Unlocking Biblical Chiasm: The Hidden Patterns That Help Us Understand Scripture

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:01][music] [music] [music] >> Welcome to Strait the theology. I'm back with Doug Vandorn. Doug, how are we doing today? Have you climbed any more mountains in the last time that we've talked? It's a little chilly, bro. It's a little chilly?

[00:00:28]>> [laughter] >> A little chilly for that. Although, there's no snow up here, so that means you could climb if you really wanted to.

[00:00:36]And there you go, but you don't want to.

[00:00:37]It's, you know, let's get the perfect weather.

[00:00:39]>> time of year. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:00:41]Um hey, I'm really excited to connect today. Um I love all of our contributors, our theologians, and scholars that write. There's a a particular kinship that I have with you, Doug, in that I think we both have very similar academic training, uh very similar affiliations, uh for me a little bit more past affiliations in terms of traditions.

[00:01:05]Um and yeah, I love when you draw those things out particularly for our listeners cuz I think for some people they may not be familiar with it. And so, I want to jump into a couple things. One is I'm trying to debate where I want to go first. I think where I want to go first is the idea of chiasm, chiasm a chiastic structure. I remember going through seminary, and it wasn't until probably the latter half of seminary that I was introduced to the concept of a chiastic structure.

[00:01:36]And for Western readers, it really messes with us, you know? Um and often what happens is we impose our modern mechanics of how to read and understand and interpret text, and we try to apply them to ancient texts, but they had a different method. They had a different kind of literary structure and devices that they were employing and utilizing.

[00:01:58]And I remember always trying to figure out like what was going on with the story of with with Judah, you know, you've got this narrative structure of Joseph and all of a sudden like the the Joseph story like kind of just stops and you get this odd chapter about the story of Judah and I remember reading a commentary that suggested that actually it's because the Judah story is meant to be um a chiastic structure. Like we're supposed to see that in light of kind of what what else is happening in the narrative. And so when it's off, it's off to us, but it's because we want to read linearly, you know, in a in a linear fashion. And so would you talk to us a little bit about chiasm and why that was kind of your theological entry point into this topic particularly.

[00:02:51]Yeah, I mean I think you're spot-on, bud, that uh modern readers want to read a linear text on every single thing that they do.

[00:02:59]Especially when you come, you know, this is the way I grew up with the Book of Revelation.

[00:03:03]You know, you might have a the first couple chapters are saying one thing, but when you come to the prophecies, it unfolds chapter 5 unfolds historically after chapter 4, chapter 6 after chapter 5, and so on all the way to the end of the book.

[00:03:17]And so you get this chronological timeline of events that are going to happen.

[00:03:21]And um when you when you pick up literally any study Bible and you kind of look at the overall picture of a book, every single one of them for every single book is going to outline it with an ABC format, right? Because that's the way that we were taught to write letters and stuff like that. And it and it might work for letters, but doesn't mean every single genre is like that.

[00:03:45]And the more that I have gotten into chiasms and thought about them, the more I'm convinced that this isn't just a a literary technique, it's actually the way that they thought. Mhm.

[00:03:57]Their minds folded back in on each other because in an oral culture where you don't have, you know, heavy access to writing and you need to memorize things, a great way to do that is to memorize half of the material by then repeating it halfway through. Yeah.

[00:04:15]>> And that's really all that a chiasm is doing. So, the word comes from the letter key in a Greek, which is our letter X.

[00:04:23]And so, it folds back in on itself and you'll have like an A B C B A pattern.

[00:04:29]And it just looks like an X and you'll have a center will be that C.

[00:04:34]And so, that would be the, you know, if you wanted to highlight something in a in a chiasm, then you would you would put it at the as the center part. So, like a very simple chiasm would be one of the statements of Jesus, like the first will be last and the last will be first. Mhm. So, first and last, last first, they repeat. A B But, if I said, "The first will be last, Joel, and the last will be first." Now, Joel becomes my C and it becomes the center point of the chiasm. Mhm. And so, you know, you can do that as as short or as long as you want to. You can have a chiasm that would go 50 rows deep if you wanted to do it, if you were super genius.

