or tamed, right? Which is, I love that thought process.

I don't think we've really talked in that sense about the garden, but you make a a great point. Like, yeah, good does not equal perfect. Perfect would not require. God wouldn't say go, so do the earth and all that's in it. Like, if everything was, you know, if it was, you know, was utopia, if you will, or whatever you want to call it. Exactly, exactly. If they're just sipping mitis on the beach, then, but that's the image that people have of the Garden of Eden. It's like, they're just naked on vacation. Like, they're, and that's not true. And so what do they need to subdue. Okay, this is the next kind of piece of the puzzle is chaos. Okay, so if, if God in seven days, well, let me just tackle this, this kind of strand of thought here,

a lot of people will say, because another thing that people say in church that I've always said, well, that's not actually true. It's actually a narcissistic thing that we say is that the creation of Adam and Eve is the pinnacle of creation. Yeah. What? Of course we think that. that we're humans. Actually, the pinnacle of creation is day seven. It's God going from hovering above the creation to resting within it. The rest on day seven proves that the creation has been ordered enough. Key word, enough.

It's been ordered enough so that humans can dwell in it and that God can dwell in it. In order for Adam and Eve to live out their purpose of subduing, it means that the garden is supposed to grow. So the garden is supposed to overtake the wilderness. So we have a garden surrounded by chaos. What God does through a process of seven days is he begins to bring boundaries between the chaotic ocean and the dry land, between the chaotic night and the ordered day. And then between the chaotic wilderness and an ordered garden. And so I'm going to go ahead, you know,

I feel like with other podcasts, I have to like, you know, kind of step gingerly because of your landmines. But I don't have to step gingerly here. You can be ginger as much as you want. Ginger's okay. Let it fly. Have you heard recently ginger's are black? Yeah, yeah, I have.

Yes. Yeah. Yes. We finally have a home. That makes no sense. We finally have a home. I feel like it's the Dave Chappelle racial draft. It's like, we'll take the gingers.

Yeah. And you're like, ah, okay, we'll give them to you. I got a lot of those. We'll take them. I got a lot of those links sent my way. That's for sure. I would say that two big thoughts. The first is this.

Because Adam and Eve want to partner with chaos as opposed to partnering with order, they get banished into chaotic space. So Adam and Eve are not, well, Adam is not, you know, carved out of the dirt of the garden. He's actually carved out of the dirt of the wilderness and then brought into the garden. So he's not even entitled to the garden. He's a visitor of this garden. Okay, he's not even created in the garden.

He has created outside of the garden and then brought back in. So the first, another massive lesson that I teach in the book is that chaos is natural for humans. It's our natural state of being because we're made from the dirt of chaos. So when people say, well, discipline's not natural or it doesn't feel right or monogamy is not natural or, you know, natural this, natural that. I'm like, well, actually chaos is natural. No one has to teach humans how to be chaotic. That's that.

So when God banishes Adam back to the realm in which he was created, God's not mean for doing that. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home. With agents who close twice as many deals, when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at redfin.com. Own the dream.

He's actually saying if you want to act wild and chaotic, you can go out there in the wilderness. But if you're going to be in my garden, well, the garden is designed for beauty and for order and for flourishing. The garden is a place that's supposed to actually overtake the wilderness. So here's my next second. This is really the landmine I have to avoid sometimes. another podcast that we won't name is there are humans out there. Adam and Eve are not the only human beings. Oh, yeah. So this idea that everyone comes from two humans is kind of crazy.

Like, that would mean that incest is the way that God is going to populate the earth, which, I mean, this is something that bothered me all through middle school and high school. And everyone I asked was always like, yeah, you know, you know, know, the Bible says it, I believe it, and that's that. And I'm like, all right, okay, there's got to be more going on here. Because smoking gun, when Kane kills his brother Abel, Kane literally is like, well, if people find me, they're going to kill me. Okay, what freaking people? What horse Kane talking about? So if you ask me, I would tell you that when God says subdue, he is actually talking to two human beings that are supposed to grow this garden.

They are supposed to expand the garden to overtake the wilderness. That's the job. They are actually there to be evangelist. They are actually there to reflect the beauty and the brilliance and the order of God against the chaos. And I guess here's the other, like, kind of big message of the book is that even without sin, there's chaos. So a lot of times what we do in church is we tell people that the number one issue they have to deal with the sin.

Well, news flash, homie, before there's ever sin, there's chaos. And God actually doesn't call it bad. He conquers enough of the chaos and then leave some chaos for Adam and Eve to begin to conquer. And their job is to bring order to the chaos. So for all of those reasons, I would say, Yeah, there's a chaos creature in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. And if we just kind of put some, you know, hermeneutical clues, well, Babylonians, Mesopotamians, Assyrians, Egyptians,

actually all tell us what chaos creatures look like. Tiamat would be a great example. And Marduk, you know, conquers a chaos dragon. Bayo conquers a chaos dragon. So the surrounding cultures actually give us. enough hermeneutical clues to go, okay, what's this chaos creature? The, oh man, I can't remember the exact, oh, the Eucharitic version of Leviathan is Lothon. And we have tons of artwork from the ancient world of Lothon.

And Lothon's a seven-headed dragon. So, I mean, I would say, there's a chaos creature that's probably a dragon who's in the garden with Adam and Eve. and the chaos dragon is trying to recruit human agents to be agents of chaos as opposed to agents of order. And the big, I guess, maybe curveball of this book is that we became the monsters. You want to know what's scarier than Leviathan?

Humans who are full of chaos. You want to know the scariest monster movies? Zombie movies, man, because humans are the worst monsters when humans become monsters. monsters, you get the walking dead. You get, and that's what, I think that's the story the Bible's trying to tell is that, guess what's freaking scarier than any chaos dragon? It's humans that have been infected with chaos and then become monsters themselves.

