Weird Stuff in the Bible

Weird Stuff in the Bible
Episode 1

Introduction
The Bible is weird right? Can’t we all agree that the Bible has got some strange things going on. Aren’t you ver just reading along and then you come across something that seems totally out of left field? Something like:
I Corinthians 6, where it says
When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? 2 Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? 3 Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life!
Wait, I don’t remember learning in SS about someday when I’ll judge the world? And not only that, but apparently, someday I’m going to be judging angels, too? I don’t feel qualified to judge angels. I can barely decide what brand of butter to buy when I go to the store. I’d like a little more information about this angel-judging. And yet the Bible doesn’t stop to explain, Paul goes right on talking about human courts after this. Or what about:
Numbers 6, when a prophet named Salaam is riding his donkey through a mountain pass, it says:
And Balaam's anger was kindled, and he struck the donkey with his staff. 28 Then the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey, and she said to Balaam, “What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?”
There’s literally a TALKING DONKEY right there in the Bible. And if that seems surprising to you, it actually wasn’t surprising to the prophet who heard it. He answered the donkey right back without missing a beat. That’s the part that freaks me out. Not as much the talking Donkey. But the fact that Balaam apparently took it in stride.
Jude 9
But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses,

Wait, what? The archangel Michael, getting in a fistfight with the devil- over the body of Moses- I missed that one in church. But it’s right there in the Bible.
Or what about things that are very familiar but that we haven’t really stopped and thought much about before. Things like
I Samuel 17:4
And there came out from the camp of the Philistines a champion named Goliath of Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span.
Six cubits and a span equates to 10 foot 3 inches tall. Was he really, though? Because according to the Guiness book of world records, the tallest man in recorded history was 8 foot 11. And he was 100 years ago, and we have many more people around today than we did back then. In other words, a much larger sample size. And we don’t have anybody near Goliath’s size in modern times. Yet in the pages of scripture, giants were pretty commonplace. Lots of passages discuss men of gigantic size. So why don’t we see people like that today.
Well, if you’ve ever come across strange passages like this and just kind of skipped right over them, that’s probably what most of us do.
But if you’ve ever wanted to go back and dig in a little bit and find out what that was all about, this is a podcast just for you.
This show seeks to answer all those questions you were too embarrassed to ask about in Sunday School. And to be fair, your SS teacher or pastor probably didn’t know what to do with that question anyway.
So if you’re interested in digging into topics like that, grab your Bible, and let’s get weird.
[theme music]

