Four live sessions, four teachers, a study guide for every one of them, and a summer spent in the parts of the Bible most churches route around. The final session went up last week, the final guide is attached below, and on Monday the whole thing gets put away.

That last part is literal. On Monday, September 7, we pull the Adult VBS links down off the front of the publication to make room for the next cohort. The sessions do not evaporate. They stay in the archive for paid subscribers, and you will still be able to dig them up. They just stop being easy to find.

So you have seven days. Everything you need is in this post.

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The Final Session: The First Exorcist

Joel taught this one himself, and of course, he opened it with homework.

Read back through the Hebrew Bible. Mark every place a spiritual being shows up. Then find a technical demon exorcism.

Most people reach for 1 Samuel 16, where David’s harp relieves the spirit tormenting Saul. Joel does not think it holds, and the reason is in the grammar of the scene rather than in the drama of it. The answer to the homework is that there is no exorcism in the Old Testament. Not one. So when Jesus walks into a synagogue in Capernaum and orders an unclean spirit out of a man, he is doing something nobody in the Hebrew Bible ever did.

The session works out what that means.

Shedim, elohim, and the gods who hate you. Elohim is a category, not a name. Shedim is the Hebrew word behind our word demons, it is cognate with the Akkadian shedu, and it turns up in Deuteronomy 32:17, the same chapter that hands the nations over to the sons of God. The demons of the Old Testament are the gods of the nations. Paul is talking about the same beings when he writes powers, principalities, thrones, dominions. They were there when the foundations of the earth were laid, and they sang. They also know they cannot defeat Yahweh, which explains what they do instead.

Where the demons came from. Genesis 6:1 through 4 is not a stray fragment. The Septuagint renders Nephilim as gigantes, and 1 Enoch 15 explains what the first century assumed happened when a giant died: the spirit had nowhere to go, because heaven belongs to heavenly beings, Sheol takes earthly ones, and this thing fit neither category. That is what unclean means. Not dirty. An unholy mixture with no proper home. A being that remembers having a body will try to find one.

Nazareth, then Capernaum. Luke 4 is the mission statement: the Isaiah scroll, the place he finds, the sentence he says out loud about it being fulfilled in their hearing. Every exorcism after that is Jesus doing exactly what he just announced. Then watch the grammar in the synagogue. The spirit says what have you to do with us, plural, then I know who you are, singular. One spirit speaking for many, and all of them know precisely who Jesus is while his own hometown is still asking whether he is Joseph’s boy.

The fever he rebuked. Luke uses the same verb for Simon’s mother-in-law’s fever that he uses for the unclean spirit a few verses earlier. Joel’s point is not that every illness is a demon. His point is that demythologizing is a choice the text does not make for you.

Then Grant Pemberton. Joel calls himself book smart and not street smart, so he brought in the friend who taught him the difference. Grant pastors Franklin Vineyard Church, he planted his first church in inner-city Nashville, and his healing prayer teams work with hundreds of people a month. He corrects two words that most of this conversation gets wrong, and he refuses to make a show of any of it. The first question his team asks is not what is wrong with you. It is where does it hurt.

Joel asked him for a word of caution and offered his own by way of C.S. Lewis: the dark powers are equally pleased by the materialist and by the magician. Grant answered both halves. That exchange is the best twenty minutes of the night and it is not in this post.

Watch the final session → here

The recording is for paid subscribers. It comes off the front of the publication on Monday.

The Study Guide

Attached below. Free to everyone, paid and unpaid.

The First Exorcist: A Personal Study & Reflection Guide runs eight sections: the opening on the exorcism you cannot find, five movements through Joel’s teaching, and both halves of the conversation with Grant. Each section carries a summary you can read cold, the best lines from the night, Scripture readings, and reflection questions written for a journal instead of a small group quiz. The Quote Wall at the back collects the lines people were still repeating in the chat after the stream ended.

Work it slowly across the week. That is the whole point of it.

Week 5 Study Guide

Seven Days. Here is the whole series.

Every session stands on its own, and the study guide for each one is free and stays free. The recordings are the part that gets harder to find after Monday.

👉 Cosmic Geography → Sacred space, Babel, Deuteronomy 32, and why Jesus walking on water was never a party trick. This is the framework the rest of the series is built on. Free to everyone, with the study guide attached.

👉 The Flood → More than 250 ancient flood narratives, the Gilgamesh problem, local versus global, and why Noah never says a word. With Mike Chu and Dr. Ronn Johnson.

👉 Joshua and the Giants → Doug Van Dorn on Genesis 6, one Hebrew letter that settles what Nephilim means, and the war that runs from Babel to Gath. The study guide post is here.

👉 Jesus and the Demons → The finale. No exorcism in the Old Testament, shedim in Deuteronomy 32, and Grant Pemberton on what actually happens in a room where somebody is being prayed for.

If you have been reading the guides and skipping the sessions, this is the week to fix that.

Next Up: World Religions, with Jeremy Jenkins

Five Mondays. September 7, 14, 21, 28 and October 5. 6:00 p.m. Eastern, live right here on Substack.

You were taught to defend your faith, but maybe nobody ever taught you to understand anyone else’s. Enter Jeremy.

Jeremy Jenkins has spent a decade in rooms most Christians avoid. He holds a master’s in intercultural studies, he teaches religion at Gardner-Webb, he pastors at Element Church, and he runs All Things All People. You have met him here before. He was in the room for week one of VBS, and “When the Spirits Answer Back” is the single most read thing we have ever published.

Five weeks, and the whole thing is read against the Bible’s own crowded cosmology rather than against a comparative religion textbook.

September 7. Culture, Worldview, and Religion. How to read the invisible foundation under any culture, and how to walk into an uncomfortable room able to ask a great question instead of a defensive one.

September 14. Pantheism and Panentheism. Neopaganism, the New Age, South Asian religion. Jeremy says this is the week that will stretch a Western framework the most.