And so, anyway, I can kind of go on that nerdy tangent. No, I love it. We were, we were going to kind of, you were going to ask me something, maybe. We talk a lot about how the chaos started with Satan's rebellion and the angels that rebelled. They had some chaos in them, too. so they decided they're going to take off they're going to they're going to grab some human women and so there's an element of chaos there too it's not just which would mean you know god's creatures have

this element of all of them seem to have this element in them and i think god wants us to choose him ultimately so then where are people afraid of another creation story outside of eve where that how did those other humans pop up yeah this is the thing this is i'm glad you brought this up manny because is this is like such a, an uncomfortable topic for most people in church because, oh yeah. Because they want to, it's just like, to me, it's akin to Genesis 6 where let's just skip over this because this is really, this is really uncomfortable. Like angels, angels having kids with women, with human women in Genesis 6 or, you know,

why is Kane need a mark on him so he's not killed? Who's going to kill him? Why are there cities outside? Well, we'll just skip over that. Adam, you have a lot of kids. It's a timing issue, right? And this is the South. People get involved.

their cousins. People, I mean, so we have a problem. We have a lot of problems here. Some people have Bigfoot's baby in Kentucky. It's okay. We can't have that. One of the big issues,

especially in the Bible Belt, especially with Bible believing Christians, is we assume that factual and truth is the same thing. So we come to a text. with an assumption that if something's not factual, that means it's not true.

And if something is factual, that means it is true. Whereas an ancient audience does not link these two things. Just because something is factual does not mean that it is true and vice versa. So let's say someone listens to the story of the prodigal son. No one listens to that story and goes, well, how old was the son? What was his name? You know, how long was he gone? No one would ask for facts.

everyone understands that the story is designed to communicate capital T truth, like objective truth, absolute truth, and that truth is that God, being a heavenly father, is patient and loving and kind, and rejoices when lost people come back to him, when lost son and daughters come back to him. So just like the parables don't need to be factual in order to be true, okay, I think that a lot of people then interpret Paul saying that like Jesus is the second Adam and that just like the first man Adam fell, the second man Jesus or the second Adam is going to succeed.

Like people will then take these very literally. Okay. So another pitfall, another word for fact, it will be literal, right? If you think about the woman at the well, she's taking Jesus literally. If you think about Nicodemus, he's taking Jesus literally. How can I crawl back into my mother's womb? Right. You know, the woman at the well is like, do you have a bucket for this living water?

In a literal interpretation of the Bible always leads us into trouble, okay? Let's let's not forget like Galileo, who claimed that it was the earth that was revolving around the sun, not the other way around, was deemed a heretic because that wasn't the literal way to interpret scripture. Okay. Scripture interpreted literally would mean that the son is actually the thing moving. And he was literally, he had to be, you know, confined to house arrest. One of the greatest minds of his time, the church couldn't navigate something being not literal, but that like true. The same would be true with, you know, most denominations in America, whether it's Baptist or method is split over slavery. Do we interpret the Bible literally?

Because if we interpret the Bible literally, then slavery is okay. But if we actually interpret the Bible theologically, if we look at the meta-narrative of Scripture, we would realize slavery sucks. So like this history of interpreting things literally and coming to a bad conclusion, that's not new. That's the pitfall that people, who take the Bible seriously fall into. So I don't want to demonize people who take the Bible seriously.

It's just taking the Bible seriously doesn't have to mean taking the Bible literally. And by literally, if we take the Bible literally, then it's going to be hard to interpret Jesus because Jesus says, hey, if you're angry at your brother, you've committed murder. Oh, wow. Okay. So am I going to interpret literal means if my can cause me to sin, I'm going to cut it off. So here. Here. Here. Here's the literal issue. Literal. Am I going to, so here's the question. Am I going to interpret the Bible literally or literarily?

Like, am I going to actually take the literature in its genre of literature seriously as opposed to just sticking to the letter or the words on the page? And when we get to Paul, I think that we can say that Adam and Eve have a special representative job to do on the earth without saying they are the only humans on the planet. I think that just theologically, even if there are other humans, I think we can say God chose these humans. God separated these humans and brought these humans into his garden and that these humans are not like the others,

that these humans have been anointed for a special task And I think that's okay. I don't think that we have to ignore Cain's mark. Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great, till the CFO sees them, that's bulls bend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions. I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

Cut the bulls bend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign, terms and conditions apply. And the fact that he's scared of other human beings and create weird timelines to fit a literal interpretation of Scripture. I think that we can be, we can have a commitment to the truth without having a commitment to facts. And that is hard for Western people.

Like, it just is. We've been wired to link facts in whether things are being taken literally with truth. Go ahead. That's a huge, that's a huge camp of division in our space. Because it doesn't matter what sort of conspiracy theory you're trying to undo. If you're trying to figure out some things that are going on, whether it's the alien narrative. A lot of people talk about alien stuff here and a lot of people read the Bible in a literal sense

so they can't accept the fact that there is no way for humans to go to outer space because they read things like the firmament and that's impossible to get through. Right? So I would say that's a literal way to read it. But like when it comes to like modern conspiracy theories like the moon landing, right?

You can't even, you have to write off that whole thing because we never could actually get to the moon. You can't get anything to the moon. It's impossible. So I think there's a spirit of religion, personally. One thousand percent. That makes us read it in a literal sense. And then we'd stone people when they don't read it that same way. I mean, you couldn't have said it better. I couldn't say it better myself. Like, and here's, I'll take it one step further. Here's the other problem that I've found. people who don't know how to interpret the Bible with nuance and with like critical thinking skills and people that don't know how to hold true to truths and tension with each other like people

that aren't good with that when it comes to the Bible are also not good with that when it comes to other humans so this is what I would call interpersonal hermeneutics interpreting the Bible well or misinterpreting the Bible or taking the Bible literally. People who take the Bible literally, they take their boss literally. They take their husband literally. They take their wife literally. So I don't like even teach biblical hermeneutics as a skill that is not a transferable skill. Actually learning how to interpret the Bible for what it means, not just for what it says,

is actually a skill that will serve you in all of your human relationships. All of them, I have found that the dude at church who's like, but the Bible says, like that guy, his kids don't like him, his wife doesn't like him, his boss doesn't like it. Like that guy is annoying in every sphere. And like pastorally, you know, I'm a pastor. So my job is to help people like Monday through Saturday. not just on Sunday. And so when I help people think holistically or like, hey, I know what the

Bible says. You telling me what the Bible says is not. I know what the Bible says. Let me one up you. What does the Bible mean? Because I knew what my wife was saying for years. But man, it's only the last couple years that I actually understood what she was meaning by what she was saying. Because understanding something and comprehending it are not the same. I can comprehend what someone is saying, but whether or not I understand what they mean is a totally different story altogether. And I actually think that there's a lot of people

who know what the Bible says. They like quoting it, they like weaponizing it, they know what it says. I just don't know if they know what it means and the only way to really know what it means, which I guess this makes people uncomfortable, I don't know why. the only way to really figure out what it means is to put it back in its context

is to go, well, there's a world that created these words. And I think people have like some Mormon expectations about the Bible, right? Like the book of Mormon, you know, there's some golden plates. And the angel Maronai helps Joseph Smith. Like I think people just think the Bible just kind of dropped out of the sky from heaven. And it's only divine. But the reality is that that's not. What the Mormons believe about the book of Mormon is actually not what Christians believe about the Bible.

