Sunday School | Doctrine of Angelology - The Seraphim

All right, you guys ready? All right, so we're in like a 9,000 part series on all things doctrine and we are finally at our second to last section, which is angelology, which includes not just angels proper, but the whole realm of what we might broadly call the Elohim, the good ones and the bad ones. And if you were here, so last week I was gone somewhere—oh, I was speaking at Penn State. But two weeks ago, we started this whole series and it was really funny because we got into the strangeness of all these things, what we tend to think of as angels.

Angels is probably more of a subset of a broader class of beings. And though it's a little bit distressing maybe for some, the Bible says there is one and only one creator, Yahweh, but there are many Elohim, small g gods, all created by him, right? So we're not affirming pantheism, we're not affirming polytheism, we are affirming that what the Bible teaches is that God made creatures that live on this terrestrial ball—he made us—but He also made another order of creatures that occupy the heavenly realms.

This could be a threatening teaching to Christians who are so committed to their monotheism that they can't see what the Bible says about God creating other beings that he calls gods. That could be very disarming, right? Or it could be a threatening teaching or at least a discredited teaching to people that were born anytime after the enlightenment when it's obvious that the material world is all that exists. And I am intentionally trying to poke a hole in both of those balloons. I'm telling you that there is more to the world than that which you can see. There are living intelligent creatures that occupy—I don't know, whatever is, right? And there are moments where they come to earth, there are times where they can make themselves visible, and there are probably many, many, many more times than that that they are influencing things happening in this world.

That would sound, if you can play a clip of this outside, it's extremely mockable and ridiculous. It just happens to be accurate, okay? So there is an unseen realm and what we see chiefly—maybe one of the central passages for this would be in Psalm 82, where we'll get to, we'll unpack maybe more of this next week, maybe, we'll see. There's this divine council. God created beings in the same way that He has delegated responsibility to us, human beings. We are His executors of God's will. There is another class of beings that are also the executors of God's will. And there are various glimpses in the scriptures where we see he has this divine council.

Last week, we walked through a bunch of the names that you might look for when you're reading through the Old Testament. If all you're looking for is angels, then you will find evidence of angels, you'll find language of angels. But I would suggest you broaden your search terms because they're not always called angels. And in fact, there might be—I don't even know if this is right—but it's possible that there are different species of heavenly creatures, right? Broadly written, we might call them the Elohim, which just means Gods—small g in this case, big G in the case of Yahweh, but little g's.

Do you remember some of the names that we looked at two weeks ago? What are some of the words might you look for in the Old Testament that will alert you that we're talking about this other order of beings? It's not just the angels—what are some of the others?

Cherubim. Right. Very good. So in the very beginning in Genesis, there's either a cherub or multiple cherubim at Eden with a sword, right? They get described in Ezekiel 1, Ezekiel 10. Other language? Prince, okay, they're given language. Especially in Daniel, we understand not just that they exist, but that they have realms of authority, right? The prince of Persia, the prince of Greece—those are talking about supernatural beings with regional authority. Others? Seraphim. Okay. Now this one is great and we're going to talk about that today. We didn't talk about it last time—that's where I want to pick up. So hold on to that one for a second. Excellent. Others? Host, right? So host kind of conveys a sense of like a group of them, right? So you see it very early in Genesis actually—the host of heaven, right? That's more language about this realm of beings. Sons of God. This is great because that is less obvious, but Genesis 6—which we will get to eventually—is when we see the language of sons of God, it is talking about this angelic realm.

Well, that one's interesting because Jesus is also a son of God, the Son of God. He is not one of these—he is not a created being. He is God of God, light of light, true God of true God. So we need to kind of disambiguate that eventually. Alright. Good enough.

Maybe there's one that we're missing. The hosts, the sons of God, cherubim. Say it again. Oh, great. So more language like what Dan had said, the principalities, the powers, authorities. We're gonna see more of that language in the New Testament. Ephesians six is probably like ground zero for this idea. But Ephesians two also talks about the spiritual forces of evil in the world. There's just all over the place, okay?

