RING THEM BELLS Interview: The Gospel is BIGGER than you think!

Interviews
Written By Anthony Delgado

In this episode of Ring Them Bells, Anthony Delgado is interviewed about his book ‘The Gospel is Bigger than You Think.’ The conversation centers on reclaiming the gospel as the announcement of Jesus’ kingship and the restoration of God’s rule over all creation. Rather than treating the gospel as merely the message of personal salvation or forgiveness of sins, the discussion emphasizes the kingdom narrative rooted in the Old Testament and fulfilled in Christ. Delgado explores how many churches functionally ignore the Hebrew Scriptures, creating a theological disconnect that weakens understanding of Jesus’ mission and authority. Drawing from biblical theology, Second Temple Jewish context, and the Divine Council worldview, he explains that the gospel includes Christ’s victory over spiritual powers and the reunification of heaven and earth through his reign. The discussion critiques the elevation of atonement theories as the gospel itself and urges a return to the broader biblical narrative, where allegiance to Jesus is the proper response to his enthronement. Themes of covenant loyalty, political idolatry, and the cosmic scope of redemption are woven throughout, culminating in a call for Christians to ground their identity not in national politics but in the kingship of Christ, living as ambassadors of a different kingdom in a polarized world.

Jason Bostow: Before we get into it—because I might mention it in the podcast—what is up with the creepy clown?

Anthony Delgado: That’s my grandmother’s artwork.

Jason Bostow: Don’t take offense to the word "creepy." I’m scared of clowns, so it’s not a big deal. We had one of those—I don’t know if it was my grandma or my brother’s grandma—but one of them had it, and it scared me as a kid. Then that movie It came out. Oh yeah, that was horrible. When that came out—whew.

But man, Anthony, I’m so excited to talk to you, brother. We’ve got a lot to jump into. I’m going to share my screen, and we’re going to get rolling.

Welcome to another episode of Ring Them Bells, where we interview top scholars and authors to help you rediscover the narrative of Scripture on its own terms. Today, we have the absolute privilege of learning from pastor, author, and fellow Bible nerd Anthony Delgado.

Anthony Delgado is a pastor and author from Southern California with nearly two decades of experience in Christian leadership and Bible teaching. He studied at Sterling College and Knox Theological Seminary. He is fluent in the work and teachings of Dr. Michael Heiser and incorporates these into his preaching and writing. He is the host of the Biblical Re-Enchantment podcast and the author of multiple books, including The Watchers and the Holy Ones, and the book we will be discussing today, The Gospel is Bigger Than You Think.

Buckle up, as Anthony does not shy away from talking about the supernatural Hebrew narrative and the context provided by Enoch. This book declares loudly that the Bible is a single story of God’s redemption and that it pervades the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation. I believe this book can help us all restore the narrative that Jesus put flesh on and more faithfully follow our King.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show—author and pastor Anthony Delgado.

Jason Bostow: Anthony, brother, it is a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jason. It’s a pleasure for me.

Jason Bostow: Before we get rolling, I just want to say thank you for this book. I’ve absolutely loved it and plan to use it as a valued resource in the future.

So many pastors, scholars, and authors shy away from the weird or supernatural portions of Scripture, and in my opinion, that distorts valuable context for understanding the narrative and our place in it. From the bottom of my heart—thank you for writing this book, for not shying away, for being bold enough to share the actual narrative with your congregation and with the world.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah, man. Absolutely.

Jason Bostow: It's awesome, man. I can’t wait to dive into it—and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. In the opening chapter of your book, The Gospel We Preach, you share your testimony about growing up in a church that had an altar call every Sunday—like mine. Like many of us here at Ring Them Bells, you say that your church taught you that the good news is that Jesus died for your sins so you can go to heaven. That’s very similar to my own testimony—and many others’.

It seems like, for you and so many of us, this kind of message led to constantly questioning your salvation as a child. So Anthony, give us some background on this chapter of your life and how it led you to write this book defending the gospel.

Anthony Delgado: I’m a child of the eighties and nineties, and that was kind of the reign of pragmatism. That’s how I reflect on my childhood now. Whatever you learned in a sermon had to go to work. It had to do something. Preaching wasn’t really about what you believe—it was about what you do and how it affects your life. It was all high application.

That’s kind of my testimony growing up. I was always looking around thinking, “Why isn’t this working?” I went down for another altar call. We’d go to youth conferences every year—there’d be all the emotions—and yet I was still struggling with the same sin day in and day out. What I’ve actually found is that it’s not that the gospel doesn’t work—it’s that I wasn’t receiving the fullness of the gospel.

I needed the gospel to transform me—not just give me an abstract hope that someday when I die, I go to heaven. Because let’s be honest, especially when you’re a younger kid—I think I was baptized when I was ten—“die and go to heaven,” you don’t know what that means. You want that because you don’t want to go to hell, but you don’t know what that means either.

This whole first chapter of the book—and really, the book itself—is about setting up this idea that when we understand the fullness of the biblical narrative, we begin to grasp what the gospel really is. I’m one of those who will say you can probably point to the gospel from any book, any point in the Bible. I know a lot of people are critical of that idea, but I think if you’re reading for it—if you’re reading the narrative of Scripture as a whole—you see that it’s all about the redemption of humankind for the glory of God. So yes, I do think you can find the gospel anywhere.

This book is about finding the threads of the gospel that run from Genesis through Revelation. What I’ve found is that different people need different things from the gospel. They come through different angles and different pathways. Some people might need to hear the gospel through the lens of transformation. Others might need to hear about how bad their sin is. That was traditional for me growing up—very fundamentalist. “You’re a sinner, you’re going to hell, so you’d better accept Jesus into your heart and be baptized.” That message mattered a lot to me as a kid.

But I needed to hear more about transformation and sanctification. I needed to hear about the eternal Kingdom of God. I didn’t even know there was an eternal Kingdom of God as a kid. I remember reading the Bible as a young adult and realizing, “Heaven isn’t the end?” And just thinking, “What are you talking about?” There’s so much more to the biblical narrative—to what God began in the beginning and brings to fulfillment in the end.

I just wanted to write a book to help people find that—and to find their place in it. I know this sounds really cliché and cheesy, but I wanted them to find their place in the story God has written.

Jason Bostow: Wow. Amen, dude. I always describe it as The NeverEnding Story. You read it, and you find this amazing narrative. And then as we walk with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, we find ourselves in that story.

I think that’s the real tragedy of your youth experience—and also mine and many others’. We didn’t get the chance to find ourselves in that grand narrative. It just became about sin management, escaping hell, and getting to heaven. And I will say, God used those things to bring both of us here, right?

I look back on my time in church—when I was walking the altar every Sunday because I was afraid of going to hell, afraid I didn’t say it right or do it right—and yeah, I have a lot of angst. You could even say anger, toward the theology and preaching that brought me to those scared moments. But I will say: glory to God that he used all those things to bring me to this point.

And now, just like you as a pastor in a church—and me with this ministry—we have an edge to show the truth, because we’ve been brought through that valley. That’s something to keep in mind, and I’m sure you’d agree.

Anthony Delgado: Absolutely. That’s a really hopeful, really positive perspective—because if you don’t know what you’re missing, you’re not going to go looking for it. I absolutely agree with that. I also believe that God is sovereign and holy and merciful and compassionate—and that he is bringing lost sinners into his kingdom.

We’re not always going to see exactly how that happens. There’s a very human part of me that sees people hurt and falling away from the church and wants to ask, “Where is God in that?” And yet the promise of Paul in Romans 8:28 is that he uses all things for the good of those who love him. There’s something about God’s working—he’s working in ways we don’t always see. There’s mystery in that.

Jason Bostow: Amen, brother. Amen. And something I had messaged you about—as I was reading your book and also reading Matthew Bates’s book before it—was that there’s been this pull on me to focus on foundational principles of understanding. Things like: What is the Bible? What story is the Bible telling? Who is Jesus? How do we define “gospel”?

We’re going to get into all that because I think it’s important, and we’ll use the lens of your book to explore what the Bible is and what story it’s telling.

In your book, you describe the modern travesty of evangelical churches detaching themselves from the Old Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures, with data suggesting that 40% of Christians question the necessity of the Old Testament. Andy Stanley is famously known for saying that we need to "unhitch" from the Old Testament. We think that’s a travesty here—and so do you.

I love how you point out that this is not just a modern problem but goes back to the very infancy of the church, with figures like Marcion trying to completely remove the Hebrew narrative.

Here at Ring Them Bells, we have a saying—I don’t know if you’ve heard me say it before—we say, “The beginning is near.” It’s designed to help us remember that no matter where we are in Scripture, whether Old or New Testament, we’re rooted in the narrative that starts in Genesis.

Your book echoes this when you say, “If the gospel narrative stems from the Old Testament—indeed from Genesis—it seems to develop as a comprehensive narrative throughout Scripture, potentially from beginning to end.” You go on to say that what we have in the contemporary church is functionally Marcionite. Rarely will a mainstream evangelical Christian reject the Old Testament outright, but many simply ignore it. Others reduce it to moral principles or fun stories.

We almost exclusively preach and develop theology from the New Testament. But in your book, you both practice and call for a gospel rooted in Old Testament theology and narrative.

