Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture
Ep. 294 Jared Brock Returns - Right-Sizing the Devil: Who is He Really?
Today, we're having a conversation that will challenge what you think you know about the devil, evil, temptation, and spiritual warfare. Jared Brock is back with us - if you remember our last incredible conversation about Jesus, where we unpacked the human life of Christ and the political imagination of his time, you know Jared brings profound theological insights that challenge our perceptions. This time, we're exploring a figure who's been misunderstood, mythologized, and frankly, given way too much credit: the devil. Who is he really? What's his actual role in the cosmic story of redemption? Jared's new book, "A Devil Named Lucifer," promises to right-size our understanding - minimizing the devil and magnifying the true King. If you're ready to see spiritual reality through a lens of hope, kingdom advancement, and radical trust in God's ultimate victory, then this episode is for you. So join us as we right-size the devil.
Jared Brock is an award-winning author and director of several films including PBS's acclaimed Redeeming Uncle Tom with Danny Glover. His writing has appeared in Christianity Today, The Guardian, Smithsonian, USA Today, Huffington Post, Relevant, and TIME. He has traveled to more than forty countries, including North Korea, Transnistria, and the Vatican. Learn more at jaredbrock.com.
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If you do the math, there's 8 billion of us over 100 year span. That means the devil would only get to spend 0.39 seconds with each of us so he's not sitting on your shoulder. There's a very good chance that no single person listening to this entire podcast anywhere in the world over the next 10 years or whatever, is ever going to have a personal encounter with Seiji.
Joshua Johnson:Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, today we're having a conversation that will challenge what you think you know about the devil, evil, temptation and spiritual warfare. Jared Brock is back with us. If you remember our last incredible conversation about Jesus, where we impact the human life of Christ and the political imagination of his time. You know, Jared brings profound theological insights that challenge our perceptions. This time, we're exploring a figure who's been misunderstood, mythologized, and, frankly, given way too much credit, the devil. Who is he really? What's his actual role in the cosmic story of redemption? Jared's new book, a devil named Lucifer promises to right size our understanding, minimizing the devil and magnifying the True King. If you're ready to see spiritual reality through a lens of hope, kingdom, advancement and radical trust in God's ultimate victory, then this episode is for you. So join us as we right size the devil. Here is my conversation with Jared. Brock, Jared, welcome back to shifting culture. Excited to have you back on thanks for coming back and joining me. Thanks for having me. Last time we talked about a god named Josh, which was uncovering the human life of Jesus, and so it was fantastic to be able to talk about Jesus and His life on Earth and what that was like, and all the political machinations that were happening during that time. Highly recommend going back and listening to that one, because I recommend that episode to a lot of people. This time we get to talk about the devil, or we get to talk about Satan, or probably don't have to talk about Lucifer, but we will a little bit. So why did you say, Hey, this is a good time to relay who is Satan? Who is the devil? What has he been doing? Is it because he's just equal and opposite of Jesus?
Jared Brock:Yeah, so that is the myth and culture that the devil is Jesus is equal and opposite power, that they're deadlocked in this arm wrestling competition. Who's gonna win? Who's gonna win? That's actually a Zoroastrian myth that is not part of the Christian story. That's an import from Persia, and it's just simply not true. A much healthier view of Jesus versus the devil would be something like a judo master who is using his opponent's force and skill and weight against Him. The Bible says that God is working all things together according to His purpose. His purpose is to reunite the world to Himself through Jesus, His kingdom is invading. It's advancing, it's inevitable. It's unstoppable. And even though it's hard for us to understand, everything the devil does, ultimately, is being used to advance God's kingdom in this world. So it's not an arm wrestling competition.