[00:05:13]Yeah, and I think that, um, which by the way, um, I do think some of these authors are super geniuses, right?

[00:05:18]Because, um, like to the point um, you read Genesis chapters 37 through 50, um, you know, and that's kind of what I was talking about with, um, the idea of Judah and, uh, the story of Joseph. I mean, that's chapters and chapters and verses and verses prior to the creation of verse and chapter, uh, versification, right? Uh, chapter separations. So, this is long period, uh, uh, parchments of text that are being, uh, deployed and told or, uh, starting from I'm oral tradition. But, to your point about that example, uh, when you did like an ABBA, is something that's kind of fascinating to me is the interpretive implication of what happens. Because the first shall be last and the last shall be first, without that Joel that you kind of use at the center, the focus is on who's kind of first or last, right? And and that is seems to be the point of it.

[00:06:11]However, when you put Joel at the center, the interpretive thing is like, "Well, what is Joel going to do?"

[00:06:16]You know? What is the decision that that person is going to make? And so, I whenever I'm talking about chiasm, chiasm, however you want to say it, one of the things I want to point out is when we're taught how to read, particularly in high school and in college as you're going through speed reading classes, I had to do this for PhD work, you know, some people kind of are like, "Man, did you read all of those books?" And there's no, I did not read all those books. There's just no way I would still be working on my dissertation right now. You're learned how to you you're taught how to a reading strategy so you can get to the things that you really need to read and be aware of the other parts of it. But, parts of it is like you skim the first paragraph, the last paragraph, the beginning of the chapter, the end of the chapter. You know that the thesis is is laid out front. You're looking for specific paragraph breaks for when the argument advances upon itself. And somewhere in the middle is fluff.

[00:07:05]Somewhere in the middle is like a kind of throwaway rabbit trail kind of you know, store and you want to skip past that. But, the problem is if we deploy that strategy to a chiastic structure, we miss the point and the intent of the entire thing. Because the whole deal is at the pivot point is how we're supposed to center to understand the parallelism that's happening around it. And so, you know, this isn't just from a narrative standpoint, it's of kind of famous for the for the poetic implication and expression.

[00:07:38]We both I think use Logos Bible software, it's pretty fun. There's a tool in there called the Psalms Explorer. If you go, you can actually separate all of the Psalms by chiastic structure. Uh, pretty amazing. You jump in and you can see exactly how it's working itself out. And so, um, you can see it deployed across various literary types or genres as well. What was it about chiasm? Well, first talk about Revelation. Um, I don't think many people think about chiastic structure in Revelation. Um, you know, maybe at all.

[00:08:10]Uh, yeah, talk talk a little bit about that.

[00:08:12]Well, so I think that, you know, I used I used Revelation earlier as an example.

[00:08:17]People, they come to a book and they assume how it's supposed to be read without looking at the genre, without thinking about the history of why people might have written things differently than us, whatever. They're not doing literary analysis. They're just assuming something. Then they come to the text and they make it fit that. And so, if you assume that John is giving you a a prophetic timeline of future events in order, you know, like you get with John Hagee and and uh, Clarence Larkin and the charts and all that kind of stuff that I grew up with, then that that's just how you read it. And you won't even stop to think about the literary structures that might actually be there because you don't care. Mhm.

[00:08:58]>> So, to me, the one of the first things about exegesis, which is trying to find out what the text means rather than what I want it to mean myself, which is eisegesis, is you want to find you want to do a literary analysis. You want to find out what's actually happening in this passage. And it could be a short passage, it could be the entire book.

[00:09:17]And what I did with the Revelation thing, I just get it from Dr. Warren Gage. I don't know even you might have studied with him. I don't know. He was down at at uh, Knox Seminary, I think.

