Christus Victor and the Divine Council: Divine Council Worldview Podcast (EP024)

Divine CoucilInterviews
Written By Anthony Delgado

In this interview with Anthony Delgado on the Divine Council Podcast, the conversation with Mel and Rich explores how Mike Heiser’s work influenced the ministry and theological development at Palmdale Church and helped inspire the writing of The Gospel is Bigger Than You Think. The discussion explores how engagement with Divine Council theology transformed the church’s structure, worship practices, and liturgical rhythms, cultivating a model of ministry deeply rooted in biblical fidelity and vibrant Christian community. Key themes include the importance of recognizing Christ’s kingship in everyday obedience, the necessity of a lived testimony that reflects transformation, and a call to move beyond simplistic or transactional understandings of the gospel often found in American folk Christianity. Topics such as the role of allegiance in faith, the relationship between practice and transformation, and the need for intentional investment in discipleship are woven together, offering a vision of the Christian life shaped by the overwhelming magnitude of God's redeeming work and the invitation to participate fully in his kingdom.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST:

QUESTIONS (Table of Contents)

  1. How did you first find Mike Heiser’s work, and how did it shape your thinking?

  2. How did Palmdale Church initially respond to introducing Divine Council theology?

  3. How has Divine Council theology shaped the structure and polity of your church?

  4. How did your leadership team engage with the polity changes you made?

  5. How has your liturgy and style of worship evolved based on your theological framework?

  6. How does meeting outdoors (at the park) affect the way your church experiences worship and ministry?

  7. Can you tell us a little bit about your book, The Gospel is Bigger Than You Think, and what inspired it?

  8. What is the 'Gospel of Middle America' and how do you critique it in your book?

  9. How does the idea of allegiance or believing loyalty connect to your view of salvation and discipleship?

  10. How do you understand the role of obedience and transformation in Christian life?

  11. What encouragement would you give churches about giving pastors time for rest and re-envisioning?

  12. What final challenge would you give to listeners who are new or growing in Divine Council theology?

TRANSCRIPT:

Rich: Welcome everybody to the Divine Council Worldview Podcast. We're your hosts, but not maybe of this episode, Rich and Mel, here to tell you about an event sponsored by the Michael S. Heiser Foundation and Drina over there that will be happening May 2nd and 3rd. It's called The Image Conference. It will be at New Purpose Ministries in Anderson, Indiana.

Mel: All this information will be listed. The link for the registration will be there. It's at the michaelsheiserfoundation.org. Go there, look under the events tab, and you'll see it. There's a form to fill out. Again, it's free. There's no cost. There's even some recommendations for some hotels there in the area.

So we look forward to seeing people. We look forward to talking to people, connecting, and having some really good conversations. Really look forward to it.

Rich: All right. Welcome to this episode of the Divine Council Worldview Podcast, where today we interviewed Pastor Anthony Delgado, pastor at the Palmdale Church in Palmdale, California, regarding his work that he is doing there, how he found Mike's work, and the book that he is coming out with, The Gospel is Much Bigger Than You Think.

It was an excellent interview. I really appreciate Pastor Anthony for doing it and making the time. Pastor Anthony is very special to me and to Mike because he held, at his congregation, one of the events that we had—one of the few conferences that Mike was able to have on his own there.

It was exceptional. We had a great time. We met a lot of great people, people that I'm still friends with and in communication with. So we thank you for that. We hope you enjoy this episode that's coming up. I just wanted to shout out a few people here. In the past week, I spent time with several people that have contacted us.

I want to say Jackson and Heidi out here. I had lunch and coffee with Jackson and Heidi, had lunch with Belinda and Pam. I look forward to spending more time with you guys. These are people near the Knoxville area that I was able to find through the email and through this and just spend some time with and talk to, and it was really great. Brian out there in Indiana, we look forward to hearing your story and having you on here. It was a great testimony, and I really look forward to hearing some of the answers to the questions that we have posed that you want to respond to. I thank you for that.

I want to thank Andre out there in Denmark. We really appreciated that conversation. We learned so much. I learned so much. Every time we have these conversations, you inform me of so many things that I like to hear. I would encourage anybody out there, I don't care where you are—anywhere in the world—you know, I do love Europe and Korea and Japan.

If you're in those places, please hit me up on the email. I would love to talk with you. I would love to learn more about both you and what God is doing within your countries and contexts. Andre, I can't wait to talk to you again. I look forward to that work.

As I said, I learned a great deal. I also wanted to say that we talked to Dr. Atwell and the possibility of two new translations that are going to be coming up—the Tagalog translation, the Filipino translation, and the Danish translation of What Does God Want. We are so grateful for that.

We thank Drina for all the provision and helping us to get these things done, to get these works done and out to people. We are really grateful for that. If you want to continue to support the work that is going on, the only place that you can do that is mlo.org.

If you want to support the translations and all the other things that are going on—the teaching and all the other things that are being done by Drina and the crew to accomplish the task of keeping Mike's work out there—please go to mlo.org. Go to the support tab, and you can find the different ways to do so.

That is the only way to support all this work that is going on here with my co-host and pro-host. Mel, how are you doing, Mel?

Mel: Hey, man, I'm doing good. Hey, don't forget about—and I'm gonna butcher his name—he's out in, I think, Slovenia or Slovakia. Oh yes, I'm sorry, Venia. I get 'em mixed up.

But Garley, he says his English version of the name is Greg, but he's doing the Hungarian translation of What Does God Want. He's trudging through it. We've had some PDF, Word doc issues, but he's also trying to get that work done. So, if you're out there and you speak a different language, you're very proficient in English and very proficient in some other language that we don't have these translations in, again, you can go to the website miclot.org—that's spelled M-I-Q-L-A-T.org—go to the resources tab, and you'll see either Supernatural or What Does God Want translations.

There's about 40 translations. We just realized this past week that we didn't have it in Tagalog, so we're looking at hopefully getting those done.

So if some of you guys out there have that skill set, please, by all means, let us know. Rich did mention Korea and Japan. We really have a heart for those two places, and there's a real heavy supernatural angle to them. Talk about gods—little "g" gods—talk about hundreds of them.

It's very prevalent. Korea is a lot more churched than Japan. Japan is just a spiritual desert. It's a spiritual desert, and they really need our prayers. So if you have some kind of experience or knowledge out there, please hit us up and let us know what's going on.

One of the ways you can contact us—Rich is gonna give his email address. My email address is mel.dvcw@gmail.com. So mel.dvcw@gmail.com. Please feel free to reach out to us if you've got anything going on. Rich, what's your email address again?

Rich: Mick Lot Rich, M-I-Q-L-A-T-R-I-C-H@gmail.com.

Please feel free to hit us up. We absolutely enjoy it. Hopefully we can continue to find the time to reach out and have conversations with all of you, because we just learn so much, and we're really appreciative of hearing all these stories and the work that is going on. It is very encouraging.

So again, please do that, and we hope you enjoy this episode.

Mel: Yeah, it's good. Anthony's awesome. Like him. Enjoy, folks.

Rich: All right. I am here. We are here with Pastor Anthony Delgado of Palmdale Church in Palmdale, California. He has a book out called The Gospel is Bigger than You Think, based on a sermon series that he did in the past year that you can find on YouTube at Palmdale Church, and we will talk more about that.

How I came to know Pastor Anthony—in July of 2018, he asked if he could preach a series of sermons based on the book Supernatural. Of course, we said yes, and all we really wanted to know was how the congregation responded, because there wasn't a lot of that going on back then.

Back in August of 2018, we had a meeting with Mike down in Palmdale at the home of John and Denise Perry regarding the possibility of having a conference or an event in the area featuring Dr. Heiser. In January of 2019, we had a great meeting. We had about 20 people there.

I was able to meet one of my good friends, Sandra, Alex, my buddy, the Korean pastor Elliot Luongo. We had a great time. It was a great meeting to sit, talk, and do all of that. From that meeting came an event in January of 2019 where Dr. Heiser spoke and did basically five sessions.

The first one was, Why Does the Church Need an Unfiltered Bible? The second was, How Do We Apply the Ancient Supernatural Context of Scripture to Our Lives? The third was, How Do We Help Christians to Be Comfortable with an Unfiltered Bible? The fourth was, How Do We Study the Bible in Line with the Worldview of Its Authors? And then the fifth session was a Q&A and panel discussion.