Joshua Johnson:That's good news. So who is the Devil then? So bring us into that. Who is the devil? There's
Jared Brock:lots of views on that. It's probably important to start by saying that we actually know very little about the devil. The Bible doesn't talk about him very much. He only says around 250 words in most English translations, and almost half of those words are him either quoting or misquoting scripture. He's not very original. He's He's not creative force. He's a parasitic force. If anything, the Bible talks about him more than he actually is. Is present. So there's two words in the Bible for the devil, hasatan and Diablos. And those words off most often have the word the in front of them. So you know the Joshua or the Jared. That's different from Joshua and Jared, right? The accuser, the adversary. Those are that's different from him actually being present. If you find, if you do a word search of the actual times where capital D, devil, capital S, Satan would know the before it, there's only three original instances, unique instances of each in the Bible. So he shows up very infrequently. The Bible actually talks about donkeys, more that talks about the devil, talks about there's more stories about olive oil than there are stories about Satan. And my favorite stat is that Satan ranks somewhere between bread and cheese. You can make a Satan sandwich a few times. He actually sells up in the Bible,
Joshua Johnson:hey. Well, if you have a little bread. Add some good olive oil to dip it in. That's definitely better than Satan. That is definitely heavenly. I want to know then a these are, we don't really know much about Satan from the Bible, that he's actually present, but there's a ton to know. So if he has a little mention, like there's, there's very little to him, why do we as as humans, give him so much importance? Why do we have him outsized compared to his presence in the Bible? Yeah, so
Jared Brock:again, it's so important to remember that the amount of words he speaks, the amount of time she's talked about, it's less than a percentage point in the whole Bible. He is a rounding error. As I write in the conclusion of this book, I ended up writing two books about Jesus, because the devil is not even the lead character in his own biography. He's like the sixth lead. It's, it's, it's a, it ends up the a devil named lucid being a book about Jesus. The reality is that the devil nowhere. In Scripture doesn't say that he's omnipresent, that he's all places at all times? The Bible does say that he spends day and night going before the courtroom of heaven, accusing the saints before the Father. So he is running back and forth, testing and tempting, trying to accuse, but he's accusing adversarially. This is not a good faith justice seeking attorney. He's just trying to bust us. But of course, every time he accuses one of the saints, Jesus, our Paraclete, our advocate, stands up and says, Not guilty, righteous because of their faith in me, which praise God for that. And then the devil slinks back to Earth to start it all over again. If you do the math, there's 8 billion of us over 100 year span. That means the devil would only get to spend 0.39 seconds with each of us so he's not sitting on your shoulder. There's a very good chance that no single person listening to this entire podcast anywhere in the world over the next 10 years or whatever, is ever going to have a personal encounter with Seiji that said 99.9% of the people who fought in World War Two never had a face to face, hand hand combat, Battle of Adolf Hitler. But they were experiencing these tactics, his tricks, his traps, his bombs, his his ordinances, his land mines, his sea mines, from North Africa to the Russian border. They were constantly encountering Hitler, but just not Hitler in the in the flesh. So the Bible says that that the accuser is the father of lies. And so we actually need to be on the lookout for things, not that are going to take your salvation. The devil can't do that, but he can try to blow our leg off by having us believe these lies they've been planting for 1000s of years.
Joshua Johnson:So he's been planting lies for a long, long time. And so we need to be on lookout. I want to get into some lies in a little bit, but I want to just maybe uncover a little bit of misconceptions about the devil. One, is he the fallen angel? Is he the leader of the demons? Is that true? Is it not true? What? What do we know about him? Well,
Jared Brock:okay, let's, let's back up all the way to start, and let's just say that his name is actually not Lucifer. We have named him Lucifer, but that is not his name. The word Lucifer does not appear in the original Hebrew Bible or the original Greek Bible. It appears in a later Latin translation. What's interesting, though, is the name isn't actually applied to the devil. There's, there's a couple different words that are translated as Lucifer. Lucifer simply means light bearer or light bringer. The first match ever created was called a Lucifer, and so Jesus is described in Scripture as a Lucifer, as a light bearer, and Christians are described as light bearers, and creation is described as a light bearer. But the devil is not described as a light bear. He's not a true Lucifer. He pretends to be an angel of light, but he's actually not a Lucifer. So that's a really important place to start, is that that's just not even his name. Is he a fallen angel? There are scriptures that suggest that he might be that, is he the leader of the demons? Are demons leadable, we don't know. Like the Jesus says. Jesus says that, like evil can't, like the house of evil can't stand it's like it doesn't stay united for very long. A great example is, like any mafia in history, they almost always descended in fighting and Snake ends up eating its own tail. How? How obedient, subservient and self sacrificing our demons to their boss like these are things that Scripture doesn't cover, and I personally think are highly unlikely. I don't know if he does a very good job of having a globally coordinated attack on, on on us, versus simply just planting his lies, doing what he does, accusing us adversarially, and then obviously the Democ doing something similar. One of the places
Joshua Johnson:you say that there are a lot of things about the devil that we could actually learn from is is Ezekiel 28 Can you take me into Ezekiel? 28 And what that teaches us and tells us about the devil. There's