[00:09:27]>> I had a actually uh, a couple class. In fact, uh, the chiasm, I'm pretty sure it was Gage who uh, drew out the Joseph uh, and Judah parallel for me, which obviously was implanted in my brain even till today.

[00:09:39]Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me at all.

[00:09:40]So, all I did is I took his material from Revelation and I put it into a chart form, and what you find out is that and and he explains this in his I think it's in his dissertation actually, where he where he does uh not just Revelation but also John and Revelation working together as two books. Mhm.

[00:09:59]>> And so, just the Revelation chiasm though, it it has a center point that is in uh chapter 12 with the um Michael and the dragon scene. Mhm. And you get it's a double center. And so, you get a fourfold repetition in two verses in a row. So, you'll have in Revelation 12:9, the dragon, serpent, devil, and Satan, who deceives the world is thrown down.

[00:10:27]Then the next verse has a fourfold parallel with the authority of Jesus.

[00:10:32]So, it talks about salvation, power, kingdom, and authority of Christ. And the accuser is thrown down. So, it repeats itself.

[00:10:40]Um that becomes the literary focus of the entire book.

[00:10:44]And then what you find like I don't even know how a human could have written this particular one. It's absolutely mind-blowing. But this thing that was at the level of YY, which means you've already gone through A through Z, and now you're starting again with AA BB CC. Mhm.

[00:11:00]>> And what you find is that within two or three verses on either side, all the way back to the beginning and the end of the book, you have these parallels that are taking place.

[00:11:10]And so, like it seems to me that that should have some kind of ramifications on how you read the book. If everything's repeating itself, then are we really dealing with something that's chronological? Are we being dealing with something that's trying to bring out, you know, literary motifs and repetitions and stuff like that, which creates a very different way of reading the book.

[00:11:30]Yeah. No, that's really good. Um in the essay you also talk about subversion as a strategy. Now there's so many places I can go with this, but um what do you mean by by subversion as a strategy? Do you think this is a norm a normative strategy throughout the scriptures or is this unique that is being present through Luke Acts through John and Revelation?

[00:11:54]No, I think it's quite it's quite all over the Bible. Um from Genesis 1 which you know, if that's the creation story and you start getting into studies and you'll find is that that there's all these parallels in the ancient Near East. They have very similar ways of telling their creation story, but they're not identical.

[00:12:12]They're similar. You have the flood story. That's the same kind of a thing.

[00:12:16]There's flood stories in over 400 cultures on the earth and they have similarities some of them, but the Bible's telling it in a slightly different way.

[00:12:23]And so the act of subversion is where you take a well-known story and you twist it for your purposes. So the famous examples that that we have in the movies in recent years was Aronofsky's Noah movie. Yeah. Um and so he's retelling the Noah story, but there's nothing about that Noah story that he writes that's unbiblical at all except for the names of the characters.

[00:12:47]Like he's completely rewritten the story. Right. Right. That's subversion and so you know, I think that what I don't think that the Bible is necessarily subverting the pagans. I think the pagans were subverting the original story and the Bible's coming along and resubverting it back to the truth. Yeah, which kind of flows really well in parallel with the concept of polemical argumentation, you know, that particularly Genesis 1 through 11 is serving as a polemic against the existing creation myths or existing mythological understandings of deity land and in relationships. And so um, I really love that inflection point of uh of subversion uh as it plays into this.

[00:13:33]Uh what Give me uh maybe just a couple of your um most you think either important or under under uh communicated subver- subversive elements in scripture.

[00:13:46]Um, Heiser wrote a great essay on the Baal cycle in Daniel 7 that I think you can find it still on on Logos' website.

[00:13:55]That's probably the classic one other than maybe creation or the flood where you have a you know, you have a story that's well known to the people around you, the story of the god Baal and his brother Yam, and then you and and he comes to the Ancient of Days. Like all these all these terminology that you find in Daniel 7, it's being repeated or it's it's coming from or however it works in the Baal cycle. And so, you're you're telling a story where instead of Baal being the hero, uh the one like a son of man is the hero. Right. And you know, man, the goodness this this happens literally all the time. And Acts is like Acts is genius for doing this.

