I Believe in Dragons
Emily: Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek.
As promised, we will talk about dinosaurs today – dinosaurs and the deification of the dead – and I hope we’ll get to Abraham as well, but let’s start with dinosaurs.
Greg: First of all, dinosaurs were and are real. The word dinosaur simply means terrible lizard. It was coined in the mid-1800s for things that people in the past had a name for. People before that called them dragons, but with the coming of Darwin and with Lyell’s introduction of the slow progression of all things uniformitarianism, they wanted to separate those concepts from their new way of looking at things.
If there were these monstrous things that people were discovering as fossils, they must be very ancient, and of course dragons – that’s not scientific, so they just kind of kicked dragons out the door, introduced dinosaurs and said, “But they were millions of years ago and no man ever saw a live one.” Children continued to play games with them anyway, but you know…
Emily: I don’t want to place too much weight on this, but it seems like some sort of social concept of wonder might have been kicked out the door with the kicking out of the dragons in favor of the more scientific dinosaur.
Greg: I think you’re right, because when God wants to inspire Job with awe toward the end of his book, he points to two seemingly fabulous creatures, but they were real because all the other animals God describes are real. God is taking him on a walk through the zoo and saying, “How about this animal? How about that animal? How about this bird?” Then finally in chapter 40 God says this –
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency and array thyself with glory and beauty. Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath and behold every one that is proud, and abase him. Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low, and tread down the wicked in their place. Hide them in the dust together and bind their faces in secret. Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee. Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee…
That is, God made man and all the land animals on the 6th day of creation, so these are not prehistoric creatures. They are within the memory of men who wrote history, particularly within the memory of Adam who first saw them.
The word behemoth is a modified form of behemah, which is cattle, big cattle, really big cattle, impressive cattle.
He eateth grass as an ox.
He’s a vegetarian.
Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar.
Not like little branches hanging down and dangling, but like the tree. He’s got this really huge tail like a tree.
The sinews of his stones are wrapped together. His bones are as strong pieces of brass. His bones are like bars of iron. He is the chief of the ways of God. He that made him can make his sword to approach unto him. Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play. He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens. The shady trees cover him with their shadow, the willows of the brook compass him about.
He lives in marshes/swamps.
Behold, he drinketh up a river.
He’s got a big belly and can drink a lot of water.
He trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth. He taketh it with his eyes. His nose pierceth through snares.
He apparently has a rather long nose.
Now, if you talk to any average 8-year-old who probably has read books on dinosaurs or has little plastic dinosaurs he plays with, and you say, “Lives in the marshes, really long tail, long neck, big body, ribs like iron,” the kid will probably tell you exactly what this is. The generic name is sauropod.
When I was young there were a few versions. Brontosaurus was one that since has been revised, but since maybe has been re-revised. The original that was called a Brontosaurus was the body of one creature and the head of another that got mixed up, but I think Brontosaurus has been reassigned. Apatosaurus was the new name for a while, but there’s also the Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus, and other things. These are the things you usually see in movies or in the Flintstones. Do you remember Dino? He was a sauropod.
Emily: Just a little one.
Greg: But he was a little one, yes. The construction-working dinosaurs in the Flintstone’s opening – kids know, adults sometimes don’t.
Emily: For my generation it’s the long-necks from Land Before Time.
Greg: Oh yes, that too. So there’s one thing that God says. “Be impressed. These things are cool,” but God’s not done yet because then he points to another creature, apparently not a land animal because we’ll see at the end it looks like he swims in the ocean. He’s called Leviathan.
Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? Or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put an hook into his nose? Or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make many supplications unto thee? Will he speak soft words unto thee? Will he make a covenant with thee? Wilt thou take him for a servant forever? Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? Or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens? Shall the companions make a banquet of him? Shall they part him among the merchants? Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? Or his head with fish spears?