Jared Brock:a couple of stories in the Bible where they're they're essentially Jewish taunt songs against foreign kings, whether they were invaders or simply enemies. One of them's the king of Babylon. And there's a couple of kings that they write these taunts about. And at first you're like, you know, he's this big, strong, evil man. He kills his enemies. He's so horrible. And then all of a sudden, you're like, Wait, hold on, pump the brakes. Are we talking about, are we talking about this King still? Are we talking about another being? Because you're talking about you fell from heaven and you got feet on fire and and you got lightning bolts coming to your eyes and like, all this, all this crazy imagery, you're like you were there since the foundation of the world. You're like you stood before the throne room of God. You're like, okay, hold on. We're definitely not talking about a human king. Who are we talking about here? And so there is this sense that that at some point, if you've been living in rebellion against the Lord long enough that he tends to turn you over to those desires. A great example would be the Pharaoh. He hardens heart again and again and again, and God eventually says, Do you know what I'm going to let you I'm going to solidify this heart as as hard as Roman concrete. And I'm actually going to use that to free millions of people from slavery. I'm going to take them out of your your control, so that I can then bless them, so they can be a blessing to all families of the earth. So there is this sense of of, there is an indwelling power that can actually take over. It can work in partnership with a human free will. Remember, these are all just free wills, the devil, demons, humans. We're all free wills and free wills can work in partnership to bring devastation to this world. It's either God's will or it's our will or it's the devil's will. Martin Luther said that that the Christian soul has three enemies, the world, the flesh, the devil. We've over indexed, I think, way too much on the devil, and we've like, really, really taken all personal responsibility off the table for her own stuff. Like, just even, like, I mean, you've obviously heard the phrase The devil made me do it. The reality is that that's not only a lie, it's actually heretical, because, let's say the devil could make you pull the trigger and the devil killed someone, but then a human being gets charged before the throne room of heaven as a murderer, then that means God is not just that means God is not good. That means God is not God. So it's actually heretical to say the devil make me do it. Devil cannot make anyone do anything. He can plant ideas, he can plant lies. He can make invitations, he can seduce, but he can't actually force you to do anything. I
Joshua Johnson:think a good example of that is the temptation of Jesus in the desert, take us there. How does he then try to lie, subvert scripture and try to get Jesus to do something. But Jesus is like, Yeah, forget you. What's he doing there? And then, what does that look like? Then for us.
Jared Brock:So context, Jesus spends 40 days in the wilderness near the Jordan. He's likely been hanging out with John the Baptist community. We don't know if John the Baptist grew up as an Essen or whatnot, but he's in that area where the kind of the Qumran canes, where, where we found the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jesus in the wilderness. And he has some people argue that it was like a literal thing. Some people think it was a vision. But Jesus has these, these three temptations. The story is, is structured like a Jewish Midrash. So often rabbis would create these kind of short stories where they would it was, the point was to help teach scripture. So like, if you encounter this, here's the scripture you could hit it with. So this, this story, this Jesus encounter with the enemy. He essentially is offered the big three temptations, you know, power, control, fame, like wealth, all this stuff. And each time it's interesting, the devil doesn't say, like, check out the cool new Tesla X, check out the cool new Lamborghini. He actually quotes Scripture. He twists scripture. He's just like, hey, like, you know you could have dominion, you could have power like you could use it for good. You could call it stewardship. You could whatever you want to do and but each time that this happens in this Midrash, the devil has just twist scripture, but then Jesus lays the smack down with the with the real truth. And so there's definitely something for us to be learned through that of, hey, the enemy knows scripture, and he knows it well. He probably has the whole thing memorized. He's had enough time, and he probably knows how to twist every single verse in Scripture. So yeah, guard your theology, for it is your life. The Bible says, so what
Joshua Johnson:does that look like? Then? What's discernment? How do we know if scripture is twisted, how do we know that what's what's going to lead us into the truth?
Jared Brock:Oh, man, like I mean, the Bible says that the Holy Spirit will lead us into all truth. So we got to stay close to Christ. Be with Jesus, become let Jesus do the things he did. We've got to be in Scripture. I'm a solo Scriptura guy it. But it is also super important to see what the early church, what their view on things were, because they were so close to it. A lot of them were kind of the kids and grandkids of the original disciples and the fossils and so where they're in unanimous agreement on something with scripture, if a new theology comes along that's just like, totally innovative and like totally new and and basically everyone for the first 400 years of the church disagrees with you, you probably just need to limit submission to that. Obviously there are exceptions, but that's a good general rule. I think. Also staying close to your church family, being part of a faith family, faith community, being under eldership, deaconship, being under shepherds, relying on our on our gifted theologians that we have, this is so important. But yeah, the Christian church is off, is off track in a lot of areas right now. I think the biggest one is economics. I'm currently working on a Christian economics course, and we're just like, light years off, off of where, where the Bible is on economics. That's the story for another podcast. But we just need to keep going back to the Bible. It's pretty clear. Like, I mean, when I wrote a god named Josh, I had pastors email me and say, you know, I've been a pastor for 40 years, and I learned something new in every chapter. And it's like, it's just crazy. What we miss if we just stop, like, really reading the scripture itself, contextually and, you know, obviously taking good use of the lexicon as well as commentaries just it's just so helpful.