September 21. Polytheism and Henotheism. Hinduism as the case study. Why many gods does not fit the biblical frame, and how to engage somebody who holds it anyway.

September 28. Monotheism. Islam and Christian monotheism, with a detour through the Divine Council.

October 5. Atheism and Spiritual Agnosticism. The religious nones, and what the changing map of belief in the West means for the church.

Live at 6 p.m. Eastern, with the replay posted the same day if Monday nights are not yours.

It is included with an annual subscription, which also carries the next twelve months: the Cosmic Mountain series with Doug Van Dorn, the Unseen Realm archive, the Why Iran Rages cohort replay, all five Adult VBS study guides, and quarterly live Q&A with Dr. Joel Muddamalle.

It is also built to be argued about on Tuesday, so bring people. Five seats or more is $84 each, which is $7 a month. Ten or more and Jeremy does a private half hour with your group. Group pricing closes Monday, September 14.

See the five weeks →

Deuteronomy 32:8 through 9 and Acts 17:16 through 34 before Monday, if you want to arrive ready.

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There is a peculiar danger in learning to see what we once could not see.

Once the supernatural world of the Bible comes into focus, it is difficult not to become fascinated by it. Passages that had seemed obscure begin to illuminate one another: the divine council, the sons of God, the allotment of the nations, and the rulers and authorities are no longer strange details at the edges of the story. Seeing these as the biblical writers did helps us understand the larger story they were telling. Yet there remains some danger that the strange details themselves will eclipse some of the essential theological messages they help to disclose.

Michael Heiser gave many of us the tools to recognize these things, but he also insisted that biblical theology was never supposed to end with collecting unusual information. He said,

“If you really believe [the supernatural worldview of the authors], it will train your mind to think, ‘What I do matters.’”

The point of understanding the Bible’s supernatural worldview is not simply that we can now explain passages that once puzzled us; it is that those passages may require us to reconsider much that we thought we already understood, and that will have “a series of ripple effects that extend far beyond what you’re ever able to see.”

Judges 5 offers a striking example of how the Bible holds cosmic conflict and human responsibility together.

The song of Deborah and Barak celebrates Israel’s deliverance from the forces of Sisera. It remembers tribes who came to participate and tribes who remained among their flocks or ships. It speaks of a river that swept the enemy away, and memorializes Jael, who killed Sisera inside her tent. These are recognizably earthly features of the story: geography, political oppression, tribal loyalties, weather, battle, and the decisions of particular human beings.

Yet the song describes more than an earthly conflict:

“From heaven the stars fought;
from their courses they fought against Sisera.”
(Judg. 5:20)

The stars are not merely a poetic backdrop for the battle below, because within the wider cultural world of Scripture, stars are associated with heavenly forces. Sometimes astral bodies represent members of the heavenly host, as in Job 38:7, where the “morning stars” parallel the “sons of God.” At other times, the movements of the heavens can function as signs of divine activity or oracles, such as with the magi in Matthew 2. Whether the passage in Judges 5 refers to the heavenly host or to celestial signs connected with the storm that turned the Kishon against Sisera, Deborah’s song presents his defeat as part of a conflict in which heaven and earth are both involved.

Now, of course, it would be easy to make “fighting stars” the most interesting part of the chapter. It’s a dramatic image that is certainly among the poem’s strangest details. But Deborah and Barak’s song does not linger over this.

The tribe of Reuben remained among the sheepfolds. Dan stayed with the ships. Asher sat by the coast. Meroz received a curse because its inhabitants “did not come to the help of the LORD” (Judg. 5:23). Jael, by contrast, is called “most blessed of women” (5:24). Why? Because she acted faithfully. The cosmic scale of the conflict does not diminish the importance of ordinary human action; it gives that action a larger setting.

The Divine Council Worldview allows us to see that the biblical story involves realities and participants that modern readings have often removed from view, yet it also helps us locate human beings more clearly within that story. Humans are created as God’s images, placed in the world as his representatives. Israel is called to live as Yahweh’s people among the nations. The church is gathered in Christ from those nations and called to bear witness to the authority of the risen Lord. Each of these holds essential supernatural dimensions but none of them turn human vocation into something secondary. Human faithfulness matters, even within wider cosmic conflict.

The Bible’s cosmic vision therefore asks more of us than recognition. It presses into the life of the church and raises questions about allegiance, vocation, worship, community, justice, and hope. Once we have learned to see the larger world of the biblical story, we also have to ask what it means to live faithfully within it.

That question provides the theme for the 2026 Divine Council Worldview Conference: Kingdom Living in Light of the Bible’s Cosmic Vision. Hosted by the Michael S. Heiser Foundation on October 9–10 in Golden, CO, the conference will bring together Joel Muddamalle and other scholars, pastors, and teachers to explore how this recovered biblical worldview informs the actual life and calling of God’s people.

There will always be more to investigate in the Bible’s stranger passages. They deserve careful attention, and there are still many questions to pursue. But perhaps one sign that we have begun to understand them is that they eventually return our attention to the lives we are already living, and help us see more clearly what those lives are part of.

Register Today!

Join us October 9–10 for the premier DCW theology event of the year! The Divine Council Worldview Conference is a two-day gathering honoring the legacy of Dr. Michael S. Heiser and exploring the rich biblical-theological world illuminated through his work.

This conference will bring together biblical scholars, theologians, pastors, and informed lay voices to explore Scripture in its ancient context and consider how the divine council worldview shapes our understanding of God’s kingdom, the unseen realm, the nations, spiritual warfare, discipleship, and the mission of God.

The weekend will include a speaker meet-and-greet, presentations from both scholars and lay contributors, a panel Q&A, opportunities for fellowship, and a Saturday worship service led by Jody McBrayer of Avalon.

An optional catered lunch will be available Saturday for attendees who would like to stay on site during the lunch break.