Anthony, I love that—and I love how you put that. Saying we have “functional Marcionism” in the contemporary church? That was like, “Yes! I’m going to steal that and use it all the time.”

Help us understand what you mean there, and help us see the importance of connecting Jesus to that Hebrew narrative.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah. So, you obviously understand this, but just to make clear what I mean by “functional Marcionism”: when you attach the word “functional” to a term like that, you're saying that someone is practicing something—even if they don't explicitly believe it.

This is a problem in a number of areas in the contemporary church. Marcion literally rejected the Old Testament on the grounds that the Old Testament God was an evil god, while the New Testament God—Jesus—is loving and compassionate. So he unhitched the Old Testament from the New, and he also rejected large portions of what we now call the New Testament.

Because frankly, the New Testament is based on the Old. He cut out whatever didn’t fit, so he could just talk about mercy and grace and the goodness of God all the time.

Sound like anybody we know?

We’ve got plenty of Joel Osteen–type preachers today. It’s not that they deny the hard parts—it’s just that they only want to be known for the good stuff. I remember hearing him say once that he wants to be known for the positive messages, and I thought, “Yeah, everybody does. Get over it. Read the Bible.”

The problem with Marcion is that if you buy into the idea that the Old Testament is all about wrath and judgment and the New Testament has none of that—or if you believe there’s no grace or mercy or compassion in the Old Testament—you’ve completely missed the Bible’s teaching. If you get rid of the Old Testament, frankly, you have no need for redemption in the New. You might as well go live however you want because it’s “all about grace and mercy anyway,” right?

So functional Marcionism shows up in churches in different ways. One, as you mentioned, is that we often develop theology exclusively from the New Testament. Another thing I see—especially when it comes to topics like God’s wrath—is people developing their view from a passage like Romans 4 and then reading that back into the Old Testament.

Now, there’s a place for saying that New Testament revelation teaches something clearly and then going back to observe that in the Old Testament. We wouldn’t see Jesus in Genesis 3 unless we did that. So sometimes that’s totally appropriate. But if you’ve already built your entire theological system and you’re just going back to the Old Testament to proof-text it—that’s a problem.

It needs to be handled delicately. When we’re doing our theology only from the New Testament, we come out with a lot of very rigid doctrines—doctrines that, frankly, helped produce the kind of “evangelical-lite” culture that both of us seem to have grown up in.

You know, where faith gets defined as “believe real hard.” I don’t know if you’ve ever heard someone say, “Well, you just didn’t believe hard enough.” And I’m like, “What are you talking about? That’s not even English. That doesn’t mean anything.”

We needed to hear more—and that “more” is in the Old Testament story. But instead, we want to live just in Paul’s letters. It’s unfortunate. We need to live in the grand narrative of Scripture. At the very least—at the very least—get out of Paul’s letters and into the Gospels.

But that’s what functional Marcionism means to me. It’s about not reading the Bible as a unified whole, or as the BibleProject puts it, not reading it as a story that begins in Genesis and points to Jesus from any point.

Jason Bostow: I agree with all that, and I’m really glad you brought it up at the beginning. It’s important to see this. When we look at Marcion—and even at what we see today—and even what I see in Augustine, the problem isn’t just about removing what we call the Old Testament.

And even that name—“Old Testament”—I think is kind of misleading. I mean, that’s what we all call it, but really it’s the Hebrew Scriptures. What happened with Marcion, and what I see in Augustine, and in so many modern examples of “unhitching” from the Old Testament—or the Hebrew Scriptures—is that we’re actually unhitching from the Hebrew narrative.

We’re cutting ourselves off from all the “weird stuff”—all the stuff that doesn’t fit our modern, Greco-Roman worldview. That’s really what’s happening.

You look at Augustine, you look at Marcion—these were leaders during a cataclysmic change in the church. The church was transitioning from being rooted in this small, Bedouin community in Jerusalem to spreading across the Greco-Roman world. When Augustine influenced the church to reject the supernatural reading of Genesis 6 and pushed away the influence of Enoch, it changed the whole framework.

And then by the time we get to the later church fathers, only three of them knew Hebrew. I’m not criticizing them personally—that was just the state of the church’s relationship with the Scriptures as it grew. But it’s important to recognize that a kind of whitewashing happened—an erasure of the Hebrew narrative and the Jewishness of the text—almost right from the beginning of the institutional church.

Do you agree with any of that?

Anthony Delgado: I do. I agree with all of that. Part of the issue is that most of the church fathers weren’t Jewish. The New Testament is extremely Jewish because nearly all of its authors were Jews. So we do see the Hebrew narrative deeply embedded in the New Testament.

But no, I completely agree with you. There are places where I love to read the church fathers—I think it’s difficult to understand Christian theology without reading them. We need to see how theology progressed. But I can’t say the church fathers are infallible, or even try to put them next to Scripture. They not only disagree with each other, but they frequently get the narrative wrong. They change the narrative.

Now, there’s grounds for contextualizing—Jesus does this with Psalm 82 in John 10. He recontextualizes it a bit for a Roman world to help them understand a principle. There are moments where that’s appropriate. But when it comes to understanding the narrative of Scripture, I’m not sure how helpful the fathers always are.

Jason Bostow: I agree with you. It’s not about throwing them in the trash—it’s just keeping that grain of salt close as we engage with them.

So now we agree on the importance of being connected to the Hebrew narrative. I want to make a quick detour to the work of Dr. Michael Heiser, because no one has helped me repair that Hebrew narrative more than the late, great Dr. Michael Heiser. Many others report the same phenomenon—I call it the Heiser Effect.

To that point, can you tell us about your Heiser discovery moment and your experience with his work? What’s your journey been like?

Anthony Delgado: You know, my story is actually a little different from most people. Most folks talk about Heiser radically changing their theology—helping them see Scripture from a new perspective. My discovery started with an article he wrote on the Logos Bible Software blog. I’ve been a long-time Logos user—since Logos 4, if that means anything to you or anybody else.

I think it was something on Psalm 82, Deuteronomy 32, or Genesis 6. I read it and thought, “That’s kind of interesting.” I clicked on his name, read a few more blog posts, and thought, “This guy’s a little fringe.” So I shelved it.

About two years later—and hermeneutics, by the way, has always been a fascination of mine. The right division of the Word of God has been a soapbox for me. I did my first hermeneutics class at The Master’s Seminary in Sun Valley, which is a very fundamentalist, dispensationalist institution. I still have my final project from that class. The professor wrote, “99%,” then added, “Minus 1% for agreeing with covenant theology.” He later told me, “I don’t ever give 100% to anyone. I wasn’t really marking you down for that.”

That class helped me realize: I didn’t agree with a lot of the conclusions being drawn, but I did appreciate the grammatical-historical method. It’s good—it’s just not enough.

So back to Heiser. My wife was watching a video—one of Mike’s “Start Here” videos—and she found it through some kind of YouTube rabbit trail. She told me, “You’ve got to watch this guy.” And I was like, “Oh, I know him. I’m good. I don’t need to get into that.” I thought he was fringe. I didn’t think there was much to learn from it.

Also, I already had a supernatural worldview. I was already reading Genesis 6 through the lens of fallen angels or rebellious beings. I didn’t yet have what we now call the Deuteronomy 32 worldview—or “divine council worldview”—but I was in that space. Eventually, she convinced me by saying, “This guy reads the Bible the way you do.” And I thought, “Nobody reads the Bible that way!”

I was in my late twenties or early thirties at the time. So I finally watched some of his stuff, and now I’ve probably read and watched everything he ever produced—some of it multiple times.

And I don’t mean to say I didn’t learn a lot from it. I did. I just don’t waste my time reading things I’m going to disagree with 98% of the time. If I get a chapter in and I’m not getting anything from it, I move on. But with Heiser, the more I read, the more the whole system started to come together for me.

People sometimes say, “Well, his work isn’t a system.” But it is. It’s a biblical theology—not a systematic theology—but it’s still a system. So yeah, that’s my introduction to Heiser.

Jason Bostow: Yeah, I think that’s great. And what you said at the end is something I want to hit on. I was just at the Image Conference in Indiana—we’ll talk more about that later—and one of the things that kept coming up, since it was a Heiser conference with a lot of people from the Divine Council Worldview Podcast, was the question of what to actually call this framework. Do we call it the Divine Council worldview? Do we call it the Deuteronomy 32 worldview?

And the reality I came to—the truth that I think you just said—is that we're really just calling it the biblical narrative. Is it a system? Yes. But it’s a system and theme already embedded in Scripture. Heiser didn’t invent it—he brought light to something that had long been in the shadows. And I don’t even think it was in complete darkness. It had just been hidden from most modern evangelical churches.

Other traditions may have retained glimpses of it, but Heiser brought it back out. So it’s not “the Divine Council worldview,” or “the Deuteronomy 32 worldview,” or the “cult of Dr. Michael Heiser.” It’s the biblical narrative—and that’s what we’re all focused on now. I think that’s really important to emphasize.

One thing I did want to mention—since we talked about this at the beginning—you’re a pastor of a church. You introduced this to your church. Tell me about that experience. I know Heiser came to speak at your church, right?

