The Secret History of Biblical Giants, Demons, and the Advanced Civilizations Before the Great Flood
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1 hour and 47 minutes
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155.88152
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Summary
When you travel well, your KLM Royal Dutch Airlines ticket takes you to more than just your destination. It takes you through winding streets, spontaneous detours, and the realisation that neither of you are actually good with directions. And when the final shortcut taken isn t exactly short, our crew is here to give you a trip home that goes just as planned.
Transcript
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When you travel well, your KLM Royal Dutch Airlines ticket takes you to more than just
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your destination. It takes you to winding streets, spontaneous detours and the realisation that
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neither of you is actually good with directions. And when the final shortcut taken isn't exactly
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short, our crew is here to give you a trip home that goes just as planned. KLM Royal Dutch
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Airlines. When you travel, travel well. Thank you for doing this. Yeah, absolutely. I have
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read Genesis like, you know, on and off most of my life. Never noticed the first part of chapter
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six with the Nephilim until about four years ago. Someone mentioned it to me in the subsequent
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years. I must've had 15 conversations, 25 conversations about the Nephilim.
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um so it seemed worth talking to someone who understands exactly what the nephilim are
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what are the nephilim and and am i pronouncing it correctly i mean good enough yeah that's i mean
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yeah i mean it's it's the the the i am at the end is the the im is the plural in in uh hebrew okay
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um but yeah so there's there's a little bit of debate about where exactly the word comes from
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There are a lot of words that are only used once
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But people have tried to do different things with it.
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but in hebrew nephilim is reflexive so it would be the ones who are fallen upon
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which is a little more difficult but it seems pretty clear most people agree now because there's
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an aramaic word uh nephilim ends with an n that just means giant and so it seems pretty
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contextually clear that this is just the hebrew form of that word and this is talking about giants
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it's translated in the greek old testament with uh yontes and in greek which means which is where
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we get the english word giant um but a lot of people when they hear the word giant now think
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right yes that's that's not the core um of the idea so the word all of the words used for giant
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not only refer to a tall person uh but uh could also be used to mean a thug or a bully
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or a tyrant uh and the example i use is uh and you're old enough to remember this when when we
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went into panama after noriega they're always referring to him as panamanian strong man yes
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always and that wasn't talking about his awesome bench press no that was you know that he was a
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dictator right yes an authoritarian and so it's the same kind of idea right that that um
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it's characterizing these people as that sort of thuggish brutish kind of kind of character
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and referring to them as tall or referring to them as giants is meant to symbolize and and suggest
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that okay um and so in in in genesis at the beginning of genesis uh at the beginning of
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the flood story in genesis 6 uh we have to understand that the the flood story is not a
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new story when genesis is telling it right this is everyone had a flood story in the ancient
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near east so the text of genesis is not primarily claiming oh there was this flood it's talking
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about the flood that the original audience all sort of knew had happened yes and which it did
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happen i think right there was there there yes there is a historical event right yeah this is
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referring to but you could have asked anybody from greece to mesopotamia to egypt they would
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have all agreed at that point that yes there was this advanced civilization there was a flood that
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destroyed it current civilization is rebuilt after that yes uh now the key one of the key
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differences in genesis six that you already have in those first four verses is genesis recasts
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what that civilization was like so in the pagan sources that pre-flood world was this golden age
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of for the time high technology right and technology in the ancient near eastern mind
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included magic magic was a sort of spiritual technology um and all of these things happened
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and that sort of uh losing that world was sort of this great tragedy but everyone agreed it was
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a more advanced world than the world they lived in yes yes that there was knowledge there that
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had now been mostly lost interesting and so you find um the civilizations that grew up after that
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and exhibit a of that is the the original babylonian empire so like hammurabi's yes
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babylonian empire at the height of the bronze age uh people don't understand how how powerful the
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global structure was in the bronze age it's called the bronze age because they were smelting bronze
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they were getting the copper from cyprus and the tin from what's now afghanistan
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well that's quite a distance and bringing that together it's about bronze in a rock yeah and
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and hammurabi had a preference for a particular style of sandal from crete so he was importing
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those there was sort of this global economy in the bronze age going on and uh hammurabi himself
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was from a group of people called the Amuru who took over Mesopotamia. Amuru means an Akkadian
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Westerners because they had come from what's now Syria. And those are the same people who are
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called Amorites in the Old Testament. Um, and we'll probably come back to them as we go forward.
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But, uh, Hammurabi and the other Babylonian emperors attributed their success and their
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ability to establish this empire to the fact that they had access to this secret wisdom from before
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the flood do we have any sense how much earlier the flood took place
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what's the timeline roughly it's so genesis doesn't really give us a time there are people
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out there who want to like add up the years and the genealogies that doesn't really work
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yeah because different textual traditions have different numbers they didn't have there aren't
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numerals in hebrew or greek and so you're using letters to code numbers yes and so numbers get
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a little slippery in translation and copying and things um so a lot of people will attribute it to
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the uh the earth changes that happened at the end of the last ice age yes so so you're talking
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roughly 10,000 years ago yeah yeah um other people are more literalists and want to add up those
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ages will say uh that it was more like six but from the geologic record because there is record
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of a flood yeah yeah and and there are massive i mean there there are villages at the bottom of
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the black sea from that period 10,000 years ago um there are that are submerged yeah there are
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The glacial ice that melted created a lot of large body of waters that were not there.
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So do we think the flood came from melting glaciers?
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That's probably the historical event that's connected to that.
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That when that ends, there's this massive shift, right?
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And places where there used to be civilization are now underwater, literally, right?
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And so, yeah, all those changes happen and there's this massive disruption.
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So the villages currently at the bottom of the Black Sea were built during this golden age that preceded the flood.
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and when we believe that that and do we believe just as modern people that that civilization was
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more technologically advanced than the ones that followed it um i mean if we're talking about there
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is some evidence in sort of bronze age i mean you can't go completely graham hancock on this
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yeah that's actually exactly the question yeah yeah and and graham hancock if you get into his
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stuff he starts getting into some little new agey crystal right technology psychic technology stuff
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um that's a little iffy but but we know that there was definitely you look at places like
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gobekli tepe and these things there was definitely a level that was reached there was a collapse
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there was another move forward the end of the bronze age there's another collapse yes right
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and then rebuilding after that i mean but there are ancient structures stone structures so we
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can't radiocarbon date them but we don't even now can't say how they were built right i mean how
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would you not exactly yeah right we don't know exactly we don't know because there's no we're
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dealing with pre-literacy yes right so we're we're making conclusions and guesswork you go to go
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beckley tepe you see the carvings of animals you see the way they had skulls displayed in certain
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You know, we could do guesswork, but nobody left us a text to frame any of it.
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But big picture, the pre-flood civilization, we think, reached some kind of apogee, some high point technologically and then post-flood had to rebuild.
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right and then and then yeah and then his bronze age civilization they're attributing
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now they're they're not saying we have some texts or something right that survived the flood
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they're saying that they're in contact with spirits who were active before the flood yes
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um and that it's the same spirits who are now revealing this
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wisdom to then so you have this in genesis 6 1 through 4 this this nephilim phenomenon before
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the flood and genesis 6 says at this time and afterward right and that and afterward is pointing
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to the this sort of recurring or continuing or happening again so the physical world changes but
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the spiritual remains constant right right um and so part of that recasting of this pre-flood
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civilization this isn't a golden age this is actually an age of incredible wickedness yes
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right and evil is that the uh there's sort of these great kings from before the flood
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uh you have the sumerian kings list other texts like this later that list the ages of the kings
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before the flood and people people tend to think that the uh the ages of people in genesis and the
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genealogies are kind of ridiculous with people living to be 950 sumerian kings list you have
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people living hundreds of thousands of years in their uh list so hundreds of thousands of years
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yes genesis is is reserved sort of in comparison uh what is that do you think a lot of that so
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there's a little bit of a code to it and this is true in in genesis also um so babylonian
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mathematics was all base 60 our math we do base 10 right decimal system there's this base 60 and
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the the survivors of that are we have 60 seconds in a minute 60 minutes in an hour right 24 hours
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in a day that's the the leftover from sort of that babylonian mathematics really yeah um i didn't
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know we had Babylonian minutes. So, um, but yeah, that, that, um, that basics of math. And if you,
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if you look at those ages as sets of 60, there are sort of certain things encoded about the
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different Kings and the different generations that way. Um, nobody's totally cracked the code
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in Genesis, but to give you an example in the Sumerian Kings list, the seventh King in the
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list is the one who creates the solar calendar um seventh person in the list and if you look
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at genesis and the epistle of jude which is like a paragraph in the new testament
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he refers to enoch as the seventh from adam yes if you go to enoch in the genealogies
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of seth in uh genesis he lives for 365 years so you have the number of days right in the solar
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calendar year as his age he's the seventh person the seventh person in the sumerian kings list
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creates the solar calendar so there are some sort of coded encoded connections going on with those
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with those numbers um is there any evidence that human lifespan was much longer at one point than
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it is now i that's that's debated by a lot of people um certainly not i don't think anyone
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thinks in the thousands of years right yes um and part of the difficulty with that is that
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people think that people hear life expectancy statistics you know like you hear that in
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at the beginning of the 20th century the average life expectancy of the u.s was 35 and people
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think oh people were living to 35 and then dying it's like well no a lot of people were
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dying there's a high infant mortality rate there's a lot of people died before 35 but
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people who made it to 35 a lot of them you know made it to 100 120 yeah so when you're when you're
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doing kind of archaeology and stuff yeah you find a lot of young people because a lot you know there's
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no antibiotics there's no right right you have a very high mortality rate it's hard to tell
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how long exactly how long the the truly elderly people were living right yes um so but yeah i
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don't think anybody would frame that in the thousands of years yes um so it's more about
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them saying something about these people and and like i said the seventh one has the solar calendar
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all of them have in the sumerian king's list have associated with them sort of the things that they
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discovered but the discovery is always it was revealed to them by this spirit
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came and and this divine spirit revealed to them this and that and the other and and
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It's technological things like metallurgy, it's ancient technological things like sorcery and divination, and it's things about the natural world like the solar calendar.