In between there, after dinner, I actually shared my testimony because Mike was like, you need to wake people up in case they're sleepy from food. I think I went about an hour and a half and had to just stop because I get long-winded in sharing those things.

But it was great. We had a great time meeting with people. I was able to meet my buddy Dan Chung for the first time, who, for the next time, came down to help. I remember meeting a guy named Justin Schey, whose father, back in the eighties and nineties, would tell him about the Divine Council from Psalm 82.

But everyone would reject what he said. I remember the look on his face—content—as he sat there listening to Heiser, knowing that he'd gotten it right and that he'd shared these things with his children. It was that justification he felt. It was so good to see on his face, and I'm so grateful.

Justin was responsible for a great deal of things that happened through the Miclot organization, so I'm grateful for that. So Pastor Anthony, do you remember anything about that meeting?

Anthony Delgado: Yeah. Thank you guys for having me on the podcast today. I do. I would say I remember a lot about the meeting, but one of the things that really impressed me about Dr. Heiser, and one of the things you don't get with every speaker at a conference, was how we had set up kind of a green room in the back. I didn't know what kind of prima donna he was going to be, if he would want to sneak out the side door and hide between sessions or what.

But he was just super— and it wasn't a huge conference, about 120 to 130 people depending on the moment—but he was super comfortable just schmoozing with people. That back room, that green room that we set up really for him to be able to hide a little bit, get some space, we had special food, some barbecue and stuff just for him and his lackeys, his entourage.

But every time I went back there to check and see if he needed anything, he was back there with guests from the conference—not having scholarly, intellectual conversations about the intricacies of the Divine Council worldview. I don't even think we were calling it that yet. He was actually back there—and let's not forget that Dr. Heiser was an elder of a church, which means he was a pastor—pastoring and shepherding people who had real needs they needed to discuss with a pastor.

They felt safe with him, for various reasons, some theological, but they felt safe and had questions for him, and he was shepherding people. I was really impressed to see that this wasn't a guy who wanted to get up on a scholarly high horse and see himself as higher than the church, but he was actually just part of the church.

He was just so authentic. I absolutely loved it. It was one of the things that really allowed me to figuratively—because I tend to read digital books—but to take his books and put them on a closer shelf to my desk.

Rich: Yeah. That was one of the main points of doing those things.

I felt if people could meet Mike, they would understand the kind of man he was, the humility that he had, the desire to engage people on different things, but really be accessible. He was very accessible to people, and I really wanted people to meet that. If you just read his books, people could get the feeling that maybe he's pompous or something like that. The dude just didn't have that in him, and I was very grateful for all that we did there.

I remember we enjoyed singing there. I loved the music that you guys played; it was excellent. I remember getting to sing at the top of my lungs, which I loved doing and can rarely do. Mike was freaking out because I sung so loud. I just loved hearing it. But it was a great time. We really did have a good time. We made a lot of good relationships from it, and there was fruit that came from that. We were able to do a lot with it.

We also printed out, I think, 250 copies of the Spanish version of Supernatural and were able to give that out to people. That was one of the first times we were able to do that, which was a real blessing. It was something we really wanted to do—to get physical copies of those things to people, because that can make a big difference.

So again, thank you for having that. We had a great time. For everyone that was there—there were about 130 people at the max—and that was really about as much as most of us could handle to actually get engaged with the people, talk to them, and see where they were at.

Part of it is learning for me and Mike. We go there to learn. He teaches, but we're trying to learn where everyone is at, what people are dealing with, what they're doing, what hangups they're having, and so on. That's about as many people as I can deal with in a three-day span—to talk to intimately and have a conversation.

How did you first find Mike Heiser’s work, and how did it shape your thinking?

So from that, let me ask you: how and when did you find Mike's work, and how did it bolster what you already understood?

Anthony Delgado: Yeah. It's kind of interesting. I actually came across Mike's work through Faithlife Logos. I'm not sure what year he started working for Faithlife, but I think I started using Logos in maybe 2010 or 2011.

Somewhere around there, I encountered Mike's work through emails and stuff they were sending out. I read a number of his articles on their blog and things like that. I come from a real conservative evangelical background as a young adult.

I think my childhood was more just generally a kind of generic Baptist, Bible Church type of background, but as a young adult, it was very much a John MacArthur-type of background. So I came across a few things. I wasn't really afraid of the demonology type of stuff that was there, but as soon as I started to see things about gods—Mike spoke very frankly, and I guess in this case wrote very frankly—some of it kind of turned me off.

A couple of years later—it probably took about a year and a half, two years—my wife actually came across his podcast and had seen the "New Here? Start Here" videos. I'm guessing this must have been several years later because those videos are marked 2015 on YouTube.

January 2015 is also the first episode of the podcast, so I guess that all coincides. She said, "I think you need to listen to at least these couple of videos because this guy's talking about stuff the way that you do."

Nothing like appealing to somebody's ego—now you have to listen! So I gave it a listen. I think maybe by that time there were like three episodes out. I quickly caught up and then never missed an episode.

As books started becoming available, I grabbed Unseen Realm immediately. I read them all. I even read Unseen Realm before Supernatural, and I still grabbed Supernatural and devoured it. It just made a lot of sense once I got into his way of thinking.

The way it worked with the worldview that I already had, it really just made sense and filled in a lot of gaps that were already there.

Rich: As I mentioned, you did a sermon series on Supernatural back in that time in 2018–2019. Let me ask you, how has Palmdale Church responded to the Divine Council worldview?

Anthony Delgado: Yeah, so, I mean, it took a while to get there.

How did Palmdale Church initially respond to introducing Divine Council theology?

Theologically, in the beginning, our church really liked the theology of it. They had no problem with it as long as I was careful to explain what I meant by difficult things. I have to be careful—even today—not to quote the Book of Enoch, for example, using the same formula as I would quote, let's say, the Book of Matthew.

If I say, "Now in the Book of Enoch, chapter four, verse seventeen," people go, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on here?" But if I say, "In Hebrew folklore, there's this book they call Enoch, and it's a pseudepigraphal work, written in the voice of this guy Enoch from the Old Testament," and say, "the folk writer envisioned Enoch as saying this," they can put it in a different context. I'm not reading the verse numbers and all that, so now they understand what I'm getting at.

As long as I'm careful not to use formulas that trip them up—when I refer to the Divine Council and I want to refer to the gods, but I don't want to step into that theology and explain the whole infrastructure because I'm merely referring to it—I'll use Paul's wording. I'll say, "the so-called gods of the nations" from 1 Corinthians.

That allows me to remind them of the theology without having to go back and reexplain everything. Because your average congregant isn't going to recall the entire infrastructure. A lot of my congregation these days can, but not everybody. You've got people who've been at my church since we did the Supernatural series, and then you've got people who've only been there five or six months.

So it's all just a matter, as a preacher, of being very sensitive to how I'm presenting that data. As long as I'm never getting too comfortable with it—thinking I can just throw this stuff out however I like—I'm okay.

I can with you guys, right? And probably with the podcast listeners, I can just say whatever I want, and you guys are fine. I can say, "Oh yeah, there's lots of gods," and nobody listening to this is going to have a problem with that. I can't say that from the pulpit.

Or in my case, from the music stand, just because of how we do church.

Mel: I think what you said there was really key. That's something that I'm going to receive for myself—to not get too comfortable with it.

Sometimes when we have these talks amongst ourselves—because we love to nerd out on this stuff—when we go and talk to someone who barely has any kind of, or no, introduction to this topic whatsoever, you have to gently go back. I really like what you're saying here about how you finesse the language and how you kind of caveat your introduction of things such as the Book of Enoch and the references to it.

I think that's really good.

Anthony Delgado: Offline, I mentioned to you guys that I have an outline for a book on how the Divine Council worldview affects the way a church operates. I also have a book on preaching a Divine Council worldview that I've outlined. We'll see if I ever have the time to write either of those.

But I think there's a space for that because people are constantly asking these questions. They're like, how do I talk to people about these things? So, I would say first that our church has responded to it really well because we haven't chased them away with it.