[00:14:37]Why do you think God uses subversion?

[00:14:40]Like why that? Cuz I could imagine that the response would be uh well, does that mean that God doesn't have an original idea?

[00:14:48]That he's just kind of ripping off of what other people are already doing in order to communicate his needs or his wants? Like what what would be your response to the person who'd kind of critique this from an originality standpoint and say, "Well, God's just ripping off other stuff and using that as a launching point instead of um a uniqueness to it." Like why subversion at all?

[00:15:10]>> two points. Like what I said first is it skeptical people assume that the Bible is subverting an original that is some pagan story. Why do you assume that? Why not assume that the pagans knew the original story and they subverted it first? So, the Bible's coming along and retelling the truth in a resubversion.

[00:15:31]That answers the question of originality. Yep. And the second point is that why would you do that? Well, it's because we know the stories. So, let's tell the stories through the lens that we know. We're not the It's God isn't the one with that has the problem with an original thought, we are.

[00:15:46]So, we don't know a lot of things and what we know, we know. So, why not use things that are familiar to us in order to help retell the story because that's going to resonate with you not just intellectually, but also emotionally.

[00:16:00]Yeah. Um so, you do a lot in in your essay where you're kind of tracing um a variety of different things from Luke uh and Acts, but then also John, you've got that cosmic bottom kind of concept as well. And then you get to this um the statement where Jesus talks about he sees uh Satan um falling, you know, um like lightning. Uh and you start to do a little bit of spatial stuff for us, ascent, descent. Um I'm actually reading a novel right now. Uh it's actually it's called Stoner. It's really interesting.

[00:16:34]It's like an old classic and in it uh it's about this professor who is it's kind of wild. Doug, I don't know if you've ever read this book or this novel, uh but it's basically about nothing.

[00:16:46]Like the story itself is basically about [laughter] Yeah, but it's fascinating. Like I'm so like right now I'm talking to you and I can't help but think about when I can sit down and read uh to to finish this thing.

[00:16:56]And it's about this guy who started in the like as a farmer, as a son of a farmer, was disenchanted with that, ends up going to uh a school to learn about agriculture. Halfway through the agricultural school, he's takes a literary class. Uh in it he falls in love with literature, changes his entire degree program, goes into literature, ends up becoming an assistant professor, like the whole nine yards. Uh and then there's this scene that um happens where his father, who worked the farm, dies.

[00:17:26]And there's this line as he's processing the death where he um he uses this line about the descent.

[00:17:35]And And really there's a biblical motif that I think the author is playing off of, which is basically here's this his dad who spent his entire life toiling with this dust, you know, with this dirt to try to it to make it produce something. And in the end it was the dust and the dirt that consumed him, you know? And And now he lays in there. And so he he says there's this line that goes, "And he watched his father in the coffin in his final descent." You know?

[00:18:03]Uh so anyways, there's just something litera- literary about that that's so compelling. And as Christians, I think, you know, the older I get, the more I'm aware of my mortality. The more I'm aware of um It's odd, there's a comedian who once was like, "You never know when you're in the middle. Like you're either the youngest in the room or you're the oldest in the room >> [laughter] >> room. There's never like, 'Oh yeah, I'm I'm like And And that has happened for me where I find myself like I was always the youngest in rooms, and now I'm like, 'Wait a minute, I'm significantly the old Yeah, what happened, you know?'" Um but you do some spatial stuff with this about rise and descent, even um with the disciples and and the Great Commission to go out. Uh what was it about the spatial stuff that uh yeah, that intrigued you, and why should we as Christians care? Why should we care about spatial, topography, directional assessment, um like why any of that?

[00:18:59]Oh man, that's a That's a good 2-hour podcast answer right there. That's That's a great question. Super fascinating to talk about, too, and to think through.