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But the ancients believed that technological advances came to them from the spiritual realm.
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yeah no this is part of this is part of the larger discussion and this is
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but nuclear technology definitely didn't come from the demonic well this is this is this is exact so
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um within the framework of how the ancients understood it and this is the ancients going
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all the way late antiquity and and this is frankly maintained in the orthodox church
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so the mind in the greek word that's usually translated mind is nous it's transliterated n-o-u-s
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and we're used to thinking of our mind as our brain yeah and it's sort of this computer in
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our skull yeah exactly that churns and processes um but that's not how they thought about it
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they thought about the mind more as a sensory organ like your eye yes so you'll see it referred
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to as the eye of the heart or the eye of the mind and that the mind sort of perceives the
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spiritual realm. And so ideas are like sights or sounds or smells. They're not produced by the
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brain, right? They're not produced by the mind. They're received by the brain. They're received
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by the mind. Yes. Right. And so they come from outside, right? But that's the experience of
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people who are paying attention now even like who hasn't had that right and and i've never met anyone
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who had the experience of generating a thought right like one of the steps from not a thought
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to a thought right um oh it's such a deep point yeah so yeah and so these things these things
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come from from outside and so this is in the genealogy of cain in genesis right it's it's
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Cain's descendants who invent metallurgy and use it to make weapons, right?
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And who discover divination and who discover music and use it for seduction and for these
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Because, and the idea is that these demonic spirits that are antithetical to humanity
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bring knowledge to humans before they're ready for it.
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right that a time would come when humanity had reached a level of spiritual maturity when they
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could receive this knowledge yes and and put it to proper use and so it gets revealed early
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right and that begins with the serpent in the garden
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right the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not itself evil
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right so adam is created humanity is created innocent right but innocent like a child is
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innocent. And created for this purpose, created in God's image in order to grow into his likeness.
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And so a point of maturity would have come where humanity could have had the knowledge of good
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and evil and been able to make good choices because God has the knowledge of good and evil.
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He knows what good and evil are. And this is the way, the phrase, the knowledge of good and evil
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is used throughout the old testament it's used to refer to a child coming to sort of what we
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would call the age of accountability coming to the age where they understand good and evil right and
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wrong and so uh the serpent comes and promises the devil comes and promises you know no god doesn't
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want you to have this because he doesn't want you to be like him here's the shortcut get this
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knowledge now before you're prepared for it and it brings about destruction so yes right the the
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atomic bomb is revealed to man we don't use it as a carbon neutral source of electrical energy
00:21:51.040
right we use it to make a weapon and i don't know if you're aware of this or not but nagasaki was
00:21:59.300
the most christian city in japan i'm highly aware of it i'm highly aware of it and it's one of the
00:22:03.960
first things it gets used for yes is to wipe out fixated on it actually wipe out most of the
00:22:10.320
population of japan so they zeroed in on a church yeah yeah so um and that infuriates people when
00:22:17.460
you when you say it but it's true yeah so that that's a that's a pattern right and so um yeah
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that that is the understanding and so they're not uh the the promise is always oh i'm going to give
00:22:35.640
you the secret knowledge this is going to give you power this is going to give you control this is
00:22:38.820
going to give you influences is going to give you xyz right but ultimately it ends up being toward
00:22:45.320
humanity's destruction yes cost of living is already making it hard to live here and it's
00:22:50.940
not getting any better unfortunately it's likely to get worse and a lot of americans fill the gap
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with credit cards not just for fancy dinners but to cover things like groceries and bills
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that is a disaster it's understandable but don't go down that road because there is a tax in effect
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800-685-5696 or visit americanfinancing.net slash tucker so to go back to the nephilim nephilim
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yeah um the passage in genesis referring to which is just a couple sentences long yeah i think uh
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is explaining why god sent the flood why does all of this have to be destroyed why does peak
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civilization pick the technology have to be destroyed and those two can you summarize what
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it says yeah so it refers to the nephilim as the men of renown men of renown so it's referencing
00:24:35.860
these kings these ancient kings right the people in charge who are looked at as heroes as divine
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heroes by these post-flood pagans right look back to them as these were the leaders of the golden
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age these are the great figures these are the spirits we want to emulate right these are the
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people we want to be like um the great heroes and instead genesis casts them as these evil
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wicked tyrants and thugs who are leading people to destruction to chaos right um genesis says
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that it gets to the point where every thought of humanity is always evil all the time right that's
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Um, and, uh, these people are actively leading humanity in that direction.
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They're, they're, uh, teaching this, they're embodying this.
00:25:36.220
And, um, so when you, when you have a person who are calling a, uh, a giant or a Nephilim,
00:25:44.060
we're talking about sort of a fully demonized human.
00:25:48.200
So in the way the church has traditionally talked about sin related to what we were just talking about with the mind, there's sort of these stages.
00:25:58.260
First stage is thought comes into your mind, right?
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You can't control that just like if you're walking down the street and you see something or hear something, right?
00:26:17.780
we start to let that thought take root start to let that thought turn into a plan right been there
00:26:24.320
then we let that plan turn into action right yeah then that action turns into a habit
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a repeated action over time that we fall into as it becomes a habit it starts to take control of us
00:26:41.220
so we talk about the sins as the passions because they make us passive right they're acting upon us
00:26:48.800
at a certain point um and you can see that with you know anger right you reach a point where
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it's now driving the bus right or lust yes or you know addiction right yes these things
00:27:06.860
and then beyond that you get what we call demonic possession where there is this sort of spirit that
00:27:13.300
is now driving full time you're not even really making your own decisions anymore you're kind of
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lost to it and then sort of the furthest you can go in terms of being lost when we're talking about
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these nephilim and these giants is that spirit isn't in control of you anymore you just agree
00:27:32.060
with it you're on board with that sort of demonic spirit deliberately you know you're rejoicing and
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enjoying right sort of the chaos and the destruction and the and the wickedness and by the grace of god
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there's relatively few of those people right but they do exist do you mind if i just pull up the
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passage because i there's one part of it i want to ask you about which you haven't addressed which
00:28:06.740
And I think this is the most evocative or the most interesting, the weirdest.
00:28:18.640
When human beings began to increase the number in the earth and daughters were born to them,
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the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful and they married any
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then the lord said my spirit will not contend with humans forever for they are
00:28:34.360
mortal and their days will be 120 years the nephilim were on the earth in these days and
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also afterward and the sons of god went to the daughters of humans and had children with them
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they were the heroes of old men of renown yeah so that's describing mating between spiritual
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entities sons of god whatever that means yeah and human women really the rape of them which
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whoever they choose suggests right rape right yeah so what is that yeah so um sons of god is
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used for example in job this is referring to a group of and what we would call angelic beings
00:29:46.060
what angels are angels angelic beings are sort of vast cosmic intelligences yes uh and so we
00:29:53.660
have to sort of think about that a little differently like what a spirit is um but
00:29:59.540
yes this is talking about them having intimate relations right with with uh human women and that
00:30:08.560
that is involved in the production of these people right of the the giants who we were
00:30:15.700
talking about right and their sort of reproduction right on on the earth and okay so that's a
00:30:22.800
different genetic profile they're not fully human right right and so this is this is now we're
00:30:30.860
getting freaky yeah this is this is also an inversion right because of course the the uh
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from the pagan perspective they would say these people are part divine right so the epic of
00:30:42.540
gilgamesh gilgamesh is two-thirds uh divine and one-third human right according to to the epic
00:30:53.880
of gilgamesh and there's a text called the book of the giants that we found among the dead sea
00:30:59.380
scrolls huh that's not part of the bible but it includes a list of the giants a list of the nephilim
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and gilgamesh is one of the names uh that's listed there so this was a very deliberate
00:31:12.500
right this is just incidental and this is it in kumran yeah yeah and so this is
00:31:18.820
you know a millennium later but they still have gilgamesh in mind as one of the so this is right
00:31:26.220
at the turn of the last millennium around the time of jesus yeah yeah um so that of course was
00:31:37.840
part of why they were so great and so good and so admirable and why they had this secret knowledge
00:31:43.180
and so this is turning that around and saying no they're two-thirds demon essentially they're two
00:31:49.560
thirds unclean spirit they're two thirds but this idea just like the the fact of it that entities
00:31:58.880
from the spiritual realm non-human entities whatever they are whoever we're going to describe
00:32:03.580
them lower g gods angels demons whatever that they can mate with human beings and produce
00:32:10.200
not fully human replicas of human beings who can walk among us and rule over us like this is a
00:32:16.860
biblical principle yeah well yeah but what this what this sort of corresponds to right if we had
00:32:22.660
a time machine in a right a gopro is that there were these particular rituals that were happening
00:32:28.700
that were involved in the production of the the next king uh and this happens after the flood too
00:32:35.300
and what one of the big clues to this that's in uh the old testament is there's this uh figure
00:32:43.020
who shows up after the flood, after the Exodus, Og, the king of Bashan, who is described as the
00:32:52.380
last of the Rephaim in scripture. And who exactly the Rephaim were, we sort of weren't sure.
