Rethinking Satan: Jared Brock on Lucifer, Lies, and the Bible

Is everything we think we know about the devil wrong? In this episode, author and filmmaker Jared Brock joins the Faithful Politics podcast to discuss his latest book, A Devil Named Lucifer. From the myth of the horned red figure to the misuse of the word “Lucifer,” Brock breaks down centuries of cultural and theological misconceptions. Drawing from biblical texts, he argues that Satan is not the all-powerful rival we’ve made him out to be—but a minor character in a much bigger story. Hosts Josh Burtram and Will Wright explore how dualistic thinking has shaped theology and politics, and why fear-based rhetoric around evil distorts the gospel message. The conversation also touches on demon possession, mental health, spiritual warfare, and how Christians can “judo” the devil’s tactics to grow in faith.

Guest Bio: 
Jared Brock is an award-winning author and filmmaker known for A God Named Josh and the PBS documentary Redeeming Uncle Tom, narrated by Danny Glover. His writing has appeared in Time, The Guardian, and Christianity Today. His latest book, A Devil Named Lucifer, challenges conventional Christian beliefs about Satan and spiritual warfare.

Resources & Links:
Read the first chapter: https://adevilnamedlucifer.com
Jared’s films and books: JaredBrock.com
A Devil Named Lucifer on Amazon: https://a.co/d/gOtutw9

Transcript

0:17

Hi there, Faithful Politics viewers and listeners, if you're joining us on our podcast stream, viewers, if you're joining us via YouTube, it's so great to have you guys back for another great and exciting episode of the Faithful Politics podcast. I am Josh Bertram. I am your faithful host. And as always, we have Will, our political host. It's good to see you, Will. It's good to see your head. Like, so I know like if for our audio listeners, Josh's head, at least on my screen, it's literally like you don't have any room above your head and it's. much, much, much better. No, but but yeah, good, good, good to see you too. And I got to I got to say, Josh, that we have been covering so many episodes about Trump. And I'm finally glad that we're jumping to a guest of yours. Generally more religious. I have no idea what we're talking about. So yeah, I'm happy to hear what your guess is to say. Maybe a topic or subject. I don't know. That's a little bit more uplifting. Well, we're going to see about that. We are so excited though to have on our show today, Jared Brock. He is award-winning author, filmmaker, and truth seeker who's not afraid to tackle the big stuff. You might know him from his book, A God Named Josh, or his PBS documentary, Redeeming Uncle Tom with Danny Glover. Jared's work has appeared in Time, The Guardian, Christianity Today, and in his latest book, which we're going to talk about the uplifting conversation surrounding a devil named Lucifer. And it's a myth-busting deep dive into what the Bible actually says about Satan. And we are so excited to have you here on the program with us. Jared, thanks so much for joining. Thanks for having me, gentlemen. Now, I gotta confess, I'm neither Democrat nor Republican. I'm a Canadian living in the UK, so we just laugh at your politics. man, you know what? They are pretty laughable sometimes, dudes. You know what I'm saying? So we won't get too sidetracked into politics, but what's your general sense from your friends in Canada about everything that's happening here in America? Say it as raw as you can. Like, mean, we're just prepping to be the 51st state. No, actually, so I don't know if you heard, but just yesterday, so Trudeau has said he's going to resign. And just yesterday, the Liberal Party selected a central bankster who is he added a trillion dollars in debt to the Canadian and UK national debt loads when he was their finance minister. yeah, we're living in the age of Mamanomics and it's just It's destroying the poor in Canada and obviously you guys are experiencing something similar in the States. There's a verse in scripture that whenever people get too excited about politics, I remind them of it. says, do not put your hope in princes. There is no help for you there. Nope. love that dude. That is so good. You know, I gotta ask man, we're talking about your latest book, A Devil Named Lucifer. Awesome. I love it. You know, I wish I had time to read through in depth every book we get. We have a lot of authors, but I was working through this, looking through this, and I just think it's such a cool topic, an interesting topic. But right before we got on this, You were kind of, you know, you're commiserating with us and talking about how you don't necessarily recommend writing a book about Lucifer and Satan. Can you go into that a little bit for us today? Yeah, so 2023, the year I wrote this book was my year from hell. Basically from the second I sat down to start researching, everything that could go wrong went wrong. My wife had a nerve condition come out of nowhere that they never were able to solve. I had something happen in my back that I saw specialist for and I spent two months horizontal. We were in a rental unit that just bloomed with mold, so much so that we had to get a health inspector and we ended up breaking our lease. and we were sick for the next year. We were sick more that year than in the previous 10 years combined. was an algorithm changed on the blogging platform I was on and decimated my income overnight, literally moved the decimal point. just name a category, it just like went sideways. I ended up, I've never been late on delivering a book and I had to push my delivery date twice. And I worked straight through Christmas Day, handed in the book New Year's Eve, and I sent it to my publisher. And he shoots me a note back and says, oh, Jared, I should have warned you. Every author we've ever had do a book on the devil or Satan has had their year from hell. I would have been like, that would have been nice