Speakers include:

Pastor Jim Burgen
Matthew Halsted, Ph.D
Doug Van Dorn
Ronn Johnson, Ph.D
Joel Muddamalle, Ph.D
Carey Griffel

The Michael S. Heiser Foundation

Divine Council Worldview Conference 2026

Registration is now open for the Divine Council Worldview Conference, happening October 9–10, 2026 at Flatirons Community Church in the Denver area…

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4 months ago · 27 likes · Michael S Heiser Foundation

Want to keep exploring? Continue learning from Dr. Michael Heiser’s own work through the Michael S. Heiser Foundation. The Foundation serves as a central hub for his archived writings, articles, podcasts, courses, and resources, while also carrying his scholarship forward for those who want to keep digging deeper.

Learn More Here

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One prophet. Four hundred and fifty priests of Baal. One mountain. This is the ultimate cosmic showdown—not just between Elijah and false prophets, but between Yahweh and the storm god who claimed to rule from the heights. On Mt. Carmel, where Baal supposedly sent rain and fertility, the God of Israel reveals who truly commands the fire and the flood. When the flames fell and consumed the sacrifice, the water, the stones, and the very dust, Israel witnessed what every mountain narrative has been building toward: there is no God but Yahweh, and every counterfeit must bow or burn.

Subscribe and watch the full episode, which drops on 8/27/26

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Catch Up On The Cosmic Mountain Season

Today’s article is from one of the co-founders of Stranger Theology, Nate Henry. Nate grew up in Northern California and was the lead singer of the rock band Sherwood. The band played in 15 countries and sold 100k+ records. Nate’s previous podcast was a top 15 variety show when he began to learn more about Bigfoot and the sightings. In the Summer of 2020, he and Luke Rodgers began working on a new show called Blurry Creatures exploring the phenomena, and together they launched in August of that year. Nate is a creative at heart who loves to visualize concepts on the Blurry Creatures podcast through AI and compelling storytelling.

When The Bible Refuses To Be Ordinary

The world is getting weirder by the hour. We can all sense it.

Over the past six years, I’ve sat in the interview chair and talked to theologians, scholars, experiencers, historians, doctors, and experts. All those questions propelled our podcast Blurry Creatures as a formidable podcast on the chart of those pondering the unknown. The experts have pretty much all said the same thing…

Which begs another question. How do we define strange?

Before 1940, if people came out of the forests in China claiming they saw a black-and-white unknown creature climbing in the trees, most people would laugh at them. And if they didn’t receive laughs, they would hear things like: THEY ARE JUST RACCOONS! The crowd would then laugh and tell them they’re losing their mind.

It’s not in human nature to believe stories of people making absurd claims.

But soon after, scientists discovered the giant panda bear (which is relatively recent in human history), even though their existence was well known for centuries by the locals. The locals knew it was something unique. And I’m sure that all who laughed at those who knew of their existence didn’t apologize for their initial reactions.

That is also human nature.

When pondering new discoveries or even considering the mere existence of strange beings or an unknown phenomenon, the human reaction has always been along the same lines. People immediately wall off. Arguments range from “this doesn’t exist” to “if this exists, then it has to be this other thing that I know exists”. There isn’t any room for the strange things in our minds.

Many Christians have built a non-researched and, in many cases, non-biblical fence around what they believe can exist. We’ve done this long before they’ve read a bible. We bring disbelief everywhere we go. As children we once believed, and perhaps that belief made us look foolish. Never again. At a certain age we all stop believing.

In recent history we have inadvertently demythologized the Bible in our minds. The further we got from the parting of the Red Sea, the harder it was for us to believe it actually happened. Perhaps it was a slow, gradual process. Hundreds of years went by, and words didn’t mean the same thing to the next generation. And then suddenly the Old Testament became its own fantasy world in our subconscious. Did those things actually happen?

I can confidently tell you this. Strange things happen, and that’s OK.

The world of the unknown is highly veiled and extremely layered. Christians often say words like “angel” or “demon” without really knowing these are only categories, not a species. And maybe broader terms are helpful for modern humans when in discussion. We can’t possibly comprehend the entirety of the Kingdom of Heaven on this side of life. As Christians, we get glimpses and continue to debate.

Maybe the prophets were God’s in-between man between heaven and earth. Perhaps, in His wisdom, God chose men and women who had learned not to dismiss the strange things He revealed. He wanted someone who knew things were strange. He entrusted His Word to people who had grown comfortable living in the tension between what they could explain and what they could only receive. These people also needed to be able to listen and not freak out. They would have been through some crazy experiences and seen a lot of strange things to earn that right. It’s a long road to get to a place where you can trust God.

Could God have picked anyone to convey His messages? Sure, but He chose the prophet. He delighted to speak through the prophets. These were people who had learned to listen without immediately explaining everything away. They had walked with Him long enough to recognize His voice, even when it disrupted everything they thought they knew. As Christians, we should learn to think and believe like prophets. These people had a unique relationship with God. God spoke to them inside of flames, and they had to listen and not pass out from fear. Maybe that’s one reason the prophets so often stood apart from the crowd. They were more committed to the truth of what God had shown them than to whatever opinions those around them had. They became faithful witnesses to what most people couldn’t yet see.

As Christians, we have to agree that we believe in non-material realities. We believe in miracles and things we can’t explain. We know there’s a lot more than shadow and flesh. Maybe nothing is strange. Maybe nothing is “spiritual” as we so often like to say. Maybe EVERYTHING is spiritual. I often read that verse and think about how foolish:

“...God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” (1 Cor. 1:27)

I often read that verse and think about how God also uses the weird things to confound the certain. It’s pride that creeps into our thinking, and we lose all sense of wonder. The mystery keeps us longing and pondering how vast and deep the heart of God truly is.