[00:19:08]So, I mean, the first thing that strikes me in the question is that you have God in us and God is not us. We are different from him.

[00:19:17]He is transcendent from us. So, he's above us if you want to put it in spatial terms.

[00:19:23]However, God condescended to us and descended to become one of us. And so, the transcendent becomes immanent. He becomes He's God with us, Emmanuel, right?

[00:19:36]So, right there, I think you have the biggest theological reason for caring because the God who the deus worship is the clockmaker that you can never know anything about has come down and become one of us in order to save us and bring us to God, which is an ascent, you know, into glory at the end of time.

[00:19:56]So, I mean, everything in the Bible is not just horizontal time-wise, but it's also vertical, ascending and descending. And this is Jesus' own language about himself. No one has ascended into heaven except for the Son of Man. He descends now and I mean, it's all especially John's gospel. John loves talking about that kind of stuff, but >> Yeah.

[00:20:17]it just struck me because we we've had a lot of essays on Stranger Theology talking about the cosmic mountain.

[00:20:24]And I had done this work on Acts. I can't prove it yet. So, I was actually working for about 3 hours this morning on kind of some of the proof of of this Luke-Acts connection and then I deleted the stupid Word document, dude.

[00:20:39]>> No way. So mad. Oh, no. So, this is this is a it's a long it's a long long process to see if I could actually prove what's happening, but there's no question but that Luke and Acts is written as a chiasm. A chiasm of space. So that and this is in the essay, but it's worth talking about here for the podcast that Luke begins in the Roman context uh of of the Caesar.

[00:21:09]And then he focuses on Jesus in his Galilean ministry. And unlike John, for example, and even the other two Gospels have Jesus moving a little bit more, John has Jesus going back and forth between Galilee and Jerusalem all the time. But Luke doesn't. Luke keeps Jesus entirely in Galilee until he leaves in chapter 10.

[00:21:30]And it's like, well, why would you do that?

[00:21:32]Why not tell me about Jesus going down into the Passover when he was a kid or something like that, you know? He doesn't do that.

[00:21:38]>> [snorts] >> Then he has Jesus entirely in the land of Samaria as he walks down to Jerusalem. And then the book ends in Jesus in Jerusalem at the death, resurrection, and ascension.

[00:21:50]And then Acts literally reverses that. From the ascension it begins with and then it goes into Jerusalem and then it goes to Samaria and then it goes kind of to the Gentile word worlds, which is the equivalent of of Galilee.

[00:22:05]And then it ends in Rome. Right.

[00:22:07]>> So, you know, I'm hardly the first person to notice that. I got that from Craig Blomberg at Denver Seminary. Mhm.

[00:22:14]And and it just struck me that, well, now, wait a minute. If you think cosmic geography, well, Jerusalem's the highest point of cosmic geography. It's not the highest point in Israel physically, but it's Mount Zion. It's where God put his cosmic mountain and temple, right?

[00:22:29]>> Mhm. So, that means that the entire progress of Jesus from his birth to his death and ascension is a vertical ascent up the beginning of the cosmic mountain.

[00:22:43]And then Acts becomes the reversal of that so that he has ascended into heaven and then he sends his spirit who descends Right. Acts >> into these people at Pentecost, reversing Tower of Babel story. And then from there they descend the cosmic mountain to bring the good news to the ends of the world.

[00:23:03]It's like it's just a wonderful picture of how how Jesus' work and the church's work mirror one another. Mhm. And And John and Revelation are really doing the same thing. This is Gage's idea that John You know, people people are wonder what in the world is like the seven-year tribulation all this kind of stuff, right? And why does What's all with all the three and a half stuff? Mhm. I can tell you right now that every single system has problems trying to explain that perfectly.

[00:23:32]But Gage, because he ties John and Revelation together, um has this really fascinating proposal, which is that John's gospel is the literal three and a half years of Jesus his ministry, and then Revelation is the spiritual three and a half years of the church, which parallels and there's reasons to think that the three and a half parallels um the millennial number at in Revelation 20. I can't get into all that, but there's good reasons for it.

