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The Last Giant King in the Bible _ The Terrifying Story of Og of Bashan · truthunedited

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  Speaker 1: Og, king of Bashan, was the last of his kind.
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  Speaker 1: The final surviving ruler of a bloodline god had sworn
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  Speaker 1: to erase from the earth. He was not a myth
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  Speaker 1: and not a metaphor. Moses recorded the exact dimensions of
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  Speaker 1: his iron bed, thirteen and a half feet long, six
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  Speaker 1: feet wide, and named the city where it was kept,
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  Speaker 1: inviting the ancient world to verify the measurements themselves. This
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  Speaker 1: was documented physical reality. He ruled a volcanic plateau of
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  Speaker 1: jagged black basalt, 60 fortified cities on the most spiritually
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  Speaker 1: dangerous ground in the ancient Near East, an undefeated kingdom
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  Speaker 1: on land the ancient world called the gateway to the underworld.
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  Speaker 1: And yet God looked at Moses and gave a command
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  Speaker 1: that should have been unnecessary. Do not be afraid of him.
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  Speaker 1: Because Og was not merely a military threat. He was
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  Speaker 1: living proof that the rebellion God had moved to exterminate
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  Speaker 1: was still alive. To understand who Og was, you must
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  Speaker 1: first understand what the Refame were. And to understand what
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  Speaker 1: the Refame were, you must go back, not 40 years,
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  Speaker 1: not 400 years, but to the opening chapters of Genesis,
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  Speaker 1: where the foundations of this story were quietly and catastrophically laid.
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  Speaker 1: Genesis chapter 6 introduces one of the most debated and
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  Speaker 1: most studied, and most carefully avoided passages in all of scripture.
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  Speaker 1: The text describes a moment before the flood when certain beings,
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  Speaker 1: identified as the sons of God, came down and took
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  Speaker 1: human women as wives. The offspring of these unions were
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  Speaker 1: called the Nephilim. The Hebrew word carries connotations of falling,
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  Speaker 1: of being cast down, of something immense and terrifying that
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  Speaker 1: did not belong in the natural order of creation. The
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  Speaker 1: ancient Jewish writers who preserved and interpreted this text understood
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  Speaker 1: these beings as giants, physically enormous, militarily devastating, spiritually corrupted
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  Speaker 1: at the genetic level. The flood came. The waters covered
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  Speaker 1: the earth. Every living thing that breathed air died, and
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  Speaker 1: most readers assume that when the flood receded, the Nephilim
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  Speaker 1: problem was over. Finished. Resolved beneath forty days and forty
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  Speaker 1: nights of divine judgment. but the text does not actually
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  Speaker 1: say that. What the text shows us, in the chapters
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  Speaker 1: that follow, is that the problem persisted, not in the
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  Speaker 1: same form, not at the same scale. But the ancient
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  Speaker 1: world that emerged after the flood still contained something the
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  Speaker 1: biblical writers called the Rephaim, a term used consistently to
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  Speaker 1: describe a race of giant warrior kings who occupied specific
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  Speaker 1: territories in the ancient Near East. who were connected by
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  Speaker 1: lineage and by spiritual identity to the pre-flood catastrophe that
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  Speaker 1: had nearly ended the human story before it properly began.
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  Speaker 1: Og of Bashan was the last of them. Not the
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  Speaker 1: last giant in a casual sense, not simply a very
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  Speaker 1: tall man from a tribe of tall men. He was,
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  Speaker 1: according to the biblical record, the final surviving king of
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  Speaker 1: the refame bloodline, the last living embodiment of a corruption
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  Speaker 1: that predated Moses, predated Abraham, predated the flood itself. When
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  Speaker 1: Israel turned toward Bashan, they were not marching to conquer
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  Speaker 1: a city. They were marching toward the end of something
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  Speaker 1: ancient and monstrous that had been waiting for them. Now
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  Speaker 1: consider who Israel was at this moment. Consider what they were.