00:33:00.460
The word pops up a few places, other places in the Old Testament. In Isaiah,
00:33:06.660
the text that's traditionally understood to talk about the fall of the devil
00:33:10.820
from heaven talks about as he's thrown down into the underworld, the Repha'im rising up to meet
0.64
00:33:16.980
him. So there are these few places, there's Psalm 88 talks about, will the Repha'im arise and praise
0.93
00:33:26.920
you? And it's talking about in the underworld, talking about would they praise God? The answer
00:33:31.600
being assumed no um but we now know exactly who they were because uh in the mid-20th century we
00:33:41.380
discovered the city of ugarit which had been destroyed at the bronze age collapse around 1200
00:33:47.100
bc and lost nobody knew it was there nobody knew existed it was discovered and we discovered a
00:33:55.320
library of texts there in a language that we now call ugaritic after the city where is it pardon
00:34:02.180
my uh it's it it's it's in uh western syria okay just above lebanon uh just north right of uh of
00:34:12.280
lebanon and rosh shamra is what it's called now um and we found this library of texts ugaritic
00:34:19.880
is a semitic language so it's like hebrew or aramaic in terms of the vocabulary and the the
00:34:25.560
grammar but it's written in cuneiform on tablets and so those tablets survived because those clay
00:34:31.640
tablets are very difficult to break even if you try yeah um and in there we shed a lot of light
00:34:41.380
on the old testament because as i mentioned earlier there's a lot of words that only appear once
00:34:44.680
in the Hebrew Old Testament, but we now have cognate words in Ugaritic that help us
00:34:50.080
understand some of these things. But one of the texts there is a ritual text
00:34:54.000
for when the king died. And when the king of Ugarit died, they did this funerary ritual
00:35:02.800
where they offered sacrifices and did what is essentially magic, ritual magic,
0.99
00:35:10.080
to try to ward off the Rephaim who were the spirits of these dead ancient kings
1.00
00:35:16.500
so that the king who had just died could pass by them safely to get into the underworld
0.99
00:35:23.020
and so that then showed us oh okay well so that's what Isaiah is talking about
00:35:28.980
that's what the Psalms are talking about the spirits of these dead kings and so
00:35:33.860
Og being the last one, right, who's alive at the time of the Exodus, he's one of these giants.
00:35:46.700
It randomly says, you know, talks about Og, talks about Og being slain by the Israelites.
00:35:53.220
Him being slain is talked about in Numbers and Deuteronomy and in two different Psalms.
00:35:57.780
They sing about how great it is that Og, king of Bashan, was slain by God through the Israelites.
00:36:03.860
uh and they say aug's bed he's had this iron bed and it gives the dimensions
00:36:09.140
and you're sort of like well that's a random fun fact you know aug slept here
00:36:13.700
uh and the dimensions are huge you're like okay he's a giant right but we we found a ritual bed
00:36:22.020
of the same measurements in the great ziggurat of enemonki in babylon a rock yeah in the city of
00:36:30.500
babylon um and that ritual bed was used in these sexual rituals to produce the next king
00:36:41.620
so this is not just saying aug was tall this is saying aug came out of this sort of sexual ritual
00:36:49.940
and this would involve um what were called at the time shrine prostitutes these were enslaved
00:36:55.780
women um who were sort of used as vessels for they would be seen to be possessed by
00:37:03.480
uh the spiritual entity and then there would be sexual relations with the king at the time
00:37:11.360
so the king at the time was seen to be as part divine and part human we have this uh woman who's
00:37:19.120
possessed and then she is human and so that's you get the two-thirds one-third
00:37:23.380
they're sort of three parents so the the temple prostitute would be the mother of the new king
0.90
00:37:29.020
right and the idea was because she was possessed by spirits those spirits would infuse the new king
0.96
00:37:34.540
right right and that that's sort of and so birthed by by that right so it's the son of the previous
00:37:43.320
king who was divine and the son of this lower g lowercase g god right and and uh so that that
00:37:53.480
ritual it was common throughout the ancient world after the rise of christianity it was still common
00:38:01.280
you see it in places like asia uh the khmer empire and cambodia had a version of this really
00:38:08.220
yeah and then the most recent example is japan right where the most civilized technologically
00:38:15.520
advanced rational country in the world really that's um in ancient japan well up up technically
00:38:23.660
still currently um on the when a new japanese emperor uh succeeds to the throne he ritually
00:39:01.540
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the Japanese emperor was having sex with a sun goddess?
0.92
00:41:13.880
he would go into a chamber with a number of concubines
00:41:23.160
So this is exactly this kind of ritual still going on.
00:41:42.020
How, and then also in Indochina among the Kemmers.
1.00
00:41:47.260
Also far from Japan and even farther from the Middle East.
00:41:50.960
So like, how are these totally different cultures, languages,
0.93
00:41:54.820
geographic locations all doing exactly the same weird thing?
00:41:59.060
Well, and I mean, this is where we get to the idea of a demonic spirit.
00:42:13.100
We've seen sort of mass evil arise within living memory in the world that can't be explained by a large group of people all making the same bad decisions simultaneously by coincidence, right?
00:42:28.240
This is what brought me to God was this exact understanding.
00:42:32.940
It was a very obvious observation, which somehow I missed, but yes, that's right.
00:42:36.740
Yeah. And we've all been on the less negative side, right? We've all been in crowds. We've been in groups. We've been in stadiums. We've been in a place of worship with a group of people where we've had the experience of sort of acting together, right? Of participating in something together, right?
00:42:59.580
and that's that's ultimately what a spirit is a spirit is a sort of collective consciousness
00:43:04.620
at a level of sort of above human right um it's hard to understand right but if we work
00:43:16.480
but it's not hard to recognize a little bit right yeah so our human body right is is made up of
00:43:24.540
They're actually sub-organisms within our human body, right?
00:43:28.760
It's kind of gross to think about, but chemically right now, my gut flora and your gut flora are having chemical conversations.
00:43:40.860
The bacteria, our digestive bacteria communicate chemically.
00:43:54.540
there are all of these functions going on within our bodies, right, that have their own kind of
00:44:01.800
low-level consciousness. And then we have our human consciousness, which is sort of over the
00:44:07.100
top of that, which is the summing up of all of that. And so when we talk about angelic beings
00:44:14.120
or demonic beings, we're just talking about a level of consciousness that's then above
00:44:18.880
the individual human. But they're not projections of the individual human.
00:44:25.720
They exist separate and apart, and we participate in them.
00:44:32.420
Right, we come to be, this is what God created humanity for originally.
00:44:39.240
Right, so he said earlier Adam is created sort of innocent at the beginning of this journey
00:44:47.720
The way he would do that is by functioning as God's image in the world.
00:44:53.600
So, in Genesis 1, the six days of creation, the first three days, before that starts, God says, the problem is that the earth is formless and void.
00:45:13.180
And it means, basically, it's formless or chaotic, it's disordered, and it's empty.