[00:24:03]And so that would mean it's doing very similar thing to Luke and Acts. Jesus first half um in Luke and in John, and then the church second half in Revelation and in Acts.

[00:24:16]So would that um would Gage or would that uh lend to an amillennial perspective if it's a three and a half year with the with like a spiritualization of that the time of the church that the church is actually in the tribulation or like in that time of persecu- persecution right now? Like an already but not yet framework? I mean it works very well for that system. I don't know if it works how well it would work for pre- or post-millennial views, but it there's no question that it works well for an amillennial view. Right.

[00:24:45]Right. Um you know, as you're talking I was thinking too about this um um recapitulation story of what uh Luke and um and and John are doing. Luke-Acts are doing what John does with revelation.

[00:25:00]I was thinking also about the story of humanity's origin where you have the transcendent God who's on high who comes low to create humanity out of the Adamah, the dust, creates man Adam but doesn't leave them in a place of loneliness, you know, so that's that condescension idea. Lifts them up, places them in Eden which would have been on a mountain. Mhm. Yet fascinating, it's on a mountain in Eden prior to the fall that they're given the dominion command to be fruitful and to multiply. So to go off the mountain and Exactly. To go off the mountain and say yeah, exactly. It's that higher statement all of you know, don't forget that Eden was on earth but all of earth was not Eden.

[00:25:44]There there's obviously work to be done, vocation to to take place for you know, some might say military conquest to happen. Like how did this serpent come outside? There's probably a bit of diligence that was a a failure, you know, where Adam and Eve let a let the serpent in. And so all that to say there's this statement and you've kind of talked about it multiple times here but you know, there's this thing and I think you addressed it in the article as well but Jesus sees Satan falling like lightning. What does that mean? Like cuz there's a lot of people that have questions about that. Is that the origin of when Satan first fell?

[00:26:20]>> Well, there's a lot of things going on going on there that I think are interesting. The first one is that you know, I've made a connection, Derek Gilbert's made this connection too. Many I think other people have that from a New Testament perspective you have reason to believe that Satan is the same character as Baal and that he's the same character as Zeus. Mhm. Um just assuming that that's true it's fascinating to me that Zeus and Baal were both the lightning gods.

[00:26:49]And so Jesus used that terminology fall like lightning from heaven, then the question becomes, well, when does this happen? Mhm. And and this is Luke's gospel that states this, chapter 10, it's immediately after he comes down off of Mount Hermon at the transfiguration, which I think is one of the great subversions in in all the Bible of the Baal story itself. Like it's recapitulating the Baal story, except for Baal is not the beloved son of the father. Jesus is. Mhm. And his response in falling like lightning from heaven, that response is very similar to the response that Baal has when his brother Yam is the one who is the beloved son of El.

[00:27:36]He gets angry and he seeks a way to go and kill him. And that's exactly what I think is happening when he falls like lightning from heaven is that he was there, present as a witness, a covenant witness on the Mount of Transfiguration, according to Psalm 89, which is basically a prophecy of the entire thing. Mhm. That that the you know, the the stars, the moon, whatever, they will be bear witness to this covenant we made with the new David. And that's what happens, except for even though he's a covenant witness, he's totally pissed off about it.

[00:28:09]>> [laughter] >> And so he he flees as soon as he can to go down and try and figure out a way to put Jesus to death because he didn't realize that, you know, like Paul says, if in doing that, he would end up bringing about his own doom. Right.

[00:28:24]Right. So, yeah, the the falling like lightning from heaven, contextually speaking, people, you know, people speculate about all kinds of things that don't make any sense to me. Oh, this is like the primeval fall. Well, why would Jesus say that at the moment that the disciples are coming back saying, we're casting out demons in your name and all the spirits are are, you know, what does that have to do with anything?