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  Speaker 1: They were not a professional military force. They were not
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  Speaker 1: trained soldiers hardened by decades of organized warfare. They were
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  Speaker 1: the descendants of slaves, men and women, whose parents and
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  Speaker 1: grandparents had spent 400 years in Egyptian bondage, building cities
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  Speaker 1: for Pharaoh, learning obedience rather than warfare. They had spent
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  Speaker 1: 40 years wandering in the Sinai desert after the first
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  Speaker 1: generation collapsed in fear and refused to enter the land.
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  Speaker 1: That first generation, the one that stood at the edge
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  Speaker 1: of Canaan and sent 12 spies into the territory to
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  Speaker 1: scout the land, That generation had seen the giants, and
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  Speaker 1: they had broken. The spies came back with a report
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  Speaker 1: that paralyzed an entire nation. They described men of great
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  Speaker 1: size and said that they felt like grasshoppers in their
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  Speaker 1: own sight and in the sight of the giants. An
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  Speaker 1: entire generation lost its nerve, and God said they would
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  Speaker 1: not enter the land. They would die in the desert,
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  Speaker 1: every last one of them, and their children would inherit
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  Speaker 1: what they were too afraid to claim. those children were
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  Speaker 1: now grown. That second generation had spent their entire lives
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  Speaker 1: in the wilderness, raised on the story of their parents' failure,
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  Speaker 1: trained on the memory of what fear costs a people.
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  Speaker 1: And now, as they approached the final stretch of their
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  Speaker 1: journey toward the promised land, the road took them directly
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  Speaker 1: through the territory of the one man on earth who
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  Speaker 1: embodied everything their parents had refused to face. the last
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  Speaker 1: giant king was standing between Israel and their inheritance. And
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  Speaker 1: the question was whether this generation would be different from
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  Speaker 1: the one before it. Pull back from the human story
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  Speaker 1: for a moment and look at the geography, because where
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  Speaker 1: Og ruled matters as much as who Og was, perhaps more.
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  Speaker 1: Bashan was a region northeast of the Jordan River, sitting
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  Speaker 1: in the elevated volcanic plateau east of the Sea of
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  Speaker 1: Galilee and stretching toward what we today call the Golan Heights.
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  Speaker 1: It was fertile territory, well-watered, strategically significant. But its importance
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  Speaker 1: to this story is not agricultural or military. Its importance
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  Speaker 1: is ancient, spiritual, and deeply rooted in the cosmological worldview
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  Speaker 1: of the ancient Near East. In the Ugaritic texts, cuneiform
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  Speaker 1: tablets discovered in the early 20th century at the site
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  Speaker 1: of ancient Ugarit on the northern coast of modern Syria
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  Speaker 1: The name Bashan appears in a form that scholars have
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  Speaker 1: translated as the Place of the Serpent. The ancient Canaanite religion,
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  Speaker 1: which occupied this region long before Israel arrived, understood Bashan
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  Speaker 1: not as ordinary territory, but as the geographic location of
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  Speaker 1: the entrance to the underworld, the Realm of the Dead.
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  Speaker 1: the place where the boundary between the living world and
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  Speaker 1: the realm beneath it was thinnest, most permeable, most dangerous.
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  Speaker 1: The Rephaim, in Ugaritic literature, are described as the deified dead,
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  Speaker 1: the spirits of ancient warrior kings who had passed through
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  Speaker 1: death and taken up residence in this underworld, still wielding power,
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  Speaker 1: still commanding fear. Og was not merely a king. In
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  Speaker 1: the cosmological understanding of the ancient world that surrounded Israel,
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  Speaker 1: the king of Bashan was the living guardian of the
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  Speaker 1: entrance to hell itself. And the geography deepens further, because
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  Speaker 1: Bashan sits at the base of a mountain, a specific
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  Speaker 1: mountain with a specific devastating history, Mount Hermon. Rising more
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  Speaker 1: than 9,000 feet above sea level, straddling the border of
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  Speaker 1: modern Lebanon and Syria, Mount Hermon dominates the northern horizon
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  Speaker 1: of the ancient Near East, and in the ancient Jewish
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  Speaker 1: literature that preserved and interpreted the traditions surrounding Genesis 6,
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  Speaker 1: specifically in the text known as First Enoch, which was
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  Speaker 1: read and quoted by the writers of the New Testament,
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  Speaker 1: Mount Hermon is identified as the precise location where the
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  Speaker 1: Watcher angels descended. where the sons of God came down
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  Speaker 1: and made their covenant to corrupt the human race. The
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  Speaker 1: very ground that Og of Bashan walked on, the territory
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  Speaker 1: he ruled and fortified and defended with sixty cities, sat
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  Speaker 1: directly above the place where the ancient rebellion against the
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  Speaker 1: created order had been initiated. This is not incidental geography.