Watch Nate, Luke, and Joel in the latest episode of The Cosmic Mountian:

The Week Three session is already up. This post is the companion: the study guide, the context, and the reason we are spending a whole summer on material most churches route around. If you came for the guide, it is attached, it is free, and you can stop reading whenever you like.

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What Adult Vacation Bible School Is

You remember VBS. One week in July, a church basement, a craft table, a felt board, a snack. It was the best week of the summer and it taught you almost nothing you could still use at thirty.

So we rebuilt it.

Adult Vacation Bible School is five weeks of live teaching on the parts of the Bible you were steered around as a kid. One topic a week. A scholar who has actually done the work in the languages and the primary sources. An open conversation afterward where the uncomfortable questions get asked out loud instead of in the parking lot. And a study guide every single week, written for a journal rather than a quiz, so the week does not end when the stream does.

No popsicle sticks. No felt board. Bring your own snack.

The premise has not moved since week one. We don’t want to protect you from your Bible.

Week Three: Giants

Doug Van Dorn taught this one. He wrote Giants: Sons of the Gods, a biblical theology of the Nephilim that traces the theme from the earliest place it appears to the very last, and he has been living inside this material for more than a decade. Leslie hosted. Joel was off.

Doug starts where he always starts, which is Genesis 6:1 through 4. Four verses wedged between two genealogies, sitting just ahead of the flood decree, reading almost like something dropped into the middle of the story from somewhere else.

Here is what the session covers.

Two readings, and only one of them is ancient. You have probably been handed the Sethite view: the sons of God are the godly line of Seth, the daughters of man are the line of Cain, and this is a passage about intermarriage. There is a second reading, and it was the only reading anyone held in the ancient world. Doug grew up in the first one and never tested it. He explains, plainly, what happened when he finally did.

One Hebrew letter. Nephilim appears in exactly two verses in the entire Bible. In one of them it shows up twice, and the second spelling carries a small extra letter that English cannot show you. Doug argues that letter settles what the word means, and that almost every podcast you have heard on this subject gets the etymology backward.

Genesis 14 reads like a border skirmish until you recognize the roster. Deuteronomy 2 brings the same clans back. Numbers 13 is where the spies meet them and come home terrified, and Doug’s read on that report is not the one you got in Sunday school. The trail runs to Sihon and Og, then to Joshua, then to three cities left standing when the conquest ends. One of them is Gath. Goliath’s hometown is not an accident.

So how did any of them survive the flood. This is the question everybody asks, and it came in from the chat within a minute of Doug finishing. There are four answers. One of them involves Og catching a ride on the ark. Doug takes all four seriously, dismisses the ones that cannot work, and tells you where he actually lands and why.

And giants in the New Testament. Yes. Not in the form you are picturing. It has to do with what the ancient world believed happened to a giant’s spirit when its body died, and it explains something odd about the Gospels that you have read past a hundred times.

Then Doug makes a turn we did not expect, and it is the reason this session is worth your evening rather than just your curiosity. It is a warning about what to do with all of this. We are not going to spoil it here.

Watch the full session →

The recording is for paid subscribers. The teaching runs a little over half an hour, and Doug went long. And we are so thankful.

The Study Guide

Attached below. Free to everyone, paid and unpaid.

Giants: A Personal Study & Reflection Guide runs seven sections: the opening on Genesis 6, five movements through Doug’s argument, and the closing conversation. Each one carries a summary you can read cold, the best lines from the night, Scripture readings for that movement, and reflection questions written for a journal instead of a small group quiz. The Quote Wall at the back collects the lines people were still repeating in the chat after the stream ended.

Work it slowly across the week. That is the whole point of it.

Week 3 Study Guide

Catching Up

The series builds, but every week stands on its own. If you are arriving now, start anywhere.

Week One

Week Two

🗓️ Next Up

Week Four | Wednesday, August 12, 6:00 pm David and Goliath, with Dr. Judd Burton

Week Three ended in Gath. Week Four opens there.

Everybody knows this story. A shepherd boy, a sling, five smooth stones, an underdog. It is the single most domesticated narrative in the Old Testament, and after three weeks of this series you already know that Goliath’s hometown, his height, and his lineage are all doing work the children’s version quietly deletes. Dr. Judd Burton, whose research sits squarely in the archaeology and history of exactly these people, takes the story back.

Read 1 Samuel 17 before you come. Read Joshua 11:21-22 too.

Bring your Bible. Bring a friend. It is about to get stranger.

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“There is a river whose streams make glad the city of our God” (Psalm 46:4).

That sentence sits in the middle of a psalm about trouble and upheaval. Nations rage, kingdoms totter, and the earth melts. Yet, right in the middle of the chaos, the psalmist points to a river. Not a trickle of water. Not a seasonal stream. A river whose very presence brings gladness to the city of God. Yet, there is no river in Jerusalem that satisfies the physical interpretation.

We are thirsty people. We know it in our bodies when we’ve gone too long without water. We know it in our souls when nothing in this world finally satisfies us. The Bible begins with waters and ends with a river. And somewhere in the middle, it tells us of a river that flows from the temple of God and brings life to the place of death itself.

The Waters of Chaos

In the beginning, the earth was tohu va-bohu: a formless void (Gen 1:2). Darkness covered the face of the deep. “Deep” is tehom, the Hebrew etymological twin of the Akkadian “Tiamat” who became personified as the chaos dragon in the Babylonian Creation Myth Enuma Elish,[1] and later in the Flood story (Gen 7:11) describes the waters the burst forth in judgment against all living creatures. Finally, the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. These were not peaceful, ordered waters. They were chaotic, uninhabitable, and threatening.

But God did not destroy the waters. Instead, He brought order to them.

