Time

So you know straight away somebody after the time of Moses is retelling an ancient story, and they’ve altered it.

You know there’s an issue here.[7:39] A decade ago, theologians and preachers around the world were challenged by the Roman Catholic Church to go back to the scriptures and recognize that there are ETs in the Old Testament and New Testament alike.[7:51] When that challenge happened in 2009 under the most conservative pope in my lifetime, Benedict XVI, I would have hoped that more books might have emerged since then saying, "Yes, we’ve done that work and we’ve realized there are aliens in the Bible," but in the end, it didn’t happen.[8:09] I thought, "Well, I’ll do it because it’s that important and the time is right for it." So I jumped in, knowing it would alter the shape of my ministry somewhat and perhaps alter my social life a little bit, but feeling it was too important to have seen these things and not shared them.

[8:42] I hear from a lot of people from week to week, sometimes every day, from people who’ve grown up in very tight thought control environments—conservative churches where we all believe these 12 fundamental truths and where thinking out loud isn’t really encouraged, and where they may be fearful for their own salvation if they allow themselves to ask too many questions.[9:12] I hear from a lot of people who’ve come from that and who maybe sat with that for decades but not felt right all that time.

Why don’t you go back and read your Bible, idiot," and comments like that.[10:01] Ninety percent of the time, if I respond by saying, "Thank you so much for your comment.

Ninety percent of the time, we’re giving each other respect by the end of the conversation, and hopefully, they might have something different to think about, and I might have finessed my own thinking in some way.[10:38] It’s only a tiny fraction of those who want to get into an argument who will remain angry and implacable at the end of it.

The reason I think this is this," and they would get into a conversation 120 characters at a time.[13:45] Bit by bit, she realized there was actually truth-seeking outside her church.

Our kids are very happy and secure there, but from time to time they’ll come home, and they’ve been doing this since my oldest was 10, and she and her brother would say something like, "We were doing Bible studies today in school, and the teacher said this, and I wasn’t sure about that."[16:18] I’ll say, "Oh, well, what did you think about it?" and they’ll say, "Well, actually, I thought that was wrong.

They might hear things they’re perfectly happy with, but a lot of the time they come home, and I think, "Wow, their theological compass is pretty good, and they can spot when the teacher is saying something that even the teacher doesn’t really believe."[17:04] The other day, in fact, my daughter said, "I didn’t think our teacher quite had this right when he talked about this text." I said, "What did you think?" She said what she thought.

I think we are.[31:49] I’ve come to the conclusion that by the time you get to Genesis 11, you’ve seen five planetary resets and resets of civilization.

Go to the Vedas, and in that tradition is the idea of cycles of civilization, cycles of life on this planet, that we are not the first civilization to grace the land on this planet.[32:16] There’s enough archaeology to point us to that fact because conventional wisdom is that civilization as we know it began at Karaca Dag in southeast Turkey when farming was invented, when 11 naturally occurring plants were cultivated for the first time by a family who worked out how to genetically modify them so they could be cultivated and at the same time worked out how to do animal husbandry.[32:45] Bit of a miracle, but there you are, that’s the story.

All around the world, we find megalithic remains of places that would have been populated and/or above sea level no more recently than 10,000 years ago.[33:31] So we can find objective material evidence of at least one pivot of a previous civilization to the current, and our ancient texts say that has happened several times.

You go to Ecclesiastes, and it says, "In time, there will be no memory of us or anything we did, and we have no knowledge of what went before us." Now, that was written when there was writing, so he’s not talking about us individually or empires; he’s talking about civilizations coming and going and being forgotten and obliterated.[35:08] I think that is the pattern.

His people are angry and thirsty; they’ve been on emergency rations for I don’t know how long with this manna that they’re provided with—they don’t even know what it is.[47:25] They come to Moses and complain a couple of times, saying, "We cannot live like this." When they come back to him one time, they’re presented with a stone—"Get water from the stone." They come back another time—stone.

He would quote something from the Hebrew text and then turn it against the Hebrew text-believing audience in order to show that he had transcended it.[51:51] There were many times when he said, "Moses said this, but I say this.

In the past, it said this, but I say this." Each time, he is putting an end to that old story because a better story has arrived.

If what they wanted people to know is that you shouldn’t be running around worshiping things that claim to be gods because there is only one cosmic source—the source of all things in the cosmos, that in which we all live and move and have our being—I think they’re right.[53:33] That’s actually a very liberating thing to know, and there are plenty of clues that there was other information they were lacing into the texts in the way they reshaped it at that time.

There’s real information that goes in at that time.

[54:11] I feel I’ve spent a long time in the top layer, in the most recent edit, and in this season of my life, I actually want to go to the primitive versions of these stories and the ancient and the forgotten and the suppressed material.