00:45:20.820
and so in the first three days god sets it in order right so he separates the light from the
00:45:30.540
darkness he separates the sky from the sea he separates the dry land from the sea so he places
00:45:36.280
everything in order and then in the second set of three days days four five and six they correspond
00:45:42.580
right so day four he's already separated light from darkness sun moon stars right sort of the
00:45:50.320
bodies uh he's already separated the sky and the sea fifth day he fills the sky with life he fills
00:45:57.020
the sea with life sixth day he creates um land animals and man right because on the third day
00:46:06.520
he had separated so he's taking care of those but then he says to man when he's been created
00:46:13.380
fill the earth and subdue it and what is that two-part command subdue means to put it in order
00:46:19.400
right and fill it fill it with life and so humanity is created to sort of continue that
00:46:27.200
work of god in the world that's the purpose to continue to participate in what god is doing in
00:46:34.040
the world that then trans transforms humanity so positive example of this god is at work
00:46:43.000
continually in the world loving every human person when i go and i show love to my neighbor
00:46:50.080
that love's not coming from me right i'm participating in god's love god is loving
00:46:56.980
them through me but that transforms me yes that love transforms and changes me
00:47:02.960
more toward god's likeness right and the reverse is true right and in that way i'm sort of embodying
00:47:12.540
the spirit of god the holy spirit in the world the flip side is true that means humanity can
00:47:18.620
also embody other spirits in the world and when you do that and you bring that into the world
00:47:28.440
and it's not just a spiritual or a psychological transformation it's even a physical transformation
00:47:35.120
we've seen that you can see someone who has gone down a dark road in life a photo of them yes they
00:47:40.760
repent they change they come back you see a photo of them out you can physically see it well there's
00:47:46.020
no question about it um that transformation happens in both directions you can read it in
00:47:53.060
their faces yeah and so as humans we're gonna participate in something there are things larger
00:48:00.740
than us at work in the world right god being the most important one and we're either going to
00:48:06.440
participate in what he's doing in the world and be formed and shaped by that, or we're going to
00:48:10.720
participate in something else and be formed and shaped by that. And the end of that is our
00:48:15.780
destruction of ourselves and each other. The reason I was lingering on the creation of the
00:48:29.060
Nephilim is because it suggests this idea that sounds really radical when you first think about
00:48:34.300
it that there are hybrids yeah spirit human together um but then as you talk about it a
00:48:42.040
little bit you realize that every culture has always believed this in fact jesus has described
00:48:47.200
as the as the union of god and a human woman it's like actually it's a central concept everywhere
00:48:54.060
all the time like it's not shocking yeah right right not in a sexual way in that case yeah
00:49:03.160
This baby is the product of God's spirit and a human world.
00:49:17.920
So why is it crazy, and I think people have lived
00:49:25.860
to someone have a feeling when you're talking to someone
00:49:27.800
that this is not that there's something else going on here that this person's not you know
00:49:32.680
does this still happen yeah i i think i have felt that way really strongly about people in charge a
00:49:41.120
couple of times not just i disagree with them i just you know i think you're a bad person it's
00:49:45.140
not even that it's like what is this yeah yeah no i have i have only kind of thankfully met a person
00:49:55.480
like that once in my life it was in a part of my uh pastoral training in a in a forensic psych ward
00:50:01.060
uh i met a person who had i won't describe what because it's hideous and you won't be able to get
00:50:05.960
it out of your head but had done horrific things to a child and that's how he ended up there yes
00:50:10.480
but who enjoyed bragging about it and describing it in detail to people and watching the look on
00:50:16.400
their faces right like that level of gone so there are people like that and did you feel as
00:50:24.560
you talk to this person or listen to this person that there was this was not fully human or this
00:50:29.900
was some kind of hybrid you could look in his eyes and see that there was something in inhuman
00:50:35.160
there i've had that same experience with people not not quite as cartoonish and obvious as that
0.61
00:50:41.840
but still like what is this yeah yeah so what is this it's well i mean i mean that's so we would
00:50:48.920
say in the church that to become like Christ, to be formed in the likeness of God, is to become
00:50:56.980
truly human. That's what it means to be human. And so to the degree which you go down the other
00:51:03.000
road, you become something inhuman. St. John Chrysostom in one of his homilies is talking to,
00:51:13.480
So he's preaching in Constantinople to just regular people.
00:51:21.240
And he says to his people, he says, so you believe that if someone dies a violent death, they become a demon, right?
00:51:30.320
So we kind of had that cultural idea, too, right?
00:51:32.920
Somebody dies some kind of violent or horrible death, they come back as this vengeful ghost or whatever.
00:51:38.240
Yeah, murder victims haunt the house where they were killed.
00:51:40.400
Yeah, so they apparently had that kind of idea, too.
00:51:47.180
He says it is people who live like demons who become demons.
00:51:53.660
Uh, so in the same way that there is an actual transformation of humanity as, as we're formed
00:52:02.960
in the likeness of God, there is an actual transformation of humanity into something
00:52:08.960
Of course, and it's obvious you become how you live for sure.
00:52:11.460
When you go down that other, it's an actual metaphysical transformation of who you are, even to the point where, so a big part of the understanding of what's going on with the Nephilim before the flood is that a lot of the demonic spirits that are talked about later in Scripture and after the flood are understood to be the spirits of those Nephilim, of those dead Nephilim.
00:52:36.240
This is explicit in like the book of Jubilees, which is a Jewish text from the period in between the Old and New Testaments, but a very important one.
00:52:48.680
If you read like Josephus' Jewish antiquities, he's cribbing from the history in Jubilees all the time.
00:52:59.140
um and it talks about uh at the time of the flood the nephilim are wiped out they all die
00:53:06.280
and they have sort of a leader who's named uh mastima and mastima comes to god and wants to
00:53:14.460
strike this bargain with him don't don't send us all into the abyss don't send us all into
00:53:19.080
into uh like a fire let some of us stay on the earth we promise if you let us do that we'll
00:53:26.700
only torment bad people will only torment wicked people um and uh in in the book of jubileys god
00:53:35.720
agrees to allow 10 of them to remain to torment wicked people but it says that god's motive is he
00:53:43.620
wants to use that to bring wicked people to repentance right so there's sort of a a theodicy
00:53:49.480
going on there right yeah sort of justification of god why does god allow these demonic right
00:53:53.920
spirits but you see reflections of that story even in like the gospels right because they're
00:54:00.700
the the spirits are told at that time you're going to be uh you're allowed to honor and tell
00:54:07.700
the last judgment and then you're going to the lake of fire with everybody else but you get this
00:54:11.500
sort of reprieve so for example when when christ comes to the demoniac man and the demons say to
00:54:19.300
him have you come to torment us before the time exactly like hey wait we had a deal yeah
00:54:23.780
right that's and then uh he ends up casting them into the pigs and the pigs run off the cliff and
00:54:30.500
it says they run off the cliff into the abyss which is the place where those other demonic
00:54:35.480
spirits were imprisoned and there's a dynamic going on there where the name jesus is actually
00:54:41.040
the name joshua right of course joshua in the book of joshua goes and battles these giant clans
00:54:47.700
to sort of reclaim the land and purify them from evil.
00:54:52.820
That's paralleled with Christ as sort of the true Joshua comes into the land
00:54:58.620
to purify it from evil, and he's dealing with the spirits of these same beings.
00:55:06.280
And so the idea, how does that become a spirit?
00:55:11.460
You can point to men in history who were wicked men, right?
00:55:17.580
who are long dead but their spirit has lived on oh no people have continued to participate in that
00:55:25.020
spirit and embody it right and bring it forward the same is true on the other side those are the
00:55:31.420
people we call saints right they live a lived a life embodying the spirit of god being formed
00:55:37.420
into his likeness and even though they've died sort of their spirit lives on they become the
00:55:41.820
the patron sense of people and nations and families and people groups um and continue to
00:55:49.360
have this life right as so you're describing the process of becoming that every person experiences
00:55:55.540
you're becoming something but genesis 6 is describing an act of creation yeah saying that
00:56:03.180
these beings were different from the very start because they didn't have two human parents yes
00:56:12.000
Well, and there's, so we also have to understand what it means to be part of a people in the ancient sense.
00:56:19.680
We have concepts like ethnicity and DNA and these kind of things.
00:56:24.580
Of course, they had no idea about those concepts.
00:56:28.140
So being part of a people was about two things.
00:56:35.880
and, uh, then participating in the ongoing ritual life of the community.