[00:28:46]Same thing even if you say that he fell at the baptism or whatever. Like the most immediate obvious place is the transfiguration. And for the life of me, I don't understand why like hardly anybody even thinks that that could be what it is. And yet that's the most obvious place of all that it should be. Hm.

[00:29:04]That's good. Also, I think it's a it's a lovely passive jab that on the Mount of Transfiguration you have Elijah, um you know, the um where you've got the uh Mount Carmel showdown as well, which I think is >> Absolutely. Yeah, that's a great point.

[00:29:17]Fun little jab, you know, like by the way, here's another witness uh to Baal's ineptness. Okay, let's jump into some questions. Um as as always, uh our conversations really build off of uh the essays uh that are written for Stranger Theology. And so if you haven't already, I'd love for you to check out Stranger Theology. You can go to strangerthology.com or right to the Substack, and you can join and get access to our entire archive of theological essays, this being one of them. Um and I think you will really love it. Uh for our paid premium subscribers, they get to ask questions on each of our essays and in our uh podcast episodes, I try to work through some of these questions and ask the authors themselves. And so one of the phrases, Doug, that consistently came up in yours is just this is mind-blowing.

[00:30:03]Like I think a lot of people are just like this is mind-blowing. This is mind-blowing.

[00:30:06]Um here here's one though, uh and I thought this was good. Uh this is from Leslie. Again, your article was mind-blowing or should I say a great light bulb moment for me. I've read through most of these scriptures and I am in awe of the Lord. Do you think we'll ever get deep enough to understand everything that is in the Bible or will we keep learning when we get to heaven?

[00:30:25]And she kind of goes on and says, you know, I know that you know, like uh his ways are not our ways and all that kind of stuff. But I think this is a fair, especially um for people like you and I, Doug, that for fun we read commentaries and read monographs and uh you know, uh how would you pastor like Doug pastor head on?

[00:30:45]Um how would you respond to that?

[00:30:48]So, it's such a great thing, great question, and um I've thought about it a lot with regard to the literary structures that we're dealing with in the Bible and how complicated they can get. I mean, I talk about in the in the paper this idea of a woven text.

[00:31:03]Dude, if you think that chiasm is is interesting and crazy, especially a chiasm that goes 50 rows deep like Revelation, >> [cough] >> woven [clears throat] stuff is taking it to a like a fourth-dimensional level.

[00:31:17]And so, I'll sit here and I'll think like, "Okay, as I'm learning to understand how to weave text or how to how to think about things chiastically, it becomes easier, right? So, on a human level, I can like go, "Okay, yeah, I can understand that to a point."

[00:31:35]But, some of these things are so impossibly mind-blowing that it's like there has to be some sort of supernatural agent that is actually behind this that I don't even think that the human author is aware of what he's actually doing, how deep the levels go.

[00:31:53]And so, that means to me that that we can find out things truly and and deeply in this life about what the scripture is, but because it has a an eternal omniscient author, I don't think that we will ever be able to delve the total depths of what God's word is. I mean, especially if there's a a union somehow between God's word, the Holy Scripture, and God's word, the second person of the Trinity.

[00:32:24]Yeah, no, that's really good. And I mean, why not? I what Heaven would be boring to me if if we knew everything the second we get there. What would be the point?

[00:32:33]Yep, exactly.

[00:32:35]Okay, that's really good. Here's another one that kind of follows in that same lane.

[00:32:40]Um Cassia asked this and I kind of love the the common language vernacular. It's like, "Okay, cool.

[00:32:46]Um uh you know, especially the poem being designed to look like an altar, that's great. Also, were John and Luke trolling their contemporaries?

[00:32:53]>> [laughter] >> LOL.

[00:32:55]Uh what level of uh intentionality do you think is present in the biblical authors with, you know, kind of that whole uh yeah, were they trolling their contemporaries?"

[00:33:05]>> [laughter] >> That's an interesting question.