to know. It was terrible. That is terrible. mean, OK, what would prompt a person to say, hey, you know what? This seems like a good idea. What was the impetus for you wanting to dedicate a bunch of time, a bunch of heartache, and finances into this project? So two years ago I wrote a book right up there on the shelf called A God Named Josh and it was a myth buster on the life of Jesus. So one chapter is like Josh's economics, Josh's politics, the Jewish Josh, the relational Josh, the genealogical Josh, and then obviously the God Josh. And I wanted to do a follow-up book to that because in culture there is this myth that the devil is Jesus's equal but opposite superpower and they're like, stuck in this arm wrestling match and it's like, who's gonna win, who's gonna win? And it's not like that at all. It's more like a judo master who is just using an opponent's force and weight against him. Everything the devil does, God is using to advance the kingdom of God. And so I wanted to right size the devil, kind of minimize the devil and magnify the Lord and help us to have a better sense of proportionality in regards to these two figures. The conclusion that I come to in the book is that the devil is a minor character in his own story. I ended up writing two books about Jesus. That's awesome. know, so I got a, so in looking at this book, I love, I love the art, by the way. I think it's just so cool. I love that. I love the name. It's very intriguing. It gets you going. You're dispelling myths. You're talking about evil and suffering and how we work through this in our lives. You talk about resisting the devil. It's so amazing. You know, but a lot of our audience, right, some of them have grown up in church. Some of them has thought about Satan, you know, or the devil or Lucifer. He's got horns. He's got a, you know, spiked tail. He's got that trident, you know what I mean? That like, you know, but it's not, not what's that dude's name, the Greek God. Now I'm forgetting the Poseidon. Yes, Poseidon. It's not Poseidon's trident, dude, it's the devil's fork. And he's going to basically use it and skewer you on it and keep you in hell. And a lot of people are like, hey, you know what? I don't want anything to do with that. I've left all that, you know, weird mythology behind and they're going to listen to this and be like, what? What are we talking about? Satan. So I'd love for you to clear this up for us a little bit. There's Your book challenges a lot of what Christians and non-Christians think they know, what they think they know about Satan. Kind of dispel some of the misconceptions and help me understand which one do you think is the most dangerous misconception that the church has embraced? So let's just start with the looks. Basically everything culture has portrayed the devil as is just simply not true. The horns are an import from either Dionysus or Baal. The red eyes are from a medieval book called the Codex Gigas. The mustache and the goatee is likely the god Pan. The fiery sulfur breath is just not real. Revelation 12 specifically says that he spews water. It's God that's shooting fire. The capentites are from a Faust play. The wings are from Dante's Inferno. The pitchfork is the Roman god of Mars. Egyptian, the red skin is the Egyptian god Set. We don't have a single artistic impression of the devil prior to the sixth century. And when we do have our first kind of image of what we think the devil is, it's in a church in Ravenna and he's actually blue. He's not even red. So, but of course all this is nonsense. Yeah, exactly. So. The reality is that the devil doesn't have a body. Nowhere in scripture does it say that he is a physical person. He's a spirit. The Bible does say that the devil disguises himself as an angel of light. So he presents himself as a radiant messenger. And so we shouldn't be looking up for things that like scare us or repulse us. It should be the things that attract and entice us. So. You know, things like sex without commitment or knowledge without wisdom or wealth without contribution, tolerance without discernment or power without stewardship, being without love, everything that glitters is not gold. And so it's actually the opposite. Like I don't immediately run towards the things that are scary or repulsive. I run towards the things that are alluring and attractive. So I think first thing, like let's just absolutely take our image of the devil and put it through a shredder because it's just not true at all. That's really, really cool to hear you kind of like break down all the different components of where our image of the devil comes from, because I think it was this last Christmas. Now, every Christmas we try to do something kind of either politically or religious surrounding Santa Claus. So like one year we had a former prosecutor, current constitutional scholar, essentially just take Santa to court. You know, what are all the crimes that he's committed? Broke him down kind of one by one, you know. A lot of break and enter for sure. Yeah, I mean we were doing like Rico statutes, you know and all kinds of other stuff and then Last year. Yeah was last year. We brought on somebody kind of break down the myths about Santa Claus like if I had a memory I could tell you the name of the guy but He sort of just studies this stuff and wrote a book about all these, you know demystifying Santa One more we spoke to another professor who does work with the wrote a book about the Satanic temple. And we were talking about exorcisms, because he wrote a book about exorcism too. he was just like, yeah, exorcism is like a manmade thing. And I'm just like, who are you to tell me? know? They're real. I grew up thinking, I don't want to get possessed by whatever. And he's just like, yeah, like prior. What did he say? There's like no record of exorcisms prior to like the movie, The Exorcist, coming out or something to that degree. So you kind of just tearing down