They're actually learning it bit by bit. They're developing it. When you teach people that way—and let's be honest, that's how we all learned theology—we learned it sort of secondhand and implicitly by living it and hearing it from our teachers over and over and over.

Once it becomes a part of your being and your thinking, and it's moved from a piece of data that rests in your mind to part of your heart that you live, then it becomes a part of how you function.

When I first came to the church, we replanted. We were originally a Southern Baptist church that had congregational polity. That's not what I grew up in. I grew up in elder-ruled churches, and "ruled" means elders make all the decisions. But we were a strict congregationalist church, which meant that technically, every member of the church got an equal vote in anything we did—from the carpet to the budget.

It was a widespread, super-democratic environment, and there’s something really beautiful about that, even if it's not, strictly speaking, biblical in nature. Because obviously if you read the Bible, you see that there is something to elders having some sort of authority.

So how do you balance those? I actually feel like the Divine Council in some ways impresses upon an answer to that question. I don't want to say the Divine Council teaches an answer, but it has influenced how I've thought about it.

How has Divine Council theology shaped the structure and polity of your church?

When we replanted in 2020 during the pandemic, we moved to a new community, took on a new mission, adopted new bylaws, and also a new polity structure. One of the things we did was implement a polity structure that incorporated both a priesthood-of-all-believers element—a democratic element that sees every Spirit-regenerate, believing, faithful member of the church as a member of the Divine Council.

They have a seat in the Divine Council, therefore they have a seat at the table. Yet even within that Divine Council structure in the unseen realm, there is a hierarchy. Even the disciples, when they came to Jesus, understood that there were seats closer to the head of the table and seats further away, and that responsibility came with that.

We have elders, and elders are placed there according to biblical principles. As they serve at the foot of the table, they are qualified to be at the head of the table. It's become a hierarchy based on servitude principles that reflects what's happening in the divine sphere.

One of the things the Divine Council worldview has really taught me is that what we see in the physical sphere is a reflection of things happening in unseen spaces. That's the Elijah narrative, right? When Elijah opens the servant’s eyes to see that what's happening here depends on what's happening in the spiritual side—the war that God is fighting.

We will see a reflection of the spiritual in the physical world. That's what we want happening within the polity structure of the church. There becomes this expectation of what that looks like.

Now I can go to my congregation and say, not just, "You have a seat at the table," but, "Here's your chair. Now please have a seat."

There becomes this expectation of participation. I think this is a place where churches suffer today. They'll say, "Yeah, you have a seat at the table," but what does that mean? Well, it might mean, "Show up at a business meeting," or, "We need your help at the food pantry," or, "We'll tell you what to do."

But now there becomes an expectation of participation in all that the council is doing, envisioning, sitting, and listening.

If everyone is in the council, then we need the counsel of everyone. I think the Divine Council worldview brings us in that direction.

Rich: Let me ask you, how did it work out with—you had an associate pastor, your brother, Pastor Dan—how did that work out with him? You guys doing that work? Did you bring it to him? How did he find it? How did you guys work that out as a leadership pair? How did this work out for you guys?

How did your leadership team engage with the polity changes you made?

Anthony Delgado: Well, one of the things that we did—so we did the boring stuff too—we still drafted bylaws when we replanted. We had to sit down at a table, and what I did was bring them a couple of different loose structures.

I did the hard work. I did all the research. I brought our initial group of elders—there were four of us—some bylaws. We talked through them. We talked through the strengths and weaknesses. We picked one, and then I went and drafted what that model would look like for us.

We sat down and went through it line by line. As a group, no one of us at the table had more authority than the other. We edited live, talked through it. We got to some things like qualifications of elders, and we said, you know what, this is so complicated, we're just going to say it's at the wisdom of the elders when bringing on a new elder or doing discipline of an elder. We said, "Let's see how that plays out." It's going to be at the wisdom of the elders. Maybe we bring that one to the congregation. Things like that.

We agreed where we needed to agree and favored, again, the Divine Council idea—bringing in more voices. Whenever you have more voices, you have more people listening to the Holy Spirit and more wisdom.

We just favored the idea that anywhere one person has more authority, you have more opportunities for abuse. Even though I'm our lead pastor, I'm always looking for more places to bring other people in.

We've had interesting opportunities where part of the problem of training up good qualified elders is they leave you to do ministry. We're at a place right now where, as of July 1st, I'll be our only elder for a quick minute. So we've had to figure out how the rest of our church fills in some of those gaps.

And they are. They're already ready. They're already serving and filling in these gaps. I have no concerns about it. They're stepping up to do that because this is what our church knows to do.

They know to operate as a council. Nobody thinks, "Oh, I can't question Pastor Anthony," because I'm not even putting myself out there as somebody that can't be questioned. That's not the expectation. There's an expectation that everybody is involved and participating in being a part of what we're doing together—all of it.

Rich: All of it.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah.

Rich: All of it. Yeah, you love to hear that. All right, and how has this changed your church in liturgy? What has gone on with that? How has this affected that part of what you do?

Anthony Delgado: Yeah. You might have heard in what I just said about the church's polity, you might have thought, well that's interesting. Because you go to some hard evangelical churches, and there's a lot of formality. Then you go to others and it's really messy, and you never know who's doing what.

There is sort of a balance between formality and informality. Maybe it's not even a balance—maybe it's a layering, where everything is simultaneously formal and informal.

One of the things we do that's way different—whatever expectations you have of Baptist churches, whatever image comes to mind when you think of that word—it's not us. We have a formal liturgy that we follow, not unlike what you'd see in a high-church setting, like Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, or high-church Lutheran settings. We have a very specific formal liturgy.

How does meeting outdoors (at the park) affect the way your church experiences worship and ministry?

Part of the replant was that we bought a piece of dirt, but we haven't built a building on it yet. We moved into a community that has zero church buildings, and we're the only church. What that means is we meet at a local park. We pop up church every single Sunday.

We've got soccer games, basketball players, and knuckleheads riding dirt bikes and motorcycles that get really loud when they pass by.

Rich: By.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah. Did you hear that in one of my sermons? Is that what that is?

Rich: Yeah, I listened to like five of them, and they're great. You hear "rat, rat."

Anthony Delgado: You hear the brakes. That happens like one out of three weeks. I think it's intentional. Or guys with their lowriders coming down the street or whatever. It's always something.

Honestly, it's comical. We had a guy, completely strung out, come lay down on the grass between me while I'm preaching and the congregation—and proceed to take off all of his clothes except for his boxers.

We've had all kinds of crazy stuff happen. But you don't get that type of opportunity for ministry in a building.

Rich: Yeah, hundred percent. I remember it too. It was cool.

I remember because I used to do a lot of work out in Berkeley at People's Park. Eventually, once we built relationships and made ourselves known there, we'd feed people and make hundreds of sandwiches a week.

We would have a little service because most of the people there were never going to be let into a congregation. So we let them come, no matter if they smelled like urine or whatever—it didn't matter. Come sit and enjoy. We'll love and care for you.

But the first time I had this young man share some of his testimony—his name was Holly, he was about 18—in the background, and this is Berkeley, California, right? In the background were a bunch of old hippies dancing around a tree naked while this guy is trying to share his sermon.

I barely kept from laughing because it was the funniest thing—this guy trying to share his heart with people, and in the background, you have people dancing around.

But it is a great place to be because you never know who's going to be there and what opportunity you're going to be given in those moments.

How has your liturgy and style of worship evolved based on your theological framework?

Anthony Delgado: Yep. So there's this balance between formal and informal. That's basically what happens.

We celebrate the Lord's Supper every Sunday as part of our liturgy. Our liturgy takes up the formal portion of the service—about 35 to 40 minutes—and then we follow it with a sermon.

We don't, as part of our model, do kids' ministry on Sunday morning. Our kids are part of our Divine Council. They're in service with us. We have coloring sheets. We call it a kid's bulletin—it folds in half and has coloring, word searches, and all kinds of stuff tied to the sermon. It has kid-specific questions. There's an expectation that kids are participating in everything we're doing at their level and according to their engagement.

They stand and sing, but they're laying on blankets, sometimes running around being kids, sometimes yelling something out because they got distracted, or whatever.

The informal environment came with an unexpected result. Our church, because of the profound nature of the formality adults see—and also the informality making it comfortable—we've become a church that attracts a lot of special needs families.