Joshua Johnson:So then take me into some of the predominant lies that accuser adversary throws out there into this world that we fall into temptation to believe. I
Jared Brock:We actually haven't covered it yet. So let's back up a sec. Joshua, for listeners, you've heard us say accuser, adversary a couple times. Where did that come from? So, yeah, so the two words in Hebrew and Greek are hasatan and Diablos. You know, Sagen and devil aren't the devil's real name. That's not his first name. Those are just English words. Same with how jehosha Ben jehoshaph became Jesus. It's just a transliteration thing, but if we wanted to get back to two words that actually have the same like verbal punch, that readers of the early text would have felt when they heard the word Hasso Diablos, we should call him accuser, adversary. That is probably a much more helpful name for the devil because it understands, uh, helps us understand what it is, and it gets rid of some of the silly pictures of like this man in in a red cape and tights and goatee and a pointy horns and all that stuff that's just total nonsense. Devil and Lucifer that kind of conjures that in their mind, whereas accuser, adversary, it does give you a different, a different kind of view of things. So there are a lot of temptations and lies that are out there. Fair to start, oh my goodness. The big thing is that, picture yourself living in a house, and you look at the window saying, is putting temptations in front of that window. His goal is for you to open the door so he could get a foot in that door. Let's call that a foothold. Once his foot is in the door, he just puts in a ratchet, and he just starts ratcheting, opening that door. And then once he gets inside, then he's trying to build a stronghold. He's trying to pour some concrete and build a pill box where he can, where he can just live forever, right? Obviously, God can blast all that stuff away, and the devil can never take your house if you never possess or own your house, but he can absolutely occupy and live in it if he gets a stronghold. So we want to avoid strongholds. That means we need to avoid footholds. To avoid footholds, we need to be avoiding temptation. So why we pray God don't lead us into temptation like keep us miles from the iceberg. We don't want to get close enough to pull a piece of ice off the iceberg and put it in our cocktail like the Titanic. We want to go miles and miles around it. So there's different temptations, like self will can that's the foothold, and that can lead to like, Oh no, rebellion. Anger can lead to violence. Hatred can lead to murder. Distraction can lead to idol worship. I grew up in a culture where the devil is scary, where he's like, terrifying, right? But that's not the Bible says that he presents as an angel of light, that He masquerades as a Lucifer, and so he's actually going to be doing things that are alluring, attractive, enticing, uh, seducing. So we should be looking out for for fool's goal, for stuff that glitters, that isn't real kingdom goal. So we should be looking out for, you know, sex without commitment. We should be looking up for things like that, like like power without stewardship, or like knowledge without wisdom, wealth without contribution. Those are the kind of lies that they're just so subtle. They're so subtle. He's a master at he's just brilliant at lies. But I would say that those are some of the lies that that we believed is just like that. He's just gonna scare us all the time when actually it's going to be like, Well, did God actually say? Did God actually meet? Does that still apply, or is that Old Testament? There's somebody like, really little subtle one click,
Joshua Johnson:yes. So that's good. I think footholds and strongholds are are really helpful for us. Like, and then fools gold, like, what is, what is shiny? See, what is seducing something that doesn't actually bring the fullness of what you know, the kingdom is all about. The kingdom of God is all about. We need to look out for those. What are ways then for us as we're looking out for those, what are ways to resist temptation? How do we resist
Jared Brock:Satan? Yeah, so it is so important to remember that we as Christians are part of an invading force. The kingdom of God is invading. It is literally taking over nations, taking over hearts. It's invading wide into all countries. It's invading deep into hearts, into different areas of our lives. I mean, this is really good news, right? This is, this is yeast and bread. It's changed. It's light in darkness. It's, it's mustard seeds growing in a garden. It's, you know, these are very potent, beautiful images of what this kingdom is doing, but it is a war, and so we should assume that there's going to be opposition, that there's going to be a fight, that there's going to be resistance. And so that's why the Bible says to put on the full armor of God. It would be very silly for Christians to go into a, let's say, a physical battle, but naked. That would be a very silly thing to do. And yet we seem to be walking around unclothed for most of our Christian life. We're not carrying the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, the helm of salvation, prosperity or righteousness, the you know, shoes of the gospel. So the writings, the readiness of the gospel, we don't we're not wearing this armor that is absolutely fundamental to resisting these temptations. So something I really encourage people to do is, is to just engineer your life to avoid as much temptation as possible. Some of it's still going to come. But like, for instance, we made a documentary a number of years ago about teenage addiction to pornography. It's called over 18, and I've never seen porn on a cell phone, and that's because I don't own a cell phone, I don't have porn in my pocket, and so that's a great way to avoid that temptation, right? It's really hard to get addicted to porn if you don't have access to it. So that's, that's just like a really simple example. Um, we used to live in west Wales for eight years. Man, talk about an easy way to avoid dairy queen. We're an hour away from the closest Dairy Queen. So you know what I mean, like, like, or like the mall or whatever. So avoiding temptation, I think a huge part of it is simply structural. You're never going to be a drug addiction, if you live in a crack house. These are, these are obviously like kind of silly metaphors, but each you know, each of us is smart enough to apply this to our own lives. And so I would just say, Yeah, start by avoiding temptation as much as possible, but then realize that you are part of an invading, advancing military force, and that that requires you suiting up with the armor of God.
