Hey Bridge Town Church, great to see all of you. I'm here with Dr. Tim Mackey, who is a dear friend,

wonderfully human being, also Hebrew professor and the co-creator of the Bible project right around

the corner, which I think is one of the best things in our city. Tim's just a brilliant mind and a great,

wonderful person, and we're in our fall practice and series around what church tradition has called

the three enemies of the soul, the world of flesh and the devil. So we've spent several weeks teaching

on the devil, you know, like you do. And our emphasis was more around truth and lies and Jesus'

whole thing of the enemy as the father of lies, but he is just the tip of the spear behind this whole

spiritual realm, spiritual reality of gods and goddesses and angels and demons and spirituality and

goddess in there, and you have been doing some fascinating work around this area. But I know you've

been a little reluctant to get into it of your own self-proclaimed skeptic of that whole thing.

So just talk to us about that. You know, I grew up in western, whatever culture at Portland,

and my default worldview is a materialist, not non-supernatural anything. So I have to choose to

actively think outside of that default. I don't find this easy to believe. Like this isn't

natural for me to... So I'm choosing to say I think these biblical authors and Jesus have a way of

viewing the world that they can see something that I guess I can't see. There's something I'm

blind to about how they view reality and that this is a really important part of understanding

what's going on. And so I just want to encourage people who find this whole thing hard to believe.

Like that's okay. Yeah, it's okay. But it is, I think it becomes a worldview that you have to

learn how to adopt and have it learn how to explain things that we see going on around us and in

our own lives with a view to spiritual evil. Yeah. And so what does that mean? But don't feel bad

about being weirded out because I think a lot of us are. You're a good company. Okay, let's dive in.

Let's just start from the beginning. The English word God. Yeah, so when we talk about God, I think

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