I need to stop here for a second because the most common interpretation given by orthodox conservative commentaries is that this is a crocodile, which would kind of make most of these rhetorical questions not so rhetorical, because the answer to almost all of them would be, “Well, yeah. Crocodiles aren’t all that, unless it’s a really really big crocodile!”
Emily: We know about the crocodile hunter.
Rachel: It sounds more like some of the great sea creatures that we see in novels when a lot of the sailing ships start going out. There are these creatures that come and somehow break up an entire ship, and they don’t know what it is. That’s what it reminds me of, more than a crocodile.
Greg: Yes, that’s more of what we’re dealing with here. Skipping down a couple verses –
Behold, the hope of him is in vain. Shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him? None is so fierce that dare stir him up. Who then is able to stand before me?
…says God. And that’s the point. These animals are really cool and impressive and awesome. God is far more awesome, far more terrible, far more the one we should stand in awe of, but he goes back to the creature.
Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are terrible round about. His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal. One is so near to another that no air can come between them. They are joined one to another, they stick together, that they cannot be sundered. By his sneesings a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning.
People are quick to say, “That’s metaphor. It’s poetic.” Okay, well just hang with us for a minute.
Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out.
Emily: Lamp being a metaphor for fire.
Greg: Yes, and sparks of fire leap out. This is obviously poetic language, and yet poetry doesn’t mean you can’t understand it or it doesn’t make any sense. It just means it’s somewhat colorful and drawing our attention to what things are like. This animal – its breath, its sneezing, what comes out of its throat is compared to light and fire and lamps, and then…
Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron.
Maybe it’s phosphorescence. He’s just swallowed in a lot of stuff and he breathes it out and the air kind of glows. That might work to this point, but then there’s this…
His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.
Later on the beast is going to be described as trailing phosphorescence, but that’s not this. This is something that sets things on fire.
In his neck remaineth strength [he’s got a neck, by the way, as opposed to a crocodile who doesn’t have much of one], and sorrow is turned into joy before him. The flakes of his flesh are joined together. They are firm in themselves. They cannot be moved. His heart is as firm as a stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone.
When he raiseth up himself [imagine a crocodile trying to get up on his hind legs, and still being tall enough to look down on people when he has], the mighty are afraid: by reason of breakings they purify themselves. The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold: the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon. He esteemeth iron as straw [he can break iron] and brass as rotten wood.
This thing can smash through metals. Your comparison, Rachel, to the sea monsters we see in movies and books and such that actually can smash through ships – apparently they can.
The arrow cannot make him flee. Slingstones are turned with him into stubble. Darts are counted as stubble. He laugheth at the shaking of a spear. Sharp stones are under him. He spreadeth sharp pointed things upon the mire. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot.
The deep is the ocean, and when he’s thrashing around beneath the surface it looks like the whole thing is boiling, so this is a big creature. This is not a small thing.
He maketh the sea like a pot of ointment. He maketh a path to shine after him. One would think the deep to be hoary.
That’s probably phosphorescence, and there are animals that trail such things, and even ships do under certain circumstances.
Upon earth there is not his like who is made without fear. He beholdeth all high things. He is a king over all the children of pride.
When God wants to impress Job, there are so many things he could point to. He could point to angels and cherubim. He just picks out two monstrous creatures – the first one sounds an awful lot like a dinosaur, and the second one sounds an awful lot like a fire-breathing dragon – and says, “You were saying? You think you’re hot stuff, Job. Look at these creatures. Can you make them or stand up to them or do anything? No, really? Not? Then why are you telling me what to do and why are you judging me? You’re in no position to do anything.”
These animals later become symbols that God will use symbolically, figuratively. We’ll run into Leviathan in the Psalms, Isaiah, and the book of Revelation. There’s a monster from the land and one from the ocean, so we’re being set up. And yet here in this context, although the language is poetic, these are real things.