Joshua Johnson:So speaking the armor of God, it says, you know, we're not wrestling against flesh and blood, but against the powers and principalities present darkness. So what are the powers and principalities? What then? What is, are these evil forces? And how do demons come into play with that? If it's just no, if it's just Satan and he comes to, you know, tell us lies, if it's like less than four seconds for our life, there is other things at play. There should, right? So there's powers and principalities demons take us into what? What are those? And help us figure out, hey, that there is a cosmic force that's not just what we could see and touch and feel,
Jared Brock:yes. So this is another area where the probably the safest thing to say is, we don't know. So there's, there is speculation on how many demons are there? Are there 100 are there 100 billion? We have no idea. There's, like, less than a half a dozen named in Scripture. It there's very few, and they they're typically called Gods, not demons. In general, we know a couple of angels names. We have no idea how many angels there are. There's speculation that there's at least 10 million, but there could be 100 million. We have, we have no idea it's it's almost silly to speculate. What we do know for sure is that Christians have three enemies, the world, the flesh, the devil. So there are billions of free willed spirits. And let's not forget that, like, the human spirit is essentially as powerful in Christ as the devil is, and demonic powers are essentially as strong as human free wills of the devil Free Will the world. So there's like, all these free wills at play, and they're all living in rebellion against the word will and way of Christ. And so as Christians, we say, your kingdom come your will be done. We are actually in free will, surrendering that will to God, and because he is the author of our story. I've had seasons in my life where I've said, God, you can sit this one out. I'm gonna pen the next chapter of my life. I know what's going on now. I think I get the plot, and then he's gonna go back and do edits and rewrites, and then he's gotta, he's gotta fix the, he's gotta fix the busted plot lines in the next, next chapter. You know, Joshua's best life is the version you. He says, I am surrendering to this king and his invading kingdom. I'm falling under his kingship. I will be a prince, I will be an ambassador, I will be a priest. I will be blessed to be a blessing. That's my proper role, and that's the best you could ever possibly imagine living your life. So we've got all these spiritual powers in the heavenly realms, and you know, we've got we've got mammon, and he's just like all those lies. And, you know, I'm not saying ma'am is a demon. Mammons is a is a Canaanite God, but is there a demon behind that God? Maybe. But we can't say that, and we can't prove that scripturally, but there certainly is the sense that, like, the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Ashtaro was a god back then, clearly, was this like Goddess of sex, and, you know, Temple prostitution and all this stuff. And is there? Is there a demon of sexuality that's twisting sexuality in the world? There certainly seems to be, we don't know. What we do know for sure is that there are billions of free wills and opposition to God, and God is on a mission to restore all things unto himself.
Joshua Johnson:That's good news, yes, that everything should be restored unto himself. So if we're living under the kingship of Jesus, if Jesus is King, and if, if money is the root of all evil, let's just take money, for example. What's upside down about money and the love of money, and how the temptation to follow money and greed and and power and all of that that has to do with with money actually, is totally antithetical to the way of Jesus and living under the kingship of Jesus. Yeah.
Jared Brock:So for those listening to it, the quote is, it's often mixed up. Some people say money is the root of all evil. It doesn't say that. It's just the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. So the love of money is behind human trafficking. For instance, human trafficking, at the end of the day, isn't actually about trafficking someone that's only useful because it makes money. So right? Someone traffic someone to build buildings in India, let's say, and that's a profitable thing to do, to lock someone in a sweatshop is it's the love of money that creates that kind of evil. So Jesus, his everyday language that he spoke was Aramaic, and the there's only a few words in Aramaic that like pop through the English into our English Bible. So it only happens about seven times. And Mammon is one of those things, uh, mamonas is, is the word he would have been saying. And if you read the context of when he says the word Mammon was often kids around, and I wonder if he isn't having fun with it like so when, when he says, like you so he could have Jesus could have said, You cannot serve both God and money. But instead, for whatever reason, the Gospel writers used the word Aramaic. What did Jesus do when he said the word Mammon? That made them Be like, Do you know what? Let's leave it in the original so you cannot serve both God and Mammon us like, what was he doing with the kids when he said, We have no idea. But Jesus clearly sees Mammon as a rival God. Mammon is the wealth in which we put our trust. That's idolatry, right? Idolatry is a big deal in the Bible, and so money is so easy to put our trust. And you just think about imagine for the average church going person, if you said, right now, if Jesus showed up in their church and said, right, all right, new rule, you have to liquidate your retirement portfolio today and give it away to prove that you trust Me fully with your old age. Honestly, I think it would decimate churches. Joshua, I legitimately think it would, because I'm working on the strict Christian economics. Course, the number one question I get from people is, well, like, what am I going to do in old age? It's just, it's the number one thing, it's, there's this incredible fear we've put so much trust in, in earthly money. So yeah, it's a rival. It's a rival god. Is it a demon? Can't prove that scripturally, but is there something satanic about it? Is there something accusatory, adversarial about money, unquestionably.
