Michael S. Heiser
@DRMSHPhD
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Biblical studies scholar. Author of The Unseen Realm and the paranormal thrillers, The Façade, The Portent. Host of Naked Bible Podcast.
Lynden, WA
Joined March 2012
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Our beloved brother, scholar and friend, Dr. Michael S. Heiser has stepped into the Unseen Realm - 02/20/23 @ 3:45pm EST
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Let us honor the memory of our beloved Dr. Mike S. Heiser, and please continue to pray for his family.
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Dr. Heiser left the hospital a few days ago and is feeling better. Please keep him and his family in your prayers
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You are better off knowing what a passage means than you are memorizing it.
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The image of Jesus walking on the sea was a dramatic portrayal that Jesus is Yahweh— the one who subdues the forces of chaos and imposes His will on the waters and everything the waters represent
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The New Testament is essentially an inspired commentary on the Old Testament.
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The idea that Ezekiel 38 and 39 is about Russia or a Russian invasion has literally no merit in terms of exegesis
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You are never going to find a church that you can look at and say, "I know that they are a hundred percent right on everything."
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God doesn’t ask that we get a comprehensive education before we believe. He wants us to embrace fully a simple idea: that we cannot save ourselves, but what Jesus did can save us.
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The Bible prohibits contacting the dead not because doing so was impossible, but because it was possible.
#TheBibleUnfiltered
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The answer isn’t laws, even biblical laws. The answer is a changed heart.
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This world is not our home. Darkness has permeated the globe. Unbelievers are essentially hostages of spiritual forces. They need the gospel to be set free. And don’t forget: It is the gospel that is our weapon. The faithful dispensing of the gospel will turn the tide.
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I don’t believe that Adam’s fall affected all humanity by transmitting Adam’s guilt to all humans. I believe Adam’s fall affected all humanity by depriving all humans forever more of the conditions under which they could abide with God in a state of non-sinfulness.
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Please pray for Trey Stricklin, producer and co-host of the Naked Bible Podcast. Trey has been in the hospital since Sunday with COVID. Pray for his healing and care, as well as for his wife and children as they manage and cope with his absence.
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There are no spiritual beings who operate alone. They are either under God’s authority or in rebellion.
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My eschatology is: It was cryptic the first time and that's the way it's going to work the second time.
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I have had to come to grips with the fact that the sweet spot of my ministry is not the masses of people in church. I realized this just sounds bad, like, we have to work hard at getting Christians interested in the Bible. But the fact of the matter is, yeah, we do.
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We are the Body of Christ. We are united to him. This has nothing to do with how I'm doing. It has nothing to do with that. Everything is about whether or not you are believing. Do you believe or not?
🌐 Go deeper: 🌐
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The Bible is not a collection of random essays from a bunch of people who weren't thinking along the same lines. It's an intelligent, intentional story. And everything in there contributes to the overarching story. Even the weird, obscure passages.
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If we’re in Christ, we don't occupy sacred space. We are sacred space.
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Spiritual warfare amounts to fulfilling one task: setting captive humanity free from the grip of this supernatural darkness through the gospel of Jesus Christ
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The Bible is not trying to teach science in any way. It’s trying to teach us theology. I think that has been the most effective way for me to defend Scripture to critics.
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One of the best things you can do to learn how to study Scripture is just learn how to think well. And that just means asking good questions.
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To be blunt, only the gospel is honest about the human situation and human inability to do a thing about it. Other religions, in effect, lie to you—they tell you that you can fix the problem of your own distance from God or that you don’t have a problem.
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My goal is simple. When you open your Bible, I want you to be able to see it like ancient Israelites or first-century Jews saw it, to perceive and consider it as they would have.
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I don't think it's a coincidence that the Dead Sea Scrolls calendar, that the Qumran people used, is the only calendar in the ancient world that creates a time window for the Messiah's arrival that matches Jesus. I don't think that's a coincidence.
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My attitude is that even if people aren't trained in grad school programs in Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East— even though you can't digest it all, you should still be exposed to it.
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I have had to come to grips with the fact that the sweet spot of my ministry, it's not the masses of people in church. The sweet spot of my ministry are the five or six people in every church who are just starved for content.
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The Law was not how Israelites achieved salvation—it was how they showed loyalty to the God they believed in.
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My personal view is that Genesis, the Bible, the whole Bible, is a prescientific document and that was God's choice. God knew what he was getting when he picked people and prompted people to inspire it.
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My goal is simple: do useful things for anyone who cares about Scripture.
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Romans 5:8: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Did you catch that? While we were still sinners. You do not need to perform at a sufficient level to prod God into loving you. If you give that some thought, it’s really good news.