this image of Satan, the devil for me and probably for lot of people watching this, it's just like, it's really helpful and I just appreciate it. But I want you to continue busting some of these myths. Like, how do we get that word like Satan, devil? Lucifer, like all these different names for this person. Yeah, so let's start at the very beginning. The devil's name is not Lucifer. I know that's a shock to most people. My book is called The Devil Named Lucifer, not because that's his real name, but that's because that's what we've named him. Nowhere in the Hebrew Bible, nowhere in the Greek Bible, the word Lucifer is not there. There's a later Latin translation that has the word Lucifer in it a handful of times. But what's interesting is that name is never actually applied to the devil. So Lucifer means light bearer. bringer. And so there's different words that are translated in that Latin translation as light bearer. Jesus is described as a light bearer. Christians are described as light bearers. And creation is described as a light bearer. So Jesus is a Lucifer. Christians are Lucifers. Creation is a Lucifer. But Lucifer is not a Lucifer. He presents as an angel of light. He pretends to be a light bearer, a Lucifer, but he is not a Lucifer. So that's the first and biggest thing. Next is the idea that his name is devil or Satan. Those are not his names. Those are English words. There's no big conspiracy around this. As I explained in a God named Josh, Jesus is just the English transliteration of Jesus from Latin, from Yeshua in Aramaic, from Yahoshua in Hebrew. His name in Hebrew is Joshua, but over time we ended up with Jesus. It doesn't mean that he wasn't real or he didn't have a real name. It just means that that's what we ended up with in English. So the devil and Satan are the same thing. What I would argue is that we need to pick English words that actually pack the same punch that the original Hebrew and Greek readers would have heard when they heard the word hasatan or diabolos. And those two words are accuser adversary. The devil is one who accuses adversarially. He's not a good faith prosecuting attorney looking for justice. He's trying to tempt, trap, and then blame before the court removed him. So he's accusing adversarially. That gives us a much better idea of who and what the devil is and does. That is like, so, so I, when you were talking about like that his name means bearer of light and that Jesus is really the one who's the bearer of light. So what you, what you're saying is that Jesus is, should be called Lucifer more than Satan? You heard it. You heard it first on Faithful Politics, my friends. Listen, Lucian Greaves. You're named after Jesus, bro. And you didn't even know it, dude. Anyway, so I just had to do that. That was a co-founder of the Satanic Temple. It's fascinating, I gotta talk to you. But anyway, so, you know, every... I'm trying to think of which question I actually wanna go with because... All right, let me do this. All these cultures, have certain creatures that they scare people with. I think of Krampus, that kind of mythological creatures that, I don't know, people in either Germany or Russia or whatever, they used to scare their kids with and say, you're not a good boy, you're not a good girl, this Krampus character is going to come and going to take you away and do whatever. mean, I'm sure I'm butchering it. I'm not really up on my Krampus mythology. in origin stories, but you know you the idea though is that there's this mythical character that is scaring you intended to scare kids and I'm not saying that Satan is mythical. That's not that's not what I what I mean. I actually believe that there is a literal adversary a an accuser a Satan that's that's out there But but we've we've given him a lot of airtime We've given them a lot of credit in our language. We've given him, it's funny because playing devil's advocate, right? That lawyer sense of accuser, right? We have these words and you talk about that in your book a little bit about how much we culturally have given Satan. you know, it feels like modern politics. It feels like media. They either have distorted it or they've weaponized it or they've tried to make it, they stylize it, they try to make it almost glorifying. And you think of like The Exorcist of Emily Rose. You think about The Exorcist, the movie and this crazy, very stylized and grand ideas of heads spinning around and... You know, everything in the room lifting and levitating and all that, and this crazy, scary demonic experience. Yet you're presenting a slightly different version than that. And yet I'd love to get your take on the research you've done. Why do you think people have essentially, they've taken Satan you used Satan for their purposes. What's going on there, do think? think generally the enemy has two strategies. Either make you underestimate him so much that you just forget he exists or to overestimate him so much that he just scares the bejesus out of you. I think we just need to right size our devil. just for context, there's the Bible talks about the devil a lot, but the devil doesn't actually show up a lot. So There's a lot of times where there's like a lowercase D or S for devil and Satan and it typically starts with like the devil, the Satan. Capital S, no D, no the Satan, so just Satan as a first name, makes an appearance on just three occasions in the Old Testament. And capital D, no the devil, makes just three unique occasions in the New Testament. So when you cross it over, it's like a half a dozen appearances in total. The Bible actually talks more about donkeys than it does about the devil. The Bible tells more stories about olive oil than it does about Satan. Satan literally ranks between cheese and bread. You can make a Satan sandwich by how few times he shows up in the Bible. And what's crazy is that he only speaks around 250 words in English translations and almost half of