A Weird time and place in history
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 welcome to episode 100 of the Cross References Podcast, but it’s also the first episode of a new podcast: Weird Stuff in the Bible. I have been wanting to do a secondary podcast that’s a little more focused on strange things in scripture- or should I say, things in scripture that are strange to us. I didn’t want to alienate my regular audience who normally tunes in for Bible studies on Ezekiel and prophecy and other random Bible topics.
So, this is episode 100 of the Cross References podcast, but it’s also episode 1 of the new show: Weird Stuff in the Bible. If you’re a listener on a podcast platform and you found this episode on the Cross References channel, I invite you to type in Weird Stuff in the Bible and go subscribe so you can get Weird Stuff episode 2. If you’re listening to this on the Weird Stuff in the Bible channel, you’re already in the right place. And if you’re a listener on Youtube, I’m probably just going to keep using my original YouTube channel and dump both shows on there. If you’re a Youtube Subscriber, you don’t need to do anything different. Cross References will continue to have new episodes on Mondays, and Weird Stuff in the Bible episodes will premiere on Wednesdays.
So if you don’t know me, or just need to get re-introduced to me, I’m an ordained minister with the Assemblies of God. Currently, I’m not working for a church, but I’m working with a Christian non-profit. I love Jesus. I’m very blessed with a wife and a couple of sons. I come at things from a Pentecostal perspective. My end-times views are premillennial. And I’m not so sure if that’s going to be especially relevant with the weird stuff in the Bible podcast, except that I have a strong belief in the supernatural, and perhaps that’s where I’d like to start.
We live at a very weird time in human history. We live in the post-modern age. Or what we might call rationalism, or scientism. We believe in natural explanations for everything. If you can’t prove it in a test-tube, then it’s subjective, and open to interpretation. How dare you say there’s only one way to heaven? How dare you declare your way to be right? Most modern people don’t believe in things like angels and demons. They might believe in God, but God is kind of distant; He’s off in heaven and all that stuff about modern miracles and demonic activity doesn’t seem super relevant nowadays, not when we have scientific explanations for things like the creation of the world, the origin of life, demon possession, speaking in tongues, and why Travis Kielce is interested in Taylor Swift. OK, we don’t really have a rational explanation for that last one, but you get my point.
We live in an age where science always seems to have the answer, and if a natural explanation doesn’t do the trick, it probably didn’t happen. We even see many modern Christians mixing scientific theories like evolution with the ancient stories of the Bible. There are churches today who teach that the flood of Noah was just something in the local region, not worldwide; that Jonah was never swallowed by a sea creature; and that gifts of the Holy Spirit just stopped functioning after the first century.
So as I said, we live at a weird time in human history. Because for almost all of history, right up until the mid-1800s, people had no problem believing in spiritual things. Supernatural creatures like angels and demons. Spirits who are assigned to certain territories. Fortune tellers and necromancers and why we should stay away from them. Modern Christians say to stay away from that stuff because it’s fake. Ancient Christians would have said to stay away from that stuff because it’s real.
So we live at a time where we hear about things like giants with six fingers and we think that sounds like a folk story or a legend like Bigfoot. Were there every dragons on the earth? Were there dinosaurs in the book of Job? Science says dinosaurs died out millions of years ago, so there’s no way. But what would the ancient Christians have said? What would the writers of the Bible have said? I can tell you that they had no problem with the concepts of dragons, dinosaurs, demons and witch doctors. It’s modern people who struggle with these things. So we live at a very weird time in human history where we are the first generation to reject supernatural explanations for all of these things.
And that’s not just a modern problem. That’s a modern, western civilization problem. You go off into Africa or India or South America and those people would have no problem accepting these things. They witness supernatural happenings all the time. I heard it from a Baptist minister who went on a missions trip to Haiti; he said it was an eye-opening experience for him. He said that the non-Christians in Haiti have a stronger belief in the supernatural than Christians do in America.
And talk to a missionary who goes into some of these countries like Ivory Coast Africa. I have. They will tell you: the spiritual world is real and very active in the world today. Demonic oppression and possession and manifestation is extremely real and influential in the modern world. The only problem is, most American Christians ignore it, or worse: they teach that the Holy Spirit doesn’t empower us to do anything about it. They’ll literally teach that the ability to cast a demon out of a person was something that went away after the first century of the church, that we are now powerless to do anything about it. Well, I’m sure that’s also exactly what the devil would want them to teach.
This debate about cessationism is also weird. I say this because there’s a cessationist conference coming up. This has sparked a revival of debate about the merits of spiritual gifts. And there are good Christians who love Jesus on both sides of the issue. But it’s a uniquely American and Western debate. Other countries don’t have theological debates break out about whether the spiritual gifts and casting out demons still happens today. They see it with their own eyes. That’s their reality. And it was the historical reality. And it’s biblical reality.
So if you’re a modern Christian living in a westernized country, I have some bad news for you: you are weird. You’re living at a very weird time and a very weird place in human history. If you don’t believe there’s a supernatural conflict going on in the unseen realm around you at all times, and that this supernatural conflict breaks out and affects the natural world on a daily basis, you are the weird one. And if you don’t believe that the Holy Spirit protects you and enables you to be victorious and stand strong in the midst of this spiritual war, you’re weird. Because that wasn’t the perspective of Christians in history up until a few hundred years ago, and that certainly wasn’t the perspective of the authors of the Bible.
Speaking of their perspective, that’s something I won’t forget. If we want to understand what the biblical authors meant when they wrote about things like the Prince of Persia blocking Daniel’s prayers from being answered in Daniel 10, or why Paul talks about judging angels someday, we can’t look at those things through a 21st century western civilization lens. We can’t figure it out looking at a theology book written in the 1800s. We have to understand the worldview of the ancient authors to see what they meant when they talked about these things. It doesn’t matter what you think a prince is. We have to know what Daniel considered a prince. So we’ll talk about how they saw things, and to do that, we might occasionally rely on ancient texts like the Book of Enoch. Now, I am not saying that the Book of Enoch is part of the Word of God. But Peter considered it to be reliable. Jude considered it to be factual. It was considered a dependable source of information by the ancient Jewish people at the time of Jesus. So maybe we should look at what the Book of Enoch says, and that will help us in understanding what Peter and Paul and others were talking about when they wrote of the flood of Noah and other topics. The Book of Enoch is bizarre to us, but it was historical to Paul or Jude. So if we can understand their mindset, we’ll understand their books better, too.