On the second day, He made the raqia—the expanse or dome—and separated the waters above from the waters below (Gen 1:7). On the third day, He gathered the waters into one place (vs. 9). The Hebrew word used here is mikveh—a gathering or collection. Later in Israel’s history, mikveh would become the word for a ritual bath, a place of cleansing and new beginning. Even in the act of creation, God was already moving the waters from chaos toward life and order. This is likely why the church Fathers like Tertullian saying,

“Happy is our sacrament of water,” as he cites Genesis 1:2 (Tertullian, On Baptism 1.1).

The land appeared. God called the gathered waters “Seas.” What had been threatening and formless was now named, bounded, and declared good. God was building a temple—a cosmic sanctuary—and the proper ordering of the waters was part of that construction project.

“Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me, and what is the place of my rest?” (Isa 66:1).[2]

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More than 250 flood narratives survive from the ancient world. Nearly every culture kept one. So what do we actually do with the parallels, and what makes Genesis a different story altogether?

The first few minutes are free. The full session, every week of VBS, and our entire archive belong to…

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Free subscribers get the first few minutes. Paid subscribers get everything.

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Vacation Bible School is officially back in session. Except this time, you’re not the one holding the juice box.

Week One of our five-week adult VBS is here, and we started where the whole storyline of Scripture starts: cosmic geography, the collision point between the seen world and the unseen one. The Bible assumes a world most of us were never taught, because we aren’t embedded in the ancient Near Eastern world of the Old Testament or the Greco-Roman world of the New. This session is the framework for everything else we’ll do over the next five weeks.

It opens with a white couch, a forbidden room, and a cup of red Kool-Aid. If you grew up in a house with a room you weren’t allowed to enter, you already understand sacred space better than you think. That instinct, the sense that some places are set apart and that violating them matters, is the doorway into how the Bible thinks about land, territory, and holy ground.

What’s In the Session

Ancient Israelite cosmology. The three-tiered world the biblical authors actually wrote from (the heavens, the earth on the watery deep, and Sheol below), and why the Bible accommodates ancient cosmology instead of correcting it. The Bible is not trying to answer our science questions. It’s after something bigger.

Genesis vs. the counterfeit stories. We put the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Ugaritic creation myths side by side with Genesis 1–2: theogony, theomachy, and what humans are for. Every pagan story ends with humanity as slave labor for the gods. Genesis ends with royal image bearers placed in a garden and given rest. That’s not borrowing. That’s a polemic.

Eden, Babel, and the crux of the whole thing. Eden as the royal temple garden where God’s two households, divine and human, live together. Then Genesis 11 read alongside Deuteronomy 32:8–9, the single most important passage you were probably taught but never shown the full weight of. Once you see why Genesis 12 follows Genesis 11, you can’t unsee it.

Cosmic geography in action. Why Naaman hauled two mule-loads of Israelite dirt back to Syria. Why Dagon ended up face-down and dismembered in front of the Ark. And what’s actually happening with the goat “for Azazel” on the Day of Atonement (hint: nobody is worshiping a desert demon).

Jesus and the reclaiming of territory. Why walking on water isn’t a party trick. It’s the One who crushed Leviathan standing on the house of Leviathan, and it’s why the Great Commission is Jesus reclaiming the disinherited nations one image bearer at a time.

Then Jeremy Jenkins of All Things All People joins for the conversation: world religions, why other faiths often “work” (and why not everything that works is good), where Latter-day Saint cosmology departs from the biblical story, and a closing challenge that might be the most important five minutes of the whole session. Learning to read the miracles like a child again. This actually happened.

The Study Guide

We built a Week One study guide to go with the session. It has section summaries, the most memorable quotes, Scripture readings, and reflection questions designed for your journal, not a quiz. Download it below, work through it slowly this week, and bring your questions to the chat.

Download the study guide.

The first few minutes are free for everyone. Paid subscribers get the full session: the complete teaching, the entire conversation with Jeremy, plus our full archive including Season One of The Cosmic Mountain.

If Week One does what we think it will, you’re going to want to be here for Week Two: Noah, the flood, and the ancient deluge narratives. The apkallu, the sages, local vs. global flood, and the same comparison work we did with the creation stories. Bring your Bible. It’s about to get strange.

And one more thing. The best part of VBS was always bringing your friends, so forward this to one person who’d love it.

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Episode 7 of The Cosmic Mountain, Samson and the Gates of Gaza, preview is out now for everyone.

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In the dead of night, a compromised judge does the impossible—he rips the gates of Gaza from their foundations and carries them uphill to Hebron. But this isn't just a feat of strength; it's a cosmic statement. The gates of the underworld, the very symbols of death's dominion, are torn away and paraded to the mountain. Before Jesus declared that hell's gates wouldn't prevail against His church, Samson prophetically demonstrated that no gate—no barrier between the living and the dead—could stand against God's anointed. Even our most flawed champions point to the Champion to come.

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Catch Up On The Cosmic Mountain Season

If you’ve been reading Stranger Theology for free and wondering whether it’s worth going paid, stop wondering. This is the reason.

For five weeks this summer we’re hosting an Adult Vacation Bible School. Five live teachings on the strangest, most overlooked stories in Scripture. Real teachers. Live Q&A every week. Recordings if you can’t make a night. Homework and resources after every session so you can keep digging on your own. We’ve even lined up a few special guests we’re not ready to name yet.

Every bit of it comes with a paid subscription. Upgrade once, and you’re in for all of it.

Upgrade and Join Adult VBS

For many of us, Vacation Bible School is where Scripture first took root, long before we ever learned words like theology or biblical worldview. We learned about Noah and the flood, Joshua entering the Promised Land, David facing Goliath, and Jesus casting out demons. Those stories shaped us.

But as we get older, something strange happens. The stories stay familiar while the world they came from grows more and more foreign.

So we’re doing something about it. We’re bringing Vacation Bible School back, this time for grown-ups.

Over five live sessions we’ll return to those same childhood stories and read them the way their original authors meant them. Not as isolated lessons about courage or obedience, but as chapters in one much larger story about rebellion, restoration, and God reclaiming what belongs to Him. At first the topics look like they have nothing to do with each other. Sit with them a while and you realize they’re all circling the same question:

Who has authority over God’s world?

