Weird Stuff in the Bible

Mailbag: Are UFOs Demonic?
Mailbag responses

Introduction
So guys, I’ve been terrible about responding to my mailbag! My comments and questions and all that kind stuff that you guys have been sending in! So I’m like: before I go any further in the Bible study, I would like to take a week and just respond to your questions.
So we’re going to talk today about UFOs, demons, Iceland, naked Noah, the end of the world, and snakes with legs. Which, being a snake with legs kinda defeats the whole point of being a snake, right? So we’ll see what that’s all about, and at the end of today’s episode, I’ll share a few thoughts about the success of this podcast in just 14 episodes, which I’m very thankful for.
But what ties all these questions together today is that they deal with things that are WEIRD. So if you don’t want to hear about weird stuff, then I don’t know what you were doing here in the first place! But if you do like hearing about weird stuff, and how that weird stuff might intersect with Biblical truth, then you couldn’t be in a better place. Now let’s get weird!
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What’s Up with these UFOs?
Welcome to Weird Stuff in the Bible, where we explore scripture passages that are bizarre, perplexing or just plain weird. This is Luke Taylor, and today we’re going to be answering YOUR questions.
Now, so far over the past 13 episodes, we’ve covered the first 10 verses of the Book of Jude, as well as had a series of episodes dealing with the Nephilim and here lately three or four episodes really focused on Satan. So that’s what a lot of these questions today revolve around. And I’ll start with one that’s really near and dear to my heart: aliens.

So, I’m not personally worried about strange looks or else I wouldn’t have a podcast called Weird Stuff in the Bible!
Now, I’m a little curious about the UFO abduction stories. There are so many of them, you start to wonder what it’s all about. I might get into it someday. If you just hear UFOs and tune out, you probably haven’t ever looked into the well-documented evidence of them. Anyone who looks into it knows there must be something to it.
I don’t believe in aliens; I’m very sympathetic to the view that demons could be messing with people to make them think aliens are abducting them.
Perhaps you say: why do demons have this ability to mess with some people but not other people? There’s an apologist named Hugh Ross. He said this about the alien abuduction stories:
That makes sense to me with my beliefs about the UFO phenomenon. So that’s where I’m at on the UFO thing. I think it’s demonic forces messing with people, and if you open yourself up to witchcraft and evil spirits, you’re more likely to get caught up in it.
And you will see UFO skeptics make the claim oftentimes that UFOs only seem to visit Western countries like the USA an Europe, so therefore, these theories or myths must be a Western civilization thing.
Absolutely not true. There are UFO stories in all cultures going back hundreds or thousands of years, stories of the sky people coming down in vessels and interacting with humans. So it’s definitely not some American thing.

Like the Days of Lot
I’m going to need to speed up my responses so that this doesn’t turn into a 45-minute episode.
That’s why I haven’t been responding to a lot of mailbags within the episodes. Because I try to keep my episodes about 20 to 25 minutes, and if I spend at least 5 minutes on a mailbag, that’s like a fourth of the runtime, and it push the episode closer to 30 minutes sometimes, and I just don’t want to put out 30-minute episodes. I’m busy, you’re busy, so I’m always trying to figure out how to be better at condensing myself. So let me speed up here.

Yes, let me go back to re-read Jesus’ words about that.
Luke 17 says
26 Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. 27 They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. 28 Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot—they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, 29 but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all— 30 so will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed.
So really, it looks like Jesus is saying that the end times will come upon people surprisingly. In these verses, the people were eating and drinking, buying and selling, making plans for the future, and then all of a sudden, they were wiped out.
So a lot of us who like to dig into this prophecy stuff kind of look at the cultural circumstances of Lot’s day and Noah’s day and we see some parallels. For example, the explosion of homosexuality in Lot’s culture, and the current LGBTXYZ and gender confusion and all that, so it makes you wonder if that was also on Jesus’ mind as He prophesied the future.
And then you can look at Noah’s day with the Nephilim and wonder if there might be a parallel to that in the last days as well? Or the violence that is talked about in the days of Noah and whether that is also a signpost of the end?
I’ll share another comment- this one is not a question so much as an observation. It’s from Ronnie and it was also left on one of the episodes regarding the Nephilim:

So as I kind of touched on earlier, Jesus said it that the end times would be as it was in the Days of Noah.
Now, in context, Jesus seemed to be highlighting the fact that it was business as usually until, suddenly, the Day of the Lord was upon everyone. For a lot of us, we look at the headlines and stuff in the news and we’re like: God’s return is looking really really near, because we see so many aspects of the end times falling into place.
But for the unbeliever, they are totally unaware of what’s going on. They might know the economy is rough right now, but as far as they’re concerned, life is going to continue as usual. We have ups and downs. The world is generally pretty peaceful. Sure, some countries are at war, but most are doing fine. And when they say peace and safety, boom, the end comes on them like a flood. That’s really what Jesus is getting at here: what it’s going to be like for the unbeliever. The unbeliever in Noah’s day had no idea the flood was near, they thought Noah was just some nut job.
Now, could Jesus have meant more than that when He said it would be as in the Days of Noah and Lot? This phrase “the days of Noah” carried a lot of meaning to the Jewish people, who read books like the Book of Enoch, as Ronnie was alluding to, I think. Would they have understood that reference as referring to not just the complacent and aloof state of the unbelieving world, but the kinds of sins that would be present among mankind in the last days? Violence, sexuality out of control, interactions between humans and fallen angels? That’s what’s a little bit mysterious. It’s a possibility for sure.
But the sins of the days of Noah and Lot certainly do seem to be repeating in modern times, and those are both stories of when God’s judgment fell, very quickly and comprehensively- especially in Noah’s case. So I think it’s a possibility that we should take seriously.

The Sin of Ham
Got a comment next from Shawn. It’s a little more combative. It’s referring to my theory about how where the Nephilim after the flood came from. The two schools of thought are that 1, some of the Nephilim survived the flood, or that 2, some of the Sons of God came down and tried this again with human women and created a second wave of Nephilim.
Shawn has another theory:
So, it’s not accurate that Nephilim were only pre-flood. I did an episode called When the Nephilim Came Back and one called Nephilim After the Flood, and I trace how the Nephilim came back, somewhat mysteriously, and how their name changed over time in the Old Testament. So all that information is out there, I won’t regurgitate it here. But just look at Numbers 13:33.
As for whether Ham was a Nephilim or whether Noah’s wife was a Nephilim, I don’t buy that, and the main reason is that it makes no logical sense. God obviously sent the flood to wipe out the Nephilim. They nearly corrupted the entire human race. Noah was chosen because he had a pure bloodline. So there’s no point in Noah bringing any Nephilim with him. You have to assume some pretty outlandish things about Ham or Noah’s wife to make this theory work.
And I don’t mean “outlandish” in the sense that it’s weird, because I’m fine with weird. But I’m saying “outlandish” in the sense that it just doesn’t make sense, it raises more questions than it answers.
Now, there could be something to how seeing someone’s nakedness can mean something sexual. I might do an episode down the road figuring out what Ham’s sin was, exactly, it might be worth digging into. But I don’t think anyone on the ark was part of the Nephilim bloodline.