The Bible is Weird
II Samuel 21:20
And there was again war at Gath, where there was a man of great stature, who had six fingers on each hand, and six toes on each foot, twenty-four in number, and he also was descended from the giants.
Six fingers and six toes. Is it normal to come across men like this? No. But is this just folklore and legend? No. This really happened. Conflicts with beings like this was considered normal to the ancient Israelites.
The Bible is there to teach us about reality. Spiritual reality. It’s telling us what this world is really like. The Bible is not a collection of stories that have no relevance to us today. If it was, why would God have given it to us? Why give us a book full of exceptions of things that don’t actually happen? No, the Bible is telling us what reality is like. When we find it surprising, it’s because we are the ones who look at things in a weird way. The Bible is not weird. We are.
So we will talk about that. You say, “But if this is normal, why aren’t there six-fingered giants around today?” We’ll talk about that, too.
Ephesians 3 says
so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth
Woah woah woah. Breadth, length, height and depth. That’s four dimensions of existence right there. Is that just flowery language that just means deep understanding? No. God is telling us something specific about reality right there. We are familiar with three dimensions: height and width and depth. That is the reality we live in. The Bible tells us there is a fourth one. We are three-dimensional beings. I believe that the fourth dimension is where spiritual beings inhabit, and that they can break into our third-dimensional realm. It’s not weird. If you’ve got a problem with it, you are weird. The bible is normal. We’ll talk about that.
Job says that Satan can go up and talk to God anytime he wants. Did you know that?
Job 1:6
Now there was a day when the sons of God [that’s spiritual beings, we might call them angels] came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them.
For real? Satan can just waltz into God’s throne room and have a seat at the table anytime he wants? He actually can. Not just Satan. There are several evil spiritual beings who can have conversations with God. In fact, God will use Satan and these evil spirits to accomplish His will on the earth. It happens all the time in the Bible. If you don’t see it, it’s because you’re just reading right over it. This is completely normal. The Bible is not weird. You are weird. But I’m going to get into all that stuff very soon and explain it all to you.

Housekeeping/Mailbag
So episodes will drop on Wednesdays. The next episode comes out in two days, which will be November 1. Make sure you’re subscribed so you can get it!
What weird stuff in the Bible do you want to know more about? weirdstuffinthebible@gmail.com
I’ve thrown out a lot of questions today. But the exciting thing is, there are answers to all of these questions. Well, maybe not the Travis Kielce thing, but for everything else, there are answers to these questions. The Bible has answers. In fact, you’ll be surprised at how much the Bible talks about all these things that you never realized before. But, once I point them out to you, you’ll read your Bible in a whole new way. It’ll make more sense to you than ever before.
So I plan to put 8 episodes out between now and Christmas. Then I’ll take a short break to assess what’s working, what’s popular, what’s not, and we’ll be back sometime after the start of the new year. I plan to put these episodes out in spurts. Probably every Wednesday for a couple off months, and then I’ll take a month or so off.
And I also thought I would spotlight a particular book of the Bible and kind of teach through it verse by verse, if it’s a weird book of the Bible, and I consider the book of Jude to be particularly weird. So at some point, I will do a series through that book.
So if you think the Bible is a little weird sometimes, you’re probably normal. But this podcast is going to make you a little less normal. But as long as we’re getting closer to the Bible, reality, and Jesus, I think that’s OK- even if it gets a little weird. Thanks for listening, God bless you for sticking around until the end, and we’ll see you next time.