Later on in Isaiah’s prophecy we hear that the land of Arabia contains fiery flying serpents, and interestingly enough the Greek writer Herodotus also mentions flying serpents as a feature of the Arabian world, and how the ibises, the tall stork-like birds, would go after them. The ancient world knew about these things and talked about them when there was some point, but mostly it was just kind of, “Yeah, they’re out there.”
God in Noah’s time did put the fear of man upon all creatures, which is to say that we should not expect dragons to rise out of Tokyo Bay and try to destroy the city, but find one in some obscure place and corner him and you might have a fight on your hands, so they were there. As men wandered through the wildernesses, they could hear dragons in the distance.
Again, Isaiah and some of the other prophets in recording the collapse and fall of great empires says, “And the ruins will be a habitation of dragons,” so these things were out there. There weren’t as many as there had once been. Maybe the climate change with all the ice ages was unfriendly to them. We don’t need an asteroid strike to account for their disappearance, and very late on we still see these things.
When you look around on the nature channel or something – we’ve been dissing crocodiles – but really great big crocodiles and alligators and Komodo dragons – if we didn’t see them today and we found their skeletons, we would say, “Oh, more dinosaurs,” because that’s kind of what dinosaurs are like. Lizards are born usually pretty small and they grow all their life. You let them grow a long time and they get really big, so there’s nothing unscientific here. How do dragons breathe fire? I have no idea. I’m not a biologist.
Emily: Even biologists don’t know.
Greg: There’s an awful lot biologists don’t know.
Rachel: But it seems like a lot of these things became fantasy as our more modern scientific movement rose, because these are meant to challenge our sense of control of the world. He’s pointing them out to Job and saying, “Can you even figure these things out, let alone me? Can you control these? You cannot control your environment, your world.”
But it seems our stories of the last 200 years all purposely, even Land Before Time, is telling us, “Oh, they’re way far away. They can’t do anything to humans. They’re probably not real, or if they are we’re not meant to interact with them.” It changes our perspective on history when we assume that nothing like this would exist in our time. We kind of simplify things and make them more manageable.
Emily: Are you telling me it’s not a coincidence that we’ve eliminated wonder along with the dragon?
Rachel: Yes, exactly.
Greg: No, no coincidences.
Rachel: Modern science doesn’t really like wonder. They tend to want everything in a lab or a test tube.
Greg: Put it in a box, lock the box. And what goes with that is the glorification of man. These dragons or dinosaurs were not all that, but man on the other hand…
One of the common themes that runs throughout the ancient world from Mesopotamia to Greece to Rome and Egypt to Scandinavia to Mexico, the Aztec empire, the Polynesian islands and beyond is the idea that man can eventually become God. And while there are entire systems built around us, and particularly later on we have Caesar worship and the worship of Pharoah as the son of the divine son, from a very early point – well, from the beginning – Satan had said, “You can be as gods, deciding good and evil for yourself.”
As men looked at themselves they saw themselves die, which you know doesn’t look so much like we’re gods.
Emily: Unless that’s the pathway to deification.
Greg: Yes, that’s the pathway to deification.
We know that the ancient ancients did deify their dead rulers. We are told in Genesis 10 just in passing, describing Ham’s line –
And Cush begat Nimrod. He began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the LORD, wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel and Erech and Accad and Calneh in the land of Shinar. Out of that land went forth Asshur…
The margin says he went into Assyria, and Assyria is called the land of Nimrod in the prophets.
…and builded Nineveh, and the city Rehoboth, and Calah, and Resen between Nineveh and Calah. The same is a great city.
Moses, or whoever wrote the original section here, knew that Nimrod was this great post-diluvian ruler. He was associated with Babel. When we hear about Babel it sounds more democratic. “Let us do this, let us do that,” but even democratic uprisings have charismatic leaders.
His father Cush seems to have been the original for Hermes and Mercury, the god of language, in this case the one who confounded languages with his sin. He’s called Bel amongst the Babylonians, in fact there are two Bels. There’s Bel and his son Bel, which means ‘lord,’ because there was the first lord, Cush, then there was another lord, Nimrod, but eventually someplace somehow Nimrod died. And suddenly in the wake of that we begin to get gods, humanoid gods, gods who seemed to have been humans.