The Seraphim

Now, the one that we didn't talk about last time, but I wanna talk about this morning, at least as a launching point is Seraphim. And so I think it's the case, but I could be wrong—we don't get that much data on this—but I think that a Seraph and a Cherub are different things, right? They're not like... I mean, who knows? Like there's dogs and there's cats. They're not the same species. I think the cherubim and the seraphim are different things.

But what's fascinating about the seraphim, if you go grab your Bible, go to Isaiah six. And sometimes you'll see Seraphim as a way to pluralize it. Sometimes we'll just be a little more American about it and just throw an s on the end of it or English about it. But if you go to Isaiah six verse two, this is that great scene where Isaiah's getting his lips burned off with a coal and all that. This is in six two and then again in six six:

Above him were seraphs, each with six wings. With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. — Isaiah 6:2, 6:6

Now, if we were in a little bit of a different setting, I'd set up my computer and I'd put this—I've got exceptionally useful, really, really helpful Bible software. I could look at anything, what does it mean, where is it used? If I were to hover over the word seraph and say show me every other time the word seraph shows up in the Old Testament, but show it to me in English, okay? So if I go from seraph to the Hebrew for seraph, back up to the English of how that word is always translated in the Old Testament, do you know how it's translated in the Old Testament? Anybody know? Kelly, you probably know. Do you remember? It's okay if you don't.

Snake. Isn't that interesting? The Hebrew word for seraph—Isaiah 6:2, Isaiah 6:6—about these angelic beings is translated as snake. It is the word in Numbers 21:

When the Lord sent venomous snakes among them, they bit the people and many Israelites died. And the Lord says to Moses, make a snake and put it on a pole. Anyone who has been bitten can look at it and live. — Numbers 21

That's a seraph, okay? Deuteronomy 8:15:

He led you through the vast and dreadful desert, the thirsty and waterless land with its venomous snakes and scorpions. He brought you water out of a hard rock. — Deuteronomy 8:15

Why is that curious? It was a seraph. It was a snake in the garden. Isn't that fascinating? Okay.

So I don't speak Hebrew, just have tools that speak Hebrew. But when you see the word seraph, what this is telling us is that whatever a seraph is—an angelic seraph, the supernatural part of the host of heaven, the sons of God—they're snaky, they're snake-like, they look like snakes. And I think that really what we're learning here is when the serpent goes into the garden, we're on good ground to conclude that the serpent that ruined everything was in fact a fallen angelic being. He was, I would assume, a seraph.

Satan and the Fall of Angels

Now what's tricky about this is you probably have picked up some sort of language that maybe you've heard—angels are fallen, or demons are fallen angels, or Satan is a fallen angel. What's complicated about making that assertion biblically is that there's nowhere in the scriptures that explains this explicitly and clearly. We base that understanding really on two passages. We're gonna look at them both briefly today: Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28. Okay? And this may not be helpful to you, but 14 times 2 is 28. Okay. So fourteen and twenty eight, they're like factors or something of each other.

So if you go to Isaiah 14 and you go to Ezekiel 28, what you're gonna find in both of those passages is a narrative that is explicitly about a human king. No question, they're talking about normal human stuff. But as this normal human stuff is being described, the language exceeds its own boundaries. And generally speaking, most theologians would say that either these passages that appear to be about the king of Babylon and the kings of Tyre and Sidon are metaphorical ways to describe something going on in the heavenly realms.

What I think is more likely is that they are talking—they're really honestly talking to human kings. But they're borrowing from a biblical...

They're borrowing from a cosmic reality about what is going on. As we hear the rebuke given to the King of Babylon, the language is meant to make us cock our head. The language is meant to make us say, I wonder why you phrased it that way. And then even more so in Ezekiel 28, it seems that Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, in a somewhat indirect way, are pointing us to a greater reality about the fall, the destruction, the rebellion, the ruin of one of God's seraphs who then becomes this great agent of destruction. That's my thesis.

So let's take a look at this. Go to Isaiah 14 and you can go back and read these on your own if you want to. But I'll just give you the highlights so you have some sense of where this comes from. We're not making this up, but it is a little bit more tenuous than what could be perhaps a more explicit case.