those words are him either quoting or misquoting scripture. So it's over before it begins with this guy. He's He is a much smaller character than most Christians can possibly imagine. The other thing too is I don't know about the culture, the church culture you guys grew up in, but in the church culture I grew up in, the devil is like personally sitting on every Christian soldier and he is tempting and testing and accusing and torturing you 24 hours a day. But the reality is there is nothing in the Bible that says that the devil is omnipresent. He is all places at all times. What the Bible does say is that the devil spends his days and nights going day and night before the courtroom of heaven to accuse the saints before the father. And so he lays a trap and tempts you. He then rushes off as a tattletale to the courtroom of heaven and he says, Josh is guilty, Will is guilty, but we have a paraclete, an advocate named Christ. And he says, no, Will and Josh are innocent because of their faith in me. And then the devil just leaves the courtroom, tail between his legs, goes back down to earth and does it all over again. I did the math, there's eight billion people in the world over a hundred years. That means the devil would get to spend 0.39 seconds with each of us. There is a very good chance that there is not a single person listening to this episode right now who has ever had a personal encounter with the devil. That said, 99.9 % of all the soldiers who fought in World War II did not have a face-to-face encounter with Adolf Hitler, but... They encountered his tests and his traps and his submarines and his blitzkriegs from North Africa all the way to the Russian border and everywhere in between. I live in the UK, we're still digging out bombs, unexploded bombs out of car parking lots. And the reality is that the devil is the father of lies. And for thousands of years, he has been planting landmines everywhere. Now, he cannot take you. Once you're sealed in Christ, your salvation is set. but he can absolutely try to blow your leg off or ruin your life. So he wants you to step on the landmine that says, no, do you know what? Like maybe my life will be happier with that woman instead of my life, or maybe this porn addiction isn't that big of a deal, or maybe it is okay to charge interest now, or turn a profit off the poor, or whatever the lies that we're believing. That is going to, if we step on these lies, we're gonna have an encounter with the devil, even though we may not have a physical him sitting on our shoulder situation. He's just not as present as we think he is. But yeah, his influence is huge. Like if somebody from like the biblical days, Josh is the resident theologian amongst us too, so you have to forgive my lack of, you know, definitional eschatological whatever sort of words. Anyways, if somebody from the Bible times showed up today, the year 2025, and You know, some Christian were to start talking about the devil to that person. Like, would they be talking about the same thing? Like, you know, the image that, say, an American Christian would have in their head when they're talking about the devil compared to, like, somebody in Paul's early church or what have you. I have no way to answer that mostly because I wouldn't speak the same language as that person if they came back in time It would be so different from like an Abraham versus Jesus's time because the Bible it covers such a huge time span I don't know if that would be helpful at all the the one thing I would say though is that They lived in a much more holistic world where everything was more connected. Everything was more intertwined not only just like people relied on each other economically and family units were much bigger and all that sort of stuff. But also they probably understood that there was more spirits at play than just the devil. So I love what Martin Luther says about this. He says that the Christian actually has three enemies, the world, the flesh and the devil. And we give the devil way too much credit for all the sin in the world. The reality is that the devil probably wasn't in Hitler's bunker. He was probably super active in the pews and pulpits of German churches. Like the world to flesh the devil, this idea that like the devil made me do that. Have you guys heard that saying before? Like the devil made me do it. That's actually heretical. Cause think about this. Let's say the devil legitimately could make you pull the trigger and kill someone. And then God punishes a human being for murder that he didn't do. then God is not just and God is not good and God is not God. So the devil can't make you do anything. He can put this idea in your head, he can feed you a lie, whatever the case may be, but he can't force you to do anything. The reality is that there are three enemies, the world, the flesh, the devil. So our flesh, I think, plays a much bigger role than we can possibly imagine. My flesh is just as corrupted as the devil is. I just haven't had thousands of years experience yet. Give me time, I will ruin everything. And you're the same way, right? And then of course the world is simply all the other free wills that are in rebellion against God. So we live in a world of free will spirits, the devil being one of them. And so I suspect that someone from the past would say, you guys are super over indexed on the devil. Have you thought maybe about some personal responsibility? And how about what's going on in the economic realm and the political realm? And that, you know, we're not fighting flesh and blood, we're fighting against ideas, against warfare in the heavenly realm. So they'd probably just be more well-rounded than we are. Yeah. So when I think about, I just want to wrap my hand around what you're saying or what kind of my sense of listen to what you're saying and then thinking about who the devil actually is. So like a being that has existed for a long time, a spiritual