The schedule

Every session is a live, seminary-style teaching of about 45 minutes, with time for your questions.

Week 1 | Thursday, July 23 - Cosmic Geography with Jeremy Jenkins.
A world where heaven and earth overlap, and the map itself is telling you something.

Week 2 | Wednesday, July 29 - The Flood and the Ancient Near East with Dr. Ron Johnson & Mike Chu.
A creation pushed to the edge by rebellion and violence.

Week 3 | Wednesday, August 5 - Joshua and the Giants with Doug Van Dorn.
Boundaries that got crossed, and the consequences that came after.

Week 4 | Wednesday, August 12 - David and Goliath with Judd.
Not just a boy and a giant. A king standing in for his God.

Week 5 | Wednesday, August 19 - Jesus and the Demons with Grant Pemberton.
The Kingdom shows up, and the powers start losing ground.

How it works

Each week is live, and each week is interactive. Bring your questions.

If you can’t be there in the moment, don’t worry. Every session is recorded, so you’ll never miss a lesson.

After each session we’ll post some “homework” and a few extra resources. Readings and references to help you sit with the material before the next teaching.

And we’ve got guests joining us across the series. A few familiar faces, and a few that might surprise you.

How to join

Adult VBS is included with every paid Stranger Theology subscription. So if you’ve been reading along for free, this is your invitation to come all the way in.

One more time, because it’s the whole point. Going paid doesn’t just get you these five sessions. It gets you the recordings, the weekly homework and resources, the special guests, the full Stranger Theology archive, the Cosmic Mountain premium podcast, and every future cohort and series we release. All of it, under one subscription.

We don’t protect you from your Bibles around here. We take you further in. Adult VBS is the best place to start.

The first session is Thursday, July 23. Go paid today so you’re not playing catch-up on night one.

Become a paid subscriber and join VBS

The stories are the same ones you’ve always known. The world behind them is still waiting to be explored.

Today’s article is from guest contributor Joshua Broome. Joshua Broome is a speaker, bestselling author, and host of the Walk Worthy Podcast. He travels nationally, sharing the hope of the gospel through his powerful story of redemption and teaching on biblical identity, freedom, and purpose in Christ. Joshua is the author of 7 Lies That Will Ruin Your Life. He and his wife, Hope, have been married for 10 years and are raising their four sons in Dallas, Texas.

I spent almost seven years inside the pornography industry, on the other side of the camera, before leaving that world in 2013 and devoting my life to Jesus in 2015. In the years since, more than forty people I once knew there have died: some by suicide, some by overdose, some by deliberately placing themselves in situations that made it plain they no longer believed they had a future. They were not statistics. They were friends. Roommates. Of the people I lived with during those years, all but a few are now dead. This is not offered as an anecdote; it is offered as the vantage point from which the following argument is made.

In what follows, I argue that pornography in the modern West is not merely a private moral failure but a liturgical participation in sexual idolatry that opens even professing Christians to demonic influence and attack, and that only the victory of Christ over the powers provides an adequate account of its destructive force and a sufficient hope for its demolition.

Scripture Has Already Named the Idol’s Architect

The modern instinct is to treat sexual sin as a private matter between a person and their own weakness, as if the only forces at work were desire, secrecy, and shame. Scripture will not allow that reduction. Psalm 106 recounts Israel’s descent into the idolatry of Canaan with a bluntness most modern readers pass over:

“They served their idols, which became a snare to them. They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons” (Psalm 106:36-37).

The horror is not only the sacrifice. It is the audience. Someone was receiving.

Paul makes the same claim explicit for a New Testament audience. Writing to Corinth about food sacrificed to idols, he clarifies that the carved idols themselves are nothing, but the worship offered to them is not directed at nothing:

“What pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons” (1 Corinthians 10:20).

Deuteronomy had already spoken this way of Israel’s earlier apostasy:

“They sacrificed to demons that were not God” (Deuteronomy 32:17).

This matters for sexual sin because the practices bound up with Molech worship in Leviticus 18 are not presented as a separate moral universe from the incest, adultery, and bestiality condemned in the same breath. The chapter forbids child sacrifice and an entire spectrum of sexual practices together, without treating one as “purely religious” and the others as “merely moral.” The whole complex belongs to a single idolatrous system, one whose true recipients were not inert idols of wood or metal but demons, and the sexual act was not incidental to that transaction; it was its entry point. The pattern, worship beginning with ritual sex and intensifying toward costlier sacrifice, is the same pattern that governs every idolatrous system Scripture examines, ancient or modern.

Pornography is not a novel moral crisis. It is an ancient sin cleverly repackaged, porneia reframed for a digital age, with the same spiritual logic of idol, demon, and sacrifice operating beneath its modern veneer.

The Character of the One Behind the Liturgy

If demons are the recipients of misdirected sexual worship, Scripture is equally unsparing about their commander and his methods. Jesus names him plainly: “a murderer from the beginning,” who “does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him,” the father of lies (John 8:44). Peter warns that “your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). Paul calls him “the god of this age,” who “has blinded the minds of the unbelievers” (2 Corinthians 4:4). None of this language is ornamental. It describes an intelligence whose primary weapon has never been brute force but deception, and whose target has never been the body alone but the mind that governs it.

Paul elsewhere identifies this figure as:

“the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2).

This is an operating influence over an entire cultural atmosphere, air a whole society agrees to call ordinary. The demonic reality behind sexual idolatry is not confined to spectacular visible manifestation, however real those may be. It is, more often and more dangerously, an atmosphere absorbed without notice, a liturgy repeated without ever being named as worship.

The enemy’s greatest success is not the extraordinary case that draws alarm. It is the ordinary case that never gets named at all, because he has persuaded a generation that describing this reality in spiritual terms is embarrassing, unsophisticated, or beside the point.

