God, Aliens, and Other Stuff

This post is not really about suffering. It's about expanding our understanding of God. Aside from the fact that the book of Job is great literature, who among us can't empathize with Job's predicament? He is being tested by God. He has lost his children, his goods, and his health. He's covered in painful sores and he smells. Dogs lick his wounds. His wife is shrieking at him and his supposed friends, those misguided comforters, are accusing him of being a sinner. Job doesn't understand what is happening with his deity. God is behaving in ways that don't make sense. Something is terribly wrong, but what and why? The fact is, Job's friends and accusers were standing on solid ground. They were drawing on God's holy, inerrant, unchanging Word. Deuteronomy 27 and 28 assure the reader that bad things happen to disobedient sinners. Good things happened to the obedient. They had ineffable tradition on their side.  "Ask the former generation and find out wh

The Resurrected Human Jewish Messiah, the Son of Man, Comes in the Clouds to Receive His Throne. This will be a shorter post than I’m accustomed to, but it’s vitally important. I’ve been meaning to blog about the Messianic prophecy in Dan. 7 for some time because it is so extraordinary. However, I’ve been reading The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible , by Dr. Michael Heiser , 2015. Of course, I’ve known about this passage since 1970 or earlier, but Heiser’s approach was so thorough and clear I couldn’t improve on it. His book was based on his Ph.D. dissertation, so it’s quite a tome to wade through—383 pages of the body of the book, then gobs more containing the footnotes and indexes. It’s a lot for even me to wade through, in spite of my own Ph.D. studies in Old Testament. It’s rare to get me excited about someone else’s scriptural exegesis (critical explanation), but Heiser has done that. What I’ll discuss here is in chapter 29. Heiser focuses on Dan.