Anthony Delgado: Yeah. We actually hosted a Miqlat Conference—I think it was the first Miqlat Conference—quite a few years ago.

Our church received the Divine Council worldview stuff really well, but there are definitely some caveats. Christians—especially evangelical Christians—love the Bible. By the way, I pastor a Southern Baptist church. That might surprise people. We’re a sacramental, liturgical, reformed Southern Baptist church—so we don’t look like anything you’re probably imagining.

Jason Bostow: I love that. Breaking all the stereotypes—you’re actually following Jesus.

Anthony Delgado: Exactly. Whatever comes to mind when you hear “Southern Baptist,” we’re not that. But the church was that when I arrived.

The one thing I’ve found is that evangelicals love the Bible. That’s always my advice: speak on the Bible’s terms.

One of the things Dr. Heiser and I disagreed on—and we had this conversation multiple times, in person and over email—was his insistence on calling the cosmic principalities “the gods.” I preferred Paul’s wording in 1 Corinthians, where he refers to them as “so-called gods.” In Greek, it’s something like “gods—or so they’re called.” Not dismissively “so-called” in a sarcastic sense, but more like, “this is what they’re referred to as.”

I think Paul does that because he wants to differentiate between the God of the Bible—Yahweh, the supreme God—and these other cosmic powers. He wants to distinguish the unknown God from Mars Hill from the divine rebel powers.

The reason I preferred that language is because I could show it to my congregation directly in Scripture. So when I’m in Deuteronomy 32 or Psalm 82, and it says, “You are gods, all of you, sons of the Most High,” I can say, “Here’s what that means,” and then go to Paul’s language and explain how they’re called gods. I’m not importing language—they can see it in the Bible. That’s really important.

I also believe in relying on the sovereignty of God. I don’t need to say everything in one sermon. And if you listen to my sermons, you might not believe I believe that—because I say a lot! But I’m always building something. Whenever I write a sermon series, I think of it like scaffolding: What pillars need to be set up? What foundation needs to be laid before I can remove some of the old supports?

If I need to knock down theological pillars that have been holding up the church, I’ll do that—but only after setting up something stronger to take their place. That’s how we moved from dispensationalism to covenant theology. That’s how we moved from premillennialism to amillennialism. We might have a postmillennialist or two in the church—but that’s how we made those transitions.

And look, I don’t care if someone out there is a premillennialist or even a dispensationalist. I’m just explaining how we moved toward doctrines that I believe align more closely with the biblical narrative.

It all happens a little at a time—and it took years. But now, there’s not a person in our church who wouldn’t say, “Oh yeah, the gospel is that Jesus defeated the powers in heaven.” Everyone in our church understands that now. So they received it really well—but again, gradually.

Dr. Heiser gave me permission to preach through his Supernatural book. One of the ongoing questions people asked him—and me—was, “Okay, even if all this is true, so what? How does it change how I live? How does it affect how the church functions?”

That’s actually the subject of my next book—I want to apply these principles more broadly to the life of the church.

We went through the book, and I developed the application of the major principles. And I think that was the deal breaker for them. They were like, “This is it. This is so much more meaningful—to think about the Bible this way.”

Then we had the conference, and when Heiser came out, we had a church full of Heiser fanboys. They were all there. Half of them had already read Unseen Realm by then.

Jason Bostow: That’s awesome. I listened to a little bit of your podcast with the Divine Council Worldview—with Rich and Mel—and what stood out to me, what I keep hearing over and over again, is just the humility of that man. The way he interacted with people.

C.S. Lewis is famous for never being too busy to talk with someone—he always made time. If someone came to him with a question, he’d sit down and talk. I am the opposite of that—I’m working on it—but I feel like Heiser had that same humility and patience to meet people where they were.

Can you speak to that?

Anthony Delgado: Yeah. And I shared this in the Divine Council Worldview podcast as well. One of the things that really struck me was—I wasn’t sure what to expect from him.

He came out and did a planning meeting with us. It was very formal. “What do you guys want to do? What should I talk about? Here’s what I’d like to cover.” Very agenda-driven. We shared a meal. It was good, but I still wasn’t sure what kind of presence he’d be.

Rich had asked me to set up a green room for him. He gave me a list of Mike’s favorite snacks and what he liked to eat. So we stocked it all—we had food in there, everything ready. And I didn’t know—was he going to be some kind of prima donna, someone who expected to be ushered off stage with a robe on his shoulders?

But it turned out that, yeah, he did spend time in the green room—but not to isolate himself. He was in there with people, praying for them, counseling them. During breaks, he was just out talking to folks. He’d finish a session, come down from the stage, and start chatting with people—just one-on-one, face-to-face.

When he needed a break, he took it. But he spent so much of his downtime being pastoral. He saw the visit as ministry, not performance. And it makes sense—he was an elder in his church. He was a minister.

So yeah—it made sense that he would see things that way. And I would just say—and hopefully no scholars watching your channel are offended by this—but may all scholars be that way.

Jason Bostow: Oh, amen. I’m glad you shared that, because I think Mike—especially when talking to his fan base or in scholarly contexts—could sometimes speak with such certainty that people got the wrong impression of him. I think I even did at first.

That’s why hearing the conversations from Rich, from you, and from so many others is important. Countless people have testified to the kind of man he was, and I think it’s a great example for the scholarly world—and for myself.

To that point, I want to say: what you described about how you introduced the Divine Council worldview—or the biblical narrative, as we’re calling it—to your church, you did so well in your book too. You didn’t isolate the “weird stuff” into one lump section. Instead, you wove it throughout the narrative, grounding it in biblical nuance.

For this moment, I’ve prepared a short clip from Heiser that condenses this framework into about two minutes. I want to give you a chance to respond to it and pull it all together. How does that sound?

Anthony Delgado: Great.

Jason Bostow: Let’s do it.

Michael Heiser (clip): And so ultimately, the Messiah doesn’t just have to deal with what happened in the Garden of Eden, does he? The Messiah has to deal with the corruption brought by the Watchers in Genesis 6. “I’ve got to fix that problem too.”

See, the Genesis 3 problem is about the fact that now that you’ve aligned yourself to the nachash—and I’ve cast the nachash down to the realm of the dead—you went with him. He, in effect, owns your soul. You will die, and you will not be in relationship with me. You’re not only cast out of the garden—there is no more Eden. You are not only going to die mortally, but you will be forever separated from me.

That’s a problem. God wants to fix that. So that’s what needs to be fixed out of Genesis 3.

What needs to be fixed out of Genesis 6 is human depravity—generally, broadly speaking.

And what needs to be fixed out of Genesis 11 is that the Messiah is not just the Messiah to the Jew only. “I want every nation back into the fold—every tongue, every language, every race. Fill in the blank. It all has to come back full circle to me.”

So we’ve got three rebellions that the Messiah needs to take care of—not just one. And if you have that in your head, you’ll read certain passages and—again—some bells and whistles will go off.

Jason Bostow: Indeed. Some bells and whistles are still going off. First, Anthony, thank you for your book’s emphasis on understanding both divine and human rebellions. That’s something you did so well. You didn’t just label it exactly as Heiser does, but you exposed the rebellion framework presented in Scripture. You brought it out with biblical nuance—and that’s something most people skip.

In my church, for example, we just went through 1 Peter, and my pastor skipped right over all the supernatural stuff. The whole “Heiser thing” was just ignored. That’s why I’m so grateful for you, man—seriously. I applaud you.

Before I say anything else, just respond to that clip. How does understanding the three rebellions—or really, the biblical narrative as a whole—give us a more robust understanding of the bigger gospel your book talks about?

Anthony Delgado: Yeah. I think you’re right. The three rebellions, as Dr. Heiser framed them, really do set the stage for the redemption narrative that starts with Abraham in Genesis 12. I think that’s what Mike was getting at there. It doesn’t strictly begin there—there are promises and hints even earlier—but Genesis 12 is where things begin to take shape.

I usually refer to the first rebellion as the human rebellion. To be honest, the book was finished over a year ago, so I’m not 100% sure how I articulated all of this in the final version, but I’m pretty sure I started with human rebellion.

I think the temptation of the serpent in the garden—what Satan does there—is offer Eve the illusion of personal sovereignty. That’s really the heart of it: “You don’t need God to define good and evil. You can see it for yourself. You can decide for yourself.” So she says, “Yes, I can be my own god,” and she takes the fruit.

That’s why you see in modern symbolic Satanism such an emphasis on personal sovereignty—because that was the original deception. Satan didn’t ask Eve to worship him. Not even close. He just wanted to dethrone God, and he succeeded in doing that in her heart.

That rebellion is why the curse—or, more precisely, the consequences—follow. Adam and Eve are sent out of the garden. If you declare yourself king within God’s kingdom, the true King can no longer let you stay. So they’re removed. Of course, God places the cherubim there to guard the way to the tree of life so they wouldn’t live forever in that fallen state. But the real point is their removal from the presence of God—the kingdom of God, the mountain of God, the throne of God.

God essentially says, “Go build your own kingdom—out there.” That’s the first rebellion: the assertion of human sovereignty. And honestly, I think most people operate with that. Even secular psychology often assumes you should have personal sovereignty. But biblically, we’d say that’s part of our fallen nature—our nature in Adam.