00:56:43.040
So biblically, you look at ancient Israel, what made you an Israelite is if you were male,
00:56:49.600
you were circumcised. Uh, if you were female, you were either the daughter or the wife of a
0.79
00:56:55.160
circumcised male and you ate the Passover, right? You participated in the festal sort of year,
0.93
00:57:02.380
uh within christianity right it's you're baptized initiation right and then you participate in the
00:57:10.040
eucharist in the ongoing sacramental life of the church so the same was true on this other side
00:57:16.640
right so what we've been talking about is essentially the initiation ritual
00:57:20.260
right the beginning right and then there was an ongoing ritual life and according to
00:57:27.520
the book of wisdom or the wisdom of solomon that depending on where you land right christianity
00:57:34.980
may or may not be part of your old testament um makes this explicit other texts outside of the
00:57:41.440
scriptures make this explicit that the ongoing ritual life of these people involved human
00:57:45.360
sacrifice and human sacrifice uh involved cannibalism yes we have a very skewed view of
00:57:54.520
we haven't done a lot of animal sacrifice and seen a lot of it so we have kind of a skewed
00:57:58.600
view that it's about killing the animal it's not really about killing the animal it's about eating
00:58:02.480
the animal yes part of it being offered to god or a god uh and then part of it being consumed
00:58:09.180
right and so cannibalism either at the level you see in mesoamerica right blood drinking
00:58:14.820
right um that's why blood drinking is forbidden right throughout the bible um and so there was
00:58:23.760
cannibalism involved in in uh this human sacrifice and so that was sort of renewed you have this
00:58:31.660
initiation you have this beginning and then there is this ongoing ritual participation yes and i
00:58:38.980
mean not to disagree with you but i just have to ask like if so if ancient peoples had no sense
00:58:44.600
of genetics why were genealogies so important well that's that's descent right yeah but it's
00:58:53.080
genetic descent yeah yeah but that could be broken right so let me give you an example
00:58:58.720
um caleb there are sort of two there's there's the episode after the exodus where the spies
00:59:05.680
one spy from each of the 12 tribes of israel is sent into the land and 10 of them come back and
00:59:12.400
say no there's nephilim there we can't do it yeah and it's gonna be too tough right you don't want
0.98
00:59:17.220
mess with them right uh and two of them joshua and caleb yep come back and say no you know yeah
00:59:25.020
we can't do this by ourselves but god's on our side god's going to win the victory for us
00:59:28.660
put your faith in him we can do this caleb is identified in the text as being a kennazite
00:59:35.780
a kennazite is not only a canaanite it's one of the canaanite tribes they were supposed to wipe
00:59:40.980
out. It's one of the giant clans. It's these people. He's technically one of them genetically
00:59:48.660
or by descent, right? But he's listed as an elder of the tribe of Judah in the Old Testament
00:59:56.580
because he was incorporated. And when you're incorporated, they would have said about him,
01:00:04.420
no, Judah was his father. He was a descendant of Judah, right? Now we would say, well,
01:00:10.500
not genetically. But from their view, now that he's been ritually incorporated, you didn't just
01:00:17.920
become an Israelite in general. You became a member of a particular family that was part of
01:00:23.700
a particular clan that was part of a particular tribe. And those are now his people, and the
01:00:29.000
Kenizzites are not his people. He is now not a Kenizzite. So that's the difference, is that that
0.99
01:00:35.840
was that was malleable that was changeable so when did the requirement emerge that in order to be
01:00:41.580
jewish you had to be the son of a jewish mother that was after the destruction of the temple yeah
01:00:48.460
that was after the return from exile so if you read ezra and nehemiah they're talking about that
0.51
01:00:52.900
they're talking that's when they banned uh israelite men marrying foreign women right
01:00:57.920
and the matrilineal descent is a way of ensuring right genetics just guaranteeing that yeah right
01:01:27.920
that supports the idea of giants striding the earth?
01:01:35.180
I mean, I don't know how tall, but taller than me.
01:01:37.800
Well, yeah, so a lot of times, so when we have visual depictions, they're usually depicted
01:01:41.900
as 15 foot tall, but that's a sort of deliberate coding.
01:01:47.680
So in the ancient Near East, they believed that their gods had a ritual body that was
01:01:59.340
um and if you look at uh we've got excavated temples of bale for example where they have
01:02:07.760
footprints they're supposed to be bale's footprints right uh as he was walking in to be
01:02:14.220
sort of enthroned in his temple was the idea and if you measure the stride it's based on him being
01:02:19.520
about 15 foot tall so they're do we think they're real footprints well these are clearly carved by
01:02:26.300
people okay right to represent that but the idea is that's how tall the gods were so that's how
01:02:32.040
they usually depict the nephilim as being 15 foot tall um goliath is sort of one of the last
01:02:37.460
stragglers yes at the end of the book of joshua it says that sort of the last of the anakim which
01:02:42.660
is another word for the nephilim fled into philistine territory and so then when david
01:02:47.380
comes as king he sort of roots out the last of them right um goliath being one of them how tall
01:02:54.760
he is again numbers there's not numerals so things go weird places according to uh the greek
01:03:01.160
old testament tradition he was six foot six which is like two inches taller than me right but which
01:03:08.420
in the early iron age would have made him gigantic right the average the average man was i think like
01:03:15.460
five foot five yeah right at the time in that area um in uh the hebrew text he's nine foot nine which
01:03:24.480
is more clearly a sort of supernatural kind of height yes right to sort of to sort of convey this
01:03:32.000
um so certainly there were people who were abnormally tall like in the six foot six six
01:03:40.520
foot seven range right some of them who who were these people uh we do not have and given we don't
01:03:47.300
have a lot of skeletal remains from that period either right that are there are a million reports
01:03:52.680
from the 19th century in north america in the u.s of people finding nine foot tall skeletons in some
01:03:59.480
cave in nevada etc etc etc they were all destroyed by the smithsonian any of that true um not as not
01:04:08.000
as far as we could tell not as far as we could verify and some of those were proven to be the
01:04:12.120
cardiff giant of course those were proven to be hoaxes um so i think a lot of that came out of
01:04:19.540
there was very much in the anti-modernist movement right what became evangelical christianity
01:04:26.820
there was very much an idea that we need to scientifically prove that everything in the
01:04:30.880
bible is literally true yes and and that led to some of that grasping um but as far as you know
01:04:38.860
there have never been found on earth fossils of human beings not verifiably not not verifiably
01:04:46.160
okay yeah do you believe that um since genesis 6 says this process of the sons of god impregnating
01:04:53.980
the daughters of man is still ongoing do you think that happens now i mean it certainly could
01:05:00.100
yeah it certainly it certainly could like we said it was 80 years ago we were doing
01:05:06.400
a similar sort of thing uh with the japanese emperor um there's no reason it couldn't there's
01:05:12.580
no reason the attendant later rituals with human sacrifice and things couldn't be going on because
01:05:17.940
they're just glimpses of it i mean what's what's interesting in the about the epstein files for
01:05:22.080
example yeah which to the extent i have read them are only hinting at various things and you have no
01:05:28.340
idea exactly what it means it is like reading an esoteric text it's like you're not read in so you
01:05:32.420
don't really interpret it clearly but there is a fixation on blood on genetics and there seems to
01:05:41.700
have been that for a well since the time that we're talking about like yeah blood human sacrifice
01:05:47.400
sex not just for pleasure but or reproduction but as a ritual like these are ongoing motifs
01:05:53.380
through human history alistair crowley is a real person yeah 100 but i mean the incas are doing the
01:05:58.340
same thing that i don't know some remote african tribe was doing with canaanites were doing it's
01:06:03.540
like everyone's doing the same thing is fixated on the same four or five themes i am by no means
01:06:09.880
a flat earther but early nasa there was some weird stuff with some of those scientists oh big time
01:06:14.500
yeah um yeah so that's definitely right that and and well so but i guess what i'm saying is if
01:06:23.260
different cultures at different times throughout history are focused on exactly the same kind of
01:06:31.020
non-obvious ideas right the spirit world breeds with people technology comes from the spirit world
01:06:37.880
blood is somehow magical human sacrifice is like the source of power like who would who would think
01:06:45.820
of these things like right this isn't a coincidence that just what i'm saying that they're rooted in
01:06:50.340
some kind of reality that right and it's and it's a it's a real like i said that you're you're going
01:06:57.080
to embody and participate in something right spiritually and as christianity has receded
01:07:04.320
and been lost in quote-unquote western countries right we should expect more and more of that to
01:07:11.940
come intruding back in because that's the other option frame no you would expect something brand
01:07:18.000
new and like people would think of like a new religious expression that isn't based on human
01:07:22.760
sacrifice but they never have right well if it was just humans making it up that's what i'm saying
01:07:26.960
yeah so it's obvious it's obvious to me i mean i'm not a priest unlike you so maybe this like
01:07:33.920
i'm just figuring this out but like clearly human sacrifice does bring dark power to the people who
01:07:40.640
commit it yes like duh yes they they yeah they weren't doing this stuff because it didn't work
01:07:46.740
they were having some kind of experience they were having some kind of right something was
01:07:53.380
happening there so witchcraft is real yeah and and when you read just purely pagan sources
01:08:00.820
right that they're kind of honest about it right and and this stuff is so we've we've received the
01:08:09.340
classics through the enlightenment which means we purge all the not just anything quote-unquote
01:08:18.020
supernatural but even religious elements there are still people publishing books talking about
01:08:23.300
how plato and aristotle were not religious right you know they represent these sort of because the
01:08:29.920
the figures of the Enlightenment sort of recast the ancient philosophers as
01:08:36.840
and since they had rejected the religion of their time,
01:08:40.260
clearly someone like Plato or Aristotle can't have accepted the religion of
01:08:59.920
this spirit that dwells within him and whispers wisdom to his soul
01:09:03.800
right yeah there's no you know it's christians who come along and say that's a bad thing
0.84
01:09:12.160
right and then post-christian enlightenment people say oh well that's silly so we'll just
01:09:16.760
yeah it's not a thing but they're very honest about it right i mean ancient authors are very
01:09:23.040
honest what's happening at the the bacchanalia the actual bacchanalia is people are being
01:09:28.540
possessed by the backing by these spirits and participating in in drug and alcohol induced
01:09:35.760
orgies right in in public so these feasts again the point of it is not just sex for pleasure
01:09:42.880
let's go get laid the point of it is to commune with with demons right it is part of the yes
0.98
01:09:47.740
these spirits are possessing them right taking possession of them taking over their body and
01:09:54.140
participating in these things that's what they say they were doing well that's i think of the
01:09:59.200
remaining world religions that we know about that are practiced in public only haitian voodoo and
01:10:04.620
african voodoo is honest about that talks that openly about talks that openly about some forms
01:10:09.560
of hinduism but yeah okay they aren't prevalent in the west right outside of right yeah but
01:10:15.680
certainly in haiti like there's human sacrifice it's denied and in the united states media for
01:10:20.640
whatever reason but it's to talk to any haitian about it it happens yeah oh it's the center of
01:10:26.060
their religion yeah right and but the point of it is not just to kill kids for its own sake the
0.51
01:10:31.380
point of it is to receive spiritual power yeah yeah and i mean i'm down in southern louisiana
01:10:37.980
so i'm not that far from and that still goes on i mean of course yeah yeah so
01:10:44.180
um what are like what are we to understand about the nephilim now
01:10:50.740
yeah i mean yeah i i think it is this possibility that's at the end of that chain of
01:11:00.100
yielding to sin and wickedness right this is the the anti-saint right right this is this is
01:11:09.220
what happens when we not only don't find our full humanity in, in Christ, but give up
01:11:19.240
our humanity in favor of something else, um, that, that twists and distorts our humanity.