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  Speaker 1: The ancient world did not think about land the way
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  Speaker 1: modern people do. In the Biblical and Near Eastern worldview,
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  Speaker 1: territory was not simply real estate. It was spiritually governed.
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  Speaker 1: Nations were assigned to divine beings. Specific mountains were understood
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  Speaker 1: as the dwelling places of specific gods. And Mount Hermon,
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  Speaker 1: the Bashan Plateau, the volcanic black rock landscape of that region,
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  Speaker 1: all of it was understood as ground that had been
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  Speaker 1: claimed by something that had set itself in direct opposition
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  Speaker 1: to the God of Israel. Og was not just a
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  Speaker 1: giant warlord sitting on a throne in a fortified city.
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  Speaker 1: He was the living human representative of the most ancient
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  Speaker 1: and most concentrated pocket of spiritual rebellion on the face
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  Speaker 1: of the earth. His sixty cities were not just military fortifications.
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  Speaker 1: They were the infrastructure of an ancient spiritual claim over
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  Speaker 1: the most contested ground in the ancient world. When God
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  Speaker 1: told Moses to march into Bashan, he was not simply
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  Speaker 1: expanding Israel's territorial borders. He was ordering a direct assault
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  Speaker 1: on the geographic nerve center of the cosmic rebellion that
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  Speaker 1: had begun before the flood and had not yet been
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  Speaker 1: fully answered. Numbers chapter 21 records the moment when Israel
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  Speaker 1: turns toward Bashan. The text is sparse, precise, and deliberately unglamorous. Og,
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  Speaker 1: king of Bashan, came out against them, he and all
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  Speaker 1: his people, to battle at Edre. Read that carefully. Og
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  Speaker 1: came out to meet them. The last giant king did
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  Speaker 1: not wait behind his walls. He did not send ambassadors
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  Speaker 1: or emissaries. He marched out personally at the head of
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  Speaker 1: his forces to confront the advancing column of Israel. This
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  Speaker 1: was a man who had survived every military threat the
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  Speaker 1: ancient Near East had produced. His 60 fortified cities were
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  Speaker 1: not the infrastructure of a kingdom that had ever known defeat.
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  Speaker 1: He had ruled this territory for decades, possibly for generations,
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  Speaker 1: and nothing that had ever marched toward Bashan had managed
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  Speaker 1: to break him. Consider what this confrontation looked like from
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  Speaker 1: the Israelite side. Moses was leading a people who had
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  Speaker 1: spent 40 years in the Sinai desert. They had fought.
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  Speaker 1: They had won battles along the way, but they had
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  Speaker 1: never faced anything like this. The military intelligence on Og
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  Speaker 1: was not reassuring. He was the last of the Refime.
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  Speaker 1: His territory contained 60 cities with high walls. His physical scale, alone,
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  Speaker 1: the same scale that had paralyzed an entire generation of
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  Speaker 1: Israelites 40 years earlier, would have been visible from a distance,
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  Speaker 1: a living, breathing reminder of everything their parents had failed
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  Speaker 1: to overcome. The psychological weight of this march cannot be overstated.
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  Speaker 1: These were the children of the generation that had broken
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  Speaker 1: at the sight of giants. They had grown up hearing
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  Speaker 1: the story of their parents' failure as a cautionary tale,
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  Speaker 1: as the defining catastrophe of their national history. And now,
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  Speaker 1: the road that led to everything God had promised them
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  Speaker 1: ran directly through the territory of the largest, most powerful,
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  Speaker 1: most spiritually significant giant king in the ancient world. There
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  Speaker 1: was no alternative route. There was no diplomatic solution. O.G.