Strategy, Not Only Sin

This is why Paul, when he describes the church’s conflict, does not point first to the acts themselves but to the architecture behind them:

“We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).

In another place he calls the resulting structures strongholds, “arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God,” that must be demolished, not merely managed (2 Corinthians 10:4-5).

A stronghold, by definition, has an architect. Pornography is one of that architect’s most effective building projects in the modern West, a liturgy of repeated acts, images, and narratives that catechize a person in a particular vision of the body, of power, of intimacy, of self. Idols are never satisfied. Every offering only qualifies the worshiper for the next one. The ancient cult that began with ritual sex moved toward an altar with a child on it.

The lie is never that the next offering is too costly. The lie is always that it is necessary, and that resistance is the greater danger.

This is also why passivity, not merely lust, is the outcome Scripture most closely associates with the enemy’s success. Genesis 3:6 records that when the serpent deceived Eve, her husband “was with her.” Present. Silent. Paul later insists that Adam was not deceived in the same way (1 Timothy 2:14). The first sin was disobedience, but the condition that made it possible was the guardian’s silence at the exact moment guarding was required.

That silence is the enemy’s quieter victory: it trains a person into silence about what that act is doing. Men trained this way stop speaking to their wives, their pastors, their brothers in Christ. Women trained by the same enemy, through a culture saturated in the visual grammar pornography has normalized, arrive at a related resignation: an acceptance of being consumed as simply the cost of being seen. Different symptoms. Same architect. Same strategy of silence spreading outward from the garden.

Believers and Demonic Influence

The presence of the Holy Spirit in a believer does not mean the absence of spiritual warfare, and it does not mean immunity from it. Scripture insists on this. Job is called by God himself “blameless and upright, one who fears God and turns away from evil” (Job 1:8), and it is that same man, not a compromised believer, whom Satan is given permission to strip of his children, his wealth, and his health. Job’s righteousness was not a shield against the attack. It was, in the text’s own logic, the reason he was targeted.

Jesus tells Peter:

“Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat” (Luke 22:31).

Peter is not a bystander in the early church. He is the rock, the one who will feed Christ’s sheep, filled with the Spirit at Pentecost weeks later. And still, Jesus does not say the sifting will be prevented. He says, “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:32). The promise is not exemption from attack. It is that Peter’s faith will survive it, and that once he has turned back, he will strengthen his brothers. That is a very different promise than safety.

Jonathan Pokluda makes a related point in Your Story Has a Villain:

Every believer’s life has a real antagonist, and the enemy’s hostility does not decrease with a person’s maturity in Christ.1

Pokluda argues the enemy’s ability to gain ground tracks inversely with the strength of a person’s faith, not with whether they belong to Christ at all. That is Job’s story. That is Peter’s story. Growth in Christ does not make a person a smaller target. It often makes them a larger one.

Pornography is one of the clearest places this plays out in the modern church. What begins as private indulgence becomes a practiced liturgy, shaping the imagination and building arguments in the mind that defend the sin from exposure. That ritualized sin becomes, in biblical language, a foothold (Ephesians 4:27), ground the enemy was given, not ground he had to seize by force. The Spirit-filled believer wrestling with pornography is not evidence that the Spirit has failed or left. It is evidence that the war Job endured and Peter survived is still being fought, in ordinary men, on ordinary nights.

Christ’s Victory and Stronghold Demolition

If the story ended there, it would not be gospel. Scripture’s answer to this enemy was never a technique. It was a person, and an event. Colossians says that at the cross, Christ “disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them” (Colossians 2:15). The powers named in Ephesians 6, standing behind every stronghold built on a lie, were defeated there, publicly, not merely restrained.

John writes that “the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8), a present tense that refuses to confine that victory to a distant past or a deferred future. Paul tells the Romans, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Romans 16:20), a share in the victory promised not to Christ alone but to ordinary believers.

That is why demolition, not mere management, is the language Scripture uses for what happens to a stronghold once Christ is brought against it (2 Corinthians 10:5).

The enemy behind its power has already lost the war that determines his fate. What remains, for believers still standing silently beside their own undoing the way Adam once did, is the refusal to stay silent, bringing what has been hidden into a light where it can no longer be concealed.

C. S. Lewis pictured this kind of confession as a death in The Great Divorce, where a ghost carrying a small red lizard on his shoulder refuses to let an angel kill it, not because he loves the lizard, but because he has come to believe it is part of him. Lewis imagines the surrender as painful and real, followed by a transformation no observer of the ghost’s fear could have anticipated. Scripture calls it by its older names. Confession. Light. Resurrection. The altar behind the screen is not merely a psychological metaphor but a spiritual reality Scripture has already named, and to confront it truthfully is to participate in the cruciform, resurrected life of Christ.

Pornography, then, is not simply an ancient sin repackaged, but a contemporary liturgy of demonic influence demanding escalating sacrifice. The gospel’s hope is not that believers will eventually grow strong enough to out-negotiate a patient enemy, but that his authority was already broken at a specific point in history, publicly, by someone else. What remains is to live as though that were true, to refuse the silence the enemy depends on, to name the altar for what it is, and to join Christ in turning every liturgy of death into a testimony of resurrection.

Freedom is possible.

If you are in the middle of a battle with pornography, you are not alone, and you are not too far gone. I know that firsthand. I have walked into healing, redemption, and complete freedom, but not easily, and not alone. It took confession, to God and to a trusted, spiritually mature person of the same sex. It took real accountability, a life without secrets, and a deepening walk with God through prayer, Scripture, and community. It took an honest look at what people, places, and habits no longer belonged in a life devoted to growing closer to Jesus.

