One can think down through life and wonder there are great swaths of life where much is forgotten. Past meals that came and went and are no longer remembered coming so regularly. There are so many mundane days that can never be recalled. Same stuff—different day! Gifts received in the past were passionately received but quickly became old and outdated, and beyond use. It truly is challenging to see how significant those gifts remain relevant to one’s life years later. They are more: here today and sadly gone tomorrow.
Modern technology illustrates the point of “out with the old and in with the new.” One buys a phone only to see it become old news as the latest phones tower over it almost as soon as its release day expires with information of what is next. Newsfeeds must clutter our lives to instantaneously give us the most recent updates even as we expect an Amazon order no longer in days but hours. However, during the pandemic, the world slowed. Many companies have expanded updates to four or even five years to make sure those who wish to stretch those dollars can do so and feel secure in their purchases. Times change with an ebb and flow to move one back and forth across the temporal spectrum while fighting to remain relevant and getting as many likes and shares as one can muster.
As I survey my life, I find what has stood the test of time instead of what is so fleeting to see what keeps resonating. We all have unique moments of such life-changing significance that they cannot be forgotten, and almost daily, we experience why they remain so important. One such figure for me is Dr. Michael S. Heiser and all he brings to the table. Admittedly, Dr. Heiser has been clear that his gifts do not lie in writing anything on the cutting edge of new ideas but in synthesizing what is out there into a coherence that makes it all stick. He shows how what others have worked so hard to bring to us fits and fits well into our ordinary lives and can hold such significance longer than fads that now, thanks to the internet, can be fleeting in as little as the thirty seconds or less it takes to share them in a click or two.
I have often stated endlessly to my students it is not only the content of what Dr. Heiser has produced that had been the game-changer for me. The introduction to get behind the curtain in both the unseen realm and the world of academia has been the most paradigmatic. True to form, Dr. Heiser has successfully bridged the gap between the supernatural and mythic with our post-enlightened understanding by utilizing peer-reviewed scholarship to bolster one’s knowledge in an information age that is turning into the next global war over misinformation. Fact-checking has become the art of spinning one’s spin to ad infinitum and ad nauseam, if I may conjecture!
We can all admit that many sermons or classes are forgettable and put us to sleep more than transformative. It was the rare occasion one experienced the special on those days which were not already auspicious for other reasons. It takes an exceptional person to turn the mundane into any more of a meal than the menial, though it is precisely those extraordinary individuals who mirror God best. When approaching God, one cannot expect it to be anything but rarified.
Unfortunately, in our low estate of affairs, we often somehow have managed to become quite good at doing that very thing. It seems so since God is no longer preeminent in a single structure, nor is the Lord even in the many associated with him. Post 9/11 in the US, sales went up, as did church attendance, and America became united once more for a brief period. The mass exodus became a reality in the pandemic, though, and a return may not be in the cards anytime soon. We have, through our ignorance, led to God’s importance becoming mundane and out of use. In C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia saga, there seem to be ages that pass before Aslan (his Christ figure) appears. It seems humanity often relegates God to the mundane, forgetting just how special he is.
In my academic travels, I have found myself at times quite far afield from Heiser’s content, but what never seems to lose its resonance is his methodology. He did not just teach me to walk in a sense, so I could get the likes of where he is but showed me why walking would let me go to just about any place worth exploring—while continuously making walking an enjoyable activity. While he remains light years ahead of me, he has given me something that rarely do I not find myself doing most of any given moment of my day.
I think otherwise. I see the world so differently. People are not the same. Everything has changed.
I not only read my Bible in a whole new way, but I also read everything that way. However, it goes beyond that. There is so much more than the content or even the thinking he instills. It is the methodology that I now can turn myself to any subject and apply the same and get more marrow out of any bones whereby before I never knew the bones even afforded any value to the meal!
In our blogs and the channel, I desire to take others to the places I am allowed to go via my journey because I took specific steps to learn how to think about what I am consuming from a trained scholar. I used those steps to get my graduate degree and Ph.D. Now I wish to pass along as much of that advice to others as I can. I find many of them cannot find it all in their present form, so I am attempting to repackage it, adding in my thoughts along the way to help them find their way as I did myself. When I get something from Dr. Heiser, I often feel like it is “the gift that keeps on giving” because somehow, it shows me a better way to think about things and will afford me much more in the future. His advice leads me to make fewer mistakes and enjoy so much more to bring me to places before I never knew existed. I cannot thank him enough for the content, the thinking, and the methodology to do biblical studies in a “more excellent way” as Paul put it to see what I once was so blind to that now means more to me than the stuff upon which I used to waste my time. So we are creating ways to get this material on our site, in our classes, and on the YouTube channel in the future to help lend support in answering the question:
“We don’t want to know what you know, but how to know what you know?”