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  Speaker 1: was not going to negotiate a passage agreement. He was
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  Speaker 1: coming out to kill them. And then God spoke to Moses.
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  Speaker 1: The text records it without ceremony, without elaboration, without dramatic buildup.
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  Speaker 1: Do not be afraid of him, for I have delivered
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  Speaker 1: him into your hands with all his people and his land.
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  Speaker 1: The words are simple. Their implications are staggering. God is
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  Speaker 1: not telling Moses to develop a battle strategy. He is
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  Speaker 1: not telling Moses to assess the military situation and respond proportionally.
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  Speaker 1: He is telling a former shepherd standing at the head
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  Speaker 1: of a column of former slaves that the last giant
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  Speaker 1: king of the ancient world, the living guardian of the
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  Speaker 1: entrance to the underworld, has already been delivered. Past tense.
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  Speaker 1: The battle in the divine economy is already over. What
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  Speaker 1: Moses has to do now is simply walk toward what
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  Speaker 1: God has already decided. This is the moment that separates
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  Speaker 1: this generation from the one before it. Their parents heard
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  Speaker 1: a report about giants and decided that the obstacle was
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  Speaker 1: larger than the promise. This generation is being asked to
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  Speaker 1: look at the same obstacle, arguably a larger, older, more
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  Speaker 1: entrenched obstacle, and trust the word of God against the
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  Speaker 1: evidence of their own eyes. The entire theological weight of
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  Speaker 1: 40 years in the wilderness comes to rest on this
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  Speaker 1: single moment of decisions. Deuteronomy chapter 3 records what God
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  Speaker 1: commanded regarding Og and his kingdom. And this is the
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  Speaker 1: section of the story that has generated more controversy, more
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  Speaker 1: theological difficulty, and more sincere confusion than any other, because
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  Speaker 1: what God commands is total, complete, absolute. The Hebrew word
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  Speaker 1: is harem. It is usually translated as devoted to destruction
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  Speaker 1: or set apart for total annihilation. It means exactly what
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  Speaker 1: it says. Not military defeat. Not political subjugation. Not the
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  Speaker 1: conversion of a conquered people into a vassal state. Total destruction. O.G.
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  Speaker 1: His sons, his people, his cities. Everything that breathed was
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  Speaker 1: to be wiped out entirely. Deuteronomy chapter 3 describes the
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  Speaker 1: outcome plainly. Israel struck down Og and his sons and
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  Speaker 1: all his people until there was no survivor left. Sixty cities.
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  Speaker 1: High walls. Gates and bars. All of it taken. all
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  Speaker 1: of it destroyed, and modern readers, both skeptics and sincere believers,
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  Speaker 1: look at this passage and ask the same question. Why?
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  Speaker 1: How can the same God who commands Israel to love
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  Speaker 1: their neighbors, to care for the stranger, to pursue justice,
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  Speaker 1: how can that same God command the total annihilation of
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  Speaker 1: an entire population, including women and children? Critics of the
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  Speaker 1: biblical text use passages like this one to argue that
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  Speaker 1: the God of the Old Testament is a tribal war deity,
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  Speaker 1: arbitrary and violent, fundamentally incompatible with the ethical framework of
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  Speaker 1: the New Testament. This is where the work of serious
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  Speaker 1: biblical scholarship becomes essential, not to soften the text, not
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  Speaker 1: to explain it away. but to read it in the
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  Speaker 1: cosmological and historical context in which it was written. Dr.
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  Speaker 1: Michael Heiser, whose scholarly work on the Divine Council worldview
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  Speaker 1: has reshaped how serious biblical scholars approach passages like this one,
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  Speaker 1: makes a distinction that is critical to understanding the harem command.