If you come down to maybe verse four, Isaiah 14:4 says:

You'll take up this taunt against the King of Babylon, explicitly the King of Babylon. How the oppressor has come to an end, how his fury has ended. The Lord has broken the rod of the wicked, the scepter of rulers, which in anger struck down peoples with unceasing blows and in fury subdued the nations with relentless aggression. — Isaiah 14:4

This is all in bounds to talk about the king of Babylon. Like you are just dreadful and you're gonna get your head kicked in. Even the junipers and the cedars of Lebanon gloat over you and say, now you've been laid low, no one comes to cut us down. Again, fair ground for a human king.

It starts to get a little weirder in verse nine:

The realm of the dead below is all astir to meet you at your coming. It rouses the spirits of the departed to greet you and all those who are leaders in the world. It makes them rise from their thrones, all who were kings over the nations. — Isaiah 14:9

When this particular creature is cast down into judgment, into what the Old Testament would call Sheol, his coming is a big deal. Maybe that's because he was particularly evil. Maybe it's like Hitler has some notoriety even in the underworld perhaps. But again, as it continues:

The realm of the dead is astir at your coming, it rouses the spirits of the departed to greet you. All those who are leaders in the world make them rise from their thrones, all those who are kings over the nations. They will all respond, they will say to you, you have become weak as we are, you have become like us. All your pomp has been brought down to the grave along with the noise of your harps. Maggots are spread out beneath you and worms cover you. — Isaiah 14:9-11

Now here's the language where it gets a little more extreme, verse 12:

How you have fallen from heaven, Morning Star, son of the dawn, you've been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations. — Isaiah 14:12

It's worth just a quick side point, the morning star in reality, outside, is what we would identify as Venus. Morning stars are the stars that you can see in early morning and generally that tends to be Venus. The host of heaven, the sons of God are often in the Old Testament conflated with the stars. They are the starry host, if you ever heard that language. So this notion that he's called the morning star, Venus is super bright, like the brightest of the stars. All of that is consistent with this biblical understanding of the Elohim.

And you've been cast down to earth, you who once laid low the nations. — Isaiah 14:12

And then listen to verse 13. This is chiefly where we get our framing of Satan wanting to be great. If you've ever heard the claim that Satan was an angel, but he wasn't content to be subordinate, and he wanted to be greater than God, and then God punished him, that whole narrative, that is verse 13:

You said in your heart, I will ascend to the heavens, I will raise my throne above the stars of God, above the other Elohim. I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds. I will make myself like the Most High. — Isaiah 14:13-14

I am not content to be his servant. I will be God. But then:

You are brought down to the realm of the dead, to the depths of the pit. Those who see you stare at you, they ponder your fate. Is this the man? — Isaiah 14:15-16

Interesting. Remember, we're talking about the King of Babylon here who shook the earth and made the kingdoms tremble. Then we see coming to ruin. It's about the King of Babylon. But in the midst of it, it seems like it grows a little bit thin and we're paring through it. And we begin to wonder, is he talking about more than just the King of Babylon?

Isaiah 14 and Satan's Fall

Isaiah 14 is incredibly important for framing what we think may be the case about how Satan went from a premier angel to a rebel who will one day be destroyed.

Ezekiel 28: A Portrait Beyond the Human King

Isaiah 14. Let me show you one more and then we'll entertain some questions. Go to Ezekiel 28. You're going to see a similar thing play out here. Ezekiel 28 is not about the king of Babylon. It's about the king of Tyre and Sidon. And we could pick it up at the beginning, but for the sake of our time here, we'll start in verse one, and I'll just skip a little bit.

You probably have in your Bible some kind of header that says like "King of Tyre" or "Taunt against the King of Tyre" or something like that. It's going to say:

Son of man, say to the ruler of Tyre, this is what the sovereign Lord says: In the pride of your heart you say, "I am a god." I sit on the throne of a god in the heart of the seas. But you're a mere mortal and not a god, though you think that you are as wise as a god. — Ezekiel 28:1-2

He's talking to a human being, somebody with a mother. But this person thinks that he's all that. The king of Tyre is a human being. However, as it gets more extreme, this is why we think that maybe there's more going on here. Come down to verse 11:

The word of the Lord came to me, Son of man, take up a lament concerning the King of Tyre and say to him, this is what the sovereign Lord says. — Ezekiel 28:11

Now, pause. Before we read what he says to this human being, just ask yourself: does this sound like something that God would say to a human being? This is far more extreme than anything. I mean, Isaiah 14 kind of tips the scales a bit, but this is different. So here it is:

You were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the Garden of God. Every precious stone adorned you: carnelian, chrysolite, emerald, topaz, onyx, jasper, lapis lazuli, turquoise, and beryl. Your settings and mountings were made of gold. On the day you were created, they were prepared. You are anointed as a guardian cherub for so I ordained you. You were on the Holy Mount of God; you walked among the fiery stones. You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created until wickedness was found in you. — Ezekiel 28:12-15

All of this—it's very hard to reconcile this with something that we could possibly say about whoever happened to be the king of Tyre. The language is too extreme. Too much perfection, too much glory, too much presence at the foundation of all things. The king of Tyre never went to Eden, right? Something in the way of describing the king of Tyre, it seems that Ezekiel starts talking about something else that he's going to relate back to the King of Tyre.

The passage continues:

Through your widespread trade you were filled with violence and you sinned. I drove you in disgrace from the mount of God and I expelled you, guardian cherub, from among the fiery stones. Your heart became proud on account of your beauty and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor. So I threw you to the earth and I made a spectacle of you before kings. — Ezekiel 28:16-17

This and Isaiah 14 are where we get the idea: he wanted to be like God, he became proud, and God casts him down.

The passage continues on, and it does seem like it drifts back to being something that's more plausibly true of a human being, gradually:

By your many sins and dishonest trade, you've desecrated your sanctuary, so I made a fire come out from you and it consumed you and I reduced you to ashes on the ground in sight of all who are watching. All the nations who knew you are appalled at you; you come to a horrible end and will be no more. — Ezekiel 28:18-19

And then it moves on and stops talking about this and we just have more judgment against the nations.

The Basis of Satan's Fall

Those two passages, Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, are the basis of most of what we think we know about how Satan came to be a fallen creature. We don't get a record of it happening. We don't get to watch it play out. We could go beyond that. Jesus makes a brief little comment. He says that He saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning. We've tended to take Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28, Jesus' remarks, what we see to be true, and then learning that the seraphs are snakes—all that stuff comes together to form a reasonably plausible case.

But I would suggest all of this should be taken with some measure of humility because we're really trying to reconstruct ultimate reality based on these little bits of fragments. So let me pause. That was a lot.

And I'll give you guys a chance to ask questions, you can interact, you can tell me why you think it's absolutely the case and it's crazy to question it, why it can't possibly be the case and we're all lunatics in this room. Wherever you're at here.

Yeah, Todd?

So we've said that we think that Seraphim and Cherubim are two plausibly distinct spiritual beings. Yeah. Great. And we've also said that we think there's reason to suspect that Satan was one of those, a seraph. And here he's called a cherub. Yep. And here he's called a cherub. I can make two of those three fit. Yeah. I can't make all three. Yeah. Okay.

And so this is where it all fits under the heading of: I don't know. It could be that cherub is not a species, it's a job description. Maybe, right? So when it says here, "You're like a cherub guardian"—are the cherubs a species or is it like, it's the dudes with the swords, man? Like that's what that is. That could be the case. There's an awful lot that I don't know. Or could it be that cherub and seraphim are ultimately synonyms for the same thing? I really don't know. There's so much here that I don't know.

But the inconsistency between—if seraph means snake and that gives us some sense of what's going on with the serpent in the garden, but why is he being called a serpent? I don't know. See also: I don't know. Right? But it's an absolutely fair observation.

Yeah, Bob?

I noticed that when it says in verse 14, "cherub," there's some descriptors in advance. It says, "an anointed guardian cherub" in the ESV. And the word "anointed" there in Hebrew is only used one time in that particular case. And so it's kind of a unique descriptor, which kind of gets into maybe there is an overlap between cherub and seraph and how that's described. I don't know.

Yeah. I mean, there really could be. It could be species. It could be job description. It could be rank for all I know. Don't we just get fragments? There may be people that know more than I do, but it's limited.