Joshua Johnson:So if Satan is really compared to, compared to Jesus, compared to the Father, Holy Spirit, He has really no power. He's like, there's nothing there, but there's tempting. He's an accuser. He's an adversary. The question is, then, why? Why do we have evil? Why is this here? Why can't we just destroy satan and everything is good right now and not later when the consummation comes? Why can't it be now? Why is there evil, and how does God use Satan to bring about his purposes? Yeah.
Jared Brock:So this is so so so important. And this may this chapter in the book. When I dug into this and spent time in this, it just made me worship God so much. So think about this for a second. God. God is so intensely relational that even his personhood is really he's a Trinitarian God, right? The father the son the Holy Spirit. Jesus is not God and not the Holy Spirit, but God the Father is, Jesus is the Son of God, and God the Son like they're so intentionally relational and and they decide that they want to have more love in the universe, that they decide to make people in their own image, in the image of God. He creates us. We we are the better done. We're the sons of God. And so he creates human beings. But God's smart, and he knows the future, and he knows, okay, I want them to love me, and that's going to require free will. If they don't have free will, then they can't freely choose to love me, but if I give them free will, that opens the door for them to not love me, to live in rebellion against me. But I have to give them free will, otherwise they're just slaves, and that makes me not good and not God. So I have to give them free will, and they're gonna rebel. So I need to have a plan to restore all things unto myself, at which point Jesus goes, I will self sacrifice, and God the Father goes, I will sacrifice my son. So it's, it's the double pain. Like so, like so, like Joshua, you know, as a father, you would die in a heartbeat for your children. There's like, no question to ask, right? But um. So it would be so much harder for you to give your son. But then, in this story, you're also giving yourself. So you're giving yourself and you're giving you're feeling the two worst pains in the universe, because you want to restore all things unto yourself. And so you all of a sudden realize that God is a brilliant chess master. And the only conclusion you can come to, if you actually think it through, is that the reason evil exists is because God's love must be the most important thing in the universe, that it was worth all the pain of child abuse and genocide and all the racism, everything God knew that we would do wrong and evil because we lived in rebellion, that he was going to work it all out. And this takes a huge amount of faith to even grasp, but Paul says that the coming glory is so great that it's not even worth considering the current, present trouble. It's legitimately not even worth our time. It's all going to be erased in the blink of an eye. There'll be no more tears. There will be no remembrance of the former things. We've all had terrible dreams, but then you wake up, and within seconds, you've forgotten that dream. It's going to be faster than that. We are going to wake up on the other side, and there's going to be no like God, why did you? We won't even remember it, and being in the presence of God is going to be so, so magnificent that we're not even going to think about these things. So again, this is all on faith. But clearly Free Will had to exist because God wanted more love. And that's a beautiful thing.
Joshua Johnson:That is a beautiful thing. What is God doing? How does he using Satan for his own purposes on Earth.
Jared Brock:Yeah, so the so God uses the devil for lots of things. Again, the devil has lots of power, but it's only with God's permission, and so God uses it for a bunch of different things. So, for instance, God can use the devil to repulse sinners. A great example would be the parable The prodigal son, like, where God just lets the devil take someone so far astray that they're just disgusted. They're just staring at their own filth, going, what am I doing? I need to get back to the father of life. God uses the devil to harden rebellionness. Great example would be Pharaoh, where Pharaoh just keeps Harding his heart, so God just turns him over and just lets the Pharaoh do what he's going to do. And it leads to the freedom of millions of people. God uses the devil to strengthen Christians. An example, this would be Jesus says to Peter, Peter, Satan has asked you to ask me, this has asked to sift you like wheat. But after that's over, you're actually going to strengthen the brother. So that's really beautiful. God uses the devil to sanctify faithful disciples. So Paul says, I've got this thorn in my flesh. I ask God three times to take it away. And God says, No, my power is going to be made perfect in your weakness, and My grace is sufficient for you. And you know, Paul endures endless hardship and end up writing half the New Testament and influencing all of us. And so yeah, God is using the devil in all sorts of ways. And as Christians, we need to be seeing the devil test temptations and tricks and traps as opportunities to grow in our faith, our perseverance, our courage, our endurance. There's a quote in the book, I forget who it's by, but it says something like, we gain the strength of every temptation we overcome. I think that's just a beautiful way of putting it. The refiners fire image pops up all over the Bible. The Crucible is how you get out the gold. And the point of all this testing is to create everlasting gold. So we really need to see accuser, adversaries, trials as tests to grow our faith and character. It
Joshua Johnson:doesn't seem fun during the moment. Oh.