being, a spiritual being with some degree of power, at least derivative power, right? I guess you'd have to say, I again, in each one of those texts in the Bible, I'm thinking about Job, I guess, in this particular case of his ability to inflict kind of suffering and pain and what does that mean? At God's, you know, God's permission, he essentially does that. we have this, but very limited, very limited being. And in the... popular imagination, there's this sense, right, going back to the devil and an angel on your shoulder, which I don't know what the devil and an angel and not God, but you know, whatever. But the idea is that it's this sense where that there's this being of such immense power that essentially it's like a like it's a competition between him and God that and we don't know who's going to win. Sometimes the devil's winning, right? We hear this. And almost like they're equal in power, like a yang and yang kind of thing. They're equal in power, but Satan is evil in nature. God's good in nature. So it's good, evil, these two equal powers fighting against each other, which is just this very dualistic way of thinking about the world. But I had a lot of that growing up in church. And even thinking about bringing it to now, how you have a lot of rhetoric, a lot of language right now in American politics. And this isn't unique to American politics, but it's certainly here right now where things are evil. People are evil. They're demonic. I'm sure Satanic has been thrown. around there, I've had guys tell me that these certain politicians are demon possessed, Satan has them, he's got whatever it may be. But this dualism, I would love for you to address that because it seems like from what you're saying and from the argument you make in your book, that that is definitely not the case. It's not the case that Satan is somehow equal in power. It's not the case even that Maybe Satan is as powerful as we make him out to be in our common thinking, in our literature, in our folklore, for lack of better term. How does this dualistic thinking impact the way we do our theology, our politics, even people who disagree with us? So this dualism that you're speaking about, Josh, that's actually an import from Zoroastrianism. So this is a Persian myth that slowly snuck into the church, this idea of the equal but opposite power. And it's simply not true. Let's remember the big story of scripture. So it's creation, fall, redemption. Jesus comes and his first recorded words in Mark, which they believe is the first gospel written, he says, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, believe the gospel. The good news is that the kingdom of heaven is here, it's invading, it's advancing, it's inevitable, it's unstoppable, and it's going wide and it's going deep. So it's going wide into all nations, it's going deep into all hearts. So it's invading. my anger, it's invading my impatience. This is really good news that the kingdom is invading. And so God is on a mission to restore all things unto himself. The Bible says that someday every knee will bow, every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord, will separate from the sheep from the goat, goats and the sheep will spend eternity in paradise with him. That's the big story of what's going on here. So everything the devil does ultimately serves God's ultimate purpose. So it's so hard to understand, but Martin Luther, again, he said, even the devil is God's devil. So God uses accuser adversary for all sorts of reasons. So for instance, God will use the devil to repulse sinners. A great example would be like the parable of the prodigal son where God just lets the devil take someone so far astray. that they are disgusted by themselves and they wake up in their slump, in their filth and they say, I'm going back to God, this is ridiculous. God uses the devil to harden rebellious. A perfect example would be Pharaoh. Pharaoh of his own free will is happy to enslave millions of people again and again and again until eventually God says, no, do you know what? I'm actually gonna make your heart as hard as concrete and it's gonna lead to the freedom of two million people with a mission that I will bless them to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. God uses the devil to strengthen Christians. Jesus says to Peter, the devil has asked to sift you, but when that's over, you're going to strengthen the brothers. God uses the devil to discipline disobedient disciples, a great example being Ahab, or to dispense justice on someone like King Saul. God uses the devil to sanctify faithful disciples. know, Paul says, three times I asked the Lord to take away this thorn in my flesh, but God said to me, You know, my power is made perfect in your weakness. It's like God's actually being glorified through him being harassed by whatever this horrible thing is. And then of course, God uses the devil to deliver his witnesses home. You know, Jesus or the Church of Smyrna and Revelation that's about to experience horrific persecution. I think of Stephen, the first martyr. You know, without death, we would be stuck in this world forever and it would be hell. there has to be death so that we can escape this world of sin. That's part of the big story. God uses the devil in all sorts of ways. So my thinking then is, so then how can we use the devil to advance the kingdom of God? And the best I can come up with is this idea that Satan is tempting us and we can decide to see every temptation as a test that we can use to strengthen. Our lives so, know, the refiner's fire is all over scripture The crucible is how you get the gold out and the purpose of all this testing is to create everlasting gold So you can simply see all trials and temptations from the devil as tests to grow your faith and character There's a quote in the book. I forget who it's by but it says we gain the strength of every temptation we overcome I think that's beautiful. So