01:11:29.280
Um, and so, yeah, it is, it is this dark possibility and there are people out there
01:11:37.200
who have gone that that far i sometimes get asked as someone who is that far gone can they repent
01:11:44.400
right can they turn back and it's sort of well with god all things are possible right like i
01:11:48.640
don't i don't see how but with god all things are possible right um but an awareness that that that
01:11:56.560
is a dark possibility and that that it is something that happens there are people doing this i said
01:12:03.200
not long after the full epstein files got released i said uh on my podcast i said well we now
01:12:08.560
know that the world is is uh run by demon worshiping pederast sort of like it has been
01:12:16.840
since the roman empire yes or before right and christians were able to operate right during
0.65
01:12:24.040
that time in a world that you know was was uh that was how it how it operated so
01:12:32.380
um i i think it's good to be free of some of our delusions yes right in this regard and
01:12:39.960
not being aware of the spiritual world or ignoring it or denying it doesn't make it
01:12:46.140
stop existing yes it's sort of like walking through a minefield under fire and just denying
01:12:51.080
that there's a war happening yes you're just going to end up being a casualty right of sort
01:12:57.980
of the spiritual warfare and things that are going on all around you that you refuse to see
01:13:03.760
it also seems to have i mean the world that you describe pre-flood is a world that's just given
01:13:11.320
itself over to rule by demons yeah and the manifestation everyone has come on board
01:13:17.260
everyone's come on board there's no meaningful resistance to it
01:13:21.180
technology has reached its you know kind of impossibly high place that technology itself
01:13:28.640
was a gift from demons it's anti-human it's anti-god and then god destroys the world
01:13:36.980
i mean it starts over yeah yeah so what does that have implications for the moment we're living in
0.73
01:13:44.000
on the brink of ai well i mean every everywhere in uh this is true in second temple jewish
01:13:51.800
literature it's true in the new testament when they're talking about the end right the end of
01:13:56.560
the world uh christ's glorious appearing right when that ends it's always compared to the days
01:14:04.780
of noah yeah right it's always referred to as and when saint peter responds which why is he taking
01:14:14.980
so long to return right with all the suffering and all the evil in the world uh saint peter's
01:14:20.460
answer is that the the uh god is being patient and giving time the maximal time for repentance
01:14:26.180
but the world has reached a point and can and will reach a point again where no one's interested in
01:14:34.120
that opportunity anymore. Right. And that's when the end will come because there's no point in
01:14:40.840
delaying it at that point. But I think it's, it's important that people understand that
01:14:47.160
the way salvation, even in Christian circles gets talked about a lot is it's salvation from the
01:14:53.640
world. Right. And I don't want someone to take from this conversation that, oh, okay, well,
01:14:59.940
you know i could die and go to heaven and get away from all this yeah the world's
01:15:04.340
yeah going to hell and the great escape but the salvation begins here right you you can
01:15:12.780
be saved from that now that sort of spectrum of sin we talked about right you don't have to ride
01:15:20.140
it all the way to the end you can be set free from it at any point right that slavery in this
01:15:26.180
world, this is the purpose of Christ's church, right, is to offer the other answer, right,
01:15:32.000
the other way, the way toward becoming truly human, being set free from that, right, in
01:15:38.400
this world, and then, right, enjoying a world that's free from that beyond this life and
01:15:45.720
But both of those are included in what salvation is and what's on offer.
01:15:53.760
so i mean how does it make you feel personally as you see the world moving in a way that's just
01:16:03.360
more explicitly evil and the leadership of the world becoming just sort of openly demonic yeah
01:16:10.100
does that strike fear into you or um not it doesn't strike fear into me because i think
01:16:20.480
i think it's honest now i don't think it's different i think it's honest i think it's
01:16:29.260
revealed yeah now right because i don't think any of this just suddenly restarted no like in 1968
01:16:36.460
no no that's there is this sort of popular narrative that everything was beautiful from
01:16:41.500
the end of world war ii until about 1968 and that's just not true at all that's um and so
01:16:48.860
So it being now out there, right, now provides a number of opportunities for helping people, right?
01:16:59.240
I deal with actual individual people, individual lives every day, right, in the church.
01:17:05.080
And being confronted by the fact that spiritual evil is real can be the shock that brings someone to, oh, God is real.
01:17:24.140
These patterns in my life aren't just bad habits that I could kick anytime I want, but there's something going on in my life that I need to be set free from.
01:17:35.080
right and require some changes and require some healing from god beyond myself right and and
01:17:41.560
so there is this now opportunity here that when everybody sort of thought everything was okay and
01:17:48.380
they were okay and everything was fine right you had to try and convince somebody that there was
01:17:53.480
a problem you don't have to do that so much now no right um and so so i think there's an opportunity
01:18:00.540
for a lot of people to help be helped to find freedom right to find salvation to transform
01:18:06.460
their lives so i i choose to look at it that way yes rather than the other i think that's
01:18:13.800
the right way to look at it yeah what so what is your advice when someone comes to you in bondage
01:18:19.680
like what what is the process for being set free yeah so i i think the the very first part is you
01:18:27.000
have to become part of something and submit yourself to something bigger than yourself.
01:18:33.260
Right? So in my case, obviously that's, that's the church, right? Because again,
01:18:38.520
you're not just an individual out there, right? Your, your brain is not just closed in this box
01:18:44.800
and you're just doing your own thing. You're participating in these spiritual realities,
01:18:49.140
whether you like to or not. Right? And so you have to submit yourself to something,
01:18:53.920
to being transformed by something and that involves becoming part of a community
01:18:59.720
right sharing bonds with other people that community brings accountability
01:19:04.360
right it brings a change of life right because you you can't live a life in isolation aristotle
01:19:12.900
said for someone to live alone they have to be either a beast or a god yeah um so you know you
01:19:24.400
It's, as I was talking about, you find this transformation through participating in what
01:19:34.180
I have to be with that person and love them, right?
01:19:38.720
I have to be with that person, have compassion for them and be kind for them.
01:19:43.560
It's not something you could practice off by yourself.
01:19:46.760
Definitely not something you could practice on the internet, right?