But what Christians actually believe about the Bible is that it's the word of God set in culture in time through human agents who were speaking and writing things that were contextually understandable. And yeah, that's every time I tell people. people, people are like, well, no, the Bible says with the Bible. I'm like, okay, that's really Mormon of you. And then, you know, you can see their, you know, anyway. That's a great way of saying, like, like the multiple authorship, you know, many authors help it to stay away from like a cult-like following. Where it gets like, well, this is the word from the entity. There's one voice, one writer, you know, one.

That's what's a bit crazy about the Bible. And I think incredible is that it's 66 books. just as many, if not more authors, for sure. And then you have a congruent message inspired by God, but it's not... Which helps its credibility. Not a singular prophets. 1,000, which is unlike the Quran. Yes.

That's unlike the Quran. Or the Book of Mormon. Yes. So let's swing all the other way. That's got fundamentalist, literalist way to read. And then you have these progressive spaces that are saying, saying the exact, well, we can't understand anything, actually. And none of this stuff happened.

It's beyond mythology. Well, it's all allegory, the whole thing, right? Like, there are no monsters. There is no, you guys are all conspiracy theorists. This is crazy. So you have this hard literalist way, and then you have this progressive where nothing like that happens.

And then you have the 3D blurry goggles where it's like you kind of have all of them converging, these three different views, and you go, there's multiple interpretations. I don't, oftentimes we say, I don't know. People say, what do you think about aliens? I don't know.

There's so many stories. It seems so complex. I don't know. But I do think that they are real. I don't know what they are. I don't know where they're from. I don't know. So what do you do when it swings the other way? So here's what I would say. If it creates chaos, I think that that's not the goal. Like, I think that God's goal is that truth begins to bring fruitfulness. It begins to bring order. It's beautiful. It's brilliant. the progressive who's removed all boundaries, right? Like, there is no gender. There is no this. There is no that. There is no, like, there's no definition. And there's no, what's like, well, actually,

the narrative that we have in scripture is a God who brings order to chaos. And that sounds like chaos. And then on the fundamentalist side, it's like, well, that sounds like chaos. And we serve a God that brings order to chaos. And all of this is chaos. And the reality is that extremes are always easy. Guess what would have been easy? Here's what would have been easy.

For God to eradicate darkness. And we just have a world of light. It's just Alaska. You know what I'm saying? We just have light. All we have is light. Actually, Revelation tells us that that is the ultimate end. That is when that's where we're going.

Okay. So God could have done that. God could have said, no more sea, no more ocean. Well, here we go. Ironically enough, Revelation says that's where we're going. So what does God do in creation? He doesn't fall for any extreme. God does not eradicate darkness. He gives darkness a boundary. He gives it a time boundary. He says darkness, you can rain at night, but then the sun is going to come up every day. And then he says to the seas of chaos. So he says to both realms of chaos, I'm not going to eradicate you. I'm going to give you boundaries. And I think that for the progressive person and for the person that's fundamentalist, we want

extremes. That is a desire for an extreme. And God says, no, like the Bible is designed to hold truth and tension. Let's think about, this is a great segue, actually. Let's think about the wisdom literature that we have in the Bible. Okay, so we got the book of proverbs. We got ecclesiastes. We got Job.

We got Song of Solomon. Okay. We got some people would put Psalms in the wisdom literature. but if all we had was Proverbs, we would actually have a very black and white theology. If you do good things, good things will happen to you. If you do bad things, bad things will happen to you. This is actually what theologians would call a very Deuteronomistic worldview.

Very black, very white. Proverbs is no gray, no nuance. Then you have the next book of wisdom, which is Job, And this is fascinating because Job lives a Proverbs life. He does the right thing. He's blameless. Yet bad things happen to him. And his friends have a Proverbs theology.

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natural vibe. At only $12, it's great for affordable touch-ups on the go. Get this new must-have concealer at Sephora or at saffora.com today. And what is the book of Job designed to do? The book of Job

is designed to hold Proverbs intention. So if we had 65 books of the Bible, we'd be off. But God in his sovereignty says, no, we can't just have Proverbs. We have to have Job. And Job's friends are literally just quoting a Proverbs perspective to him. And then God speaks. Okay. So Job invites us into the messy middle, invites us into the gray, because extremes are easy. Hyper-progressive, that's easy. Fundamentalism, that's easy. You need the Holy Spirit and a commitment to God to begin to interpret the scriptures in a way that is a little bit more creative. It can be a little bit more messy. So in the middle of all this, Job cries out to the Lord. The Lord finally responds.

and we get one of the longest recorded conversations between God and a human in the entire Bible. Outside of God dictating the instructions for the tabernacle to Moses, this is the longest description that we have of any creature in the entire Bible, and it's God describing Leviathan to a man named Job. Now, let me say this. if I just lost my children and I had boils and I just went broke, God describing a dragon to me wouldn't help me. Like, like, let's just, can I be that honest to just admit?

Man, I got boils, I'm broke, and my kids are dead. I do not need a description of Leviathan and behemoth, but that's what God does. So if that response is frustrating or confusing, I got to ask the question. There's something going on here that I don't understand. And I think what God is saying to Job is that I baked chaos into creation. The creation that you are living in Job is not perfect, but it is good. And until you learn that it is good, and by good,

It means that Leviathan predates the fall of Adam and Eve. God is describing a being to Job that is letting him know, hey, suffering is going to happen in a world where I sovereignly pre-baked chaos into the cosmos. There is chaos in this world. This world is not safe, yet it is good. This world is not perfect, yet it is good. This world is not black and white, yet it is good. And I alone, I as the sovereign creator, know what's good for you. And I could have made a world without Leviathan, but I chose not to do that.