[00:33:09]If if either one is doing more trolling, I would say it would be Luke doing more trolling, but it's a positive trolling, not necessarily a negative one. Hm. So, especially in all the subversion that he has with the Greco-Roman world and the way that he retells his stories, there's no question that he's trolling the gods and he's trolling the stories of Homer and all these kinds of guys, Virgil and he's using all kinds of people as he's tells his stories.

[00:33:34]I don't know that they're trolling in in the sense of, "Look at how superior I am in the way that I write that you do."

[00:33:40]Because like I said, I don't know to what degree like they're aware of just how deep what it is that they're writing goes.

[00:33:50]You know, they can have something in their mind, but these guys are inspired by the Holy Spirit and you know, the deepest writing that we have uh that's secular, it can't I don't think that it can compete with what the scripture is and that's brilliant stuff.

[00:34:05]Yeah. Yeah.

[00:34:07]Okay, um here's uh the last one we'll do for this one. Uh this is from Gina uh and I'm going to like turn this into a question. Uh Gina just says, um "Thank you. Not sure if I fully understand it, but the diagrams really helped. I will need to read it through several times."

[00:34:22]Which honestly is great. That's the point. The point is for you to be challenged and and you to be equipped.

[00:34:27]Now, you do have some diagrams in here which are great, Doug. Uh talk to us about the diagrams, where they came from, and then also where can people get more of this cuz I know this is directly connected to a book project that you worked on.

[00:34:39]So, the first set of diagrams is just the chiasm of Luke and Acts.

[00:34:45]And uh those I just found those online or in Blomberg's book. The second one is the actual altar poem that was written by Dosiadas, um a Greek poet, where he actually writes the poem to look like an altar.

[00:35:00]Pretty wild.

[00:35:01]The third graphic that I have is one that I created using AI, and that's kind of my hypothetical look of the cosmic mountain of of Acts and Luke.

[00:35:15]And uh you know, all of this is kind of related, I suppose, the most to the Revelation book that I wrote. Mhm. Um rings of Revelation. The the whole idea of a rings in that story is that Revelation is recapitulating and retelling the story over and over and over, um which is uh kind of different, I suppose, than the idea of going up and down a mountain.

[00:35:40]Uh because when you're when you're looking at that, you're looking at it slightly different because you have two books that are put together into one to tell some kind of a story. But when you're just looking at one book by itself, it's like, well, so is it just a is it just a straight line down the mountain again? That kind of chronological temporal successive moments, you know, in a row that there's nothing being retold and and um the more I've come to think about the depth of Revelation, it's not just a chiasm. Like, it's retelling the same story over and over and over. If you go and read the uh the end of chapter 16 with the battle of Armageddon and the end of chapter 19 with like this uh grotesque uh meal of birds uh at a great battle. And then you go and read the end of Revelation 20 where devil's thrown into lake of fire and I think the end of Revelation 14 as well. It's all using exactly the same language which makes you think maybe it's not four different wars, maybe it's actually the same war told from four different perspectives. Yeah, which fascinating four different Gospels all all telling four different you know angles and and you know trajectories and and you know the one Jesus so Man, Doug thank you so much for this for your time always enjoy our conversations and your scholarship.

[00:36:59]You guys can grab Doug Doug what can they what can they grab Rings of Revelation? Uh they're all available at Amazon like you can go to my website and read stuff about it but I don't make any extra money or whatever from the website so I just publish everything through Amazon. Yeah. Um in terms of those books so yeah there's all kinds of them that are up there. I think I put out three new books in February so I have one on Genesis 1 through 3 that's my sermons and then I did one on this whole battle of of the Bible's truth that was the talk that I had at Blurrycon 3 Mhm. and then I did one on what's the third one that I did? Oh it was a first Corinthians 11 and a sarcastic reading of head coverings. Oh yeah.

[00:37:45]Love it. Well, you guys can grab those on Amazon we will link to the Rings of Revelation here in the show notes and Doug till next time we'll see you soon. Thank you.