You don’t have to walk that road alone either. Join us on the Walk Worthy Podcast for weekly conversation on this exact fight, or visit walkworthypodcast.com for the P51 Project, an eight-part course on sexual purity and healing from a biblical and mental health perspective. If you’re called to help others do the same, we also have a course where you can become a sexual addiction recovery coach there as well.

You can find out more about me and Walk Worthy here:

Learn More

For many Christians, their childhood memories of Vacation Bible School are where the stories of Scripture first took root.

Long before we learned terms like theology, hermeneutics, or biblical worldview, we learned about Noah and the flood, Joshua entering the Promised Land, David facing Goliath, and Jesus casting out demons. Those stories became part of our imagination. We carried them into adulthood, often without realizing how much they had shaped us.

Yet something curious happens as we grow older. The stories remain familiar, but the world they came from becomes increasingly foreign.

Most of us learned the story of David and Goliath as a story about courage. Trust God. Face your giants. Those lessons certainly have value, but they are only part of what the biblical authors had intended to communicate. Scripture spends a surprising amount of time describing Goliath himself. We are told where he comes from, how large he is, and how he fits into a broader tradition of giant warriors connected to Israel’s past. Suddenly, the story becomes much larger than a young shepherd overcoming impossible odds with unimaginable courage. It becomes part of a long-running biblical narrative about Yahweh confronting forces that oppose His purposes.

The same thing happens throughout Scripture. Familiar stories often contain strange details that modern readers either overlook or never learn how to fully interpret.

At Stranger Theology, we have dedicated our lives to exploring those details because we believe they really do matter. The Bible was written in a world very different from our own. The ancient authors understood reality as a place where heaven and earth overlapped, where geography carried theological significance, and where spiritual powers were active participants in the story of humanity. When modern readers encounter those ideas, they can seem unusual or even uncomfortable. Yet they appear throughout the biblical narrative.

Learning to see the Bible through the eyes of its original authors does not make Scripture stranger than it is.

That conviction led us to create something we are calling an Adult Vacation Bible School.

Over five sessions, together we will explore some of the themes that have become central to the Stranger Theology community:

Cosmic Geography, The Flood and Ancient Near Eastern Deluge Traditions, Joshua and the Giants, David and Goliath, and Jesus’ confrontation with demonic powers.

At first glance, these subjects may seem unrelated. In reality, they are all asking the same question:

Who has authority over God’s world?

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The flood narrative addresses a creation corrupted by rebellion and violence. The giant traditions preserve the memory of boundaries that were crossed and consequences that followed. Joshua’s conquest narratives describe God’s people entering and reclaiming a land promised to them. David’s victory over Goliath becomes more than a military triumph. It is a symbolic confrontation between God’s chosen king and a representative of forces that stand against Him. When Jesus confronts demons in the Gospels, He is announcing that the Kingdom of God has arrived and that the powers resisting that kingdom are being driven back.

Seen together, these are not isolated stories. They are chapters in a larger biblical drama about rebellion, restoration, and God’s determination to reclaim His creation.

That larger story is one of the reasons so many people find themselves drawn to the stranger parts of Scripture. The more we understand the world behind the Bible, the more connections begin to emerge. Stories that once seemed disconnected suddenly speak to one another. Themes that appeared only occasionally reveal themselves to be woven throughout the biblical narrative.

There is also a particular joy in returning to stories we have known since childhood and discovering that they still have more to teach us. The Bible becomes larger without becoming less familiar.

That is exactly what we hope to explore together in this Adult Vacation Bible School.

Access to the VBS is included with every paid Stranger Theology subscription. If you’re currently a free subscriber, we invite you to upgrade and join us for all five sessions. Each week will feature a live, seminary-style teaching designed to help you better understand the world behind the biblical text and how these themes fit into Scripture’s larger story.

We are also excited to welcome a number of special guests throughout the series. Some of them will be familiar faces to the Stranger Theology community, while others may surprise you. In the coming weeks, we might even drop a few clues and let everyone take their best guess at who will be joining us.

More than anything, we want to hear from you! Bring your questions. Share your insights. Some of the best conversations happen when curious readers gather around Scripture together.

If you know someone who loves studying the Bible, is fascinated by the unseen realm, or simply wants to explore Scripture more deeply, invite them to join you. Vacation Bible School has always been better with friends, and we would love to see this become a summer of learning and discovery shared with others.

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The stories may be familiar. The world behind them is waiting to be explored.

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Key Verse: 1 John 4:1-3

“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.” (1 John 4:1–3, ESV)

Discernment Protects Us From Deception

The best deceptions lull us into a false sense of security because they first highlight something that is true. Like a magician who distracts our attention by telling us to look at one hand all while doing something with the other hand out of our view. The dark powers love to deceive us by pointing us towards something that is generally true all while preparing us to believe in something that is specifically false.

John writes in 1 John 4:1-3 that we as believers must discern the spirits. It is highly likely that some believers who were eager to hear from God, exposed themselves to other spiritual beings that led them astray. Additionally, it was the common practice in the Greco-Roman world to rely on spirits as guides of wisdom. Plutarch tells a story of a Roman commander who kept a Syrian prophetess named Martha who traveled with his army during war. In moments of crisis or decision making, he would rely on Martha, who herself relied on spirit beings for guidance.1

These guides came in various types. Self-proclaimed prophets, priests, oracles, prophetesses, and interpreters of dreams. The issue is not whether these people and what they claim exist, it is the source from which they are drawing from. The difference between a false teacher/prophet and a genuine one is if the source of their revelation is from God the Father through the Spirit of God, bringing honor and exaltation to the Son of God, or if it is from dark powers, demonic entities whose aim is to deceive, divide, and ultimately destroy.

This is why John calls us believers to “test/δοκιμάζετε the spirits.” The Greek word δοκιμάζετε means to prove something’s worth, or to determine its lack of worth.2 The determination of worth is directly connected to the source being from God or not. The word is also grammatically a present imperative, which implies an ongoing practice.

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