I made a world where there's chaos. And guess what? That answer helped Job. Like, Job goes, okay. I get it, man. We're good. This answer actually resolves a lot of tension and, like, massive, you know, questions in Job's soul, which means, I don't know, man.

The book that describes Leviathan, which is Job may be a massive roadmap to helping people find peace and to help answer some, like, quintessential questions about the nature of humanity and what kind of world it is that we're living in. Okay, I feel like I, like, I don't know, is that a fair response? Like, yeah, yeah, you tell me if I kind of tackled the question in a way that you feel like is helpful or fair. Yeah, I mean, you're just saying there's a lot of nuance. And I think that, I mean, Luke and I feel like that tension every day doing the show of you get 50 stories with facts in it that all sound like, we didn't see it. We didn't experience it.

But there seems to be this, like the little pocket. of truth within these paranormal spaces of things that help us understand, okay, there could be more than human beings out there. There could, you know, there could be something creating spacecraft and all these other things that we tackle. And if we just had this hard view, like our show dies because we know exactly everything's the demon shows over. Yeah. That's it. You wrap it up, right? Case closed. But every day a new story comes and you have to have the you have to have the care to actually listen to the person and say okay you're a human you're having a real experience you had some trauma but i can't believe everything but i can't believe nothing

so what do i do i live in that space and you live in that space and we have to keep the show going with that humble uh perseverance manny i got a question about the we started kind of with the dragon in the garden and i wanted to sort of just pull this string a little bit like so how do you when you're you're writing this book on chaos, but we're describing this creature in the garden. How do we relate that to Satan? Because we see Satan in Job, right? And we see Leviathan,

and we seem to be two separate things. We also have the dragon in Revelation. And we have these different characters, right? And I think they all seem to play for the away team, if you will, right? They're not playing for the home team. So. You're not playing for the home team. No, so how do we,

how do we quantify these? How do we talk about these things? And are they the same? Are there, there's their overlap? Or do we have? Because also, no, we've done the show long enough too, right? That we know that Satan, you know, Mike Harser would say this is a title. It's the accuser.

So you have many Satan's in the scriptures. The Satan, actually in scripture. The Satan. Yeah. Yes. And then we have the Satan figure in the New Testament, who is the prince of the power of the air, tempts Christ. You also have this, this definite article, if you will, that's a,

this is a, I would say it's a person, but it's not a person. It's a fallen angel. It's a created, created beings, an adversary that's not, but it's not just the title. And then we have a dragon, and we have a dragon here, and we have a dragon at the end. And how do you, how do you interpret all these things as, as they, as they relate, not only to biblical narrative, but also to, you know, to us as we, you know, battle the darkness as we participate in spiritual warfare, et cetera. I'll give two nerdy nuggets. I'm ready for them.

The first is just a quote. I'll just read a quote from my iPad. This is St. Jerome of Strident. This is the guy who like, anytime you see in your Bible where it says Vulgate, like Latin Vulgate or LXX, it's St. Jerome, right, who translates the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts into Latin. Okay. I like his work. I've got a Vulgate tattoo. I like his work.

Let's go. Okay. This is St. Jerome. early church father Jerome connected the dots between dragon and Satan. Here's what he said. The Jews say that God has made a mighty dragon called Leviathan, which lives in the sea. And when the ocean recedes, they say it is because the dragon is turning over. But let us say that this is the dragon that was cast out of paradise, that beguiled Eve,

is permitted in this world to make sport of us. So there's a lot of people who would say, man, the early church fathers, obviously St. Jerome, 100% believe that Leviathan is Satan. The dragon and Leviathan are together. What a lot of people don't know about this book, Crushing Chaos, is that the backbone of this book is actually my doctoral dissertation. I did my dissertation on the title of my dissertation was out of order. This is just a way less nerdier version of my doctoral work. Good work, though, man.

It just takes into a book. I like it, man. That's strong work. Hey, hey, man. Spent all that time. Two birds and one stone. Yes, sir. Yep.

A quarter of this book is about Jesus. Because I'm going to say that, you know, Jesus is the dragon slayer. Yeah. Which Genesis 315 is saying that Jesus is going to crush the head of, of the serpent, which I'm going to say is a dragon. And Jesus conquers chaos throughout his ministry. It's one of the coolest ways that he does that is Mark 439.

They're out there on the sea of galley. There's a storm. Okay, storms equal chaos. And in our English translations, it says, peace, be still. Jesus stands up and says peace be still. But in Greek, the word is Famo. It's not peace be still, but it's peace for ma'o. So peace be muscled.

Isn't that interesting? Peace be muscled. So he says to the storm, peace. And then he says to like the dragon, apparently, be muzzled. And the storm stops. That same word for mo'o is like Paul is going to use it in Corinthians where it says, don't muzzle an ox while it's treading out the grain. So that, so two words are going to get used in the New Testament, same Greek word for mo'o.

but the context of one gets translated as be still and the context of the other is be muzzled. I would actually say that if you add an ancient context, not just the context of the paragraph or the story, but the big context, the meta-narrative context, they should actually both be translated as muzzled. So, okay, so that's just kind of one piece to the puzzle. Like, actually, I think Jesus says he's going to fulfill the story of Jonah. And he says he's going to get put in the belly of the earth. Like I think Jesus understands he's going to get sacrificed into the belly of the dragon.

But like Jonah, he's going to come out of death. Man, when Jesus starts talking about Jonah and when he's talking about storms, I can't help but see. It seems like Jesus understands the dragon as Satan. One of my favorite chapters in this book is called Plunder the Dragon. and Jesus says that no one can go into a strong man's house until he first binds the strong man. And the desert is actually a place of chaos. And I actually think that Jesus goes to war with the dragon out in the desert.