Jared Brock:I don't we. It's Hollywood. Movies glorify war. War is ugly. War is messy. We live in a fallen world, and it is being invaded. And that is a very helpful metaphor, that this is going to be chaos and carnage to the bitter end. What's funny, though, is, if you read scripture, and how the how the authors of Scripture envision the end coming. There isn't some final battle of like, Oh, who's gonna win at the last minute, it's over in a lightning flash. There's it's so anti climactic boom over devils cast down and King of Heaven reigns forever. It's very anti climatic. I think
Joshua Johnson:a lot of people then are looking to the future of when it is over, when does this cosmic battle in this war happen? But you're saying, hey, it's over in an instant. So you do go into the book of Revelation, and that's that's helpful. I really like that. It's a that you talk about it being a series of prophetic loops. So how can we understand revelation through prophetic loops and and how are we living in some of those at the moment,
Jared Brock:this is, this is hugely important. So people say, okay, they ask, is the revelation about the Roman Empire? Is like, is it about the past? Is it about some future kingdom? Are we currently living in it? And the answer is probably yes. So you can map the Roman Empire quite handily over revelation and and it seems like, oh, yeah, this is, if you, if you get creative, you can be like, Oh, this is 100% about the Roman Empire. And then you can do the same thing about Charlemagne Empire, and the same thing about the Nazis, and the same thing about Babylon and the American empire, the British Empire, you can probably make the same case for the coming Chinese Empire. There's scriptures. There's verses in in Revelation that you're like, is, is are those robot soldiers? Is that a nuclear device? Like, there's some crazy verses in in that revelation. But the reality is, it is a series of five apocalyptic loops, and each one it's getting stronger and stronger and stronger. Like the verb, it's the child, it's the it's the birth pangs before childbirth and so and then there is a relief. But the cycle that the that the revelation is so has picked up so brilliantly, it's rebellion, judgment, salvation, so human free wills, demonic free wills, whatever, all the free wills live in rebellion against God. God decides to judge. So there's devastation, chaos, but God always protects and saves a remnant, and the remnant rebuilds a salvation cycle, just rebellion, judgment, salvation, rebellion and and we are stuck in this cycle forever. AI is not going to save us. China is not going to save us. Capitalism not going to save us. No Empire man is ever going to break out of this cycle, except for our Savior, the coming kingdom. So so we are in that cycle the pangs of childbirth and and they are painful, and they sometimes they have and sometimes they flow and get worse, and they get stronger, they get weaker. But that's where we're currently living. And so, yeah, the revelation is, it's a much more. I wouldn't say it's understandable, but it, it's, it's a, it's a better meta narrative to kind of get our head around. In regards to, like, is this talking about Vladimir Putin, or is this talking about Donald Trump? I got an email this week from someone saying, like, this verse of Revelation is clearly about Vladimir Putin, and this person in Ezekiel is clearly about Donald Trump. And I was like, you are using the word clearly generously.
Joshua Johnson:That's hilarious. So if we're in these prophetic loops, and we can't break out of these cycles like there's, there's no way Jesus is going to be the one that breaks the cycle, and it's going to be finished. We get the consummation. It's going to be beautiful. That's fantastic. But we're living in this time of the kingdom is here. It's now, but it's not yet fully made manifest, right? So is there a role for us to play in breaking some of these cycles. What can we do to actually bring about the subversive nature of Jesus to see his kingdom reign on earth? Now
Jared Brock:that's a wonderful question, Joshua. So I don't know if we talked about this when I wrote a guy named Joshua, but the best image I can kind of picture of this idea of the coming Kingdom. Is France during World War Two. So you've got Free France, and then it falls to the Nazis. And so they've got this puppet Vichy Regime, these Nazi sympathizing they're exporting Jews to murder them in concentration camps, and they're putting in German laws. And so, so Francis fall free. Francis fall, however, Charles de Gaulle is in England, and he's building a huge army, and the French Resistance is just spreading like yeast and dough and is spreading like light and darkness and mustard seeds, right? And it's just infiltrating every area of culture, and the French. French, the Free French army has good news. The Kingdom is coming. The kingdom is invading. So then what happens? D Day comes Charles de Gaulle. 300,000 soldiers, the Free French army, with all the allies. Boom they blast in. And within a matter of weeks, the Nazi regime is just they're gone. We're out of France. It's over. We are living in that fall in time, and so we are living like like French Resistance fires. We are living like guerla warfare. That said. We're also living like ambassadors. We are supposed to be modeling the economics of our coming kingdom, the politics of our coming kingdom. How do men and women treat each other in our coming candy? How do Slaves and free people treat each other in our coming kingdom? It's radically different way to live, relatively different way to act. And so if the world doesn't accept Jesus in the church, it's most often because they haven't actually glimpsed the view of what our kingdom is like like. I live in the UK, and when I grew up in Canada, I had a very good idea of what UK was like from the outside, most people have no idea what the culture and kingdom of God is like because they've never seen it modeled by the citizens of that kingdom. Well,