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Just because God can foreknow an event, that is no guarantee he predestinated the event
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If you really believe this thing that's sitting on your lap is the word of God, why wouldn't you want to know all that you possibly could about it?
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Seeing the Bible through the eyes of an ancient reader requires shedding the filters of our traditions and presumptions.
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@ZubyMusic
@BrianGodawa
wow - "resentment with a mask of compassion" - the perfect description.
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The powers of darkness have been dethroned. But they have not surrendered. They resist, fighting a losing battle.
#WhatDoesGodWant
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I came to realize that most of what I’d been taught about the unseen world in Bible college and seminary had been filtered by English translations or derived from sources like Milton’s Paradise Lost.
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Yahweh was not one among equals; he was species unique. But all elohim were members of the spiritual realm, the realm whose inhabitants are by nature disembodied. This was the theology of those who composed and edited the Hebrew Bible.
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Augustine had the odd notion that an unbeliever could never ever please God since he/she was an unbeliever. I think this is silly, since the OT has examples where pagans do God’s will (e.g., Cyrus) – so, was God not happy with his will being done? Makes no sense.
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The Bible is really a theological and literary mosaic. The pattern in a mosaic often isn’t clear up close. It may appear to be just a random assemblage of pieces. Only when you step back can you see the wondrous whole.
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Humankind was created as God’s image. If we think of imaging as a verb or function, that translation makes sense. We are created to image God, to be his imagers. It is what we are by definition. The image is not an ability, but a status. We are God’s representatives on earth.
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True prophets were first contacted by the God of Israel; they did not solicit that contact as though God were some sort of revelatory vending machine
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Paul calls our earthly bodies a “tent” (2 Cor. 5:4) because we are indwelt by the same divine presence that filled the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle and the temple (Rom. 8:9–11). We don’t need a tabernacle or temple to mark sacred space. Our bodies are sacred space.
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The biblical writers were writing for an audience that shared their cognitive framework. They didn’t assume they’d need to explain everything for a foreign worldview
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The theocracy of Israel was planned to become obsolete. I’m not so sure people realize that but what I mean by that is, it was always the plan of God to send Christ and include the Gentiles into the people of God, which by definition is an end to the theocracy.
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We are sacred space and that actually is the fundamental theological rationale for subduing the flesh and living a godly way.
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People like enough about a theological system that they get married to it, and then they just have to do whatever it takes to keep the system preserved. Why do you need to tweak the Scripture or deny something that's pretty obvious in Scripture just to make your system work?
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There are references to ghosts in the Old Testament and those ghosts are the departed spirits of the human dead, not demons
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The work of Jesus is better than the Old Testament system. The Old Testament system didn't have sacrifices for defiant deliberate sin. The work of Jesus covers everything.
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If we want God only so he will come to us to meet our needs, then we’re more like the people at Babel than we are like Jesus.
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There is no salvation based on original ethnicity. Israel’s salvation is ultimately about believing loyalty aligned toward Jesus as Israel’s promised Messiah.
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I want to encourage you to go for the high end scholarship, the high-end research. Don't be put off by it. Don't be intimidated by it. You’ll be able to decipher some of it, some of it you won’t. But ask people, get help, and then look at who has the better argument.
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Christians typically assume that ghosts are demons. This is simply not true, and it is demonstrably untrue with respect to the biblical text
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God joined humanity not to make Satan or demons look silly. He did it because he wanted you in his family. He needed no other motive. You were enough.
#WhatDoesGodWant
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You’ll never appreciate God’s story if your story—and solving your problems—is what you focus on when you study Scripture.
#TheBibleUnfiltered
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We judge good worship by whether we are bored or not. That's really foreign to a biblical mindset.
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Providentially, I learned that academic respectability is a myth a long time ago. If you are a confessional scholar, they will respect you, until they find out that you actually believe in what's in the Bible. Not all of them are like that, but a lot do.
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This is why the book of Revelation ends with the global Eden where all the earth is God’s, every nation. It is the New Earth.
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There's a difference between memorizing Scripture and knowing what it means. Again, I'm not opposed to memorizing Scripture, but let me just be blunt: you are better off knowing what a passage means than you are memorizing it.
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The gospel writers were not required to reproduce the exact “real time” words that Jesus spoke. Rather, they learned truth and transmitted it in writing as their life context dictated under providence.
🌐 Go deeper: 🌐
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In 1 Enoch Human civilization is viewed as a pitiful attempt to restore Eden. Humans cannot recreate utopia. They cannot restore what has been lost
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Had those dark powers known that manipulating people to kill Jesus would initiate the end of their own rule, they never would have done so.
#TheBibleUnfiltered
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I don't think any of the creationist positions demand my allegiance since I don't think the point of the Bible in its creation stories is to teach us science.