The same thing happens in the line of Shem. The father of the Assyrians is named Ashur, and oddly enough their chief god is named Ashur. So men began to deify their ancestors and their great rulers.
Nimrod seems to have been one of those at least who set the tone. Ancient traditions assign to him a wife named Semiramis, so Nimrod may be the male god Baal/Bel and all of that, and Semiramis the female god Ishar/Astarte/Ashtoreth.
Certainly the theme of a male dimension of nature and a female dimension of nature permeates the ancient world, and yet as late – or as early, depending on how you look at it – as Cicero, Cicero is pointing out in his discussions that, “Your gods are all men. They’re deified men. You’ve been initiated into the mysteries. You know the stories. You know how this happened. We can point out their tombs. We know where Zeus was born and where Zeus was buried, and so with the other gods.”
When Christian apologists came along they just picked it up and said, “Yeah, right,” and oddly enough the pagans never said, “You’re making that up. These gods have been here forever.” They just kind of quietly mumbled.
Emily: It’s more like, “We’ve never said they were really real.”
Greg: I’ve mentioned in another context Agatha Christie’s story, Death Comes As The End, which is set in ancient Egypt. Her husband was an archeologist and they had archeological friends who dealt in Egypt, so she did a good job of representing this.
The idea was that when your ancestor dies, you bury him probably on your property someplace, and then you feed his spirit to keep him happy, and he will bless you. If you don’t, he may get ticked off and his spirit may come back – and here we have the idea of ghosts – and may torment you and bring disease and all kinds of horrible things on you. The same was true in the Greek isles and amongst the Romans. There were spirits of the dead and they had to be kept happy.
Originally there was no idea of a Hades. That came later in Greek mythology. Originally dead Grandpa was the living god and he was out in back in a tomb, 6 feet under. That’s where he was and that’s where you brought food and water and flowers and such. We still see this. The Disney film Coco approaches this in its discussion of the Day of the Dead. Rachel, you’ve done some research here.
Rachel: Yes. I have the background of teaching it some to my Spanish students, but I’ve also looked into it a little bit more. The Day of the Dead or Dia de los Muertos is something we see primarily in Mexico, but it does have different aspects that show up in other parts of Central and South America.
It’s an interesting celebration because it takes a mix of Catholic All Souls Day and mixes it with Aztec and other types of traditions, so you take the two things that should not go together and you mix them and you get what they celebrate there.
In the Dia de los Muertos it does come right after what we would think of as Halloween and All Saints Day in November, and kind of corresponds with that tendency we see in cultures to remember the day when lots of people died. We could go back to the flood for that. But in this they are drawing on the Aztec view of wanting to kind of mock at death and make it a celebration instead of something bad, so we have people wearing the painted skulls that are smiling because they’re smiling at death, to say death isn’t bad, and they’re making food for their ancestors.
The Aztecs did it for a whole month, but the modern version is for a day, and they believe that the barrier between the spirits and the living world goes down and they can cross over so you have to greet them with food and presents and all of that. It originally was because they believed they could actually commune with those ancestors and receive guidance for this life from those that had passed on, because they would know more and be able to, in a sense, guide the family on their way.
You see their version of an offering or an altar, where they remember and offer the gifts to the spirits in this attempt to basically treat death like it’s not bad. It’s more of the entrance into the next level where you can gain more knowledge. The Aztec version actually had many different levels that you would ascend through in the spirit world towards your final end, but in the midst of that they would come back and visit for a time.
It's the Western hemisphere version of trying to stay connected with your ancestors that have died, and to show that death is not really the end but that you can cross over or reach through that veil, that the Bible very clearly tells us not to reach through, and continue to have fellowship.
Emily: It’s definitely portraying death as an ascension of sorts?
Rachel: Yes. Those who have died have more to offer to us than the living do, in a sense.