And so the temptation narratives are not just conversations. I think that what happens, the reason that Jesus is able to have three years of successful ministry is because he bound the strong man. He went out into the desert and did war with the dragon. dragon out in the desert. And to me, I just, I don't know, a couple years ago, I went from reading the Bible in color to reading it in black and white. I mean, sorry, from reading it in black and white to reading it in color. I misspoke, the exact opposite actually. And I don't know, it's more, I don't know, it's a little bit more entertaining to think about a God who's able to muzzle a dragon, whether that be in a storm or whether that be in a desert.

Here's another just interesting thing, and I learned this from Tim Mackey at the Bible project. When we get that portion of Genesis 3 that says that there will be enmity between the offspring of the woman and the offspring of the serpent, we've got to actually ask a question, like, what's the offspring of the serpent? Are we talking about baby snakes? Are we like, what are we talking about? And then the next story, the very next story is Canaan.

Able. And Abel is clearly a son of the woman. He's going to be a Christ figure. But then you got Kane, who up until this point in the narrative, every single time the field is talked about, there's a beast. So all throughout Genesis 1, 2, and 3, it's the beast of the field, the beast of the field. The beast of the field. And if there's one thing that the Bible loves to do is create a pattern and then break it so that you can kind of be jarred back into attention. And then it says that Kane takes his brother out to the field, which means we're supposed to ask a question. So where's the beast? Well, Kane's the beast.

It's a fulfillment of Genesis 3 because there's going to be enmity between the offspring of the woman and the offspring of the beast or the offspring of the serpent. So we get to see that these offspring are actually two different kinds of human. one human that allows anger or lust or jealousy to fill them towards rage and the other kind of human that just doesn't fall for that trap okay next set of brothers is isaac and ischal isic going to get sacrificed you know on mount maria or nearly sacrificed before the angel steps in saves the day but his brother is described as a wild donkey of a man well that's a fascinating way to describe a person, which means the Bible is doing a lot more showing than telling. What the Bible's telling us is that Ishmael is an offspring of the beast, but Isaac is an offspring of the woman. The next

generation is actually Jacob and Esau. Esau is so hairy that Jacob has to get skins of an animal to even pretend to be his brother. He's so hairy that they just call him red. He looks like the Bible's describing him as like a furry animal. that's coming out of his mother's womb. So here we go. That's pretty clear. That's the offspring of the beast. And then the next brother comes out grabbing his heel.

Well, the last time we saw the word heel was Genesis 3. And it was a description of who, the beast or the serpent. So this story, again, remember, if the Bible likes to establish a pattern, it's to break it. So the Bible has established a pattern where one brother is a son of the offspring of the woman. and the other brother is an offspring of the beast. But now we get to the third loop in this ancient way of telling stories, and both brothers are sons of the beast. And the entire story of Jacob's life is God turning a monster back into a man.

And so Jacob has to learn empathy. How does he learn empathy? Well, let's think about the stories. Jacob deceives his father, and he's supposed to bless the brother, who's Esau, but instead blesses Jacob. So a dad makes an irreversible blessing to one boy instead of the other, and now there's strife between the boys.

Well, let's loop to the next story. Laban is going to give his daughter Leah in marriage instead of Rachel, which means instead of Isaac, Jacob, and Esau, you have Laban, Rachel, and Leah. And it's irreversible. So the same way that the blessing on Jacob's irreversible, the marriage to Leah is irreversible. And for the first time in Jacob's life,

he can actually have empathy to his brother because animals don't have empathy, but humans do. And it's a uniquely human experience to begin to feel the pain of somebody else. So it is not until Laban deceives Jacob that he feels the pain of betrayal from a family member,

that he finally starts to actually be human towards his brother Esau. Also, what he sees in Laban is his future if he does not change. Because the one thing we know about snakes, is they live in isolation, and Laban's a snake. He pulls a snaky move on Jacob

and on his daughters. And these daughters can't wait for the day where they leave their dad's household. They can't stand this guy. And what Jacob understands is he finally sees Esau with human eyes, but he finally starts to see himself with human eyes. And God takes two decades to turn Jacob back into a human. That's actually the whole

story. And then the last story in all the loops, and then we get to the end of Genesis, is Joseph. He's got a really dope coat. His brothers take the coat. They kill an animal. They put blood on the coat. They go back to the dad. And they're like, a wild animal has torn your son to pieces. Well, guess what? they are right and wrong. They are lying about the facts, but they are right about the fact that wild animals have torn Joseph to pieces. They are the wild animals. And this is the Bible showing.

It's showing. So what is the Bible showing us? It's showing us that figuring out who Satan is is not important. The story is about humans. Figuring out who humans are is very important. Guess what's unclear in the Bible. It's very unclear who Satan is. Is he a dragon?

Is he an angel? Is he a this? Is he of that? Guess what's really clear? What's really clear is that it's easy to devolve into beasts. That's the thing that's super clear. And the Bible is screaming at us saying, please protect your humanity at all cost.

Protect what it means to be truly human. Be empathetic. Be kind. Be understanding. Be wise. Be honest. Be vulnerable. Be human. Like, like, you're not designed to be like animals. Man, I was the chaplain for the high school football team when I was a youth pastor, North Carolina. And those boys weren't Christians. You know, 65 boys on a football team. Maybe, you know, maybe 12 or 15 of them were Christians. Well, it was the Bible Belt. So, yeah, all of them Christians, whatever. So, you know, and at the beginning, of every football season, I would do an abstinence challenge with all 65 boys.

And every year, you know, they, they'd kind of mope and groan and complain, especially the new boys who, you know, new guys who had never, you know, been with me. And I did that for four years. And I would give an abstinist challenge. Hey, while I'm chaplain for the whole season, we're going to be absentent. And all the boys would start to just be like, oh, pass it manny, but we dudes, you know I'm saying? We do, like, we just men, you know what I'm saying?

Like, you can't limit our manhood like that. And every year, I'd say the same line. I'd say, who told you that acting like an animal is what it meant to be a man? Who equated beast-like behavior with humanity for you? Who drew that link? Who defined humanity for you? Because the reality is you're not a blurry creature. That's what you're not.

There are blurry creatures out there. And some of them are humans that have lost their humanity. but you being able to have emotionless sexual activity with tons of different women means that you are devolving into an animal. And part of what holiness begins to do is you can never be like God if you don't know how to first be like a human. Part of my job as a priest, as a pastor, is to help you learn what it means to be a human again.