Certainly in Genesis—and in 1 Enoch—we get a little more influence on that narrative. The Watchers come down because they’re interested in the daughters of men. They find them beautiful.

I think there’s enough evidence in 1 Enoch, if we consider it at all authoritative or historically helpful, to suggest they actually wanted to have children. They were jealous—they wanted to produce offspring the way humans do. There’s something to be said for that.

But it’s almost like human rebellion wasn’t enough. Just humans being rebellious against God didn’t prevent people from still desiring to know their Creator. And that’s a key thing, I think. It’s part of being an imager of God—we want to know our source. Nobody is content not knowing where they came from. If someone’s adopted, for example, there’s often this deep question: “Should I find out who my parents are?” We know that longing is real.

Jason Bostow: Yeah.

Anthony Delgado: And I think that’s what it is. As sinful as we are, humans want to know their Father.

So the Watchers come down—and they seem to accomplish a lot. After Genesis 6:1–4, the narrative says the Lord saw that the wickedness of mankind was great. Every thought and intention of man’s heart was only evil, always. That’s the level of corruption we’re dealing with.

Then the flood comes. You have a divine rebellion that effectively seals the deal on human depravity.

And after the flood, as Noah’s descendants spread across the earth, we get what appears to be another emergence of giants—Nephilim. That’s at least suggested in early Christian tradition and in some Second Temple literature. One of those figures is traditionally identified as Nimrod, who leads a rebellion of the nations.

This third rebellion is what I call a social rebellion. Nimrod gathers people to unite against God. And I believe that part of what’s happening at the Tower of Babel is that they are calling down—not just trying to reach God—but calling down the powers of the gods, the principalities.

I think there’s reason to believe they were specifically trying to call upon Azazel. And part of the reason Azazel doesn’t respond is because, one, he has no authority against Yahweh. But two, he seems to be imprisoned—preoccupied in the desert of Dudael, according to 1 Enoch.

Jason Bostow: We should probably talk about the Book of Enoch. We’d be remiss not to mention it since we’ve basically landed right there.

But first, tell us about your book The Watchers and the Holy Ones. Just give us a brief synopsis for my audience.

Anthony Delgado: Sure. So I found that a lot of the translations of 1 Enoch available online weren’t great. The better ones you can buy are a little too technical—they’ve got a lot of academic markup, which makes it hard for the average person to read.

As our church got deeper into the Divine Council worldview, they started asking—and it was the right question—“You keep quoting the Book of Enoch like it’s Scripture.” Which is kind of funny, because I never actually say that. In my preaching, I’ll say things like, “According to Hebrew folklore,” or “In Hebrew tradition,” and then go on from there.

I rarely even mention it’s 1 Enoch unless someone asks me afterward. And that’s intentional. It helps my congregation understand that I’m referring to something outside the sacred canon of Scripture—something that’s not authoritative for the Church but is still useful.

I think one of the major mistakes evangelicals make is this: we believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God—and I do too; I have a fairly traditional view of Scripture. But we then conclude that anything not in the Bible must be wrong. Or worse—heretical, dangerous, even evil.

The funny thing is, a lot of what makes ancient texts “look like Scripture” is actually how we format them today. We use chapters and verses to catalog and reference these texts, just like we do with Scripture. So Enoch looks like a Bible book—not because it’s trying to be Scripture—but because we’ve applied a biblical formatting style to it.

Then people start saying things like, “Well, it’s not even in the Apocrypha—so it must be worse than that.” I’ve even heard people say, “You can get a demon from reading the Book of Enoch.”

And I’m like, “Come on. I think you’re smarter than that.”

Anthony Delgado: Right, right. So my view on the inspiration of Scripture is traditional. But my view on the inspiration of texts outside of Scripture is a bit non-traditional.

Think about it this way—in a Reformed context, for example, especially in the more rigid, capital-“R” Reformed world, preachers believe that when they’re preaching, they’re proclaiming God’s Word. But they don’t believe their sermons should be transcribed and added to the canon of Scripture.

So what does that tell us? It tells us they believe in degrees of inspiration—or that inspiration can mean different things in different contexts. And they don’t just mean their preaching is inspired by Scripture. All the preachers I know pray and meditate on the text. They expect the Holy Spirit to be actively involved in their preparation. There’s a mystical element to that. Dare I say, even a little Pentecostal.

So then, how dare I not say my sermons are, in some sense, inspired by God—and yet clearly not Scripture. That would be dangerous. That’s how you end up with cults—when people start treating their own words as equal to the biblical text.

So when we look at Enoch, I’m not saying it’s Scripture. But I don’t think we should treat it like it’s so dangerous that you shouldn’t even open it. I think we can acknowledge a certain level of inspiration in it—particularly when you consider how many points of contact exist between 1 Enoch and the New Testament.

There are several anchor points that strongly suggest the New Testament authors regarded Enoch as authoritative in some sense. So in The Watchers and the Holy Ones, I try to introduce evangelical Christians—specifically—to this conversation.

Because this isn’t as much of an issue in broader Protestant circles. If you’re Anglican, for example, you probably don’t have the same hesitations around Enoch that a Baptist does.

So what I try to do in the book is two things:

  1. Show where the New Testament authors are drawing from or relying on Enoch.

  2. Show how Enoch provides context for Old Testament ideas that the New Testament writers are assuming their readers already understand.

The structure of the book is simple. After the introduction, about 90% of the content is just the text of Enoch in very readable, modern English. It’s designed to be accessible. Each section is accompanied by Scripture references to reflect on, and then I offer very brief commentary—just enough to help evangelical readers say, “Oh, this isn’t scary at all.”

Jason Bostow: Love that.

Anthony Delgado: I've even had churches invite me to speak on this—just to reassure their congregations. Like, “Hey, this is okay. You can read it. Just do it responsibly.” The danger comes when someone says, “Oh, we found the Book of Enoch—and it’s older than the New Testament—so it must be more authoritative!”

Well, even Heiser held that parts of Enoch may have existed as oral tradition, and I respect that. But personally, I think even that might be a stretch.

Jason Bostow: Totally. That was their preferred way of writing—it was pseudepigraphy. That’s how they did things. It was like, you had fiction, nonfiction, and pseudo. That was just the genre.

Anthony Delgado: Exactly. I think it was written in the third century BC—maybe as late as the second century. It’s pseudepigraphal literature, for sure. And honestly, it’s not just reflecting on the flood—it’s covering a much broader swath of theological ideas.

I think it’s brilliant. I don’t think it’s necessary, but I do think it’s important. That’s why I wrote the book.

Jason Bostow: Definitely check it out, everybody. I’ll have a link to it in the description. It really is an important resource for understanding the Scriptures.

And look, Peter and Jude both reference it—if not directly quote it. And by tradition, Jude is Jesus’ brother. So there’s a strong case that Jesus himself was familiar with it too.

We’ll bring this up again later, but I just want to touch on something foundational here. I believe the authority of Scripture lies with the original authors and audience. Would you agree with that?

Anthony Delgado: Ish.

Jason Bostow: Okay—let’s say “ish” for now. I want to hear your caveats. But let me finish the thought, and then you can respond.

So I believe the authority of Scripture lies with the original authors and audience. And that makes Enoch hugely important—because, like you just said, the Hebrew Scriptures, the Tanakh, what we now call the Old Testament, were brought into their final editorial form sometime between 200–400 BCE. 1 Enoch, as you just said, was probably written around 300 BCE—give or take a hundred years.

So they’re happening at the same time. These books are contemporaries. The scribes and editors who were finalizing the Tanakh were working in the same environment as those writing and preserving Enoch.

And I call those guys “Bible ninja masters”—the scribes who finalized the Tanakh. And it’s reasonable to think they were deeply familiar with Enoch. So reading Enoch is like reading the mail of the editors—it gives us context for what they were thinking and how they interpreted earlier Scripture.

Here’s a silly example, but it makes the point: today, we know the difference between a butt dial and a booty call. If I tell you, “Hey man, I butt-dialed you,” you’d be like, “No worries.” But if I said, “I booty-called you,”—that’s a whole different thing! Now imagine someone from the ancient world hearing those phrases. They’d be like, “Isn’t that the same thing?”

What I always say is, Enoch gives us the kind of cultural and theological context we need to understand those distinctions—the ones that were obvious to the ancients but are totally foreign to us.

So I’ve said a lot—but what are your thoughts on how Enoch informs the narrative of Scripture, and how the issue of authority rests with the original authors and audience? And I want to hear your caveats too.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah. So here are the nuances and caveats. What we have to understand is that when the New Testament reflects on an Old Testament principle—and you can’t immediately find that principle naturally or clearly in the Old Testament—that’s not unusual. This happens more than people realize.

Honestly, the entire conversation about the wrath of God could be framed this way. But one example I mention in the book, which may be more directly relevant, is the Day of Atonement. Some people say that the first goat of the Day of Atonement has nothing to do with Jesus, because they can’t see that in Leviticus.

