14: Facing Your Giants

[00:00] Stephanie: Season 2, episode 14. Today we are continuing our lessons from the wilderness series with a look at facing our giants.

Hello, Father.

[00:10] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Here we are again.

[00:13] Stephanie: It’s so good to be with you on a beautiful day. I always love to talk to you. Today, for our icebreaker, are you ready?

[00:23] Marcus: All right, let’s break some ice.

[00:26] Stephanie: Do you prefer to listen to instrumental or vocal music?

[00:33] Marcus: Yeah, that’s a good question. Usually vocal. I listen to instrumental when I’m studying or something, but most of the time vocal. How about you?

[00:42] Stephanie: Yeah, same. I enjoy instrumental for sure, but I’ve noticed that even when I’m writing, if it’s too instrumental, it’ll distract me. I actually need kind of the consistency of the vocal to drown out, which I might be weird for saying. I will say my favorite sort of instrumental is the kind with a really strong violin in it.

[01:09] Marcus: Which sounds epic so that would make sense. You like epic violin music.

[01:13] Stephanie: I like both, but I tend to lean toward something that has a vocal lead to it. All right, there we go. Ice broken. So we all have battles to face on our journey. A lot of times especially on the healing journey if we are facing something that we feel like is a battle, it’s usually because it feels bigger than us. And so I’ll use that to segue into today. We’re talking about Moses and the giants. We usually talk about David and Goliath. But today, Moses and giants?

[01:49] Marcus: Moses and the giants. It’s the original. It’s an old B.C. rock group, Moses and the Giants. No. So between the wilderness wanderings where they are there for 38 years, then the Israelites leave camp and start going around Edom and into the plains of Moab. To the north of Moab there are two kingdoms. In these two kingdoms the text goes out of its way on multiple occasions to let us know that there were giants in the land, and these giants were given names like Zumamim, Rephaim, and Anakim. And it’s not the”im” that makes them giants, but there are a lot of giants in the land and it was these giants they were afraid of facing. When the spies first gave their report they’re like, we can’t take on these giants.

Moses, while he’s still their leader, fights two giant kings and there are probably other giants in there as well. And they are known as Sihon and Og. One of them is famous for the fact that he had an enormous bed made out of iron. And what they found out through archaeology since then, is that his bed is actually the exact same dimensions as an altar to Marduk, the God of Babylon. And it gets into a whole lot of speculation. Are these people related to the Nephilim? What does this look like? Who are the Rephaim? How do all these things connect? And if you want all that, you can go to Dr. Michael Hyzerl. He’ll give you all that you want of that. But these are the giants that Moses is taking on.

[03:45] Stephanie: Yeah. Do you want to say anything more about Nephilim? We don’t have to. We can just direct people to Heiser.

[03:51] Marcus:  No, they can look it up on their own, the Nephilim. We don’t have time for it.

[03:55] Stephanie: Okay, cool. So yes, God is giving them object lessons of literal giants.  I’m going to pull out from Deuteronomy 3:21, 22, what they say. God says, and I commanded Joshua at that time. Or Moses says, “And I commanded Joshua at that time. Your eyes have seen all that the Lord your God has done to these two kings. So will the Lord do to all the kingdoms into which you are crossing. You shall not fear them, for it is the Lord your God, who fights for you.” And you opened your mouth?

[04:34] Marcus: I was about to say something, but I realized I should wait for you to ask a question. We have multiple things coming out here. First of all, again, the big scary thing that kept the people out of the land in the first place was these giants. And so God’s going to have Moses fight the first two, so to speak. Joshua will be his assistant, and he’ll watch and he’ll learn.

So we’re seeing this leadership succession thing happening. I think you were pointing out there’s this mirror neuron thing going on brain science wise. In which  I’ve seen this before, I know what this looks like, and it helps you to not be quite as afraid of it. So when Joshua is going to lead them into the land and they’re going to take on the giants in the land, he’s at least already experienced and seen what it looks like for God to come through, and defeat an army that has giants in it.