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How do you worship God? Live like Jesus. Don’t be conformed to the world—its values and self-gratifying pursuits. That is worship. True worship is thus a matter of the heart.
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Creationism, the important fundamental ideas on it just do not depend on science. They don't. God chose people to communicate these ideas who didn't have a scientific worldview. That alone tells you that these ideas are not dependent on science.
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While a tyrant ran Babylon of Daniel’s time via his bureaucracy, laws, and army, supernatural princes were the ultimate intelligence behind the tyranny.
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Part of being a conscientious Bible student is ensuring we don’t filter Scripture through our own assumptions and preconceived ideas about what it says. Our theology should come from the biblical text, not from our traditional readings of it.
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The content of the gospel is not about what you’ve done, or might do, or need to do. It’s about what someone else did for you.
#WhatDoesGodWant
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I’m not anti-creedal. I subscribe to the basic creeds of Christianity (e.g., Apostle’s Creed, Nicean Creed). I just don’t believe that creeds serve any role in exegesis of the biblical text.
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New Testament scholars know the book of Revelation frequently makes use of the Old Testament. That is not the case with many readers of Revelation.
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Many Christians have an unworkable picture of inspiration—that the content of the Bible just sort of dropped from heaven or was downloaded into a writer's brain.
We have to think about when the book was edited: how it was put together and why.
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What you couldn't gain by moral perfection, you can't lose by moral imperfection.
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We are blessed to have access to more information that connects us to the contexts of the biblical writers than ever before.
#TheBibleUnfiltered
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If people look at our lives and don’t see any distinction from the unbelieving world, they won’t find the gospel believable (or at best, they’ll be confused).
#WhatDoesGodWant
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I’ve tried to convince people that the content of the Bible is either presented as a story or framed by a story and that the Bible’s story is inescapably supernatural.
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Our traditions, however honorable, are not intrinsic to the Bible. They are systems we invent to organize the Bible.
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We cannot lose sight of the fact that our “spiritual worship” of God is intrinsically tied to the way we live (Rom 12:1-2). It’s not about a thirty-minute experience at home or in a church. It’s about a life oriented by, and directed to, God.
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Scripture’s argument against abortion is not set forth in proposition; it is set forth in a worldview that views any animate human being a complete being
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Spent the last two days with the Bible Project team; great that they embrace Unseen Realm content (i.e. biblical theology’ supernatural content matrix); even better that they want to help people see it via their unique talents and ministry; stay tuned!
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Yes, the biblical author can be scientifically ignorant and still get his point across
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The kingdom spreads slowly but relentlessly, one new believer at a time. Every church is a new pocket of resistance, every baptism another pledge of allegiance to the Most High, every celebration of the Lord’s Supper a denial of fellowship with lesser masters
#UnseenRealm
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The biblical writers wrote about the world they knew, not the one they didn't know.
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My Demons book has low ratings from some who (a) follow Zecharia Sitchin, (b) thought it was a history of Catholic teaching, and (c) thought it was about experiencing demons TODAY. (Not sure how "what the BIBLE says about the powers of darkness" led to that. Mission Accomplished.
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All of this creationism, young earth, old earth, all this battling that goes on I think on some level is just ridiculous. It's just a failure to affirm the Bible for what it is. Just let the Bible be what it is. Let God's decisions stand.
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What if, each day, our lives were organized around our knowledge of our status as part of God’s family, tasked with delivering siblings from darkness?
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I have come to the conclusion that a high percentage of people within churches are dramatically under-taught and underestimated in terms of their desire to think. And when they don't get that, it'll drive them to compartmentalize their faith.
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The fact that Jewish scribes at Qumran would produce a pesher text on the Book of the Watchers suggests that 1 Enoch was highly regarded, if not considered Scripture.
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Evil is the perversion of God’s good gift of free will. It arises from the choices made by imperfect imagers, not from God’s prompting or predestination. God does not need evil, but he has the power to take the evil that flows from free-will decisions and use it to produce good
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Election was not equated with salvation since vast multitudes of elect Israelites were not saved due to their unfaithfulness
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The Bible is not trying to teach science in any way. I think that has been the most effective way for me to defend Scripture to critics because at the end of the day I get to look at them and say, look, why are you mad at the Bible for not being what it was never intended to be?
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Wow; you’d never see that today.
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If you're letting your theological tradition filter the Bible to you, you aren't doing Bible study.
#bible
#biblestudy
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So what is the proper context for interpreting the Bible? Here’s the transparently obvious truth: the proper context for interpreting the Bible is the context of the biblical writers—the context that produced the Bible. Every other context is alien or at least secondary.
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Since the Powers of darkness lost their authority because of the cross, all they have left is to blind people to the truths about who they are and how God perceived them: People, including trauma victims are God’s beloved imagers; they belong with God
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