We have a lot of special needs kids in our church. It's not strange for a dad to chase a kid literally through what you would envision as the "stage" area during the sermon. You see it on the video all the time if you watch. And it's just what we do. It's great. It's formal and it's informal.

I say all this because the Divine Council worldview frames our liturgy—the unseen realm frames the liturgy—in this formal-informal way. I'm afraid when we talk about the Divine Council, some people might get too formalistic of a view, thinking somehow our eternal state might be something like an eternal court session.

Rich: Hmm.

Anthony Delgado: And that sucks. I don't want that.

Rich: That's just as bad as sitting on a cloud for all eternity.

Anthony Delgado: Right. When we were kids, that's what we thought heaven was. I don't want that either. Nobody wants that. I don't even play the harp.

Rich: Right, right.

Anthony Delgado: I'm not even that kind of harp-playing type. Can I play guitar for eternity at least?

Rich: How dare you, sinner.

Mel: Hey, by the way, since you're on this topic, can you tell people where to find your church sermons you're talking about on YouTube?

Anthony Delgado: Yeah. A lot of it can be found on our church website, which is Palmdale Church. Under the media tab, there’s more on our YouTube channel.

If you go to youtube.com and put an "@" symbol—@PalmdaleChurch—with no dot, you can find it there. If that gets complicated, because sometimes even I can't find it easily, just search for Palmdale Church in the YouTube search bar and you'll find it.

The complicated thing about our church name is I thought it was such a great idea because anywhere you go, if you search for Palmdale Church, you find us. But we're not Palmdale Community Church, we're not Palmdale Baptist Church—we're just Palmdale Church. Apparently, that has become super pretentious because there are like a hundred churches in Palmdale, so it's super pretentious to just claim to be Palmdale Church.

Mel: That's awesome.

Anthony Delgado: Like—yeah. When you were the church in Corinth and it was the only church, it wasn't pretentious. But anyway, that's awesome. So it was a little pretentious, but we did it for search engine marketing reasons. It does make us really easy to find, but also complicated because people are like, "Which Palmdale Church?" It's like, no, just the one that's just Palmdale Church. That's how you find us.

Rich: Literally. And what is the community like where you're at in Palmdale? I mean, I was there and stuff, but what is it like in the area where you guys have planted your congregation?

Anthony Delgado: We're super boring. We're very suburban. But we're not typical suburbia.

Our community is predominantly Hispanic. If you were making a TV show about suburbia—and I'm not super into racial stereotyping—but you'd probably put mostly white people with some token ethnic diversity, because that's the stereotypical suburban experience. You'd play off of all the middle-class white America suburbia stereotypes.

We are suburban in the sense that it's a bunch of big houses on small pieces of land that all look the same. But at one point, it was about 79% Hispanic. That's come down a little now. There's a noticeable white and black population, and almost nobody of anything else.

Mostly white, black, and a lot of Hispanic. What's interesting is that it's predominantly working class. There are no churches in the entire zip code—there's like 44,000 people. That tells you something about the community's values.

On a Sunday, everyone's out in the park with us, but they're not with us—they're not doing what we're doing. It's a very interesting environment. Everyone is very family-oriented, at least when they're outdoors.

We have two parks in the community, lots of soccer fields. Soccer is huge. Sports are huge, which is to be expected, especially in suburbia.

There are some things that are predictable about suburbia. Last I checked, it was around 65% English as a first language, even though it's predominantly Hispanic. That’s helpful from a ministry standpoint, but unfortunately, most of the people who are interested in religious things are Spanish as a first language—which isn’t our church.

Even though my last name is Delgado and I'm Hispanic, I actually don't speak any Spanish.

Rich: Any English.

Anthony Delgado: Way too—I'm sorry, I don't speak any Spanish. I'm way too English-ized.

Rich: You're fantastic for not speaking—yeah, you're doing great, man. It's incredible. It's really good.

Yeah. And have you, in the past few years, seen the same problems in communities even up there with things like fentanyl and stuff like that? Are you finding any of those issues? Like drugs, meth, and things like that overtaking it?

Anthony Delgado: On our side of town, we don't get as much of the higher-class drugs. The fentanyl issues are on the other side of our valley.

Rich: Okay, that's right.

Anthony Delgado: Where there's a lot more money. We do have ridiculous fentanyl issues over there. We're getting a lot more of the traditional amphetamines, and crack cocaine is still a huge issue. Obviously, marijuana use is through the roof. It was weird—this last Sunday I was joking that somebody was feeding a perpetual pot fire in their backyard. The cloud of pot smoke didn't leave where our service was set up from eight in the morning when we started setting up until we literally left at noon. It was the craziest thing.

Mel: Some churches get fog machines and laser beams. You guys just get a pot machine?

Anthony Delgado: Yeah, it's just built into Palmdale. What's funny is that's always been Palmdale—even before marijuana was legal out here. Some things never change.

Rich: And what side of the valley is that Air Force base on? Sorry, I remember going there with Mike.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah. So Edwards Air Force Base is further out into the desert. It's near us, but if you're coming north from L.A. and then you hit the Antelope Valley, you have to keep going north and a little further east, and then you hit it out there in the desert. It's huge. Edwards Air Force Base is bigger than the whole Antelope Valley. John Perry worked out there.

Rich: Yeah, he called it Area 52 and took me and Mike out for a visit. We went to the museum and saw all the different tests they'd done over the years. I told people they had like the Silver Surfer surfboard they were testing out in the 1960s, flying through the sky. It was wild.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah, there's some wild stuff going on out there.

Rich: Yeah. Do you ever have anyone from that area—anyone from the military—that you guys interact with? Do you have anybody from your congregation at all?

Anthony Delgado: No. I'll be honest, most of the military personnel—we have a couple of the bigger, more traditional, conservative evangelical churches that attract most of the military, most of the police officers, sheriff's department, medical personnel, those types. Most of the emergency service personnel tend to lean toward a specific type of theological environment.

Rich: Yeah.

Anthony Delgado: Not to say we're not conservative in our theology—I'm just pointing to a specific pocket of where—

Rich: Where they're comfortable.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah.

Rich: All right. And then one of the questions we were gonna ask is: how do you consider yourself spiritual but not Pentecostal? No offense to any Pentecostal whatsoever, but how do you—

Anthony Delgado: Right. I have a lot of Pentecostal friends. This actually comes up a lot in the Divine Council space, so thank you for bringing that up. There are a lot of different people in this space. I feel like we're not just an interdenominational space but an inter-sectarian space.

What I mean by that is there are Catholics, there are Orthodox people—I actually find a lot of Eastern Orthodox in this space—there are occasional Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, and then a number of people who just refuse to pick and say what they are. I think this is a good space for that. Divine Council Worldview theology isn't a denomination; it's not even really a system. Not yet.

Mike was taking some notes on what a Divine Council systematic theology might look like. I think I'm in favor of his early comments where he said it doesn't make sense to make a Divine Council systematic theology. I'd be curious if that ever comes about because he did start taking notes on it, as I understand it. I'd be curious if somebody ever fleshes that out and what it would look like.

You know, John Calvin never meant to make a systematic theology either—that was something that developed over time. Divine Council worldview isn't a system, and it should never become a denomination or anything like that. I think it's a safe space for a lot of different people to exist and to work together.

When I say Pentecostal, the only reason I want to address it is because some people are turned off by Pentecostalism—and I think needlessly. What I hear is people hear something from the Divine Council space, maybe something about demonology, and it triggers some kind of notion of maybe a bad exorcism experience or a theological leaning they disagree with, one that might be more engaged in Pentecostal circles than others.

It's not like you have to believe in the full expression to be a Pentecostal either. I know lots of Pentecostals who have very biblically conservative theology. I don't want to characterize Pentecostalism unfairly.

People sometimes get turned off by it. I think, in a lower sense, all Christians are Pentecostal if you read Acts 2. It's hard to be a Christian and not believe that the Holy Spirit has come upon the church. Even if you try not to read Acts 2 the way it should be read, what do you do with Paul's letters when he gives us a pneumatology—a theology of the Holy Spirit—and speaks of the Holy Spirit as indwelling and sealing every believer?