I would disagree. I think if you're looking for what Jim Hamilton (though I don’t agree with all his theology) calls “promise-shaped patterns,” then yes, you do find Jesus in the first goat—and even the second goat—of the Day of Atonement sacrifice. If you’re tracking the promises of God across Scripture and looking at how they form patterns, I think you absolutely find him there.

Some people resist that because they insist on reading the Bible strictly from left to right. Leviticus must set the pattern for Jesus—not the other way around. But I don’t buy that. The term biblical theology was first coined within the covenant theology tradition, and I tend to side with that school of thought.

In that framework, the New Testament doesn’t contradict earlier revelation—it gives us further revelation that helps us understand what we couldn’t fully see before. No one argues that Genesis 3 doesn’t contain the protoevangelium. We all look at the promise of the seed of the woman and see Jesus there. So I’m not sure why we resist that in the case of the Day of Atonement.

Jason Bostow: Well, John Walton argues with that. But we can get into that another day.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah—I don’t need to go there. I’m kind of glad I didn’t read that one. Every time I see him post on Facebook... anyway.

So that’s the idea. That’s one of my caveats: when we talk about authorial intent, it’s not always clear what Moses—or any other biblical author—actually understood at the time. Think about reading Leviticus as an ancient Hebrew. You might not connect it to Jesus. So if we say the authority of Scripture lies only with the original author and audience, that becomes a bit tricky.

You can say, “It was in the mind of the Divine Author,” and that’s fine. But I don’t think we can prove that Moses fully understood the typological significance of what he was writing, especially in passages like the Day of Atonement.

Jason Bostow: Yeah.

Anthony Delgado: So we have to dance with that a bit.

And then there’s another nuance: we have a whole body of literature—the Second Temple literature—that stands between the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. I appreciate that you brought up how the Tanakh was compiled and edited during that Second Temple period. You're exactly right.

So, we have this development of the Hebrew Scriptures happening during that time, and alongside it we have a growing body of contemporary literature. This is important. They had their sacred Hebrew Bible—but they also had what we might call their “contemporary canon.” These were their sermons, their theological reflections, their interpretations.

This is why my sermons don’t belong in the Bible. Their writings—like 1 Enoch—didn’t make it in either. It was contemporary. It wasn’t canonized because it didn’t come from the earlier inspired tradition. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t meaningful.

Then you get the apocryphal texts that stand between the testaments. And I’d say those texts were inspired—not in the same way as the Tanakh—but still inspirational and influential. Just like I hope my preaching is today.

So when the New Testament authors write the Gospels, the Epistles, Revelation—all of that—they’re writing within the framework of that Second Temple context. They're saturated in it. And they’re not just influenced by the Hebrew Scriptures—they’re also influenced by what was being widely read and discussed in their day.

There are a lot of apocryphal works that existed then but weren’t widely read. But the ones that were—those were deeply influential. Not because they were canonical, but because they were formational. They shaped the worldview of the people. So they were inspirational in that sense.

So, to sum it up: Moses might not have understood all that we now connect to his writings, because many of those ideas weren’t developed until the Second Temple period. And while the apocrypha and other Second Temple literature aren’t Scripture in the same way the Bible is, if you don’t understand that literature, you won’t fully understand the New Testament.

Those are my caveats.

Jason Bostow: Yeah. I get that.

Anthony Delgado: I believe it’s the original audience, the original author. But we also have these “right-to-left” renderings that become necessary in how we understand the Old Testament—because of where we live. We live on this side. We live on the right side of the New Testament. So we have to understand it forward and back—and back and forward.

Jason Bostow: Yeah.

Anthony Delgado: Moses didn’t need to worry about that.

Jason Bostow: Yeah.

Anthony Delgado: He lived in a Levitical day. We have to worry about that.

Jason Bostow: Yeah, I agree with all that. I really do. And I think the point is, it’s just a matter of nuancing—understanding value and authority, and where the line gets drawn between those two when it comes to different texts. But at its root, this is really about understanding what the Bible is.

For most of my youth, I thought the Bible was just this book that dropped out of heaven. Fully formed. Perfect in word. No moment where it wasn’t exactly the way we have it now. And honestly, while that might sound laughable to some people, I think others listening might still be thinking that way without realizing it.

That’s why it’s so important to build a solid foundation for what the Bible is—and how it came to be. Even the book of Hebrews—it’s a sermon. And when that sermon was first preached, no one in the audience said, “That’s the Tanakh. Slap that right next to Leviticus.” But over time, it was so valued that it became part of the canon. And I do believe it’s Scripture. I believe it’s authoritative.

But understanding that process—that’s what helps us recognize the truth and validity of what the Bible is.

So now we’re going to move on to the biblical definition of the term gospel. That’s what your book focuses on, and everything we’ve discussed—divine rebellion, Hebrew narrative, inspiration—it all leads to this. The gospel. While we just talked about the authority of Scripture being connected to the original authors and audience, I think that context becomes especially important when we try to define what the gospel actually is.

Before we go further, I want to watch this quick clip from N.T. Wright. You may have seen it recently on Facebook. It helps us get historical context so we can better answer the basic but crucial question: What did the original authors of Scripture mean when they used the word “gospel”? Let’s watch the clip and explore it together.

N.T. Wright (clip): The word “gospel” in Greek is euangelion, which literally means “good news.” Actually, the old English word “news” is a plural word—“new” is the singular, “news” plural. And so sometimes in Greek, it’s the same—euangelia, good news, as it might be.

And that’s what you find, interestingly, in the first century with some of the great inscriptions honoring the Roman emperors. When it’s the accession day of, say, Augustus Caesar—or his birthday—you sometimes find it carved in stone: “This is the good news—we have an emperor who has brought peace to the Roman world.” Now, that wasn’t always such good news for the people who had been trampled along the way, but we’ll leave that to one side.

The point is, if someone in Greece or Turkey or North Africa heard the word euangelion, or “good news,” that might be one of the first things they thought of—unless they were well-taught Jews who had been reading their Bibles in Greek, as many of them did. Because in Isaiah—Isaiah 40 and Isaiah 52—you get the same word: “How lovely upon the mountains are the feet of the one who brings good news, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.’”

And when we find “good news” in the New Testament—like Jesus, at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel, coming into Galilee saying, “The time is fulfilled. God’s kingdom is at hand. Repent and believe the good news”—what he seems to be doing is very clearly evoking Isaiah in order to confront a world full of other kinds of “good news” that might not be so good.

So the gospel has Isaianic roots, and perhaps Roman imperial targets. When people said, “Here is the gospel of Jesus,” some people would definitely hear: “This is a different message than what we’ve been getting from the Roman Empire.” After all, Caesar called himself “Son of God,” and the Christians talked about a gospel of the Son of God—especially in the letter to the Romans. That was pretty in-your-face.

But the Christians weren’t daunted. They kept saying Jesus is the gospel in person. And when Jesus himself went about announcing that this was the time for God to become King, he called what he was doing “the gospel.” And he was doing it as well as saying it—because the gospel isn’t just a message about something that might happen to us. It is a new reality.

Jason Bostow: I love that clip. So, first, I’m not going to say anything—just respond to that amazing clip and the cultural context of the word gospel.

Anthony Delgado: Man, I don’t think I can say anything better than N.T. Wright, but I think he’s spot on.

There was an emperor shortly before Christ—I can’t remember which one—whose birth was announced using the word euangelion. The Roman proclamation declared him the savior of the empire. So, the word didn’t just mean “good news”; it meant the best news, a royal announcement.

You can actually see it in the word itself. Right there in the middle is angel, which means messenger. We usually think of angels as divine messengers, and rightly so. But in a broader New Testament context, an angel is simply a messenger. In the ancient world, that meant someone delivering a message from the king. So euangelion is a good message—it’s news of victory or royal decree.

That’s why some Bible translations render euangelion as “good news” instead of “gospel.” The word gospel doesn’t make much sense etymologically in English—it comes from old Germanic roots. That’s why we only really use it in church settings now. It’s become a technical word.

I like to paint a picture: imagine there’s a battle. The emperor sends out his best general to confront a neighboring threat. They win the battle. And standing at the edge of that battlefield is a skinny kid—not carrying a sword—just standing there as a messenger. He’s the evangelist. When the battle is won, they turn to him and say, “Go!” He runs back to the capital city, through the marketplace, shouting, “We’ve won the battle!” Then he runs into the throne room of the king and announces, “Victory!”

That’s the image behind euangelion—the gospel. It’s the message of victory, that the kingdom has triumphed.

Jason Bostow: I love that. The proclamation of the Kingdom gospel. That’s what you explore in one of the next chapters of your book, and I think it’s such an important context to hold onto—it’s not just generic good news. This was royal language. It was a political announcement.

And the shocking claim of the gospel is that the enthronement of God as king happened through the crucifixion and murder of Jesus. That doesn’t make logical sense. I’ve been a Christian for a long time, and it still doesn’t make logical sense. And that’s part of the reason this announcement is so counterintuitive—even to the ancient world.

And it’s polemical. The Hebrew Scriptures are constantly pushing back against the dominant worldviews of their time. Like with 1 Enoch, the Watchers, and the divine beings who give forbidden knowledge—the Hebrews are speaking back against those ancient near eastern myths. They’re reclaiming the story.