And what it means to be a human is that you retain your dignity, that you live. learn what it means to forgive, what it means to share, what it means to be generous, what it means to think because animals obey God through their instincts. Every time a grizzly bear is catching salmon, every time that, you know, animals do what they do. They're obeying God because it's hardwired in them. Animals don't have a Torah. They don't have instruction. But humans, Humans don't live inside their instincts. Humans have a distinct place in the world. We stand outside of our passions.

We stand outside of our desires. We stand outside of our instincts and we think critically about what it is that is overtaking us. We don't allow lust to overtake us or greed to overtake us. We don't allow the passions of our flesh to overtake us. And actually, whoever Satan is, I do know that the temptation that he's giving to Adam and Eve is you don't hear God any differently than I hear God. Actually, the Hebrew for, even though God said, don't eat of the tree, like that verse that gets interpreted pretty poorly, actually, in English. In Hebrew, it's even if God said, and the emphasis is on said, even if God said, so what?

Like, essentially what the animal is saying is you're no different than me. You're an animal just like me. And God speaks through your desires. And guys, I mean, we interact with Christians all the time. And there's tons of Christians who say to me, I know what the Bible says, but I don't know. I feel like my feelings are telling me something different than the Bible. And I always let them know, well, you know, animals don't have a Bible, but humans do. Humans are not ruled by what we feel.

or our desires. Humans are not ruled by the machinations of our ideas or our flesh. Like, actually, you are forsaking your divine call to be human by descending into whatever your feelings are or whatever your body tells you to do. So actually, the most human thing you could do is to go, my desires don't define me, my feelings don't define me, my urges don't define me, my instigues don't define me, my instinct. don't define me. Actually, my ability to hear the voice of God and obey the Bible and think rationally about my desires is the thing that makes me human.

And I actually would say that is a message, not just for the church, but for the world. And you want to know what's crazy? Over the course of like 12 weeks, doing an abstinence challenge with those boys, a lot of those boys did come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. A lot of them did give their life to Jesus, but it's because I first helped them to recover their lost humanity. And I presented Jesus as the ultimate human, because for a lot of us, Jesus, we forgot that he's a human. And one of the things that I do in the last couple chapters of the book is I help people to realize that for the disciples the greatest revelation of their life is that this human being that they watched pee

on the side of the road and eat food and get tired and get hungry, this human that they've been doing life with is also God. That was the biggest revelation for their life. Oh, OMG, this guy's God. That was huge. The opposite revelation is actually true for us. And that is that this God that we sing songs to, this God that we lift up our hands and worship to, this God that we worship and follow and adore. He's a human. And my favorite story is Peter walking on the chaos. Yeah. Because storms represent chaos. My favorite story is like if Peter saw God walking on the water out there, he would have stayed in the boat. But Peter didn't see God walking on the water. He saw a man walking on the water. And that made Peter believe if he can walk on the water, I can walk in the water too. And the resounding message

of this book is, I don't know what this dragon really is. But guess what I know we do a lot in church? We distract ourselves from the real questions that the text watches to ask, which is, what does it mean to be human? How do I retain my humanity? How do I not lose my humanity in this dog-eat-dog world? How do I, what if I end up like? able. What if I end up being sacrificed on the altar of my brother's anger? And Jesus in the cross says, then that's okay. It's okay to end up on a cross. And oh, man, I wish I could, I wish I had the quote. I can't remember who said it. I could find it if I look. This is really, really dope quote. Here we go. TR. Clever. This is a great quote. Here we go. Christianity was victorious

because the early Christians outlived, outthought, and out died the world around them. And what does it mean to be truly human? I would say is to be willing to outlive, outthink, and out die the world around us. The reason that the Roman Empire was the most vile, inhumane, beast-like place on the planet. I mean, the Roman Empire is just talk about humans

that have devolved into animals. I mean, rampant slavery. You got a coliseum of people being fed to lions. like just barbaric, a barbaric world. And within 300 years, you have an emperor converting to Christianity. Why? Because Christians decided to outlive. That means live with grace, live with mercy, live with justice, live with patience,

and peace and kindness and joy. Out think. Like Christians produce the best thinkers on the planet for hundreds of years and then out die that said, you know what? is not evil. God has not created a perfect world. He's created a good one. And you know what? A good world may mean that we go to our death professing that this Jesus rose from the dead. And man, I would say that the way that I taught those boys to be human again was to outlive, outthink, and out die everything and everybody around them. Because if Christians just got that,

my God, we would make Christianity so dang on appealing to everyone around us. So, an apology for not being able to tell you exactly who Satan is, right? I don't think any of us know. Well, I think. But here's what's not a mystery. Who are humans supposed to be? That's not a mystery at all. Well, I think it's incredible.

That was probably the best mic drop 10 minutes we've ever had on this podcast, is straight. but I would say we know the beast on his temperament. We know the beast that he lacks empathy. It's almost like the Bible doesn't want to give him any credit by giving you a description of what he looks like. It's just he's this. He's the behemoth. He's the serpent.

He's the dragon. He's the snake. But what he really is is a creature who lacks empathy and you will become a beast if you practice his ways. You know what I'm saying? Last thing I'll say is this kind of informs how I interpret revelation. You know, when I think about the mark of the beast, I actually think about it as are you a human that's been marked by the beast? So when people look at you, do they see the maker's mark or the beast's mark? Have you been marked by a God who went to the cross for his enemies? Or is your behavior marked by a beast that wants to deceive and undercut and and fight and and and you know

have you been marked like you know i remember when i first got like a apple watch my grandma was like you go they're just getting you ready for that eye chip she interpreted the mark of the beast very very literally and i would say that in all of our debates i think we just missed the point like Is it a vaccine? Is it a chip? Is it a this? Is it a that? Do you act like an animal? Let's let's do you act like a human or do you act like a beast? Because I actually would say that the biggest play that Satan has is to get us debating about dumb stuff and forgetting that the thing that actually matters is do I love my neighbor? Do I love the Lord, my God with all my heart's soul strength? And like, am I marked? Is my behavior, is my mindset, is my

attitude marked by a lamb that was slain or by a dragon who wants to kill everything in his path. That, I think, is a question. Nimrod becomes a beast. He transforms into one. So it's like both are true. You can act like So does Nebuchadnezzarnezzar. Yeah, he does. You can act like a beast and you can turn into one. I think the final revelation is some sort of genetic modification that will be you can become the beast literally, you know. But I think what you're describing is there are beasts in the field. There are behemoths and other creatures. And then you can act like those creatures.

