Idol money lies in your current account picking crumbs out of its belly button wondering, should I eat them? But when you start investing with Monzo, your money's always busy. It turns on regular investments, invests your spare change and tops up your stocks and shares ICER. It even helps you make sense of risk and return. Monzo, the bank that gets your money moving. You could get back less than you invest. Monzo current account required UK residents 18 plus TCCs apply. There's a story in Kings about how Israel and Judah, I believe, are going to fight against Moa. I can't remember which kingdom they're fighting against, but it says the king of the city went to the wall and he sacrificed his son and the wrath pushed back. He did a magic something. The ritual, yeah. That worked. Like, that's the... It's not that he did it. That's so crazy. It's the fact that it worked and it pushed back against the Israelites and they weren't able to take the city. And that's something that you got to sit back and think, wait, the Bible says that happened. What does that say about the larger world that you live in? I mean, if you're going to believe the Bible as I do, well, then that happened. The history of our earth is so different from what we can imagine. The Smithsonian, and if they found out about a large skeleton somewhere, was to go get it. I'm going to assume at least one person is right because if one person's right, it busts the paradigm. It all goes back to the fallen cherub. And the problem with the modern day church, they have a very truncated view of the supernatural. This backdrop is just pregnant with all kinds of meaning associated with this Mount Hermon event. And this guy defects from the kingdom. That's a big deal. Welcome back to Blurry Creatures. If it's more in the 80s spacemen, and I have to read something for you. This just goes back to the 80s. That's the heck of a start. I hear your name whispered on the wind. It's the sound that makes me cry. I hear a song blow again and again through my mind. I don't know why. I wish I didn't feel so strong about you like happiness and love revolve around you. Trying to catch your heart is like trying to catch a star. So many people love you, baby. That must be what you are. Waiting for a start of fall and carry your heart into my arms. That's where you belong. In my arms, baby. Yeah. Boy meets girl, one of the best 80s songs. Waiting for a start of fall. We're going to continue. I don't know where the start of fall is. I don't know where it's going. At first, it would probably make Kayla a little uncomfortable. You're like trying to catch your heart. He's like, what are we doing? Why don't we come on the show? Where are we going with this? How about this? If a one-time star were compelled to draw near and bring all its power from heaven down here, who on the earth do you think could prevail? The strength of the strongest and fiercest would fail. They'd flee to the mountains and crawl in a cave, hopelessly hoping that hiding could save from gravity, majesty, fusion, and fire, consuming the earth like a flame on a pyre. So yeah. Here I thought we were doing blurry creatures and it's like I'd drop into some kind of poetry slam here in the middle of this. Is that from the Hobbit? No, I wrote that. You wrote that. Yeah. Wow. Kayla Jones, welcome back to the show. You got your own 80s band. Of course, we're our Christmas episode. We talked about the star of the Magi. Not to be confused with the Magi star trademark. Tell me those were the lyrics of your youth group band back in the day. No, that was not. Did you recite that to your wife who's in studio on your wedding day? No, I didn't do that one. Did you dab on his spare time? That was a little bit. That was a little bit. Writing your fiction novel. Do you not like you dabble in poetry? You're a Renaissance man, you know? I am, yeah. You're a lawyer. Yeah. You spend peers most of your spare time reading old books, very old old books. We did our first episode of the Magi Star with you and we're going to continue that conversation today, right? We're going to keep going into it and I'm sure there's, because you kept hinting. You teased it real good. We knew it was going somewhere else. Yeah, well I wanted to save it for further episodes and here we are. We're talking about it. But if you want to talk about what the Magi saw with the astrology of the star, you first have to understand what that is and how ancient people thought about that. So that's kind of what I'm prepped to talk about now. We're going to go back in time. Yeah, we did. You know, it's fun. It feels like an extension and we talked about this off camera, a bit of what we did with Doug Van Doren, the wandering star, right? We talked a bit about how the tabernacle and the temples laid out astrologically towards the cardinal directions and also towards constellation signs, right? And so one of the things we briefly touched on, I'm really excited about expanding on today is the idea that the ancients very much were familiar if not obsessed with the heavens and what was going on there and they recognized that these constellations were preceding the procession. There's the idea of ages were based upon constellations and where they were. We talked to Tim Aberrino a bit about that. But I'm excited to kind of go forward to go backward, right? We did an episode on the Magi Star talking about Christmas and the star and it's in your work and theory on what was happening, when it happened, etc. But I think like the great Dr. Michael Heiser, what's important is to understand the worldview of the ancients, to understand what was happening there. And we kind of, as Nate said, he touched on it briefly. The magi we're watching the stars, perhaps from Babylon, as we assume, but they had a whole different worldview. They're insane. We kind of went to this last episode. This is not a unique thing to Babylon. The ancients were obsessed with the movement, the travel of Venus, of Cirrus, of the North Star, of these places in the sky they would track and then they would orient their temples, places of worship, the things they did towards the rising setting. It would be the equinoxes or even the movement of the stars and planets. Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things that they're obsessed. One of the things you can think of is we wouldn't say that, oh, we're obsessed. Some people are obsessed with science. But no, science is just the way the world works. You're just operating in the world and this is just the way it works. So you're going to be talking about science and whatnot. Whereas in ancient times, just the stars, the movement of the sun and the moon, that's the way the world works. That's how you count your calendars. That's how you tell the ... There are so many things that we have a clock. That's how you tell time. That's not how you tell time. It was observational. It's just everything was part and parcel. There are things that seem kind of foreign to us that were just so normal for them. It's just a different way of looking at the world. So where do we start? Well, this is about astrology. So I hope to reveal kind of the explanation of why the magi showed up. But to do that, I kind of have to explain the basic understanding of how someone would look at the world and see how astrology would incorporate into your worldview. And to do that, so we're going to talk about what the ancient understanding of the heavens was, the basic concepts and terms of astrology, and what the astrology's relationship is the star of the magi, and how Christians should view it. It's kind of complicated. There are some terms in astrology that there's nothing magic to it. It's just a weird way of talking about things, and they're very basic. And I hope to illustrate that. I've got some diagrams that I made with my trusty Microsoft Paint. You are a Renaissance man. I am a Renaissance man. But these are my books. I brought them, but I've got the image right here. The discarded image is a book that I have harped on how good it is. If you were a Christian and you want to see a completely different way of looking at the world, you should read that book by C.S. Lewis. He is writing in a scholarly format. He is a professor of literature, and he's telling his students, you're about to read all of these books from the medieval world, and you need to understand how they viewed the world. And one of those chapters, I think it's chapter seven, he talks about the heavens. He talks about how they thought it moved and what they do. And this is another book by Tasman Barton. I found it very helpful. It's very... It's kind of academic. It just gives it... There's a good... It gives you kind of straight what it's talking about, because let me just warn you. You should never, ever Google a question about astrology because you will ruin your algorithm for altering. So if any of y'all need some crystals, essential oils, tarot cards, like... You need your chakra aligned. ...getting all the ads. So I made that mistake. You can't do it. And sometimes people... When you talk about the Star of Bethlehem, people are like, oh, wow, you should get an expert in astrology to help you. No. No, you shouldn't. You should never seek out someone who tells you that they... Oh, yeah, I'm an expert in... You have to just do it on your own, which is, I guess, what I've had to do. And yeah, but we'll get into that. Yeah, Luke likes to ruin people's algorithms. I sure do. That's for blurry after dark. Yeah. Yeah. Another thing that I'd recommend, what's great about old books is they're all free and they're all on the Internet. If you want to get something crazy, you should read Pliny the Elder Natural History. It is a Roman encyclopedia, and he just explains how ancient people... He wrote it in about 78 AD, 79. It's a great beer, by the way. Yeah, I've heard. That is... Is it? Yeah. Pliny the Elder. I Google it a lot, and it comes up with a beer. Dude, it's a great beer, by the way. That's just a side note. Yeah, I've also brought up this. So, Cicero, if you've heard of him, he is the famous Roman orator, writer, and he has a... It's called On Divination, and I like going to the old source to just see what they say about what's going on. And he is... And I guess I'll just read. So, now I am aware of no people, however refined and learned, or however savage and ignorant, which does not think that there are signs that are given of future events, and that certain persons can recognize those signs and foretell events before they occur. First of all, to seek authority from the most distant sources, the Assyrians, on account of the vast plains inhabited by them, and because of the open and unobstructed view of the heavens, presented to them on every side, took observations of the paths and the movement of stars and having made note of them, transmitted to posterity what significance they had for each person. And in that same nation, the Chaldeans, a name which derived not from their art, but from their race, have, as it is thought, by means of long-continued observation of constellations, perfected a science which enables them to foretell what any man's lot will be and what fate he was born. The same art is believed to have been acquired also by the Egyptians through a remote past, extending over almost countless ages. Now, here is something I'll just tell you. The Romans, we're kind of, I would say, descended from them. The Romans are actually fairly scientific. They are doubtful of these things. And Cicero attributes it to, oh, we're looking at the stars, and we can basically figure it out by taking long observations. But the really ancient, so ancient even to Cicero, 2000, the people who are originally writing things, which you probably know from the book of Inok, you don't figure out astrology. It's told to you. 100%. So, it's the gods or the muses or whoever. You're getting these from non-human sources, and you're always trying to figure out the truth of knowledge that has been received. The Chaldeans, he knows that the Chaldeans, by the time Cicero is writing, there are no Chaldeans. Nebuchadnezzar is coming around in 700, 600. They're not really Chaldeans. We call them the Neo-Chaldeans. The only time Chaldeans in the Bible is referred to as an actual people group is in Job, which is super, super old, like 2000. The oldest book, perhaps, in the Bible. So for those of us that are like Bill and Ted on their history journey right now, like I'm more in that camp, you're going to take us back in time to like why the Magi knew beforehand what they were going. They had a prerequisite knowledge of what was coming down. They didn't necessarily know what, when exactly, but they knew something was coming, right? And that's what this episode's about. Exactly.