What are you going to do with that? And the work of the Holy Spirit that comes from Christ and Paul—what do you do with all of that? We are, in a sense, Pentecostal if we are Christians.

What I don't want people to do is completely discount Pentecostalism. What I do want people to do is be spiritual in their leanings and not discount everything that sounds spiritual just because it sounds Pentecostal, if they disagree with certain expressions they have ignorantly considered Pentecostal.

My fear is that sometimes when you come into this space, especially if you've come from a camp that says spiritual gifts have ceased, you'll come into a space like this and hear someone talking about demons and think, "Get out of my face with that," or hear someone talk about a spiritual gift and say, "Get out of my face with that."

I just think we need to be careful with that.

I don't want to tell every single person what to believe. I don't want to tell every church what they need to teach or how they need to structure their dealings with spiritual things.

But at Palmdale Church, we have had to make decisions about this because, again, we took our denomination out of our name. We had to decide in our statement of faith how we were going to deal with spiritual things.

We decided we’re going to defer to the Scriptures on how to deal with spiritual things, and we're going to assume that God is going to do spiritual things. We're not going to say God can't. We are going to read the Scriptures and let God say what he will and won't do, and in what settings.

We want to allow spiritual things to shape our worship, our theology, and our lives—even outside of a worship gathering—but we want to be biblical with it.

I would say that because we come from a more reformed perspective, we are influenced, though not bound, by the regulative principle. If you're familiar with that, the regulative principle says if it’s not in Scripture, you can’t do it.

We come from a more reformed perspective and are influenced, though not bound, by the regulative principle, which holds that if something is not in Scripture, it should not be practiced. While we would be hesitant to say we will see much that is not in Scripture, we recognize that as the context of the world changes—through time, location, and the specific group of people gathered—the application of Scriptural principles may look different, and the working of the Holy Spirit may manifest differently in varying contexts.

As the world shifts and morphs, the application of Scriptural principles is going to look different in varying contexts. Time, location, the specific group of people coming together for various reasons—the working of the Holy Spirit is going to be different.

Maybe in a basic sense, if I spoke three different languages—which I don't; I only speak English and a little Hebrew and Greek—but if I spoke three languages and sat down with people from three different cultures, the context would determine that I would need a different language for each of those cultures.

I wouldn't say, "Well, I grew up in the United States and Southern California, so you're just going to have to deal with my English." Contextualization is important, and God designed the diversity of this world. I think He understands that. I'm not going to limit what He is going to do by His Holy Spirit in varying contexts, but I am going to expect—or at least suspect—that He will work within the means He has developed within the Scriptures.

Rich: Yeah, and just in the past week, I think this is really good.

Mel: I think you're doing a really good job of recapturing the word "spiritual." In today's context, I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with people who aren't necessarily believers, and somehow topics come up and they'll say, "Well, I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual."

But I think you're capturing it in a much better context—kind of reclaiming the purpose or the nature of the word. I also like how you're talking about how the Holy Spirit's going to work differently in different contexts. I always think of—like you mentioned earlier—the layering of things. Even if you bring the same group of people, the same five people, into a different location, I think that location, the time, and whatever has happened in their lives since the last location creates a different calculus that equals a different outcome.

The Holy Spirit is really sensitive to all of that—the individual experiences, emotional state, even things that may or may not affect their spiritual state depending on maturity and stuff like that. The calculus of the situation can be completely different. The outcome can be completely different.

And then if you bring in different people, different cultures, different languages—the Holy Spirit is still the constant, but He’s looking at the mathematics, for lack of a better term. It's a layered, nuanced, contextual thing that eventually equals an outcome. Sometimes we see that outcome, and sometimes we don't. Sometimes we're aware of the calculus happening in the room, and sometimes we have no clue.

I think what you're talking about is really great—letting the Holy Spirit do His thing in that space while understanding it’s going to be different.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah. I think we have a tendency to want things to be basic.

If I can reduce my expectations for any kind of exchange—whether that's in the context of the church, in a worship gathering, or walking into a Bible study, or even having coffee with someone at a coffee shop—I can predict how I'm supposed to respond. I've already rehearsed that situation mentally.

It's why when somebody sets up the chairs differently at church, everybody comes in and has to pause and figure out where they're going to sit. People don't like even minuscule changes. We set up our entire lives around basic expectations.

When we do that, I'm afraid we limit—not what God can do—but our ability to see God working.

For those skeptical of God's work, they limit their ability to see it. But for those who seem to have a need—like the Corinthian church had a great need to see God's working—there's an equally destructive mechanism. If you expect to see God working everywhere, you might see Him working where He isn't.

If we can have a different expectation—that God will always work according to His own nature within all of the infinite variables happening in the moment—it might help. It's not a simple expectation; it's a very complex one.

It means I have to admit that I am probably not going to understand what God is about to do. That's really uncomfortable. But at least if I can understand that I'm probably not going to predict or understand what God is about to do, that might be my best shot at seeing it.

And that will also be the most uncomfortable situation I can ever be in.

Rich: Yeah, those differences were like when we were planting a church in Berkeley, but the work that went on in the park was very different. The people that came to the congregation in Berkeley were all college students. The people that we were with in the park were majority—you know, they were all college grads from—

Anthony Delgado: Berkeley, so—no, I'm just kidding.

Rich: Yeah. At some point, you know, actually most of them were probably from Oakland, in the streets of Oakland. You're dealing with very different things—crack addicts, heroin addicts, drunkards, murderers, bank robbers. The work is going to be very different when you're out there, and you don't know what's going to happen. You have no idea how things are going to go.

But you can understand that God is going to do something. And if you're available, you can see it—good, bad, or indifferent. Who knows what happens?

But just like you said, the DCW is not a system that people fall under. It's meant to really undergird some of the other things that we're doing, wherever we are.

Just in the past week, honestly, it epitomizes or reflects what we've been doing for the past 12 years. I've spoken with about 15 different people. Me and Mel have spoken with several of those together. They are just so wide-ranging and diverse—from different parts of the world to different parts of the country.

One day, I had lunch with a couple that I would consider normal Baptist people who found Mike's work. The very next day, I had lunch with people who were just straight middle-earthers—conspiracy, conspiratorial—but all rallied around this thing that helped them understand more about the faith.

For me, that's very comfortable because that's what we've been doing for 12 years. When me and Mike would work, there was such a wide range of people, and the goal wasn't to try to change them and what they were doing, but to lead them and draw them closer to the biblical faith that would help them live it out where they were and whatever they were doing.

Each person is unique where they are. Each group and congregation is unique. But we have these certain truths that underpin our faith, that we stand on, and then we trust God as we go out and work.

Anthony Delgado: Nice. Yeah. I love that.

Rich: All right. Let's talk a little bit about your book while we're here, since it's one of the reasons we're doing this. Tell us about it. Go ahead.

Can you tell us a little bit about your book The Gospel is Bigger Than You Think and what inspired it?

Anthony Delgado: Yeah. So the book is called The Gospel is Bigger Than You Think. This book has undergone a number of different titles. It started out being called A Biblical Theology of the Gospel with The Gospel Within a Divine Council Worldview as the subtitle.

My wife said, "That's terrible. Nobody's ever going to read that." And she was right. Actually, that was originally the sermon series title. It wasn’t until I got knee-deep in structuring the sermon series that I decided to make it a book. Honestly, it was an even worse sermon series title.

She came up with the title when I explained to her what it was about. And that was good because it happened early enough in the process that I was able to allow it to shape first the sermon series, and then the book. I actually wrote the first handful of chapters during the sermon series, so it really shaped the entire construction of the book.

Effectively, The Gospel is Bigger Than You Think and why I wrote the sermon series—and finally the book—the book is a lot more than the sermon series. I encourage any of the listeners to check out the sermon series. I don't fancy myself the most engaging preacher; I'm told I'm engaging, but I don't fancy myself the craftiest preacher.

I definitely encourage you guys to listen to the sermon series. The book is a lot more, but it’ll give you a good introduction to what the book is about.

Mel: When does the sermon series start? What were the titles and around what date on YouTube? Do you recall?

Anthony Delgado: So the first one should be just about a year ago. I think it was right at the beginning of August 2023, maybe the end of July. It should be just about a year ago that it started.