Greg: God through Isaiah does a little jab at that.
And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter, should not a people seek unto their God? For the living to the dead? To the law and to the testimony. If they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.
Isaiah mocks the whole concept. “You think dead people know more than you do? What? They’re dead. How did that make them omniscient?” Well, because the human race believed that somehow death was, at least for some persons – particularly if you were the father of a large tribe or clan, or you were the emperor of a great kingdom – then that could happen.
In Egypt the Pharaohs of course, the sons of the divine son, made a big deal over their deity, and we’ll talk about Egypt before too long. Every common Egyptian had hopes of preserving his body in such a way that when his ‘ka’ or his soul-self passed into the next world to stand before the gods in judgment he would sneak by them and go on to become his own little Osiris, his own little god. So although they were sure that the Pharaohs did this, they all hoped they could too.
Emily: This is the Book of Mormonism as well today.
Greg: Yes, there you go. It’s the common theology of the pagan world. “We will be as gods.”
When archeologists, sociologists, and anthropologists go back and look at the ancient world, more of them are thorough-going secularists who really don’t understand religion at all. They know a little bit about ritual magic, and they know a little bit about idol worship and the outward forms, and a little bit about the mythology, but they don’t get that people actually believed this stuff and that they erected entire cultures and encircled their entire personal lives around their commitment to these beliefs.
So archeologists and anthropologists can discover little facts that are helpful to us, and we can read their work and say, “Oh, that’s interesting that they did that,” but as Christians we have a much clearer idea of why they did these things. They wanted to be God. They wanted to make rules for themselves. They wanted to escape judgment. They wanted to transcend time. They conned themselves into thinking that somehow this was possible.
Again, we’re looking at history. These are not little tribal superstitions in the dark corners of the earth. This was the classical world, and one of the reasons I shiver, tremble, and my blood boils a little bit is when Christians stand up and say “classical culture, what a great model for education,” I think, “Do you even begin to understand what you’re talking about?” What’s going on here is you’re not taking these people seriously.
They’ve told us what they believe. We have enough of their writings to understand what they believe and what they were committed to, from the early chthonic religions that worshiped god in the ground in the backyard, to worshiping the spirits that had transcended all that and reached Olympus, to beyond that – the ideals of Plato or the one of Parmenides. They’re very clear.
The secularists don’t get it, either. “The Greek philosophers became purely naturalistic, no longer confined to religious interpretations.” They are thoroughly religious, and if you would read what they actually say there’s no doubt. They knew they were talking religion. It’s just that they got tired of religion that even they thought was stupid.
Emily: D.G. Hart has written a whole book, A Secular Faith, arguing that it’s only through the spread of Christianity through the western world that the idea of a secular aspect to life has even been developed.
Greg: That is so absolutely true. It took Christianity to de-deify the world. Then of the course the next step was, “If the world isn’t God, then what do we need God for? Let’s just kind of push him aside and revel in this world. It’s not divine so obviously God’s not there.”
“How about God’s sovereignty, prominence, imminence?”
“No, no, no. We got God out of this.”
And yes, the world is secular and a little bit boring, and you get Wordsworth complaining that you go out and look and you no longer see Triton rising from the sea, or nymphs and dryads out in the forests and the lakes, and feel sad about it because we’ve de-deified reality. I don’t know if it was Chesterton or Lewis who said, “Yeah, if he ever really saw Triton rising from the sea he would run away screaming. These are demons.”
We think of some of our Catholic friends as being Christmas/Easter Catholics, meaning they give a little bit of lip service and they do the religious thing at certain times of the year, but it doesn’t really affect them. We try to impose that back on the pagan world. That’s not it.
Speaking of books to read, here’s another one, C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, where he portrays very clearly what the old pagan religions were like and how they emotionally gripped and terrified their worshipers. Contrast that with the new intellectualized faith that came from the Greek philosophers and that brought the Olympian gods down to manageable forms.