So that brings us to my favorite chapter of your book—“The Kingdom Gospel.” As we attempt to understand what this Kingdom gospel is, we’ve got to start at the beginning, like you do in Genesis.

In your section on human rebellion, you quote Genesis 3:5, where the serpent says, “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” And then you write: “The word ‘God’ here is translated from the plural ‘Elohim.’ Elohim is a categorical term, meaning ‘divine being,’ and is frequently translated as ‘gods’ or ‘spirits.’ The serpent may have been telling Eve that eating the fruit would make her like himself and all the other divine beings.”

And then you conclude: “For Adam and Eve, rebelling against the King meant exile from the Kingdom. They were cast out of the garden into the world, separated from King and Kingdom.”

Anthony, I love that quote and how you frame the gospel as the remedy for humanity’s forfeiture of the Kingdom. We touched on it earlier, but let’s give this a little more attention. We get later clues in the Gospels about Jesus’ Kingdom announcement as the solution—but first, help us see how humanity lost the Kingdom in the garden.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah, the whole idea is that the temptation in the garden was this: “You can be your own king.” That’s what was lost.

So at the heart of what needs to be restored is the kingship of Jesus. The storyline of Scripture shows Jesus reestablishing his kingship over all the earth. But it’s not just about him being king—it’s also about us being in submission to that kingship.

To me, the fundamental shift that moves a person from the kingdom of the world to the kingdom of God is this: the denial of self-sovereignty and the acknowledgment of Christ’s sovereignty.

Jason Bostow: Yeah.

Anthony Delgado: That’s key. Because it’s exactly the opposite of what Eve did. Her rebellion wasn’t just about a piece of fruit—it was about self-rule. And that’s the posture that has to be reversed in order to return to the kingdom of God.

That plays out through the other rebellions as well, but it starts here. And yes, some people might say it’s about rejecting the serpent—and in a metaphorical sense, that’s true. There are still spiritual beings who speak lies and deception in the world today. So it is about rejecting that voice. But even more, it’s about who we give authority to.

We say things in church like “give your life to Christ.” But what does that even mean? It means he’s King. It means he is the sovereign one—and I am not.

Jason Bostow: And that’s what I want to press into next—understanding the question of authority. Who do we give it to? Right? And through the biblical narrative, if we take the Divine Council worldview—which is the biblical narrative—and we look at these rebellions you talked about, and then the Deuteronomy 32 worldview, we see that God assigned Elohim, or these other lesser gods, to the nations. And then they rebelled.

So now we live in a world ruled by spiritual evil. And then you get to the New Testament where the satan walks into the wilderness to tempt Jesus. He shows him all the kingdoms of the world and offers them as if he has rightful authority over them. And Jesus doesn’t dispute that claim—he just refuses to worship anything other than Yahweh.

It becomes a matter of loyalty. And it points back to this loss of kingship, or transfer of authority. God casts the satan down to the eretz, to the earth—which is the same place he sends humanity. And now, the very place we were called to rule and reign is where we find ourselves under another authority. So when Jesus comes proclaiming the Kingdom of God, my question has always been: where did it go? Where did rulership and authority go? And in my reading of the narrative, it seems like it went to the nachash—the serpent—who becomes the satan. What are your thoughts?

Anthony Delgado: Yeah, you’re absolutely right.

I think the first step in understanding that paradigm is embracing a three-tiered cosmology. Now, not everyone likes that because we’re post-Enlightenment materialists. We want spiritual truth to align perfectly with physical observation. So I’ll say this unapologetically: when I’m watching the news or booking travel, I believe the earth is a globe. But when I’m reading the Bible, I think it’s shaped like a pizza box—with a firmament over it.

Beyond that firmament is the glory, love, and goodness of God. That’s the basic three-tiered cosmology. It helps us understand what it means that the serpent was “cast down to the earth.” He lost his position of heavenly authority. He was demoted.

We see the same idea in the Genesis 6 narrative—especially from Enoch’s perspective. The Watchers come down, have children with human women, and realize they’re in trouble. They want to go back up, but they’re not allowed. So they ask Enoch to go to Yahweh and plead their case. Enoch basically says, “I don’t think this is going to work,” but he goes. And God tells him, “Yeah, that’s not going to happen.”

So Enoch delivers the bad news: there’s no angelic redemption. They are stuck on earth. And what do they do? They begin teaching secret knowledge to humans—using the only leverage they have left. That influence unleashes wickedness on the earth.

Then in Jude—and in Enoch—we’re told that because of their corruption, they are now bound in Tartarus. So you’ve got a progression: from heaven, to earth, to under the earth. That’s your descent. They’ve been demoted, then bound.

Jason Bostow: Yeah.

Anthony Delgado: And this is where the three-tiered cosmology really helps. It’s not perfect in the modern sense, but here’s something interesting: humans don’t actually live in the earth—we live on the earth. Which means we live between heaven and earth. We stand at the intersection. And in Scripture—especially in Enoch and even more clearly in Jubilees—the Garden of Eden is on a mountain.

Jason Bostow: Yeah.

Anthony Delgado: And the reason it’s on a mountain is because mountains represent places where heaven and earth meet. In Scripture, a holy mountain isn’t just man going up—it’s also God coming down. Think of Jacob’s ladder at Beth El. Angels ascending and descending. Heaven and earth overlapping.

That’s what Eden was. It was the meeting point—the sacred overlap between heaven and earth. And after the fall, Adam and Eve descend the mountain. They are demoted. Their pursuit of self-sovereignty results in being cast down to the ground.

So what does it mean to return to the Kingdom of God? It means to ascend the mountain again. What’s at the top of that mountain? The throne. In Revelation, we see the throne of the Lamb. In the Old Testament, it’s Yahweh’s throne. The meeting place of heaven and earth is always centered around the throne of God.

And this is where Christ comes in. He’s the one who condescended from that throne. And now, the only way to return to the Kingdom is to find the one who stepped down to us.

So back to your point—the devil tempting Jesus in the wilderness—it’s cruel irony. He offers Jesus a promotion: “Worship me, and I’ll give you the kingdoms.” But Jesus is like, “What are you talking about? I’ve condescended. My throne is already above yours.”

Jason Bostow: Yeah. No, I appreciate that. The main thing I’m taking away is your connection between three-tiered cosmology and the casting down to earth—it makes so much more sense. And what you said about the ancients believing birds were spiritual because they lived in that space between heaven and earth—we just don’t think that way today. But it’s so important for understanding how the Bible communicates.

And this ties in perfectly. Because the kingdom focus of the gospel—the rule and reign God was establishing in the garden, the union of heaven and earth—is finally realized in Jesus. Not only in his condescension, as you said, but in the union of heaven and earth being embodied in him. Nowhere have we learned that more clearly than through the BibleProject. Another great scholar we love here is Tim Mackey. I can’t promote him enough—just an awesome scholar and communicator. Kind of consider him my rabbi, if you will.

I’ve got a clip here that flows perfectly out of what you just said. It’s about the kingdom announcement and the redemption of God’s world from the nations. Let’s watch it and then discuss. How’s that sound?

Anthony Delgado: Sounds great.

Jason Bostow: Let’s do it.

Tim Mackie (clip): So the question is: how is God going to assert his rule again over the nations?

When we come to the claims of the New Testament, every single one of those documents connects itself to that storyline. They’re trying to present Jesus as the one in whom that whole political conflict finds its resolution.

Take the Gospel of Matthew. What does Matthew want you to know? That Jesus is the Messiah—a Hebrew word that means “anointed king.” He’s the son of David, from the line of Israel’s ancient kings. He’s the son of Abraham. So Matthew is saying, as clearly as possible—especially to a Jewish audience—that Jesus is the promised Messianic King. He’s the one who will fulfill the promise to David that a king would come from his line to rule over all the nations. And Jesus of Nazareth is the one in whom that whole storyline comes to resolution.

If you were to hear Jesus talk on any given day, what would he be talking about? You might hear him say, “Love your neighbor” or “Bless your enemies,” sure—but what you would always hear is, “The kingdom of God is here.”

Here’s Mark’s summary of what Jesus preached on a typical day: “After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. ‘The time has come,’ he said. ‘The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news.’”

The kingdom, the kingdom, the kingdom.

Jesus presents himself as the one who’s here to bring God’s rule back over his world. It’s exactly the storyline the whole Old Testament sets up. The plan was always that there would be a human who perfectly embodies God’s rule and authority over the nations. And we’ve done a pretty bad job of that—Babylon, Egypt... and now, finally, here comes the one. He’s the true human who will embody God’s perfect mishpat and tsedeq—justice and righteousness—over the nations.

Jason Bostow: That was awesome. It’s from one of my favorite talks by Tim. Before I say anything, just tell us your thoughts on that clip.

Anthony Delgado: I’m really taken by how clearly he states it—especially that early point about Christ meaning “king.” I first heard that developed in detail by Matthew Bates, but Tim Mackey nails it too. The idea that “Christ” isn’t just another word for Jesus, but means Messiah, and that Messiah means “anointed one”—that’s something many of us didn’t fully understand growing up.

In a better church setting, you might have been taught that Messiah is the Savior of Israel. But I didn’t really understand until adulthood that David was also a messiah, in a sense. He was Yahweh’s anointed. He was a type of the Lord’s anointed, even if not the Messiah.