If you find Palmdale Church on YouTube and go to playlists, there’s a playlist that has all—I think it’s seven or eight—sermons on there.

Mel: And is it called The Gospel is Bigger Than You Think? Is that the sermon series?

Anthony Delgado: Yeah, and it’s got a super obnoxious kind of seventies, big flowers and colors vibe that everybody hated. It's way too fun for the serious nature of the series. That’s why people didn’t like it.

Rich: It’s great.

Anthony Delgado: I loved it. In my mind, I thought, "Hey, let’s lighten this up a little bit," and maybe that wasn’t the way to do it. But anyway, it’s very serious content. It’s good stuff, though, so check that out if you want before you grab the book. It’s a good supplement to it and a good introduction to it.

The main issue I wanted to address with the book is this: why do we have people professing Christ, getting baptized, coming to church, and then immediately just sinking into a seat or a pew as observers?

You take them out to lunch and say, "Hey, let’s talk about next steps. Let’s see what you know," and they go, "Yeah, I don't know, maybe we could do something," or, "Let me check my work schedule." You ask if they want to do a book study or hang out at the church and talk through ministry things, and they say maybe, but then they never engage.

They never do anything. They never, to use a more technical term, get discipled.

You start wondering, are they listening to anything I say in my sermons? And then they start coming every three weeks, then every four weeks, and you’re calling them, saying, "Hey, I haven’t seen you." They say, "We got busy," or "We’re out of town," or "We got sick." Then it’s three months. Then it’s never.

I just had that happen with a couple. A friend of mine called and said, "Hey, did you hear they’re getting divorced?" And I said, "That’s interesting because when I did their wedding, I told them that if they ever started having trouble, the first thing they needed to do was call me."

It’s a pattern, and it’s heartbreaking as a pastor to see people give up. Not just—I’m not the judge of eternal souls—but it feels like they gave up their temporal life and, with it, their eternal life.

Again, I’m not the judge of eternal souls. I don’t know if that’s what happened. But that’s what it feels like.

It’s not just a pastor thing either. People in the church come to you and say, "What’s going on with so and so? How come we haven’t seen them?" If somebody’s coming to me, that means they’ve already been talking to each other. Especially in a church like ours where there’s so much connection—80% of our church is in small groups, which is unheard of.

There’s a lot of interconnection. So if they came to me, they were already talking to each other, and they’re heartbroken over people who are missing.

That’s a problem that needs to be corrected. And what I think is happening is not so much that the gospel is wrong, but that the gospel they’re professing to believe isn’t enough of the gospel.

Functionally, what I believe is that if I'm going to define the gospel the way I define it in the book, the gospel is so big that a lifetime is not enough to believe the gospel. A lifetime of study will never be enough to fully believe the gospel. Just throw that out there and put a pin in it. That's how big the gospel is.

Now, you're not going to read this book—and even if you agree with every word I say, which I have no expectation that anybody will—but even if you do agree with every single word, you're still not going to know the whole gospel.

What this book is supposed to do is open your mind to avenues of thinking. It kind of reminds me of Mike's work. Mike didn’t have any interest in becoming a cult leader who developed every truth of a system. He wanted other people to become inspired to do more work.

In many ways, that's part of the mechanism behind why I wrote this book. Mike inspired me to write. I’ve been writing my whole life, but Mike inspired me to publish and to get my work out there. That's kind of what this is—I want to inspire people to think more broadly about the gospel because the gospel does more than magically convert people in a moment.

What is the 'Gospel of Middle America' and how do you critique it in your book?

I call it in the book—and stop me at any time if you guys have questions—the "Gospel of Middle America." By Middle America, I don't mean middle-America technically, but colloquially, the way we use "Middle America" to mean what most Americans tend to believe.

What Middle America tends to believe about the gospel is something like: if I believe in Jesus, I'll go to heaven when I die. That's kind of it.

I've had people tell me this all the time. I worked in high schools for years, and the kids all knew I was a pastor. Most of them went to other churches. In a Catholic or Hispanic context, most of them were Catholic.

And I’m not concerned about what church you belong to—I care what you believe. So I'd have a kid come to me all excited saying, "I did my confirmation, I'm taking my first communion," and all of that. I'd say, "That's great! Let me ask you a question: why are you doing this? What do you think the gospel of Jesus Christ is?"

And they would say something like, "Well, it's because I believe in Jesus that I'm going to go to heaven when I die." And in my brain, I think, that's not Catholic doctrine. Where did you even get that from? I know you didn't learn that in catechesis.

Is it sort of in Catholic doctrine? Kind of. But is that what they taught the kid in catechism? No. So I wonder, where did you learn that?

Then I teach them the gospel. Now I’m in my media arts class teaching a kid the gospel, which is great. That’s like the greatest thing.

Mel: I wonder if part of this is—and I don't mean to disparage the evangelical effort, and I don't mean the religious identity of evangelicalism—but I mean the literal mission, the verb of evangelism, that we went through here in America through the 1900s.

You could kind of typify it with Billy Graham revivalism and that whole era. Revivalism—you feel convicted of your sins, you go forward, you have this salvation experience, and then you kind of point to that day and it's like, "Now it's done."

And then you kind of ignore the remaining chapters of that person's life because it's like, "They were saved on this date, and then they went to heaven at the end of their life."

And this is where I see you going with it. It's like, what about restoring Eden? What about the Edenic mission—the mission to create disciples, the mission to bring about "on earth as it is in heaven"?

Now that's your job. Now you can really get to work. Now you can really do the thing you were meant to do.

Rich: Yeah. The dominion mandate of the garden is to defeat sin. He was victorious over a great deal—many things—including the powers and principalities. And that all comes into the work and things that we do.

It is great to reconcile people from their sin, but there's a larger story that goes on that we actually get to play a part in through it.

Anthony Delgado: Yep. And that's one of the interesting things. When you get into the theological side of the gospel, you sort of get two major camps.

You'll get the Christus Victor folks and then the PSA folks—the penal substitutionary atonement—and now you're getting into people who have really studied the gospel and are digging into the theology of it. Which can almost be dangerous at times, because when you do that, you tend to camp out.

I actually have two chapters in the book where I don't pit them against each other. I say, you know, "¿Por qué no los dos?" Why not both? Those are the only Spanish words I know.

Because I think something happened legally at the cross—I do—to atone for our sins. But the Christus Victor guys are right that Jesus conquered sin and death.

I think the Divine Council worldview takes that a step further, as you just said, Rich. Chapter four of the book, which I think you might have read, really takes that a step further to say, but where did sin and death come from? Where was that inspired?

It walks through this narrative of how Christ has conquered not just sin itself and death—the results of sin—and his rising from the dead, but also conquered the beings that had authority in the cosmos.

All authority in heaven and earth was given to him. And it's part of the hypostatic union that he became King of heaven and earth. That's not something we’re usually taught when we study Christology.

In Jesus, 100% humanity and 100% divinity, when he receives 100% of all sovereignty, he becomes King of 100% of the heavens and 100% of the earth. He becomes the perfect King in the cosmos over the fallen kings of the cosmos, and he becomes the perfect King of earth where even David failed. He becomes the perfect, perfect King of earth.

I'm not sure exactly how I said that in the chapter. I wrote that quite a few months ago now, but that's the idea there.

Mel: Just some technical difficulties. But, Anthony, you were talking about the gospel of Middle America. Go ahead and kind of finish or let us know what your thoughts were on that.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah, so we were just talking about how obviously there are implications of the gospel that need to go broader than just a basic "Jesus died for my sins so I go to heaven" type of thinking.

That doesn’t really answer the transformative questions people have that need to affect the way they live their lives now.

In the book, I describe the gospel of Middle America as like a folk religion. It's interesting because even across sects of Christianity and denominations—and even outside of it—people who maybe only identify culturally with Christianity still believe a gospel like that.

"I'm good because I believe in Jesus, so God will accept me when I die." And it's like, you've never even read the Bible. Why do you believe that? You just happen to believe it. It's really a folk religion.

In the book, I compare it to Appalachian folk magic. Maybe that's a weird flex for people, but Appalachian folk magic comes out of this weird intersection of Dutch Reformed theology in the Appalachians during the post-colonial period and early pagan sympathetic magic.