He can show us, “This approach had this advantage, and this approach had this advantage,” but you know what? People really believed these, and people didn’t suddenly give up their old gods simply because Plato or Aristotle said something about man having a soul. They just simply thought man’s a god now because – soul, divine. So as we study history we need to keep bringing this up and saying, “This is how they thought. This is how they acted. This is what they believed, and it is everywhere.”
And back to the book you had recommended, Digital Liturgies, and the intro about fish in water, which I’ve seen in other contexts. The old fish looks at the new fish and says, “How’s the water?”
“What’s water?”
We look at the pagan world and we’re tempted to say, “Where’s the religion?” Where isn’t the religion? Again, the book The Ancient City takes this very seriously, so we recommend that as well.
Rachel: I think in all of this, one of the things we should keep in mind from where we started is that these are all manifestations of the rejection of the curse that God gave, and of trying to grasp onto the truth that Satan gave of saying, “No, that’s not actually what’s going to happen,” and “Satan, yes, we believe you, that we can be as gods, that we do not need to be simple dependent creatures who die. We can live on and become gods. We can get that great name for ourselves,” which is what we see over and over again – “…make a name for ourselves, have a great name, be a great man, a mighty hunter before the Lord.” Over and over again they’re trying to deny what God has said would be real, and believe Satan.
Emily: They’re trying to take the sting out of death in their own way.
Rachel: Yes. Each culture finds its own way to make death palatable, because everybody has to face it. In our day we have our own way of claiming, “We’ll find dignity in death.” For them it was, “You’ll find godhead or godhood in death.” We do need to take it seriously because we do it too, just in a different way.
Greg: With that said as a foundation, let’s just glance back and see what we have. We have men divided by language and language groups spreading out across the planet. We have sheets of ice descending from the north while the earth’s climate rebalances itself. Out of the wasteland we have dragons, dinosaurs, and monsters that may not come after us, but if we go after them they’re scary. And we have men building communities, and the leaders of these communities claiming for themselves, or their ancestors later claiming for them, that they are sons of God, that they’re divine.
And with the spread of humanity, things like trade arise. “They have lumber. They have sand. You can make glass out of that. And those people over there, they have cows. And these people have goats, and these people have wheat. Hmm, funny that we don’t all have all of it. We can either go conquer them all (and sometimes that was a solution) or maybe we can start trading. We’ve just got to get around this language problem.”
And oddly enough, they did because people who want to make money learn really fast how to point at things and hold up fingers. It’s not that hard to communicate if both sides really want something. They’ll figure out a way to work out the language barrier, and eventually will actually go to the trouble of learning the other’s language, or something close enough to it that they can do business.
This is the ancient world. From Noah to Abram are 10 generations, and during that time cities are rising and falling. The climate change is having its effect. As the ice approaches, some men forge forward into it and make their homes in caves. Others retreat from it toward warmer climates. People run out of land and jump on boats and sail they know not where.
So little by little, the command that God gave to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth is being carried out, not particularly willingly but either in search of new treasures, new resources, or in fear that people are trying to take your stuff. And all the while, watch out for the dragons.
All of this that we’ve talked about goes from Genesis 10 to 11. Then we hit the tail end of 11 and 12 and we meet this man Abram.
Emily: For whom we have about five minutes, by the way.
Greg: You always hope you’re going to have more time than you do, so next time we’re going to be talking about what God does with him, because his story and the stories of his sons and then their sons takes us the rest of the book of Genesis. We’ve done 12 chapters and there are 50 chapters in Genesis, and in all of that there’s no more worldwide floods. There are no huge plagues to wipe out nations. The world is fighting wars all around, but only one of them actually intrudes on Abraham’s life.
Emily: And very minimally.
Greg: Yeah. We hardly get anything about it.
Rachel: He just wins.