Jesus is that true and final anointed one—but David’s kingship helps frame that. And as Tim mentioned, Matthew emphasizes this by tracing Jesus’ genealogy through David. That’s also why Jesus is called the Nazarene. It signals his connection to Davidic kingship.

So when you understand “Messiah” or “Christ” as shorthand for the Lord’s anointed, you start to see how deeply it’s tied to the Davidic covenant. Jesus is the rightful heir to David’s throne—the Lord’s anointed—and the only one who can fulfill that eternal kingship promise.

And it’s a strange promise, isn’t it? That David’s son would sit on the throne forever. Because people die. But Jesus isn’t just a man—he is the God-man, the King from heaven and from earth.

Jason Bostow: Yeah.

Anthony Delgado: And this is where it gets theologically rich. Jesus is both the God who condescends and the man who ascends. He unites heaven and earth in himself. He is Yahweh’s anointed, enthroned forever—and the only one who could fulfill that covenant.

Jason Bostow: Borderline heresy when you try to explain the Trinity too clearly.

Anthony Delgado: And so—wow. Going back to the cosmology discussion, it makes no sense to have a king who is merely human. From God’s perspective, such a king could never reign in perfect righteousness. But from the human perspective—from feet on the ground—humans have a hard time following a king who is only transcendent.

Jason Bostow: Yeah.

Anthony Delgado: So when you talk about the coupling of heaven and earth—the union of King in Heaven and King on Earth—the Christ, the Messiah, is the only possible explanation for that. There were various views in Second Temple Judaism. Some believed the Messiah would be divine—maybe even God himself. There are arguments that some even anticipated a kind of incarnation.

But most Jews were just expecting a man. And some groups, like the Sadducees, weren’t even expecting a Messiah at all. So we can’t really say, “Oh, the Jews were expecting the Messiah, and it means this.” There were a lot of different messianic expectations in that period. But there’s good reason to believe that, through prayer and reflection on the Hebrew Scriptures, some of them were genuinely beginning to grasp the mystery of incarnation.

Jason Bostow: Yeah.

Anthony Delgado: That was the big thought that stuck with me from the clip. But the other thing Tim mentioned was the redemption of the nations. And I want to say a word about that too.

We have to remember that God always fulfills his promises. And the return from exile wasn’t the fulfillment of the promise to reestablish the full kingdom of Israel. Only two tribes—plus some Levites—returned from Babylon and Persia. The ten northern tribes were essentially lost.

So in Romans, Paul says, “In this way, all Israel will be saved.” And he’s talking about the redemption of the Gentiles—the nations. Why? Because those scattered tribes have become assimilated among the nations. God’s plan for Israel was always to bless the nations. And now, the way he restores Israel is by redeeming the nations.

I think that’s a central theme in Daniel. Yahweh preserves Judah as an ethnically distinct people, while the other tribes are assimilated. And in Daniel, you see Babylon trying to get them to assimilate. That’s what empires do—they eliminate internal divisions and unify power. That’s why empires like Babylon and Rome push for assimilation. It’s the same logic behind Hellenization later.

The Jews resisted that—not just out of nationalism, but because they’d already been through this before in Babylon. They understood the cost. But Judah survived because God preserved them. Still, the question remains: how can Paul say “all Israel will be saved”? His answer is: when the Gentiles are brought in.

So when the nations come in, all Israel is restored. That’s how the promise is fulfilled.

Jason Bostow: I love that. That’s a great connection—understanding the nations in the context of God’s promise. Because even from the very beginning, in the family planning we see with Abraham, God’s call of one person, one family, was to bless all the nations.

This was baked into the promise from the very beginning. But Israel didn’t do that. Think about Jonah—they didn’t want to go to the nations. They kept God in instead of putting him out. And it was Tim, from the BibleProject, who helped me see that exile was actually the means by which God pushed his promise outward—out into the nations.

He exiled his people on purpose to send his word to the nations. If they weren’t going to go willingly, he would send them through judgment. And even through assimilation—which we often see as negative—God was using it redemptively to draw the nations to himself.

So I love that. Thank you for sharing that.

And that brings us to something else you mentioned: another great scholar and mutual friend of ours, Matthew Bates. I think what he’s doing really connects all this together, especially when we talk about the Kingdom Gospel. Because the idea that “Messiah” means “king”—that’s something that, for whatever reason, just wasn’t emphasized much in my upbringing. It’s only in recent years that this focus has become more prominent.

Matthew Bates and his work on gospel allegiance have helped me return to that biblical understanding of Jesus’ kingship and lordship. We’ve had him on the show a few times. I love his focus.

I was wondering if you could just talk a little about Matthew Bates and the gospel allegiance model, and your experience with his work.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah. I think I mentioned this earlier in the recording, but when I read Salvation by Allegiance Alone, it wasn’t mind-blowing—but it was amazing. It had so much explanatory power.

What really stood out to me was how people have confused the effects of the gospel with the substance of the gospel. That’s a major theme in The Gospel Is Bigger Than You Think, too. Gospel allegiance—allegiance to Jesus—is, honestly, the altar call. It’s how you move from the substance of the gospel to its effects.

What we’re seeing in contemporary evangelicalism—especially in this neo-evangelical fundamentalist resurgence—is a major confusion here. Some of these guys, including voices in my own tribe and others like The Gospel Coalition, have spoken out really strongly against Bates' new book. And the reason is clear: they’re so tightly wedded to their view of the atonement.

Here’s the problem. If you make your atonement theory the gospel, then yes—of course you’re going to respond negatively to Matthew Bates’ work. And in that sense, their criticism is internally consistent. But they’re wrong on what the gospel is.

There’s been a lot of mockery, angst, and divisiveness in some of those responses. Frankly, it’s not a good reflection of Christian character. That’s what really bothered me about the TGC article, which is why I responded to it on my website. I didn’t respond to the SBTS guys—not because I agreed with them, but because I didn’t think their critique was as brash or in need of a public rebuttal.

And listen—I’m nobody. I get that. But I wanted to point out that these arguments about atonement theories are not the gospel. They’re not the substance of it, and they’re not the response to it.

The mistake people keep making is they treat their atonement theory as the gospel, and then treat allegiance as merely the fruit of the gospel. But that’s a misunderstanding—honestly, I think it’s a misunderstanding of Martin Luther’s conception of faith.

I actually think Luther was orthodox on this. It’s many of today’s neo-fundamentalists who’ve flipped the formula.

Jason Bostow: Yeah, I agree with you there. And I think what’s happened with so much of this—especially around PSA, penal substitutionary atonement—is that, growing up, that was the gospel. Christ died for your sins. That was it. And if you budged on that—if you even added a comma in the wrong place—you were basically a heretic.

There’s this strong, almost militaristic protection around PSA, because people equate it with the gospel. So if you think that’s what the gospel is, then of course you're going to guard it with everything. But like you were saying, that’s a category mistake.

So I try not to get caught up in title debates. Personally, I stick to the narrative. I don’t engage in the back-and-forth over which label fits: PSA, Christus Victor, ransom theory. Even with the end times stuff—premill, amill, postmill—I don’t make that my focus.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with people who do, but for me, staying close to the narrative keeps me closer to the truth.

And that’s what I appreciated about your book. You said in there, “The Apostle Paul’s understanding of the gospel indeed includes Christ’s death for sins,” and you quote, “For I passed on to you as most important what I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.” You’re not denying that’s part of the message. But you rightly point out—it wasn’t a new gospel message. Paul says that message came “according to the Scriptures”—meaning the Hebrew Bible. The Torah.

PSA has been a non-debatable, dogmatic pillar in evangelicalism for as long as I can remember. That’s why I really respect that you’re willing to stand up for the narrative of the gospel, even if you still affirm aspects of penal substitution. You’re helping us return to the full biblical story.

And that matters—because, as we’re going to see with Ron Johnson—this is where a lot of people get axed.

So thank you brother. Alright, so recently I went, we talked about this recently. I went to Indiana for an Image Conference held by the Heiser Group, where Dr. Ron Johnson gave an incredible, paradigm-shattering talk on atonement. He doesn't claim authority, but he's presenting some biblical narrative—what we’d call Divine Council worldview—points that help us see atonement in a more biblical light, in my opinion.

So let's watch a quick clip from that talk and then have you discuss and nuance your view of atonement. How does that sound?

Anthony Delgado: Sounds good.

Jason Bostow: Let's do it.

Ron Johnson (clip): Now that we hear “Jesus died for our sins”—amen. According to what you know in the book of Leviticus, you've got to pick up that whole book, bring it over, and drop it on that phrase. That’s how Jesus dies for your sins. You can't invent how he died for your sins—you’ve got to go with the biblical model and bring it over. It’s not unfair for Paul or God to say, “Read Leviticus,” and then you understand 1 Corinthians 15. That’s how their story would’ve been brought along—one continuous process.

Now let’s talk about kafar. Among other things, one way of achieving ritual purity in the Old Testament was through kafar—a Hebrew term often translated as “atonement.” The word just means “to cover.” It’s a very physical word, with denotations of covering and connotations of forgiveness—because you can “cover over” a sin, as they would say.