Did Snakes Have Legs?
I’m going to include a mailbag here that I actually received and responded to on my CR podcast, but it has to do with the devil, which is a subject we’ve been covering at length right here:
from Joe in North Carolina:
Good podcast. Note that the English word snake isn't found in the KJV, but another synonym of serpent is: dragon. But did snakes even exist before God cursed the serpent?
Always appreciate Joe’s positive comments. And I went ahead and responded and here is what I said: in my research, I learned that there is a Hebrew word for snake (which Genesis 3 did not use) as well as the Hebrew word nachash, which is translated there as serpent. Serpent basically means the same thing as snake, but also has a lot more semantic meaning packed into it.
I have a theory that snakes had arms and legs before the fall. Might sound a little silly to some, but evolutionary scientists actually believe that snakes used to have arms and legs after studying snake skeletons and fossils. I don't personally believe in evolution; I think those signs of arms and legs are there because snakes actually had them before God cursed the serpent.
I remember watching The Good Dinosaur with some of our foster kids, and it’s a movie set in prehistoric times, but there is a scene where a snake comes out, and it’s very clearly a snake, but it also has arms and legs. So I looked up why they included this scene, and the Pixar animators had researched how according to evolution, snakes had arms and legs at one point. so to stay true to science, the animators made the ancient snake in The Good Dinosaur have legs.
Isn’t it interesting that the science says the same thing the Bible says about ancient snakes. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, guys. And I don’t believe in evolution. But I do believe in Genesis 3, where God cursed the serpent and said from now on you’ll crawl on your belly.

Iceland…?
One more comment on the Nephilim episodes:
So I require some elaboration on that.
I googled, but couldn’t find any information on this. Except there is a subject that’s been on my mind lately about Nephilim that does intersect with Iceland, and that’s Norse Mythology. Which is very common in Iceland and some of the Scandinavian regions of the world.
So in Norse mythology, they believe in the ancient “giants,” and they believe these giants descended from an angelic being named Ymir, and Ymir came from a cow deity. No joke. I’ve been learning about Norse mythology a bit lately and it’s just downright fascinating to me how much of it intersects with the Bible.
Because if what the Bible teaches about the giants is real history, it’s no surprise that we’d see other places in the world that have stories about the giants. And, that’s exactly what we do see. Every civilization with stories of the ancient world talks about things like the giants.
And the flood. And the end of the world! In Norse Mythology, they. Have their own apocalypse called Ragnarok.
And that is not to say that Norse mythology is true. But it’s so interesting to me that the more I learn about it, everything I see intersects with some kind of spiritual truth that we also find in Christianity. Even things that most Christians don’t know about, such as godlike beings who are placed in charge of various regions, and giants, and a cow-like deity and how Satan has a cow-like face according to the Bible, and the spiritual interacting with the physical. It is truly fascinating. So, I’m sure I would learn a thing or two if I went to Iceland.
So let me pose that question to my listeners today: do you know of anything else in Norse mythology that intersects with Christian truth? It’s just a subject I’ve found fascinating lately. I’m just gonna put that out there and you can comment or send me an email if you know of anything. weirdstuffinthebible@gmail.com
Closing Thoughts
Hey in closing, I just want to thank you all for tuning in to this podcast. We have only had 13 episodes of Weird Stuff in the Bible and already, we have episodes getting hundreds of listens. That is off to a great start.
I started podcasting in 2021 with a podcast called Cross References, and I still do that one. Cross References is at about 110 episodes, it’s a pure joy, the episodes are a bit longer than Weird Stuff episodes. But I have to tell you, it did not take off nearly as much as Weird Stuff did. I already have more subscribers with 13 episodes of Weird Stuff than I did with 110 episodes of Cross References. So, thank you all so much for being a subscriber and helping this show get off to a running start.
I’m going to take a couple of weeks off. It’s honestly a terrible time to take a little break, but ever since I got sick around New Year’s, I have been trying to catch up with myself, working a full time job, doing two Bible study podcasts, I just need a couple of weeks to refresh myself. But since I don’t want to lose momentum, I’ll try to be back as soon as I can, perhaps at the end of February. In the meantime, if you subscribed here in 2024, go and give a listen to some of early episodes from November and December. They really form the foundation for everything that the show is all about, so take the next couple weeks to go back and refresh yourself on that.
Can’t wait to be back. So thankful to you all for being here now.
So if you think believing that believing snakes originally had legs is weird, I hope you’re a little more weird today, too. Thanks for listening, God bless you for sticking around until the end, and we’ll see you next time.