our goal is to figure out ways to judo the devil to use his strength speed against him to further the cause of our king and his kingdom. That's awesome. And great, great metaphor with with Judo, which happens to be actually the same sport that Vladimir Putin is an expert in. Founded by Jigoro Kano, actually. I can go on a tangent about Judo because I used to teach Jiu Jitsu and Judo was sort of like the the I don't know, the offspring of Jiu Jitsu. But, you know, I I'm curious, like Would you say that our understanding of the devil, Satan, whatever it is that we're talking about, do you think our understanding of this individual and this person helps us understand kind of evil, kind of just broadly, or are they sort of like disconnected or kind of like, what's the Venn diagram look like on evil and devil? Hmm. Yeah. Honestly, the problem of evil or the question of evil is a really exciting one for me because if you think it through logically, it brings you to an unbelievably beautiful conclusion. let's back up. So God is intensely relational. Even his being is intensely relational. This triune God, he's in a relationship. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. and he wants to expand his radiant love to more free will beings. And so he decides that he's gonna create benedoms. He's gonna make people made in the image of God. He's gonna make little God-like people, sons of God, small s, you know, us humans. But he has to give us free will because if we don't have free will, then we cannot choose to love him. With my wife or with my sons, if there was a button on their shoulders I could push that said, I love you, daddy. I love you, husband. It's not real love, right? There has to be the opportunity for rejection. So God has to open the Pandora's box, open the door to the possibility that people will reject him. So he goes, okay, I want there to be more love in the universe, so I'm gonna create free wills. I'm gonna risk their rebellion. But God knows that some people, slash all of us, are gonna choose rebellion. And so he goes, okay, I have to have a plan to meet every single person in their place of rebellion and offer a restoration of relationship back to me. And so Jesus, the son, God the son, the son of God, volunteers himself to come and be that person for us. I will go, I will sacrifice myself. God the father, know, imagine, imagine giving away your son like that. Imagine being the son, giving yourself away. They're experiencing that dual pain. and they decide that they are gonna go and Jesus is gonna sacrifice himself to restore all those who want unto himself. the only conclusion that you can come to is that the reason that the devil and evil exists is because God's love is the most important thing in the universe. That it is just so intense and radiant and brilliant that he was saying, I'm willing to risk child rape, genocide, suicide, murder. economic exploitation for centuries, millennia, because I want a world that has more love in it. And so how can we say that this is worth it? This is where faith comes in in a huge way. All we know for sure is that when this is all over, it's going to be over in the blink of an eye. There's no big last battle. Is Satan going to win? It says it happens in a lightning bolt. It's instant. And it says that the former things are going to be forgotten, that God's going to wipe them every tear and Paul says that the past, all the past, pains of his past, had tons of pains of his past, are not even worth thinking about compared to the coming glory. So there is a brilliance and a radiance and an unfathomable love coming that this conversation is honestly not even worth having on faith because we can trust that God is good. He is so good. that he gave us free will despite knowing we would screw it up so badly, but he has a plan to restore all things unto himself. So to me, I'm just like, God's a brilliant chess master and he's so many moves ahead of us. The best thing that any human could do is just say, that's it, I surrender, I'm in, you're the king, I'm in your kingdom, teach me how to live as an ambassador, a priest, a servant, a son, all the metaphors and scripture that we have for what it means to be part of that kingdom. That's really an interesting answer. I really appreciate that though, because some people will avoid trying to basically address these really deep questions that all of us have. If we haven't, then we haven't gone through something that's caused suffering in our life. Yeah, and it will happen when we're asking these questions. And I want to dig into something that can be controversial. And this idea of demon possession or even like satanic possession, I mean, you see in these, again, going back to media, that's the biggest thing that we have, Hollywood producing things, or this isn't just any demon, this is Satan himself that you're against in this one person or whoever it was. So Satan possesses this one person. You do have kind of intriguing passages like the devil entered into Judas, kind of like pushing him or manipulating him, whatever you want to say, kind of towards this end of betraying Christ or maybe there's something there in the literature like metaphorical language or literal. And that's kind of what I'm getting at. this sense of, you when we're talking about the spiritual and the interaction with the physical, right? We see the world around us and, you know, I'm a pastor, man. I mean, I've believed in God for my entire life. I have such a deep belief in God. I don't even know if I could not, I don't even know if it's possible I could not believe in God, you know, or not believe in Jesus. I mean, anything's possible, but like... I can't even see how that would happen. Even the suffering I've gone through in my own life of losing a child, of going through depression, going through addiction, going through... I've had times when I was really mad at God, but I've never had a time