Greg: Yes. Mostly he’s out there in the wilderness raising cows and sheep and selling them and making friends with other sheikhs who are doing the same thing, and managing a rather large sheikhdom. He had 318 homeborn slaves, plus other servants, and they all had families, so we’re talking a few thousand people at least, and that was his life. It was to run this huge business, get along with your competitors, trade with them, and stay away from those wicked cities that want to do wicked things to you, for you, and with you, and teach your family and your extended household how to worship God, because you now have a promise.
Somehow God came to him and said, “I’m going to bless you. I’m going to make of you a great nation. You’re going to be a blessing to the world. In fact, in you will all the families of the earth be blessed.”
Abram knew enough to understand that this ties into the promise that God made to Eve at the garden gate. There’s someone coming who’s going to bless the world. He’s going to be not just the seed of Eve but he’s going to be the seed of Abraham. That’s the rest of the book, and then we begin to start speeding things up as we go through the rest of the books of the Bible.
We need to stop and look at this because what God does with Abram is not the kind of thing that we would put in a textbook today, but God did. God thought this was really, really important, so we need to stop and look at this promise, this covenant, and what meaning it has for us today. That will all have to wait until next time.
Emily: Before we sign off, shall we recommend some cool stuff?
Greg: We’ve been doing pretty good with that. I’m going to go back and recommend the Agatha Christie novel, Death Comes as an End. It’s set in ancient Egypt and is historically very accurate. It concerns this whole thing of the deification of an ancestor and why it’s important to be the first-born son who gets to go on feeding great-granddad and keeping him happy, and what happens if no one takes on that role. And if the son dies, who takes his role and who gets the inheritance?
It becomes a murder mystery in good Agatha Christie fashion, but as you read you’re not sure where she’s going, because it seems like the world is full of evil spirits. Are these evil spirits or are these human beings that are just very sinful? Read it and find out.
Emily: I think I’m going to recommend the children’s book, Waiting for Gregory. It’s very cute. It’s about a little girl named Iris who has a cousin coming and she wants to know when, and the grownups cannot give her a satisfactory answer. They tell her things like, “Oh, not too soon, not too long,” and then she’s drawing diagrams to try and figure out what on earth they mean. The art is very lovely and it’s a very sweet little story.
Rachel: For me, I was going to recommend a book, but we didn’t get to that part of the discussion that relates to the book, so I will save that for next week and I will instead jump off from what Emily did last time with her favorite kitchen appliance and recommend my new favorite, which I got as a wedding gift because my husband David said, “We should register for this,” when I said, “Why would we want this?” and that is an air fryer.
It is a wonderful tool that I have started using since we got married, instead of doing oven-roasting for vegetables and things like that. It allows you to use less of your oil and still get the wonderful crunchy fried texture on the outside.
Emily: I’ve heard more people convinced against their will about the air fryer than about any other appliance.
Rachel: It just seems so not-necessary, and then once you use it it becomes, “Oh wow, it can do everything.”
Greg: And it’s fast and it doesn’t leave an oily mess. And whereas I don’t mind oily messes, my family often does.
Rachel: I hate oily messes.
Greg: My wife got a new one and made some salmon for me the first time and it was wonderful, so they do the job. They’re very nice. You just need to find a place to store it.
Rachel: It’s one of the appliances that we can say, “Thank you, Lord, for technology that gave us this.”
Emily: Great. Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our financial supporters for keeping the show rolling. We really appreciate you. We really value the editing software that you purchased for us. Thank you also to Maggie Smith, who did our cover art.
Thank you, listeners, so much for listening. We hope you’ll join us again next week.
We are a production of Diecast Media Group.
SHOW NOTES
Scripture: Job 40-41, Isaiah 8:19
Resources:
A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State - D.G. Hart
Till We Have Faces – C.S. Lewis
The Ancient City – Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges and Dennis Bouvard
Recommendations:
Greg: Death Comes as an End – Agatha Christie
Emily: Waiting for Gregory – Kimberly Willis Holt
Rachel: An air fryer for oven roasting with less oil