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  Speaker 1: The Rephaim were not simply a large ethnic group that
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  Speaker 1: happened to occupy territory that Israel wanted. They were, in
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  Speaker 1: the biblical and ancient Near Eastern worldview, a corrupted bloodline,
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  Speaker 1: a genetic and spiritual contamination that traced its origins directly
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  Speaker 1: back to the rebellion of Genesis 6. The corruption was
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  Speaker 1: not cultural, it was not religious in the ordinary sense.
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  Speaker 1: It was something that had been introduced into the human,
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  Speaker 1: biological line, by the intersection of the divine and the
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  Speaker 1: human in a way that was never authorized, never intended,
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  Speaker 1: and never redeemable through ordinary means. Dr. John Walton, whose
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  Speaker 1: work on ancient Near Eastern cosmology provides the cultural framework
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  Speaker 1: for understanding Old Testament divine commands, reinforces a parallel point.
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  Speaker 1: In the ancient world, the total destruction commanded by harem
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  Speaker 1: was not equivalent to ethnic cleansing in the modern sense.
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  Speaker 1: It was the removal of something that had placed itself
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  Speaker 1: outside the boundaries of the human community in a fundamental way,
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  Speaker 1: something that, if allowed to continue, would contaminate and ultimately
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  Speaker 1: destroy the very people through whom God intended to bring
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  Speaker 1: redemption to the entire world, because this is the stakes
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  Speaker 1: that most casual readers miss entirely. The Rephaim were not
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  Speaker 1: a peripheral problem, they were an existential threat, not just
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  Speaker 1: to Israel as a nation, but to the specific biological
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  Speaker 1: and covenantal lineage through which the Messiah was to come.
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  Speaker 1: From Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Judah to David,
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  Speaker 1: there was a line, a specific, traceable, protected line through
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  Speaker 1: human history that was moving toward a singular destination. And
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  Speaker 1: everything that the demonic rebellion had produced, the Nephilim, the Rephaim,
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  Speaker 1: the giant kings of Canaan, was positioned along that line
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  Speaker 1: at the precise geographic and historical points where it was
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  Speaker 1: most vulnerable. God was not engaging in arbitrary destruction. He
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  Speaker 1: was conducting a surgical quarantine The Rephaim bloodline was not
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  Speaker 1: collateral damage in a territorial dispute. It was the primary
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  Speaker 1: target of a divine operation designed to preserve the one
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  Speaker 1: thread running through human history that would eventually produce the
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  Speaker 1: salvation of the entire human race. Remove the Rephaim, and
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  Speaker 1: the Messianic line survives. Allow the Rephaim to persist, to intermarry,
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  Speaker 1: to corrupt the covenantal community of Israel and everything that
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  Speaker 1: was being prepared. Everything that the entire Old Testament is
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  Speaker 1: building toward is threatened at its biological and spiritual root.
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  Speaker 1: God was not destroying humanity, he was preserving it. The
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  Speaker 1: battle itself is described with almost brutal economy. The text
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  Speaker 1: does not give us a dramatic, extended account of individual combat.
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  Speaker 1: There is no duel between Moses and Ogge. There is
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  Speaker 1: no climactic moment where the giant king's strength is tested
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  Speaker 1: against the military genius of the Israelite commander. Moses receives
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  Speaker 1: the command, Israel advances, and Og falls. Deuteronomy chapter 3
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  Speaker 1: records the outcome in a single devastating sentence, So the
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  Speaker 1: Lord our God also gave into our hands Og king
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  Speaker 1: of Bashan with all his people. Israel struck them down
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  Speaker 1: until no survivor was left. Sixty cities taken. The most
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  Speaker 1: heavily fortified urban infrastructure in the ancient Near East, captured
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  Speaker 1: and dismantled. A kingdom that had stood for generations, that
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  Speaker 1: had survived everything the ancient world had thrown at it,
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  Speaker 1: reduced in the biblical account to a single verse of
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  Speaker 1: measured military closure. There is something intentional in the text's
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  Speaker 1: restraint here. The point is not the spectacle of the battle.