Yeah, what do you think? What is the difference? Or I guess, can you explain Sheol and how that is different from hell? Because it says he's cast down to earth, and then it does say Sheol, which is the land of the dead. Right? But yeah.

That's great. Okay. So we are gonna do it—once we're done with the angels, okay. So the question is: what does Sheol mean and is it different than the word hell?

Sheol vs. Hell

It is different than the word hell. And we'll cover this more when we get to eschatology, the end of all things, which is the final segment of this Mondo series, okay?

But in Hebrew, the word Sheol—well, many nouns in Hebrew have really stretchy definitions. They mean you use one word to mean a whole range of things. And Sheol is one of those. So Sheol basically means the place of the dead, okay. So you could see it sometimes it just means the grave—it means the physical hole in the ground where you put your body. Sometimes Sheol means the place where all of the dead go, like just the underworld, the place where the departed souls go. Sometimes it means the place where the departed souls go that are wicked—a place of gloom, a place of darkness, right?

And so those three things: everybody's going into a grave physically. But then everybody—your soul will survive your first death and will be somewhere. And then for some, it is a place of gloom and estrangement, loss, right? And so that word Sheol carries all of that.

Whereas in the New Testament, the word Sheol doesn't appear because the New Testament is not written in Hebrew. And we have basically three different words in the New Testament that are used that we translate as hell, which is unhelpful because they mean distinct things. But in Greek, sometimes we're talking about Hades, which is the place that you go between death and resurrection. Sometimes it talks about Gehenna, which is a place of judgment after the return of Christ, sometimes called the Lake of Fire. And the third term is Tartarus, which is more like Hades.

So you probably have some simple vision of like, there's life and then there's afterlife. But that's not really the biblical view. It's really a three-stage thing: there's life, there's the time between death and the return of Christ, and then there's everything after. And it's a mistake to conflate phase two with phase three. Sheol covers all of it. And hell kind of tends to cover all of it the way we use it. But we really should distinguish between Hades and Gehenna because they're different places and different things happen there at different moments in world history. But we'll unpack that more later, okay?

All right, Fetzer, you're back. Welcome.

Thank you. A question of clarification. I know you might have mentioned this last week.

But are seraphim snakes? If you're saying that seraphim are like snakes, yeah, and snakes generally are not a good thing. I would hear that. But seraphim aren't all bad. So there might be good seraphim and bad seraphim?

It might be that there's good seraphim, bad seraphim. Certainly they were all created good. But if our understanding of Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28 is right, that there was some corrupting influence. I was surprised when I learned that the word seraph means snake. Unambiguously it does, which was like, what the heck? Are you making snake angels? Ever think of a snake angel? Who wants a snake angel? But apparently that is the case. The serpent was like a snake, but it wasn't exactly like a snake before he lost his legs. All this stuff is weird. But it's surprising to me who hates snakes. I don't know what aspect of their snakiness they had or retained.

Well, it does say that the seraphim was standing in what you read. And apparently they covered their feet with their wings. But the word is translated to snake. This is crazy. Snakes are cute? No. Snakes are bad. Okay.

Satan as Job Description

Let me say this before we go too much further. Kelly Sue, can you comment on the Bible Project? They make a big deal out of calling Satan "the Satan"—it's not a proper name—and it reinforces this idea of the link to fallen seraphs.

So Kelly's pointing out that the way the Old Testament treats the word Satan is not that it's his name, like what his mom named him. Satan means the accuser. It was a job description. You could think of that particular seraph's job as being like the state prosecutor, something like that. His job was to be an accuser, and then he maybe went out of hand. You kind of see him playing that role in Job, where the Satan accuses Job—look at this guy, he's a phony, right? He was essentially living out his job description in that role. So yes, that is absolutely true.

Ezekiel's Vision

We might get to this later, so kick it down the field if you need to. But are you going to talk about the angels in Ezekiel? The eyes all over and the wheels?