where I didn't believe that God exists. Although for some people, obviously that does happen. And then they come to this conversation and they're like, well, all this stuff, we're talking about mental health issues. We're talking about stuff that has a natural... explanations to it. And I'm just wondering like in your study, how has that shaped the conversation around the effect of the demonic or the satanic in terms of spiritual evil on us and our mental health, on us in our personal agency, on us in our sense that you know, living through this life because, you know, clearly if there's this temptation, then there's some kind of, there's some kind of plane in which our, like there's some kind of place in which we interact with the spiritual evil in some way, right? That then connects with us and tempts us or brings us to a place of depression or whatever it is. And I think this is where it gets kind of dicey trying to figure out like, What is the actual nature of these demonic forces? Because we say it so much without a lot of substance to what that even means. And I'm not asking for the perfect answer. I know that there's a lot of mystery in this. But what have you discovered in that process that's helped you? Or maybe how has your thinking evolved in that through this? Well, let's start with the fact that Jesus was an exorcist. It's a weird thing to say, but if we want to talk about the exorcist, Jesus is kind of the OG. You know, there is so much demonic activity. I would argue there was probably never more demonic activity than when Jesus was here in the flesh. Like, think about this. If this is a war and the head of the opposite army is taking the battlefield, It's all troops on deck. We're calling up the reserves. Everyone's going into battle for the next 33, 35 years of a prolonged crisis here. So let's just start with the assumption that just every demon was working the overtime. They were working the night shift. They were flying the red eyes. They were busy. But let's also talk about the fact that every demonic encounter in scripture is super anti-climactic. There's no... Bloody head spinning. my goodness. Who's gonna win fridge magnets are flying around. There's no tornado It's mostly Jesus just saying stop quoting scripture. Stop telling people that I'm the son of God like it's just basically the devil just Jesus is telling the devil or to go away when it's the devil or with demons He's just telling them to be silent or come out or going to those pigs. Just get get lost. It's very very Low-key very understated So that's so important to remember. The other huge thing is let's put this in proper proportion. We have three enemies, the world, the flesh, the devil. So our assumption should not be, my goodness, this person is acting strange. They must have a demon. That's just not where we should go with that. The other thing that's important to remember too is that the human body is fallen. We live in a world of fallenness, right? Our DNA is not perfect. There are people born with schizophrenia, people who are born bipolar, who are going to have what presents as quote unquote demons their entire lives. And it's, that's simply not true. They may never have an encounter with the demonic in their entire life. They might be so plagued with the result of fallenness, of human rebellion. on writ large, that they're just going to struggle with things that present as demonic. so, you know, it can be quite hurtful, quite sad if you start tossing around this idea like, I think they're demon possessed, when the reality is they just have a hormonal imbalance or chemical imbalance or enzymatic imbalance or missing chromosome or chromosome is firing the wrong way or whatever it is. So we need to be super careful with that. I mentioned in the book, but The Catholic church actually has some like on staff exorcists, like full time dudes. They're like, this is their job. And they're like, head honcho. He's been involved in something like 40,000 exorcist meetings. And he's like, there's only been like a genuine like dozen or so that were actual, like the, believe were demonic possession. The Catholic church's official stance now is the first step is to see a psychiatrist. That's step number one. Like why wouldn't we take advantage of all the beautiful technology that God has allowed humans to create in partnership with things like spec scans for the brain and whatnot. Let's start there. Let's rule out everything we can on the flesh level. Let's talk about the world level. Hey, like how's our nutrition? How's our sleep? What are we doing about social media addiction? What are we doing about child abuse? What are we doing about porn addiction? Like let's talk about all the world level things, the flesh level things. Okay, so now we've narrowed it down from 40,000 to a dozen cases. Now let's talk demonic, okay? So now we're at that level and let's talk about what does that look like? Is it some big dramatic show to like get the demon out of someone? No, it's in the name of Jesus. It's really simple. It's also so important to remember that a demon cannot possess a Christian. It cannot own you. You have been bought at a price. You are owned by God. The more healthy phrase would be to say that The demon doesn't possess you, but you possess a demon. You currently have in your possession a demon, but you can let that demon out of your possession. You can throw away the keys in your pocket. You can throw away the lint in your pocket. can evict the demon from your life in the name of Christ. So the demon cannot possess you. It cannot own you. You can possess it, but that's a choice that you've made. For whatever reason, you've said yes to temptation, turned into a foothold, turned into a stronghold, but you can... in the power of Christ, get rid of it. So that's like a very quick answer to like a very messy big problem, but I do think in general that we just need to carefully, but also