And then like Heiser says, you know, like often the Bible describes a creature, but it's connected to a supernatural entity. And then there also are dragons roaming around. So you kind of have to hold all these things. these four things and to make sense of a lot of what's going on which is hard right that and on our show

people see these things to this day they still email us say I saw this thing in my backyard or I saw this thing in the woods and it's like

okay what do you do with that you know but also I love I love the beast I mean they put animal skins on there in the garden

here's some animal skins now you want to act like a beast here you go I mean precisely didn't think of about it like that before. Well, I think it's interesting too many, and I love this, and sort of in the

theme of this message is that, like, we live in a culture where it's like self-love, take care of yourself, put yourself number one, follow your heart, right? And what we're saying here is that, like, the Bible's pretty specifically, the heart is the wellspring about evil, right? And we have to, and our minds have to be renewed, Romans 12, too. We have to renew, we have to be, as you have put, become more human, but our blueprint for humanity is an incarnate God who took on flesh and became came the perfect, the perfect example of humanity, right? And I think that's such an interesting distinction. Like even, you know, we talk about like a lot of the Nephilim here, right? We're in Gen 6 and we talk about Genesis 3 being that like there's this prophecy of Jesus that the seat of the

woman is going to, you know, is going to defeat the seed of the dragon and there's going to be a, you know, it'll strike a teal. You have this, the whole, the cross. It's all prophesied there. But interesting to kind of go through, as you were saying, go through these, these sets of brothers and you have sort of this allegorical, like one is representative of. They're not really like the, it's not really the offspring of the beast, you know, literally, as we talked about earlier in the thing, but you have this representation of the beast and you have the reputation of the woman, right? There's human and then there's this.

Oh, yeah. And then we see it in real time with, with, and Genesis 6 where they're actually literally trying to breed out humanity, right? They're like, we're going to create some hybrids here. And that's, yeah. They're going to run around until Joshua comes and tries to vanquish all of them in the Holy Land, right? You've got this whole crazy, the flood.

get some of them and then and then Joshua gets the rest not all of them because we get we get some that still maybe roam around but I think I I I there's been so much here I really I really I don't know I'm sorry I really love this episode man I think that there's I think it's so important from the top of the as you talked about just to understanding the the nuances of the Bible this is where you know like the Mike Heisers and other folks and you know even the Tim Mackey's these folks that the Dr. Mania Rangos have talked about like you have to there's there's way to read the Bible that that is um i say 3d it's in context right and and i would the words that i use is always like the bible is designed to engage the imagination that is what it's designed to do

it like revelation is actually doing what what all of the scriptures are supposed to be doing like engaging the senses you cannot read revelation without using your imagination. So if you're able to read the other books of the Bible and all of those sensory experiences don't happen, then you may want to ask yourself, am I a victim of the lullaby effect? Am I so familiar with this that it's actually bad? Well, yeah, I mean, think about the Pharisees standing in the presence of the Son of God. They knew the Bible better than anybody, but there was nothing going off inside of them. Exactly. I mean, mean, and then he says, your father is Satan, which is very interesting.

I quote that verse in chapter like 22 or 23. Yeah, yeah. The cool thing, honestly, and I know I'm biased, but one of the really cool things about the book is that because I was in a New Testament program, all of the chaos stuff that a lot of us just see as like Old Testament, I was able to pull a lot of it from the New Testament. Oh, yeah. And go, nah, like,

like a lot of the ancient near east, like chaos monster, dragon stuff, we would all say is all, it's all up in the Old Testament, but I don't think we realize how much of it is really in the New Testament. And,

yeah, Jesus is definitely being portrayed intentionally that way. They were still ancient near Easterns, right? This is Second Temple. We're still, like Jesus walking in the water is Jesus conquering chaos,

right? The pigs at the tomb, the demoniac, the demons going to the pigs and going into the water, is the representative of the chaos that the demons, the cosmology was the demons lived in the sea. Oh yeah. That was the abode. That was the abyss. Even the sun turning to dark, even the darkness on the cross. Like anyone, and I, this is actually a really, really good Michael Heiser quote at the top of that chapter, the chapter where I talk about the crucifixion. I may be able to find it actually, where I actually was really, really glad I was able to throw a Dr. Michael Heiser quote in this book.

Here we go, Michael Heiser from the Bible Unfiltered. This is chapter 29 of crushing chaos. I start the chapter with this. When darkness, earthquake, and the tearing of the veil accompanied the death of Jesus, Jews of his day would have feared the end of the world, the victory of chaos. The signs three days later would have allowed. alerted them that a new age was at hand. That's Dr. Michael Heiser, the Bible unfiltered.

And yeah, I, 100%. Chapter 29, I talk about the fact that chaos swallowed up Jesus on the cross. But that when, what chaos didn't know is that by killing Jesus, you killed the old earth in the old creation. And that what happened is you put a seed of new creation into the ground of this old earth and resurrection actually started the age of tension so that the eight this present evil age would run alongside the kingdom of god and um anyway chapter 29 is the last chapter of this book i started with a dr michael heiser quote and a hundred percent like this chaos stuff is

not just old testament yeah it is very very very new testament up until the crucifixion so yeah yeah yeah And I think some people might hear your words. Just maybe we should touch on this that they would think that there's a genetic difference between humans. There's the actual. I think there is a genetic. I think that's what the giants were. They were a genetic. They were hybrids.

They were anomaly. But they'll think the cane, the line of cane, is not human. You know what I mean? And I don't. I've heard that. I don't buy that personally. Yo, here's one of the cool things that my Scott McNaniel. I, if you ever want, if you ever, you should get Scott on the podcast.

He's freaking brilliant. Scott McKnight was my doctoral advisor. And one of the things he used to always say is that for every two rabbis, there are three opinions. Which is like a more Eastern way to think about things than a Western way to think about things, right? So like, think about how many denominations there are in Christianity versus how many denominations there are in like Islam or Judaism. And the reality is that because we're so, because we are so black and white, it actually creates splintered. It creates a nominationalism because if I don't agree with you and everything you have to say, then I have to stop my own denomination over here.