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  Speaker 1: The point is the completeness of the outcome. The myth
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  Speaker 1: of the invincible giants, the myth that had broken an
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  Speaker 1: entire generation of Israelites forty years earlier, dies not in
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  Speaker 1: a blaze of cinematic glory, but in a quiet, comprehensive,
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  Speaker 1: military fact. They came. They obeyed. The giant fell. The
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  Speaker 1: sixty cities were taken. The last king of the Rephaim
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  Speaker 1: was dead. his iron bed was taken as a trophy.
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  Speaker 1: The text tells us it was preserved in Rabbah, the
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  Speaker 1: capital city of the Ammonites, where it could still be
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  Speaker 1: seen at the time Deuteronomy was being written. Thirteen and
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  Speaker 1: a half feet long, six feet wide, not displayed as mythology,
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  Speaker 1: displayed as evidence, as a physical artifact of a defeated enemy,
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  Speaker 1: as the ancient equivalent of a war memorial, proof that
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  Speaker 1: the monster was real, that the battle was real, and
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  Speaker 1: that Israel had been on the right side of it,
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  Speaker 1: The Rephaim were finished. The giant kings of the ancient
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  Speaker 1: Near East, the Anakim, the Amim, the Zamzumim, the bloodline
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  Speaker 1: that traced its corrupted origins back to before the flood,
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  Speaker 1: were reduced to memory and fragment. Joshua, chapter 11, would
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  Speaker 1: record the final mopping up operations, noting that no Anakim
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  Speaker 1: were left in the land of the children of Israel.
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  Speaker 1: They survived only in Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod, remnant pockets
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  Speaker 1: that would persist for another few centuries before disappearing entirely
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  Speaker 1: from the historical record. For 14 centuries, the bones of
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  Speaker 1: the last giant slept in the dirt of Bashan while
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  Speaker 1: the world waited for the king who would finally come
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  Speaker 1: to claim his territory. It is now approximately 27 A.D.
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  Speaker 1: The ministry of Jesus of Nazareth is at a critical
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  Speaker 1: turning point. He has been teaching in Galilee. He has
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  Speaker 1: been healing the sick, raising the dead, casting out demons.
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  Speaker 1: He has been doing in the human realm what no
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  Speaker 1: human being has ever done. Demonstrating in the physical world
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  Speaker 1: the absolute authority of the kingdom of God over every
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  Speaker 1: corrupted and broken thing the ancient rebellion had produced. And then,
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  Speaker 1: he does something that his disciples would not have fully
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  Speaker 1: understood in the moment, but that the entire Old Testament
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  Speaker 1: has been quietly preparing for across 15 centuries of revelation.
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  Speaker 1: He takes his disciples on a journey, a specific, deliberate,
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  Speaker 1: geographically intentional journey north, to a place called Caesarea Philippi.
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  Speaker 1: Locate Caesarea Philippi on a map. Place your finger on
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  Speaker 1: the northern edge of the Galilee region, move it northeast,
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  Speaker 1: past the Sea of Galilee, up into the elevated volcanic plateau.