Joshua Johnson:that's a great call for us. Then let's model the kingdom and so that the world may know this is what the kingdom of God is. And it takes a radical reorientation for us to not live under the lies and the temptation of the devil and give in to those things in our human free will and our free will of self, of saying, Yes, this is what I want. But it does then take us to live under the kingship of Jesus, that Jesus is the King, the Christ the King, and that when we live under his kingship, we're going to be following the ways of Jesus and living a totally different life, and a life that is actually real. It's the real life that we are called to be living, because the Kingdom of God is the real thing. The world is not the real thing, and that's the facade, that's the fake thing that we have to endure until we get to see the fullness of this kingdom, which is the really real beneath everything which, and this is what I want to live in, is the realness of the kingdom of God. If people go and pick up a devil named Lucifer, which is a fantastic book, you're going to learn a lot, and it's really fun to read as well. What would your hope be for your readers? What do you want people to get from this book? I want
Jared Brock:to right size the devil and right size God. So that means minimizing the devil and magnifying the Lord. We need to get our proportions right. This is not an arm wrestling competition. We need to right size our devil and right size our Savior. And if people could walk away with with a better sense of proportionality as well as an awe at the brilliance of the chess master who has this entire game plan sorted, that is my big hope for this book. If you have
Joshua Johnson:one call for the body of Christ, the Christian church around the world, what do you hope for the Christian church? What do you call the body of Christ to this day and age that we're living in?
Jared Brock:Oh, man, let's save that for the conversation about Christian economics. That's probably my good one. But I would just say, like on the macro level, just what George Miller and what George Miller lived, and what Jesus Christ preached. Seek first, the kingdom and the righteousness which is, which is like before career, before money, before all this other stuff, uh, Seek first, being an ambassador, living as a prince, being a blessing to the nations of the families of the earth, seed first, the kingdom and the righteousness, the right way of living. This, if we can figure out those two things, we're going to see revival. We're going to see awakening. We're going to see renewal. We might even be able to avoid a judgment cycle that will require a salvation reset. We might actually be able to get away, at the very least, we need to be like prophets, like Jeremiah, Ezra and all these guys, at the very least prophetic. But hopefully, if the Christian church woke up, it would be amazing if we could see a revival without the need for devastation first.
Joshua Johnson:Amen. That would be fantastic. That'd be great. Any recommendations, anything you've been reading or watching lately you could recommend, oh man, come in. Goodbye for that. Re watch. Great. I lights every five years. Great, great TV show. I love Friday Night Lights. Um, man, I wish there were more shows like Friday Night Lights. Like, I'm always looking like, what's, what's the next Friday Night Lights?
Jared Brock:So I'm working my way through Michael Hudson's corpus. He's a, he's a, he's a secular economist, but he's written a ton on that Jubilee. So I'm currently reading his book, forgiven them there. Forgive them their debts. He also wrote one called Killing the host, about how shareholder capitalism is just destroying the world. The reality is, the world is at three, $15 trillion in debt to creditors right now, and as you compound. Math out for the next 20 years that's guaranteed devastation for the rest, unless we Jubilee all global debt and ban interest. That's I'm I'm happy to tell that to any Christian. If you have bonds, sell them today. If you have stocks and banks, sell them today, you are part of an enslavement system that is stolen more human time in the last 50 years than the slave trade did in 400 years, it's 32 times more intensive for stealing human life. So I could go on about this forever, but yeah, we have so much work to do. Wow.
Joshua Johnson:Yeah, that's good. Great recommendations. Thank you. That's fascinating. I'm really excited to talk to you about money and economics and those things. So definitely need to have you back to be able to do that and go down be great, because I think that's really important. So Jared, how could people go and get a devil named Lucifer? And anywhere else you'd like to point people to? Yeah,
Jared Brock:so if you go to a devil named lucifer.com you can download the first chapter for free if you want to start reading it. You can see the trailer for the film there, and you and all the purchase links are there. If you go to Jared brock.com you can get my first book on prayer for free, as well as three of the documentaries we made for free. So a devil name lucifer.com and Jared. Brock.com
Joshua Johnson:Awesome. It's fantastic. Well, Jared, thank you for this conversation. Thank you for right sizing the devil, giving us a real view of who he is, what he has done, how little that he actually shows up within scripture, that he is a cheese and bread sandwich, that we could just enjoy our bread and our olive oil, because it's a little bit more more pronounced in the Bible than than the devil himself, and that he is not Lucifer because he is not a light bringer. He is a false bringer of light, which he looked he brings things that look shiny and new and beautiful and seduces us. But these are temptations to get us away from following King Jesus, who is the ultimate power and authority and goodness in this world that we get to be princes in his kingdom. Fantastic. Thank you for this conversation. It was fun. I love talking to you. Yeah, thanks for having me.
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