Whereas Jews and Middle Easterers in general, right? So Muslims and Jews, the saying is that for every two rabbis, there's three opinions. So, you know, most of the times people say stuff, I'm like, yeah, I can see that. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, why not? I don't think this stuff contradicts with each other. I think it feels contradictory if you're used to a Western perspective. But the moment you immerse yourself in like an Eastern worldview, you just go, yeah, I think, I think that Kane's line could be genetically different.

And I think that there's another layer of interpretation that is saying that Kane is like. like an animal. Like, these are not either or. I think we could stack these up on each other. And I think that's actually a way more fun way to interpret the Bible. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a better way to, especially with some of the modern problems with the weird blurry stuff, you have to sort of hold it all in one.

Because. Intention. Just when, yeah, just when you think you've got it cornered and figured out, you get another different piece of the pie and you have to go, well, if this is true, what do we do with that? You know? Yeah. And I think that obviously you have a lot of genetic stuff happening in the Old Testament.

There's really not an easy explanation. I mean, I would say until recently, and you see it with the House of David now going popular, this whole Nephilim stuff and the whole hybrids and giants, it was not popular. Nobody, maybe one or two pastors in the 70s talking about it. Buck Missler. Yeah. And now it's like, oh, now we have, now we half the church is like, oh, yeah, the nephalum. Angels and humans. Hanky-panky, sure, you know.

I get questions about the nephalum like all the time. I bet you do. And I literally am just like, just go, go read anything Dr. Michael Hyder's as. I love it, man. Thanks for joining us. Any final thoughts on chaos, man? The book is crushing chaos. Let you plug that in a second. But what's your final thoughts on this? I mean, because I know what we touched on a lot of big, big pieces of this. But we'll dial down on the next Yeah, we can dial in on the next time. But any final thoughts as we kind of close this out? The big thought is, man, you know, if all we have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail, right?

So for a lot of people in church, everything's sin because that's the only hammer we've got. And I hope that what I'm adding to the conversation is saying, well, there are some things that are not sin, but that they are chaos. and we didn't get a chance to talk a lot about like my personal story. Yeah. But like, dude, like my mom was pregnant with my older sister at the age of 12. Wow. Pregnant again at 14. My dad was incarcerated for 18 years. My dad took me to a crack house for the first time when I was five. Man, being, and me and my mom got diagnosed with like surrogate spouse syndrome.

And then I had to like put some of that stuff in order. And church taught me how to deal with sin, but didn't necessarily teach me how to deal with chaos. And the reality is that all that stuff from my childhood was like chaos. And I brought all that into my marriage and golly. Like I tell a lot of stories in the book of like marriage, like how chaos has like made its way into my family relationships and me as an entrepreneur and then me as a church leader. And the reality is that like anxiety is not sin, but man, it's a form of chaos. right me and my mom's relationship not sin it's form of chaos there's all these things and sometimes in church the most aggravating question can be well is it sin is it sin and i think church does a pretty

decent job of telling people what sin is or and what it's not but i don't know that church does a really good job of helping people to discern chaos and then equipping people to bring order to that chaos and man if i could anything that marked my 30s like more than anything right maybe my 20s was marked by me just figuring out how to not be an idiot. Like, hey, don't, don't. That sins because I'm stupid. Like, stop being stupid. And then you won't sin.

But then my 30s, it was like, okay, I don't have a sin problem anymore. I have a chaos problem. And the book is really nerdy. Like, it's definitely a lot of nerdy stuff. But I don't think I ever lose track of helping people how to actually deal with chaos. And anxiety is probably that. the number one thing. It'll be part two, man.

We'll have to do a part two. We'll dive into the interpersonal part of this. Oh, let's do it. I'm in. This was my favorite podcast that I, and I mean, I'm not exaggerating. I have done dozens. But I feel like on every podcast, I'm a little filtered because I'm like, I am not about to say there were other freaking humans out here.

Like, I'm not going to say that on any other podcast. They were very hairy. I knew I could say it on this podcast. So I feel like I was the most myself. And this was super fun. I'm down for part two. Let's do it. I love it.

I love it. I appreciate your take on this because I think sometimes there's these big, overarching conversations that we can have. And then we can dial it in sometimes, have a very specific conversation about the nature of demons or something, right? Yeah. But this feels like a big broad brush that helps us in our listeners. And I think because of all the wild and weird stuff, we can actually have some of these

conversations again for the first time because we know less than we think we do. And there's this element of humility that kind of to pump into the story and how you process and how you understand that, I don't know. I just, I think there are, there are, there are like real bloodlines. There are human bloodlines and there are nephilum bloodlines. And we've uncovered all those things the last five years. And a lot of times people come up and they're like, well, does that mean? angels have man parts and it's like I probably you know probably

and it gets or it just means that women are just that hot that that's that would be true I think we'll end there yeah that's a chaos women are so hot even angels are like man wow what about them I know it's a little chaos

ensues yeah isn't that how things work right yeah chaos manned well Dr. Manny where where can people find you. Are you on the Instagram? Oh, man. I'm the most active on Instagram. So at Mani O'Rango, M-A-N-N-N-Y-A-R-A-N-G-O. Mani-R-R-A-N-E-O-N-R-N-E-O-N-N-E-O-N. I mean, I love popping into random Barnes and Oval locations and just, like, signing copies. The book's done really, really well. I'm, I'm, like, shocked as to how well the book has done. You can get it on Amazon. You can get it anywhere. You can get it anywhere.

Thanks, brother. Oh, man. This was so much fun But we're going to run it back, baby We're going to do it again So let's do it again Yeah, I'll have to get Yeah Appreciate you man

Everybody get listening Go check out The Mani's book Crushing Chaos Anywhere you can find books And give him a follow On Instagram Mani

We'll run it back We'll talk about Talk about the other things In the book And also things about chaos It'd be cool to hear your story We'll do that at a Absolutely

Another time So appreciate you man Thanks so much For spending time With us here in the Bluriverse Dude Until next time Until next time

Stay blurry.