This process was a privilege afforded—please get this, this is key. This is how I lost my licensure with a major denomination. I stuck on this sentence, and they would not let go of it. So I’ll say it to you, because I’m learning that you’re my friends.

This process was a privilege afforded to the Israelite who was presumed to already be loyal to Yahweh. The only people who got atoned for in the Old Testament were already righteous Yahweh loyalists—every one of them.

And I shouldn’t have brought up my licensure, but I did. I remember at that point, there were like seven guys around this table. They were doubting me on this one. I said, “Well, no, it’s there.” I was talking, and I’ll never forget the feeling—I turned my Bible around and pushed it across the table, and I said, “Here’s where.” And he pushed it back. I’ll never forget that. He said, “We’re not here to talk about the Bible. We’re here to see if you agree with the denominational stance on this.”

And just that moment of realizing—what we’re doing here—it’s not the Bible we’re arguing. It’s... well.

Jason Bostow: Yeah, okay. We know. We just talked about this. So I just want to say—I love that clip. And I’m going to tease this for everyone: we’re about to drop that whole talk exclusively here on our channel. It’s not something we’re holding up as dogmatic truth. I just think it’s a really valuable conversation that Ron has opened up, and it’s something you all should look forward to seeing. That’s coming soon.

So before I say anything else, tell me your thoughts on what Ron had to share.

Anthony Delgado: That segment was great. I have a great deal of appreciation for Dr. Johnson. I really value his interactions with Michael Heiser. They definitely didn’t agree on this issue entirely, but I think part of that comes down to their different disciplines. Dr. Johnson is a systematic theologian who has a strong grasp of biblical theology, while Dr. Heiser didn’t want to mess much with systematics—he stuck to biblical theology and biblical studies. So I think some of their differences were more about their school of thought.

Jason Bostow: Yeah—more of a term disagreement.

Anthony Delgado: Exactly. Which is why they could be friends. They were working in different fields to a degree.

What I really appreciated in what Dr. Johnson shared is how he named something I’ve experienced too. I had a similar situation when trying to establish elders in a congregational church. I asked the deacons, “If the Bible says this, can we have a conversation about it?” And they said sure—but I couldn’t even get a single verse out before they jumped in with, “You don’t understand the tradition,” and so on. So I understand how deeply rooted some of these ideas are.

But what he said there is absolutely right. They weren’t being atoned for just because they were performing some ritual. That’s not what was happening. The only reason they were there, carrying out the ritual, was because they were already loyal to Yahweh.

I always say biblical faith isn’t just intellectual assent. It’s something you believe so deeply that it radically affects who you are. It’s like always wanting to see the Grand Canyon—so you make the drive. That’s what these people were doing.

The guy who shows up from Ephraim to offer sacrifices for his family at the temple in Jerusalem—he had gospel allegiance long before he had a sacrifice.

Jason Bostow: Yeah. Amen.

Anthony Delgado: And that’s where I think Dr. Ron Johnson is absolutely right.

Jason Bostow: Yeah. I think it’s so mind-blowing to me because—my own story—I grew up in church, went to Bible college. I didn’t go to seminary or follow that path all the way down, but honestly, I’m glad God spared me from some of it. Because I hear this same kind of story from people like Ron—times ten. People go through these systems, and when they finally start discovering biblical truth, they end up running straight into a wall. Whether it’s a denominational board, or pressure during doctoral work, or just trying to challenge tradition—it’s like, you’re immediately under scrutiny.

And what Ron said in that story—the Bible getting pushed back across the table—that's going to live with me just as much as it did with him. That moment wasn’t about truth. It was about institutional alignment. And I think that’s the kind of pressure that keeps a lot of people from really grasping what the Word is saying.

That’s why I’ve thanked you ten times already in this episode—because you’re standing out. You’re not just defending doctrine; you’re defending narrative, Scripture, the biblical worldview. So thank you for that.

As we close here, I want to tie this all together with a final quote from what I think is the best section of your book, titled A King Who Doesn’t Fail. You write:

People are really skeptical of governments. We like the idea of democracy because it gives us a sense of control over the powers of this world, even if it’s a limited sense. Yet our experience with earthly government is that dragons reign to some degree or another. If you read the narrative of human history with childlike faith, one concludes that a greater king must come to rescue us from this tyranny. To receive the kingdom of God like a child means believing Christ has conquered. That means Jesus is crowned and reigns over his kingdom. We are citizens of God’s kingdom, but we’re aliens in a foreign land. You could say we live in the kingdom of the dragon. Largely, people in this land hope in this world’s social and political systems—they have submitted to and hope in the dragon. When the dragon rears up and prepares a blaze of fire, we ought to be strengthened in our conviction that the Savior reigns—not become fearful, doubtful, or begin to shift our security to man-made social or political systems of hope, but rather rest in God alone: “My soul, wait silently for God, for my hope comes from him” (Psalm 62).

Let me just say—as everyone else in the YouTube-verse is clapping—I absolutely love that quote. The church in America has never been more divided. And every day, that dragon you describe tries to pull people further into political division, pulling Christians away from loving their neighbor as themselves.

N.T. Wright said it well recently—followers of Jesus must abandon the binary of left or right and find a third way forward, rooted in the gospel.

So, as we close, share your thoughts from the book on how the gospel unites us under the authority of King Jesus, and how that can help the church navigate this polarized political climate.

Anthony Delgado: It’s interesting because I just preached on Romans 13:1–7 this past Sunday. And what I encouraged our people to do was this: fight for policies, not against people.

Peter tells us to honor the emperor. Paul says give honor to whom honor is due, and respect to whom respect is due. So I will caveat—there’s room for humor and memes and satire to an appropriate degree. Certainly, Martin Luther thought we should be able to do that—he was a cartoonist himself.

Jason Bostow: He was also a racist, but that’s another conversation.

Anthony Delgado: Fair enough—he’s not Jesus. Not even Paul.

Jason Bostow: Exactly.

Anthony Delgado: So yeah, there’s a degree to which I think we can engage in public commentary and even humor. But when it comes to our posture, it has to be shaped by the fact that we don’t ultimately belong to these kingdoms. We live in the kingdom of Christ. And that means when we engage politically, we do so as ambassadors—not as warriors for the dragon.

But I think generally, we don't want to be the kind of people who, out of disagreement, justify slander, outbursts of rage, or things like that. And if we focus on policy rather than people, then we can actually engage biblical realities. Because the Bible doesn’t condemn Biden or Trump by name—except in the sense that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. It doesn’t treat them as political enemies. But if you go issue by issue, you can argue biblically for or against a policy. Depersonalizing the discussion allows for more faithful and constructive conversations.

Jason Bostow: Yeah. Dude, I cannot echo and amen that enough. In this polarized world, I’m like apolitical. I give all my allegiance and focus to the kingship of Jesus. Just speaking personally—I don’t even vote. I don’t get caught up in it.

I was over at a friend’s house—he’s a conservative Trump supporter, white redneck kind of guy—and he had neighbors over who are African American, way more liberal, Biden supporters. But they’re friends. They love each other. Awesome people, all of them. I was at dinner with them when all the Trump news was flaring up, and they were just going at it. Back and forth—Trump, Elon, RFK, Biden, Kamala—they were arguing constantly.

But then I said, “Hey, let’s take the names off and just talk about the issues.” I asked, “Do you think it’s good for people to eat healthy food and not have chemicals shoved down our bodies?” Everyone agreed. We did that for like ten issues—everyone agreed! These people who thought they were miles apart politically actually agreed on almost every policy idea when it wasn’t tied to a name.

That’s what makes what you just said so important. Christians need to step out of these personality-driven political trenches. That’s why I’m asking this same question in the last five interviews: because I see a new wave of Christians, scholars, publishers, and churches speaking out against Trump now. And sure, there are valid reasons for that. But where were they the last four years when it came to Biden?

Like you said, the better path isn’t to react to political leaders—it’s to focus on principles. Fight for the gospel-centered values no matter who’s in office. Otherwise, we’re just echoing the same political partisanship with different slogans.

So thank you for saying it the way you did. That was such a wise, biblical way to frame it.

Anthony Delgado: You got it, man.

Jason Bostow: Guys, this was a longer episode, but totally worth it. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. We’re going to get this segmented out, and all the links to Anthony’s books, podcast, and anything else we referenced will be in the notes.

Anthony, from my audience and everyone out there—thank you, brother, for taking the time to be here. I hope this is just the first of many conversations.

Anthony Delgado: Sounds good, man. I'd love to come back anytime.

Jason Bostow: I’m going to pray us out, because I want to pray over this moment.

God, thank you for Anthony. Thank you for this moment to talk with another brother and commune. I felt like this was one of my favorite conversations—to sit here and learn and listen, and get so much context to understand the gospel, the good news. I pray that you would further this moment, that your Spirit would enable it to bring truth into the hearts of many people, so they can follow our King—your Son—more faithfully, and that we can unite, as Anthony talked about, under the kingship of Jesus.

Thank you for him. I pray a blessing upon Anthony, his family, and his work, Lord. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Anthony Delgado: Amen.

Jason Bostow: Alright guys, we are out.

Anthony Delgado
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