don't underestimate it. My closest friend has a deliverance ministry and he is busy, like, and it's real. And so, you know, it's definitely both, I think let's hit it from all angles and let's love people and serve their... mental and spiritual needs as best we can. You know, Jared, your book, it's bright red. It's labeled Devil Name Lucifer. And I could see a situation where either you've got this grandma in the bookstore with the book at the checkout counter, you know, and somebody asking her or at least looking at her kind of a scant, you know, like, hmm. What you got going on over there? know, like, well, what's the best sales pitch you've got to believers and non-believers for why they should buy this book? Like, mean, if you want a Mythbuster to set straight a lot of misconceptions about the devil, this book should put you on the right track. If you want to right-size the devil and magnify God, this book, that's the mission of this book, is to just shrink the satanic, shrink the devil down to size, show how brilliant Jesus is. That's the word that just kept coming back again and again. was just like... This man is a chess master. This man is a chess master. he's just, he's got it so in hand as the Brits say. That's awesome. if you were to hear stories coming out from people listening or reading the book, what kind of stories would you want to hear that let you know, hey man, this was worth it, this book accomplished the purpose that I set out when I put pen to paper, so to speak? Bible says that perfect love casts out fear. And I would love to see people just feel this like, this fire of love growing in them that it almost becomes like a force field. And it just like pushes the fear out. Like any residual terror, uncomfortableness, misunderstanding of the devil that just by the time people finish reading this book, they're like, oh, I actually understand. Accuser adversary, what he is, who he is, what he does, how he works, how to resist him, how to use him to advance the kingdom. And I'm so full of love and admiration and expect for the brilliance of God that that love is actually radiating out of me. And it's like creating a force field that I feel untouchable, that I feel that I'm just not afraid of the devil anymore. I'm wary, right? I'm wary of the Nazis. I'm not stepping on their landmines, but I'm not afraid anymore. I know how to disarm. I know how to disengage. I know how to avoid. And so I just I hope that people walk away from this book feeling the love of Christ. I can second that and third that and fourth that. That's what I hope that people feel from just about everything that I do. And I love that mission. how can, is there a preferred place that you have for people to get the book and how can people connect with you and what you're doing and what do you have in the pipeline? Oh, okay. So, adevilnamelucifer.com if they want to read the first chapter for free as well as watch the trailer for the book, adevilnamelucifer.com. And then if you want my first book for free as well as a download of my first three films, there's one on human trafficking, one on teenage addiction to pornography, and one on slavery, you can get all of those at jaredbrock.com. So, those would be the two websites. One will probably get you the other and vice versa. but I try to give away as much as my stuff for free as I can. What am I working on now? Two projects on the film side. We have finished shooting a documentary on the global housing crisis. Spoiler alert, the banks and landlords caused it. And so I'm on a mission to destroy interest in rent and all its forms. documentary on the housing crisis. And then I'm working on a course on biblical economics. I have spent the last three years diving so deep into this. started when I was working on the book on Jesus. And I just realized that I've been sitting in church for 40 years. I've heard over 2000 sermons and I've never heard a single sermon on biblical economics. You occasionally hear the Dave Ramsey style, like personal finance sermon. But actual biblical economics, the study of scarcely allocation of resources is something that the church is not talking about and it is disastrous. We are so, so far afield of what the Bible actually says about how we are to allocate money and how we're to use money and how we're to set up economies. And so I, it's the biggest thing I've ever tackled and it's the thing I've never been more excited about. And my goodness, the blowback has been insane already. It's been awful. so I want to teach biblical economics to all 2.6 billion Christians. That's the next project. Yeah. a little, a little thing, a little side hustle. So. the reality is that Christians, 2.6 billion of us, we control 55 % of the world's net worth, $100 trillion. And we could absolutely change everything. I would love to see a generation of Wilber forces rise up and abolish interest. In the past 50 years, interest eaters have entrapped the world in more debt. It's going to steal more time than the transatlantic slave trade did in 400 years. So it's 32 times more exploitative in hours stolen than the slave trade was. So we got huge, huge fish to fry on this one. You know, we would love to have you back to talk about either of those things, those films and the biblical economics. I would absolutely love to do that. So we'll connect with you. Man, thank you so much, Jared, for jumping on the program with us today. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me, boys. Absolutely. And to our viewers, guys, thanks so much for joining us. Make sure you like, subscribe, hack the algorithm so that we can keep getting this great content to you. Like this conversation with Jared, and we're going to put all of his links in the show notes. And so make sure you check out his latest book and follow him on his new projects. And until next time, guys, keep your conversations not right or left, but up. Thanks and God bless. See you.