It came about because the Dutch Reformed churches didn't have the means of dealing with a lot of the practical issues of the day. Their theology didn't answer those practical questions. So some of the cultural folk traditions that had come from paganism before the Dutch became Christianized had carried over and began to intersect with the Reformed faith.

You get this divide between the official religion of the Dutch Reformed Church—which is very well-defined—and the actual practices of people in the Appalachians, who would say, "Oh yeah, I'm Dutch Reformed," but what they actually believed was a sort of Appalachian folk magic or sympathetic magic type of thing. Their gospel was very thin.

Their religious beliefs were really based on what works for me to get through life now, and had very little to do with actual spiritual or eternal realities.

That's kind of what’s happening with the gospel today. People like the idea of fire insurance. They like the idea of not going to hell, but then they go to church and really all it's doing is keeping them from sleeping in on Sunday morning or getting some extra rest.

They're equating that sacrifice—missing out on something they want to do like sleeping in, hanging out with their family, or going to a concert on Saturday night—with faithfulness. But they haven't been taught what the rhythms of Christian community are actually about.

The gospel becomes some abstract, eternal thing, and functionally they walk away from it. They lose their need for the body of Christ.

I recognize some people have a very formal view of the body of Christ as an ecclesiastical structure—the church itself. I take more of that type of view. Others will say it's more about Christian community, and I think there can be a place for that too.

But either way, you have to have some kind of Christian community. You have to have the church. If you don't have that, I don't really see that you have an effective gospel operating in your life.

So we end up with this kind of folk religion where people think they have a secure eternity, but they don’t even have a spiritually secure here and now. That's kind of what we're getting at with the book.

Mel: So let me kind of throw this at you. And I know you're going to have words on this, so let's tease it out a little bit.

What I kind of hear is similar to what Dr. Matthew Bates talks about, and even what Heiser referred to, that your salvation or your eternity is kind of a result of believing allegiance, or believing loyalty.

I think Matthew Bates’ idea was that the whole word we translate as faith, pistis, really a better word for that would be allegiance. And so it sounds like what you're talking about is that a lot of Middle America just has the believing part, but they're not doing the allegiance or the loyalty part.

It's not an ongoing process. It's kind of like, "Well, I believe the sky's blue, but I'm not really doing anything about it." What are your thoughts on that?

Anthony Delgado: Yeah, so the third chapter of the book—it's actually the second sermon in the sermon series but the third chapter of the book—sort of addresses this question in a more thorough fashion than I'll do here.

How does the idea of allegiance or believing loyalty connect to your view of salvation and discipleship?

I'll answer it this way. As a young adult, I was highly influenced by the work of John MacArthur. These days, not so much. But he had a doctrine that is controversial to a lot of the lighter evangelical subculture called Lordship Salvation.

Today, it's seen as a kind of fundamentalistic view that basically says if you're a Christian, you better follow all the rules. If I can characterize what Dr. John MacArthur was talking about, that's what he's saying: Jesus is Lord, so follow all the rules.

I prefer to talk about Jesus as King because a relationship with a king is a little bit different. Yeah, there are rules involved, but a king's role with his people—especially if you have a good king, and obviously Jesus is the best King—is different.

A good king's immediate responsibility is to the people of the kingdom. A king is only rich because he takes care of his people. He needs the means to do so. A king amasses armies and servants so he can defend his kingdom. All of these things exist for the purpose of the people.

We have God's providence because Jesus is King. We have provision because Jesus is King. We have comfort in God's kingdom because Jesus is King. All of these things exist because Jesus is King.

When it comes to allegiance and loyalty, what I'm afraid people hear is Lordship Salvation fundamentalism—"follow the rules"—and that's kind of part of it, but it misses the heart of it. Why does the King even have the rules?

If I'm honest about what I think Jesus’ rules are really about, I think they are more often thou shalts than thou shalt nots, if you've ever noticed that. They are things like "Love your neighbor as yourself," not "Don’t do bad things to your neighbor."

Positive commands are more about creating positive environments that are good for people.

I often say that sin is sin because it’s bad for you. God’s laws are about what is ultimately good for you, for your interactions with other people, and for society.

Like, I don't know why, but just don't make that noise. I can't, you know—and maybe it's not gonna be good for you if you keep making that noise. Maybe it is still. But like, God doesn't have preference-based rules.

God doesn't say, if I can be super controversial, "I disapprove of homosexuality because I think it's icky." That's not what it is. God disapproves of homosexuality because it’s not good for humankind, for a number of theological reasons that I obviously can't fully unpack right now.

It has to do with core, fundamental theological realities of who God is in relationship to his people. It’s not good for human flourishing or for human relationship to God, and therefore it’s against God's law.

Sin is sin because it's bad for you. It's bad for human flourishing.

When we talk about Christ as King being a fundamental reality of the gospel, it’s about forsaking your own sovereignty and submitting to Christ’s sovereignty. It’s submitting to a higher sovereignty—not abstractly—but giving your allegiance, your loyalty, to Christ as King.

It’s acknowledging that his ways are the better ways, the ways that are going to lead to your own personal flourishing, to the flourishing of your relationships, and ultimately to the flourishing of the kingdom of God and human society.

That's how I think I would answer that question regarding allegiance and kingship.

Mel: Do you also think that some of the reason for the laws—and I absolutely get what you're saying about them being for our benefit—but sometimes I feel like, and we've had this discussion point in some past episodes, and I'm trying to unpack it myself, that there’s more to it?

Like, even how marriage on earth is an image of the relationship we have with God. There's a lot there. It's a small, very dirty, filtered view of what our relationship with God is supposed to be.

But there’s also this sense that in a marriage, each spouse has things that show love. Like, if you want to show me love, this is how I receive it: if you would rub my feet, if you would cook meals, if you would do these things.

Even though it’s counterintuitive to you—because you hate rubbing feet, you hate cooking—because you do them for me, I know you love me.

And I wonder if that’s also one dimension of some of the laws. When Jesus says, "If you love me, follow my commands," it’s like, as you do these things, even when they're counterintuitive to your sinful nature and human will, it shows your believing loyalty, your believing allegiance to him.

How do you understand the role of obedience and transformation in Christian life?’

Anthony Delgado: Yeah. Sometimes we have to draw dividing lines that aren't really there in order to illustrate direction— theological direction. These dividing lines aren't super clear, but I'm going to draw one.

In Orthodox theology, they tend to believe that practice precedes transformation. In Protestant theology, we expect that transformation precedes obedience. Protestants are happy to say, "Your sin exists because you don't feel like doing the right thing," where the Orthodox community would say, "If you would start doing the right thing, you would start to love the right thing."

To use your foot-rubbing analogy, the husband who starts to rub his wife's feet because she said, "If you would rub my feet, I would perceive that as love," will eventually learn to love rubbing his wife's feet because the wife will express the receipt of the act of love. Love is always reciprocal.

What's interesting about that theologically is that we love because Christ first loved us. The problem is that if the Christian in no way wants to keep God's law, the theological conclusion is that they in no way have experienced God's love.

If the Christian has no desire for obedience, that becomes a fundamental gospel issue. Now, I understand sanctification is an ongoing process. That's why I said this is a dividing line that's not really there. It's a reciprocal cycle: we experience God's love, we obey, we learn to love obedience, we obey more, and the cycle continues.

We obey, and then we learn to love that obedience. It’s hard, and then we love what's hard. It doesn’t become hard anymore, and then we do harder things. It’s like learning to ride steeper and steeper hills.

The person who never wants to obey in any way has not received the regeneration of the Holy Spirit. Again, this is an artificial dividing line. I grew up in the church. I don't have a clue when the Holy Spirit regenerated my heart. I have no inkling of suspicion. But theologically, I believe it happened momentarily: there was a moment when, on one side, I was unregenerate, and on the other side, I was regenerate.

If somebody in no way wants to obey King Jesus, then that moment hasn’t occurred yet. That's the only conclusion I can draw.

But again, I don't want to be a fundamentalist about it. If I have somebody coming to me saying, "It's just so hard. I don't like any of God's laws. I don't want to do any of it. I just want to go drinking with my friends. I just want to live for myself," I'm not going to say to their face, "It's because you're not a Christian," or, "You don't love Christ."