01:19:49.360
um but and so you need to you need to become a part of that and then within that you you need
01:19:57.420
to form spiritual relationships with within the orthodox church that we have the idea of spiritual
01:20:02.380
fatherhood that's very important where you have a person who you trust deeply right who you sort of
01:20:09.100
open up and bury your soul to right who you uh someone other than yourself who you say this is
01:20:15.060
what i think i should do am i right you know uh uh should i right where where you can get feedback
01:20:23.120
and have this ongoing relationship of guidance right yes as you work through these things
01:20:28.340
because this isn't a snap it isn't you say a prayer it isn't even you get baptized and now
01:20:33.840
everything's great right this is this is a long process of of working your way back down that
01:20:41.440
that road and then getting onto the right road and moving in a positive direction but it's
01:20:47.620
available to everyone right if you're willing to right come and participate in it but it's not as
01:20:55.340
simple as an altar call during a church service yeah and and we know that right that's why i had
01:21:01.260
uh i have a friend who was uh um assemblies of god pastor and i asked him once did you write the
01:21:06.920
day you got saved the date in your in front of your bible he said oh yeah i wrote all of them
01:21:11.440
because he'd go forward and then he'd go back to his life and be like oh i don't think that took
01:21:17.340
let me go do it again right and so it is this ongoing thing right it is uh adam was created
01:21:25.400
to begin right this life of growth toward god right that that doesn't just happen throughout
01:21:33.480
this life but stretches on into eternity um because god's infinite so we're not going to
01:21:38.860
get to the point where you know uh now i know everything about god now right it's it's sharing
01:21:45.760
in god's life forever has there ever been any other society at scale that didn't put god at
01:21:53.700
the center or gods at the center put its religious practice at the center of its civilization no no
01:22:00.280
it always happens right so they've recently covered that with a veneer of science oh no
01:22:06.020
we're insisting this isn't a religion it's a secular ideology okay you know but but there's
01:22:14.860
you know there's an ideology there's ritual activity there are sacred texts there are all
01:22:18.900
the things religions have right you know that's yeah so that's never happened but but has there
01:22:24.740
ever been a society that was as um dishonest about it as ours no no i think that's the
01:22:35.540
there's a lot of spiritual delusion and self-delusion um and that comes out of there
01:22:44.640
there was a move in the the 18th and 19th centuries where sort of deliberately uh spiritual
01:22:54.080
iconography religious iconography religious symbols and practices were taken over by the state
01:23:00.100
i noticed happened in europe first i mean you could go to the capital see the
01:23:04.000
the uh deification of george washington and yeah sort of all of these things all the weird masonic
01:23:13.000
symbols and our currency like what is that being attributed to this political stuff right and sort
01:23:18.580
of the formation of you know we're not going to be we're not going to be uh sola scriptura
01:23:25.480
protestants talking about the original text we're going to be all about the constitution and what
01:23:31.400
did the framers have in mind right we're just going to switch this all over into the the
01:23:37.560
political realm and then as politics is kind of devolved it's you know become even more sort of
01:23:45.080
ephemeral than that right um and so we're not willing to admit that our rituals are rituals
01:23:51.160
uh we're not willing to admit you know the the way the way most people talk about the economy
01:23:57.380
is essentially the way ancient people would talk about a god what do you mean that's
01:24:04.000
flesh that out that's fast the the economy makes decisions the economy favors this group over that
01:24:12.980
group uh we need to do this and that to sort of appease the economy right make sacrifices right
01:24:20.020
uh so there are all these you know we don't call it mammon you know but then the it's it's the
01:24:26.500
same kind of it's fulfilling the same kind of the same kind of idea right and uh other for war
01:24:34.840
right we don't call it aries we don't talk about a war god right but we we talk about national
01:24:41.820
events it needs to be fed it needs to be supplied with right sacrifices need to be made and right
01:24:51.680
because they're built into what it means to be human.
01:25:16.220
it's killing people in order to get peace and prosperity and power right right what do you i
01:25:23.060
mean how should christians approach that well it's it's a lot of them seem to ratify it a lot of the
01:25:29.940
leaders seem to be like yeah no this is a good thing unfortunately yes yeah that's and a lot of
01:25:37.560
religion has been secularized it's a bizarre phrase right but in the united states it kind
01:25:45.360
of has i mean it's it started with the more leftward-leaning religious bodies yes becoming
01:25:51.600
sort of just overtly political and oriented toward this world um and but it has now gradually
01:26:00.540
come to include a lot of the more rightward-leaning religious bodies where sort of the
01:26:07.060
especially the eschatology of christianity um the the the ultimate goal right of blessedness
01:26:16.740
is removed from sharing in the life of god himself or the life of the world to come
01:26:23.980
and it's made very this worldly right so it's prosperity now yes right and whether it's
01:26:30.820
It's a mainline liberal Protestant denomination saying prosperity now in the sense of we need to help the poor and raise their standard of living or whether it's because that's what the gospel is, right?
01:26:46.900
Or it's a prosperity preacher, right, in a more socially conservative church saying, you know, give your seed and, you know, you'll get back 10 times, you know, the money and you'll have all this, right?
01:27:04.760
Don't build up treasures in heaven, build them up here on earth.
01:27:12.580
and uh that is secularization in the in the true sense right the the first sort of thinker to talk
01:27:21.400
about uh the the seculum was uh saint augustine in city of god and he was using that city of god
01:27:29.700
famously where the title comes from he's living at the time of the collapse of the western roman
01:27:35.280
empire which from their perspective was the end of the world yes certainly the end of the world
01:27:39.580
as they knew it, right? And saying, him saying, so yes, there is this city of man, right? There
01:27:47.540
is this empire. There are these kings. There is this government. There's also the city of God,
01:27:52.800
and the city of God exists eternally and is steadfast, right? And he described what was
01:28:00.440
going on outside as, as the secular, the secularum, right? The, which included in it's not just, uh,
01:28:09.180
the world, but also the idea of an age as in it's constantly shifting, right? There's sort of this
01:28:16.960
cyclical pattern, nations rise and fall, all these things happen. There's a sort of churn, right? And
01:28:22.720
that's but that's outside of the place where god is and so a lot of these formerly sort of overtly
01:28:32.980
religious movements have just become engaged in that cycle and you can watch them it's like the
01:28:38.460
the the virtually in the news cycle now right in terms of what they're quote-unquote preaching
01:28:45.280
right and coming out and weighing in on it's just sort of whatever's going on in the news cycle
01:28:50.960
right now right and this constant sort of churn and they're making these prophecies that don't
01:28:55.500
come true and oh well don't worry about that here's the next one and it just you know continues
01:29:02.680
in this in this never anything but it's not it's divorced from the actual spiritual reality of who
01:29:11.420
god is who christ is right what god is doing in the world those questions aren't even asked
01:29:17.160
right it's more about um asking god to bless what i'm doing in the world
01:29:23.620
or just asserting that god is blessing it is behind what i'm doing in the world
01:29:28.100
um what do you think of that well there's there's a famous quote from abraham lincoln
01:29:33.800
during the civil war where a reporter asked him if he thought god was on the side of the union
01:29:39.540
yeah and he said the question isn't whether god's on our side the question is whether we're on god
01:29:43.380
exactly and that's the core question right the core question that anybody who's going to call
01:29:52.240
themselves a christian should be asking is what is god doing in the world right now where is he
01:29:58.020
active in the world right now i need to get on board with that i need to become a part of that
01:30:04.160
not what do i want what do i think should happen and i'm going to try and get you know a whole
01:30:11.800
bunch of people to try and pray and convince God to do, you know, or I'm going to claim and assert
01:30:17.100
that God is going to do what I think he should do. Right. Um, that's, that's not only kind of a,
01:30:26.340
a gross inversion of Christianity, but it's essentially the way ancient magic and sorcery
0.52
01:30:31.080
worked. Really? Right. That's what separates sort of your, when you're talking about ancient
01:30:37.780
religion right in the in the pagan world where you're talking about the greco-roman world or
01:30:42.640
the ancient near east the the division between magic and just sort of pagan religion right is
01:30:48.720
that in pagan religion they thought that the the gods the spirits they were worshiping sort of
01:30:55.680
remained free so you could make a sacrifice you make an offering to them you try to cajole them
01:31:00.540
into doing what you want but they could say no they could decide they don't favor you right you
01:31:05.700
read the iliad the gods could just decide to switch sides at the middle of the war um they
01:31:11.960
sort of remain free with magic the idea of ritual magic is that you get by doing the ritual in the
01:31:20.080
correct way saying the correct things doing the correct things you get the spiritual entity to do
01:31:26.180
you kind of compel it or command it to do what you want it to do that makes you god god of god
01:31:32.200
of those right demons yeah and so even when someone identifies as a christian if they're out
01:31:41.460
there trying to say well if you do xyz right if we get x number of people praying if we do it
01:31:49.580
then god will that's essentially magic right the the the whole idea of christian prayer and worship
01:32:00.960
And the Christian life is that God is transforming me.
01:32:06.080
Not that I'm changing God or God to change it'd be different.
01:32:16.760
So how much genuine Christian practice do you see?
01:32:23.720
Um, I, I, no, I think on, on, if you go to the level of the average person, the average
01:32:33.160
Christian person, regardless of what denomination, what church, what group they identify with,
01:32:42.560
Or are part of, or where they go on a Sunday morning.
01:32:46.480
I think the average Christian person is trying to follow Christ as best they know how.
01:33:16.320
that's where things get a little more troubling, right?
01:33:22.080
In terms of, in terms of, in terms of leadership.
01:33:29.280
Now, obviously I'm, I mean, I can't sit here as an Orthodox priest and pretend I'm not, you know, biased toward the Orthodox church.
01:33:39.540
When was the last time, how do you experience God, like actual God's work day to day?
01:33:45.620
Yeah, well, so there's both within the services of the church.
