Revelation 15 and 16 deal with the seven bowl judgments meted out against all those who follow the
Beast. The passage contains several images drawn from the Old Testament that telegraph the victory of
Jesus and the Father over the Beast and the chaos system of Babylon. This episode explores those
systems and the connections between the bowls and other Old Testament chaos enemies. The effect of
the judgments is to cleanse the earth of chaos, preparing it to once again be sacred space to be re-
occupied by its rightful Lord, the returned Christ.
Dr. Michael F. Bird is a well-known New Testament scholar and theologian from Brisbane, Australia. After serving in the military as a paratrooper, he completed his PhD at the University of Queensland. Dr. Bird is currently the Academic Dean and Lecturer in Theology at Ridley College in Australia. in 2013. Dr. Bird has written or edited many books in the areas of New Testament and Christian theology, several of them aimed specifically for lay Christians. Among these are How God Became Jesus (a response to Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God), What Christians Ought to Believe: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine Through the Apostles’ Creed, and Jesus the Eternal Son: Answering Adoptionist Christology. In today’s episode we chat with Dr. Bird about two of his books: Evangelical Theology and Seven Things I Wish Christians Knew About the Bible.
Christians know Jesus as the messianic son of David. The fact that the messiah is referred to by other titles and terms (e.g., Servant, Branch, Root) is also well known. But there is one title or trajectory about the Jewish messiah that is relatively unknown, save to a handful of rabbinic teachers who intentionally do not want attention paid to it. That trajectory is the Messiah son of Joseph. In this episode we discuss this topic with Dr. David Mitchell, perhaps the solitary scholar who has brought all the relevant ancient “Josephite Messiah” material together into one book. Dr. Mitchell writes extensively of how Jewish sources such as the Talmud speak of a figure called Messiah ben Joseph, who comes forth from Galilee to die, pierced by his enemies at the gate of Jerusalem, whose death confounds Satan, atones for sin, and abolishes death itself.
The Psalms and Eschatology with Dr. David Mitchell
Many Bible readers have wondered, and perhaps suspected, that there is a logic to the ordering of the Psalter, the Book of Psalms. Surely the material cannot be random. In this episode of the podcast we discuss this topic with Dr. David C. Mitchell. Our conversations serves to introduce listeners to Dr. Mitchell’s scholarly work that argues that the Psalter is arranged to tell the story of a “once and future” king of Israel, opposition to that king (and his people) by the nations, the death of that king, the king’s subsequent rise in victory over the nations, the redemption of Israel, and the re-gathering of the nations to worship Yahweh on Zion at the Feast of Tabernacles.