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  Speaker 1: And you are in Bashan. Caesarea Philippi sits at the
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: base of Mount Hermon. It sits on the ground that
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: Og of Bashan once ruled. It sits in the ancient
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: cosmological understanding that every Jewish scholar of the first century
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: would have carried with them directly on top of the
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: geographic entrance to the underworld. There was a cave at
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: Caesarea Philippi that the local population called the Gates of Hades.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: It was a natural grotto from which an underground spring flowed,
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: and the ancient pagan world understood it literally as an
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: opening into the realm of the dead. The Greeks dedicated
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: it to the god Pan. The Romans built temples there.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: It was, in the religious geography of the ancient world,
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: one of the most explicitly demonic sites in the entire region,
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: and it was surrounded by the ruins and the memory
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: of the territory that the last giant king had ruled
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: and defended and died defending. Jesus stood there. He stood
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: on Og's graveyard, at the entrance to the underworld, in
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: the shadow of Mount Hermon. the mountain where the watcher
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: angels had descended, where the ancient rebellion against the created
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: order had been formally initiated. And he asked his disciples
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: a question, Who do people say that the Son of
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: Man is? The disciples gave various answers. Some said John
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: the Baptist, some said Elijah, some said Jeremiah or one
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: of the prophets. And then Peter answered, You are the Messiah.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: the Son of the living God. And Jesus looked at him,
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: standing on that specific piece of ground, with all of
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: its ancient and demonic history pressing in from every direction,
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: and said the words that would reorder the entire meaning
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: of everything that had happened in Bashan across the previous
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: fifteen centuries. Upon this rock I will build my church,
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: Pause four seconds. Understand what is happening in this moment.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: Jesus is not speaking in abstract theological language. He is
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: not delivering a general promise about the durability of the
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: institutional church across the centuries of Christian history. He is
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: standing at the literal, physical, geographically specific location that the
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: ancient world understood as the entrance to the realm of
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: the dead. He is standing on the ground where Og
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: of Bashan ruled. He is standing in the shadow of
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: the mountain where the ancient rebellion began. And he is
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: making a declaration, not to his disciples only, but to
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: everything that mountain represented, to everything that ground had hosted
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: across the centuries. That the gates of this place, the
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: entrance to this realm, the power concentrated in this specific
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: geography since before the flood, would not stand against what
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: he was building. Moses had come to Bashan with an
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: army of former slaves and taken it by the command
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: of God. He had broken the military power of the
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: last giant king and established that Yahweh's authority was absolute
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: even over the most heavily fortified seat of ancient spiritual rebellion.
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: But what Moses accomplished was military and temporal. It cleared
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: the land. It ended the bloodline. It removed the physical
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: threat to the covenantal community. What it could not do
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: was descend into the realm of the dead itself, into
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: the underworld that the Canaanites and the ancient world believed
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: lay beneath that volcanic ground, and claim authority there as well.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: Jesus was announcing that he would do exactly that, not
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: by military conquest, not by the force of an army.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: but by the same obedience to the Father that Moses
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: had demonstrated when he turned toward Bashan and advanced despite
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: everything his eyes told him about the impossibility of the task.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: Jesus was about to walk into death itself, intentionally, sovereignly,
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: with complete understanding of what he was doing, and come
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: out the other side with the keys to the very
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: realm that Og of Bashan had spent his life guarding
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: the entrance to. The giant's bed was a museum piece
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: in Rabba. The giant's bones were dust in the soil
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: of Bashan. The sixty fortified cities were long since taken
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: and repurposed. And now the Son of God was standing
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: on the ruins of everything the ancient rebellion had built
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: and announcing that the final assault was not coming. It
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: had already been decided. The gates of hell would not prevail.
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: Not because of the strength of the army marching against them,
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: but because the king who was building his church had
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: already determined the outcome before the battle began, just as
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: God had told Moses in the same territory fourteen centuries earlier.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: I have delivered him into your hands. The story of
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: Og of Bashan does not end in the dirt of Adre.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: It does not end with an iron bed on display
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: in an Ammonite capital city. It ends here, on the
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: graveyard of the giants, at the entrance to the underworld,
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: with the Son of God planting his flag on the
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: most contested spiritual ground in the ancient world, and declaring
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: in a voice that the gates themselves could not silence
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: that this territory, this ground, this ancient seat of rebellion,
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: now belonged to him. that what the flood had not
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: fully resolved, what Moses had begun, what centuries of prophetic
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: preparation had been quietly building toward, was now standing in
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: its final form on the ruins of everything that had
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: opposed it. The last giant king fell so that the
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: final king could stand on his ground and speak victory
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: into the darkest place the ancient world had ever known.
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: That is not mythology. That is not legend. That is
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: the Bible. precise, geographical, historically rooted, and more connected across
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: its centuries than any human author could have engineered alone.
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: The giants are gone, the gates are broken, the church
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: stands on their grave, and the king who built it
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: is still reigning. If this video has opened your eyes,
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: subscribe and check this channel for more exploration, including a
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: deeper dive into the Nephilim that goes further than anything
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: you have heard before.