Well, not necessarily. So that's Ezekiel 1. We only looked briefly at Ezekiel 1 and then Ezekiel 10 last week, which is where we see a visual description or at least a symbolic description—Lord knows—of what these things look like. They're called cherub in Ezekiel 10, but they are vividly described in Ezekiel 1. I wasn't planning on walking through that whole vision. We could, but I'm not sure that we will. But that is a pretty fascinating thing. People have an image of angels and it's all wrong. It is all wrong. It's very strange.

Deconstructing Our Understanding

When we're talking about these ethereal type things in relation to where we are, I think taking those two things is always helpful when we have these conversations to try to interpolate how it explains why we see what we see in the world. As in Satan is a betrayer, so we see betrayer. Satan is an accuser, so I'm going to be attacked with accusations. Satan is a liar, so we're going to be lied to. Something I can take home and say, okay, this is what I got today.

Well, I'm probably not going to satisfy that today. And I think there is absolutely value in that. However, I have a different agenda today—to try to completely disrupt your thinking. That's my objective today. So all you're going to walk away with today is a sense of what is the world actually like. We will satisfy it eventually, maybe, but today is more about deconstruction than reconstruction. So bear with me.

Spiritual Power and Physical Realm

Is there any evidence to suggest that when in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, when God is talking and seems to get more spiritual realm and back to more of the physical realm, that there is any spiritual power of saints possessing the kings or that there is an evil or spiritual being that is coming down in the form of playing spiritual?

Are you asking if there is evidence that the demonic realm is in some way possessing the king of Tyre? We see in Sodom and Gomorrah that angels come to Sodom and Gomorrah. So we see that Elohim or lower case gods are present and are heard.

Is there any evidence, Jeff, that that might be the case with these?

Yeah. So the question is: when we see what might be a conflation of like the king of Babylon and then like the devil behind him, could that be because there's a devil behind him? Like, is there some demonic person that is influencing these kings, and that's why we're getting this kind of almost like three-dimensional vision?

That could be the case. I'm gonna have to keep saying like, I don't know, because I don't know. But that's not an unreasonable guess to make. And you do see like Saul will have spirits come upon him and compel him to throw a spear at David. And so you will see in the Old Testament some sense of the evil realm influencing this. So that's a plausible case to make—that might be what's going on, or at least that may be part of what is going on in those couple of passages. So for sure.

Okay, now, something I want to say, and then I'll come back to you maybe. What I said to PJ is that the goal today is to kind of disrupt your thinking. And that's because the goal is to disrupt your thinking, all right?

Thomas Kuhn and Paradigm Shifts

So the guy named Thomas Kuhn—k u h n, if you want to look him up—he's not a Christian, well maybe he's a Christian, but he's not a theologian. He wrote a book called Structure of a Scientific Revolution. And I just want to invoke him for a second to give you a way to think about this, whether it's uncomfortable or not. I want you to think about this.

What Kuhn argues is that scientific revolutions happen somewhat catastrophically. Okay? You can think about this both as an individual, you can think about this societally. Kind of the classic example of this, if there's ever been a scientific revolution, it would be the Copernican revolution.

The notion that the sun is at the center of the system and we are spinning around ourselves and orbiting around it is something you all accept to be obviously true, because you were taught it since you were like five years old. It is not obviously true. Okay?

In fact, the first day some yahoo said, "Hey, you know how we're sitting here on the earth and then we see the sun rise and go over us and then go down? Hear me out. I don't think the sun is moving. I think we are. I think the sun is sitting there and we're spinning around ourselves and orbiting the sun." And everybody's like, "You're an idiot. Go outside. Does it feel like we're spinning around?" The most obvious thing in the world is that we're stationary and that the sun is moving over us.

And then they're like, "Okay, but hang on, hear me out. Because my system—this notion that we are not sitting still, that we're moving, that we're spinning around ourselves and orbiting it—just hear me out. This would make sense in light of what we know about the seasons. You know how like it's colder and then warmer and then it's in this winter and spring kind of stuff?"

"Yeah, yeah, I know about that. I've seen that. I've been alive for thirty years."

"Well, what if hang on, let me explain this to you. What if we're like tilted to like 23 degrees and yeah, okay, makes sense but it's still stupid. Go outside, it's obvious that we're standing still."

"Right? Go hang on a second. Did you ever notice the way the stars move in the sky and how like most of them are like fixed?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"And then these weird ones that move like this, they move like that. Yes, I've noticed that. What explains that?"