I'm going to say, "Let's go back to the Bible. Let's talk about what God's kingdom is about." I'm going to point them back to the things they are supposed to love about God, about his kingdom, about Christ. I'm going to return to Christ’s work on the cross.

In the book, there are about seven things Christ has accomplished for us, packed into five chapters. I'm going to go back to those things and lay before them what it means to be a child of God, what it means to be the bride of Christ, what it means to be victorious in Christ, what it means to be a prince in God's kingdom.

I'll try to help them see the beauty.

I'm never going to ask them to pray a prayer. I'm going to wait until it takes hold—until they want to obey Jesus. That's when I know they’re ready to be baptized.

Mel: And, you know, I think those prayers are—'cause like you, I grew up in the Baptist tradition—I think for some people it's something good to point back to at some point in their life, you know, kind of like, "This was a turning point for me." But I think it's better to just look at yourself as part of this ongoing process, asking, "What does my fruit look like right now? What did my fruit look like last month? What did my fruit look like six months ago? A year ago?"

What does my fruit look like right now? What seeds am I planting, and where am I planting them? I mean, sometimes we have no control over where we're planting, but sometimes we do. And sometimes we can know that what our efforts are doing is well intended—like, "My heart's in the right place. This should bear good fruit." And I think that's just a good thought to routinely ask ourselves.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah.

Mel: Right? Because you want to see that love for the King reciprocating and growing.

Rich: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mel: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah.

Mel: So again, tell us the name of your book. As of this recording, it's not out yet, but by the time this recording gets posted—probably mid-August—we think the book will be out. So it'll be available. Where will it be available again?

Anthony Delgado: The Gospel is Bigger Than You Think should be out the third week of July at the latest. So by the time this airs in August, it should be available everywhere—Barnes and Noble, Amazon. A hub to find it will be my website, anthonydelgado.net.

Anthony Delgado: If you just Google The Gospel is Bigger Than You Think, there's already a page on my website that's usually hitting first in Google. So it's easy to find—just make sure you use the word "bigger," get the title right, and it should be there. You can also use my name, Anthony Delgado, traditional spellings. So yeah, sorry, cheap shot there. But yeah, that's it. It's easy to find basically everywhere, and it's gonna be out there.

I'm easy to contact. I'm not the kind of author—I've got a couple of books floating around—I'm not the kind of author who doesn't respond. Again, like Dr. Heiser, who even to the end was really good about answering his emails eventually, even with thousands of followers. I want to be that kind of accessible person. You can find my email on my website—it's actually kind of stupid simple: me@anthonydelgado.net. And you can find me easily on Facebook and Instagram. I'm honestly not on social media a ton, just in bursts here and there, especially when I'm doing something like a book launch. But I'll be checking messages there if you want to contact me.

I'm happy to answer questions and do all of that. I've done things for churches who wanted to get interested—deals on bulk orders, things like that—so anything I can do to support churches, I'm there for you guys.

Mel: That's awesome. And Anthony, I'll tell you this—you've mentioned, both in some of our private conversations and even here during the recording, that you've always just had this gift for writing. And I pray that if that's something that's having an impact, you keep following God's leading in that direction. Maybe some of the topics you've talked about addressing—I think they resonate. I can see them being needed resources at some point. But, you know, don't listen to me—listen to what the Holy Spirit is telling you going forward.

I think the pastoring at your church is obviously going to be a really important thing. And hopefully you can have some crazy good time management skills to pump out some other books if that's where you're led.

What encouragement would you give churches about giving pastors time for rest and re-envisioning?

Anthony Delgado: Well, my church has been very generous with me this summer, giving me time to wrap up this book project. They're eager to see it come out too, so yeah.

Mel: And you know, that's another thing—I want to encourage churches to do this because I've seen this be of great benefit to a lot of pastors. Churches that give their pastor some time off to step back, disengage, and sort of widen their spiritual lens—to get a 30,000-foot view of what's going on in their life, their family life, their church.

To just step out of it for a little bit and be willing to pray about it, take some kind of leading, and then come back with a really cool new vision about where things are going. We talked to Pastor Jim from Flatirons in our last episode, and he had the same experience you're talking about. I can see this being of great benefit to a lot of churches and just the blessings that people receive from pastors getting that time.

Rich: Yeah.

Mel: So what kind of message do you want to leave our audience with? This is already kind of an audience that's—they've already taken the red pill, most of them. Maybe not all of them. Some may be kind of new into the Divine Council, Deuteronomy 32 worldview. What kind of message or challenge would you have for this audience on what to do with this?

What final challenge would you give to listeners who are new or growing in Divine Council theology?

Anthony Delgado: I would say maybe a twofold challenge. First, don't be afraid of what the scriptures teach. You should be skeptical of a gospel or of a worldview that you would have designed.

Anthony Delgado: You know what I mean? So as we get into Divine Council theology, as we talk about the gospel being bigger than you think, it should blow your mind. If there is an almighty, infinite God of the universe who created all things—and I think of David in Psalm 39, or Job, same thing—who says, "Who is man that you are mindful of him?" They see themselves as closer to the animals than to God. They’re thinking about how God wouldn't judge a cheetah for killing an antelope, so why does he even care about human sin? Why does such a great God even care about us?

If there's a God that big and he cares enough to engage with us, don’t you think his way of thinking is going to utterly blow your mind? Let the gospel and the reality of who God is and everything that he's made absolutely blow your mind.

That's one. And then with that thought, thinking about the bigness—and I know that's not great English, but anyway—the bigness of the gospel, keeping that in front of your mind, I just want to say this: even if it means you can't share the gospel in a single setting, learn the biblical gospel to the best you can. I talked about it as being sort of infinite before, but learn what it means to have a biblically robust, life-changing gospel and figure out how to invest that in people.

I know I just said I'm not big on "pray the prayer" type of evangelism. I personally don't do altar calls and stuff like that. I don't care if you do—if you're the listener and you're like, "That's my tradition, that's what we do," that's fine. But figure out what it means to sit with someone for multiple sessions and invest in their life. This is the way evangelism is going to work. This kind of big-net type of fishing that the megachurch movement was doing for so long—that's gotta be out. It's not how it's going to work anymore. It's gotta go back to the old world model of just spending time and investing in people, letting them see the love of God come through you and into them, and helping them to understand how God works through Christ to mold and shape who they are, so that they come to faith in Christ.

Rich: Our testimonies are a big deal for that.

Anthony Delgado: Oh, Rich, absolutely.

Rich: Our testimonies are a big deal for that. Honestly, that's probably one of the greatest tools—what has God done in our life, through our life? How has he led us and shown us those things? How has he saved us from sin, from the darkness, from death, and given us life in him? What does that life look like—the difficulties in it, the sufferings that people endure and that we endure, yet for Christ because he is so great in what he has done? These testimonies, again, although we know them barely here, this is what we will testify about in eternity to the glory of our God, forever.

Anthony Delgado: And that’s a warning. No, I was going to say real quick—that is a warning I give at one place in the book, back to the conversation Mel and I were having about Christ’s kingship: make sure you have a testimony. You know what I mean? If your friends and family don't see that Christ has changed your life, and they still see you living as the old man under the old law, that's going to be a problem. Make sure you have a testimony—and then it becomes a powerful, powerful witness of the gospel.

Rich: Yeah.

Mel: Because we all do, even the people that grew up in church. And I think those are so powerful because usually, like, testimonies—it's like, I remember you saying before, when you're presenting data to your congregation—there’s a difference between data and anecdotal evidence. A person’s testimony is sort of the anecdotal evidence. It is anecdotal, right? But the evidence, the real data, is kind of when you're like, "Listen, I was this way. There’s no way I was going to go another way on my own. There’s no way, out of my own discipline, my own self-fortitude, that I could have stopped doing what I was doing and turned around and gone the complete opposite way."

I think those are really powerful. Like, Rich has got a really powerful testimony in those things. And so I love when people have those really powerful testimonies that just show, "There’s no way I was going to change until this happened—until I accepted Christ. And through that power, it enabled me to do that which I could not." I love those.

Anthony Delgado
Previous

Questions about the Gospel with Kaleb Amos on the Two Trees Podcast
Next

Reclaiming the Historical Role of Pastor-Theologian in the Church