01:33:52.080
right because i i see god very much working in that way and it's not just the actual quote
01:34:01.280
unquote worship service but the time spent afterward and fellowship together the life of
01:34:08.520
the community right um i see that continuously right i also i mean i i hear people's confessions
01:34:18.320
and confession is done a little differently in the orthodox church than the roman catholic
01:34:23.580
church because we have this as i said spiritual fatherhood tradition um and so i've i've seen
01:34:30.160
people come through and come back from some really difficult and terrible things um like what
01:34:41.180
well i mean i i don't want to divulge anything no i mean not yeah yeah yeah specifics no names
01:34:48.840
but like what kind of things you're talking about people who have had the kind of traumatic
01:34:52.300
childhoods that you see as the origin of a villain in a movie yeah yeah like for real yeah
01:34:58.400
yeah um that you know and and people who have gone down really dark roads of addiction
01:35:33.140
Yes. And it takes time and it takes a lot of work and both of the people have to be on board, but, but there is healing there on offer from God. Um, part of the, part of the failure of a lot of Christianity, um, broadly is that an environment has been created.
01:35:58.200
i think unintentionally where people are afraid to open up and even talk about things like that
01:36:03.660
yeah i know with anyone it's sort of we go to church on sunday we put on our sunday best
01:36:08.500
we all act like everything's fine when it's definitely not fine
01:36:13.080
and you know this is why a meetings are so wonderful yeah because there's no pretense
01:36:20.660
like that at all. And I say to people about confession, especially if they've come into
01:36:29.260
the Orthodox Church and they're from a background that doesn't do it. There's a lot of trepidation
01:36:33.860
and what is this? And I'm scared. And how can I tell you these things? And you're a priest. I
01:36:38.900
respect you. I don't want you to know these things. And I try and tell them, each of us
01:36:43.400
walks through life thinking we're the most disgusting, perverted, weird, disturbed individual
01:36:50.520
to ever walk the planet right and if you're actually willing to open up with other people
0.86
01:36:57.000
about that you find out that most of them are dealing with the same stuff yeah and struggling
01:37:02.080
with the same things and the power of opening up about that in a place that's designed to bring
01:37:09.520
you healing right when we we say over and over again in the orthodox church that the church is
01:37:14.840
a hospital not a courtroom yeah it's not about finding who's guilty of what right it's about
01:37:21.140
helping people in various stages of woundedness some of them almost dead right trying to help
01:37:26.540
them find healing right and restoration to life there's incredible power to that to just that
01:37:33.020
honesty right of telling someone finally this thing that i've been hiding from everyone even
01:37:40.440
myself when i had managed it for decades you know um saying that out loud right admitting it and then
01:37:49.480
talking about okay how are we going to work on this how are we gonna gonna make things right
01:37:54.600
how are we going to start moving toward toward healing and even restoration a priest for almost
01:37:59.080
20 years have the kind of confessions you received changed are the problems that people are struggling
01:38:06.120
with different from what they were and what are the what are the common ones again without being
01:38:10.940
yeah i mean honest honestly they've they've changed less than you'd think but there's there's
01:38:17.240
a pattern when you hear confessions usually the first six months to a year uh you kind of get
01:38:25.460
tested as a priest right yeah so you get a lot of like oh i was stuck in traffic and i cussed at the
01:38:32.020
guy who you know cut me off and it's like i'm sure you did but i'm also sure there's a lot more
01:38:37.900
we'll let it be we'll let it be for now right you get those and so that's that's the confession
01:38:44.080
right yeah and it's sort of those kind of things you know you know oh i was late for work and i
01:38:48.920
made up a story you know those kind of things um but they're testing right they're seeing if it's
01:38:54.600
safe yes right they're pushing the limits and then i shot a man in reno just to watch him die
0.79
01:38:59.060
Yeah. And then at a certain point, right, the real stuff comes out, sometimes with tears.
01:39:05.400
Sometimes with people you'd never expect to see tears from.
01:39:10.000
And it sort of finally unloads. And a lot of it is the same stuff. A lot of people are—now, it takes sort of different forms.
01:39:19.260
Like, so, for example, sexual sin used to be a lot more about actually doing things with other people.
01:39:26.960
right and now a lot of it is distortions and things going on due to the internet pornography
01:39:33.740
on the internet and that kind of thing and so and so that's changed that yes you've got people
01:39:39.860
that this is one of the scariest statistics the average age at which a person is first exposed
01:39:47.060
to hardcore pornography on the internet in the united states today is eight
01:39:50.820
yeah i don't know why no one's in prison for that it's so weird yeah
01:39:56.960
so well there's too much money being made off pornography i'm aware yeah that's and again the
01:40:02.580
economy is kind of god now right yeah um but so yeah so that's right and dealing with that has
01:40:13.620
to be dealt with in a different way that's not i went too far with my girlfriend on a friday night
01:40:18.320
right there's that that's got to be unwound in a different way people sense intuitively do you
01:40:24.320
think that there's something disordered and bad about porn or is it something that they learn at
01:40:30.080
your church and they're like oh i guess it was bad no they know they know um a lot of people who are
01:40:37.080
dealing with sexual sin and that kind of thing they will come and when they're ready to talk
01:40:43.480
about it will say yeah i first saw pornography at some absurdly young age yeah and and usually
01:40:52.080
there's an escalation pattern with it yes starts out being sort of quote-unquote normal pornography
01:40:58.260
not that pornography is normal but yes and then moves into darker and darker places more and more
01:41:04.760
uh dysfunctional places um but yeah they can they generally have an idea of that but that
01:41:12.800
that is that is breaking a lot of a lot of people really um you see that a lot yeah yeah and and
01:41:22.540
that is a lot of people's issues with sexuality uh with gender identity a lot of it is traceable
01:41:32.260
back to some of that early exposure to really that material i believe it and it creates this
01:41:39.120
confusion yes um because yeah and people's first sexual experiences being divorced from their own
01:41:48.660
body yeah right causes this distortion right that that takes a lot to unwind and and part of the
01:41:58.280
unwinding of that is having a community right where they're spending time as themselves right
01:42:37.360
in person very common gen alpha it's even more common
01:42:41.840
and so helping them get out of that and into a community of actual people who care about them
01:42:48.700
who are interacting with them in the real world uh is the is a huge first step in sort of bringing
01:42:55.900
people back to to reality do you find that pornography is a bigger problem than addiction
01:43:03.140
um more common yeah i mean there's an addictive element too right yeah i mean yeah i guess but
01:43:12.480
yes then drugs or alcohol the drugs or alcohol yes really yes is it interesting so that's a
01:43:19.940
huge part of your ministry it sounds like it's uh you don't hear people talk about it very often
01:43:24.680
it's all men and most women most women yes men don't think that but
01:43:33.140
are you ever shocked i mean by this part of your job do you ever hear things that shock you um
01:43:39.680
so i i can't say i've never heard something that shocked me but when i was shocked it was
01:43:47.020
more the particular person right right um part of part of what you have to do i think as a priest
01:43:56.840
Part of what, honestly, I think we all ultimately have to do this, is we have to become deeply acquainted with the worst parts of ourselves.
01:44:07.540
And if you're really acquainted with that and you really know what you're capable of in a negative way, given the right or wrong circumstances, you can understand more.
01:44:25.060
my my um my dad told me the story that stuck with me when he was a kid
01:44:31.080
he was watching uh the footage of the nuremberg trials
01:44:35.640
and he asked my grandfather you know what do you think of these horrible things these people did
01:44:43.140
what do you think of this and my grandfather said there but for the grace of god go i amen
01:44:48.160
and usually people say that to mean like oh some accident right yeah yeah you know unfortunate
01:44:54.220
a thing happened to someone oh god preserved me yeah car crash but he meant without god's grace
01:45:00.700
i could have done all those things 100 i could have gone down that same road right um and really
01:45:06.920
coming to terms with that then i think is a prerequisite not only for our own repentance
01:45:12.960
right and our own getting free of that but being able to help others you know and being able to
01:45:18.900
hear where they're coming from, right, and understand how they ended up there and trying
01:45:23.900
to help them, give them the hand up out of the ditch. Amazing. Last question, which is totally
01:45:30.740
unrelated, but it just seems like you might know the answer. There's this, and most people will
01:45:35.200
not be interested in this, but there's this really interesting moment in the Gospel of Matthew where
01:45:41.860
Jesus is talking about sin and how it can all be forgiven, but the one sin that can't be forgiven
01:46:14.000
Said that the spirit by which he was doing this
01:46:16.420
was actually one of the names for Baal, right?
0.54
01:46:26.200
And so that's why it's blasphemy of the Holy Spirit
01:46:45.100
it. You can't be healed. They were rejecting, rather than seeing what God was doing in the
01:46:52.700
world, which was Christ himself and what he was doing in the world, rather than seeing that and
01:46:58.100
trying to get on board with that and be healed from their sin, they were rejecting it. So if you
01:47:05.260
reject Christ, if you reject God's provision for our sin and our wickedness, then you can't be
01:47:13.920
healed from by definition right but yeah definitionally yeah father thank you for that
01:47:19.280
that was fascinating yeah and great thank you for having me thanks