"I don't know."

"Well, hang on. What if they are like us and we are all orbiting the same sun at different rates and we're at different distances? Because my system would make it all..." And eventually you're like, "Holy cow, everything I think is wrong. It's all wrong. And this system is a better explanation for the way the world actually is."

And when that happens, you've got to rethink everything because nothing is what you thought, right? Now, that's distressing. Do you understand this? This is like, nobody's like, "Awesome, that's so much better." Instead, everybody's like, "Holy cow, I don't know what's true anymore because it really feels like we're standing still."

That Copernican revolution has happened multiple times in our understanding of how the world functions, right? In the realm of science, or in the realm of physics, or in the realm of biology—pick a thing.

But you guys, that exact phenomenon has to happen to you in this world, not about things as grand as the sun, but in your complete view of the world. There was a time that somebody said to you, "Hey, hear me out. What if Jesus—who leads that uptight religion of nut jobs who don't want you to have any fun—what if he was who he said he was?" You're like, "Yeah, please. Because clearly he's not. But hang on a second, hang on a second, I'm gonna walk you through this."

And then we walk through the evidence for the resurrection, or we walk through the evidence of the superiority of the world that he creates for those that follow him. Or and eventually, eventually, you were like, oh my goodness. This changes everything. This completely reframes the way I think about absolutely everything. Okay?

That process whereby you go from your little simplistic understanding of how things are and you allow all the data that's all anomalistic—it doesn't fit in your worldview. And so you just dismiss it. This is the easiest thing in the world to do. Anybody tells you something that doesn't already fit in your pre-existing box, just ignore it and go live your happy life.

But if eventually there's so many anomalies, the way that Kuhn paints it is like your beliefs exist like on a network. Imagine a net, and it holds your world together. And I come in here and I tell you something that doesn't fit in your net, which is like a weight, and I just hang it on the thing. And you're like, yeah, I can just ignore that, that's fine. Then I hang on another weight, and then I hang on another weight, and then I hang on another weight. And eventually the whole thing collapses and you need to rebuild a better net that does a better job of making sense of this data that you can no longer ignore.

Does this make sense? You guys, learning to accept that process, learning to embrace that process, learning to seek that process is crucial. If you're so brittle in your framing of things that you can't learn any new information, some of you need to understand this. I'm just going to be equal opportunity offender here, okay?

Some of you need to come to understand that the charismatic gifts are real and you're not going to like it, because it's so much simpler if that weirdness just doesn't exist. Some of you need to understand that God's sovereign in salvation. And that whole thing about TULIP—I was right about all of it, right? And you're going to be like, oh, I hate this part of this, right?

Some of me, there are still things in my worldview that need to get corrected, that need to get adjusted, right? This is always true. Learning to say like, I'm not just so locked into what I used to think was true that I can't accept new data—that's a really important thing.

We must allow God's Word to penetrate through whatever we've hardened into and believe whatever comes out on the other side. When the net collapses and all the new data comes in and then we rebuild it, we get closer and closer to accurately understanding the world as it really is. And that is a highly, highly desirable state to be in, okay?

So the next few weeks—and this is all set up for the next week, okay? Because next week we're gonna start at Genesis six. Whatever happened with Satan—it might be, I think, the first rebellion of the fallen angels—but it is not the last rebellion of the angelic realm. There's gonna be another one. We're gonna read about it in Genesis six and it will make you uncomfortable. It's gonna screw up your net. You're gonna say, well that's obviously not true because I can tell we're standing still.

And I just want to ask you, just soften a little bit. Just be willing to let the Word of God come over the wall of your life and to reshape what you think ultimate reality is. Because there's more going on than meets the eye, all right?

The more that we do this, we're going to see this more in our study of angelology. Hopefully you've already seen it in previous things we looked at. And you're definitely going to see it when we get to eschatology, because there's going to be some surprises there that may thrill or deeply concern you, all right?

But I just want to suggest: be soft. The things that are obvious are not always the things that are true. But God's Word is reliable. Do the work. Let your worldview get reshaped.

We'll see you next week for Genesis six.