[05:27] Stephanie: Yeah, he’s learning by example. I have done this, you’ve done it with me. Moses is the bigger brain and not the giants.

[05:37] Marcus: Yeah, well, that’s why I was asking before. Does a giant by definition have a bigger brain?

[05:44] Stephanie: It’s actually been a while since we talked about brain science here. Do you want to pause and kind of give simple definitions?

[05:53] Marcus: Yeah. Dr. Wilder talks about that. For little children to grow and develop maturity they need to be around a bigger brain. And the meaning of that is not a smarter person, but somebody who is not overwhelmed by things. So a classic example of that would be a thunder and lightning storm and the little kids are scared to death. And when the little kid comes to Mommy and Daddy, they’re not coming so they can get a meteorological explanation of what’s going on outside.

They’re going to somebody who is not overwhelmed by this, who can actually be a calming presence and have the bigger brain, the more developed brain. And all of us when we get overwhelmed emotionally, when we get overwhelmed in life, we all need that bigger brain person to turn to who can help us kind of stabilize our own emotions. And we see this in the scripture repeatedly that God says to us over and over again, I am with you. The “I am with you”, is that God is always the bigger brain for us to help us to find shalom in our overwhelm. In this case, what we’re looking at here is that giants obviously are not bringing shalom to people by their bigger brains. What we’re talking about here is that Joshua had a chance to see Moses not be overwhelmed by this, to see Moses trust God, and see what happened. And now he’s got a model in his brain he can follow when he goes into the promised land.

[07:26] Stephanie: Yeah. And I think even beyond Joshua the people get to see, ah, Moses did this and we were fine. So maybe with Joshua we’ll be fine. And also, I just wanted to give a little anecdote. It reminds me of growing up and one of my favorite math classes. Which I don’t say very often. I’m not a math person, but it was a good math class. And my teacher would give us what she called candy problems. And the candy problem was the most difficult problem to solve from whatever lesson we were in. We would go through things and then we would get our candy problem, the most difficult thing.

And if we solved it she would give us a piece of candy.  The point was, okay, now go home and anything in your homework that you face, is not going to be as difficult as what you just successfully faced. We learned from our candy problems that we could do this big thing so I can do the next thing and not have anxiety about it.

[08:32] Marcus: I like it. Moses solved the candy problem here, that’s good. Literally, they were facing armies that were considered unbeatable with the kings who were very impressive. And so when Moses led the people in victory over these kings it brought terror to the people of Canaan because it’s like, wait a second, how did this happen? I will also say, if we’re going to get into the weeds, of just the sheer numbers of the people in the book. I’m an advocate that the word that’s translated, thousands in Hebrew doesn’t mean thousands, that it should have a different translation.

Something more along the lines of groups like clusters of people, or musters, or units of people. And that changes everything. Because let’s face it, if there were actually 603,000 Israelite warriors, as opposed to 603 units of Israelite warriors, that’s a very different thing. If there are 603,000 of them they could have overwhelmed everybody because there was no one in those days that had that kind of numbers. They would have outnumbered all the inhabitants of the land combined. This image we’ve had of two million people leaving Egypt I think is actually based on a bad translation. So that’s my take. That’s my In the weeds. Now, people who don’t like that can let me know.

[10:08] Stephanie: Thank you. So, in your new book, Breakthrough, a lot of people on first blush, don’t like the name of your new book. Because they’re like, no, too many people are just looking for the breakthrough. But your point with it is that actually we need multiple breakthroughs. We’re looking for breakthroughs along the journey in multiple areas.

And I promise this is related to the battles we face here. Through our healing journey and through our journey of life, we are going to face multiple battles and need multiple breakthroughs. We’re going to have different levels of giants or armies that we are facing, so to speak. And how do you see that playing out in this narrative and applications?

[11:00] Marcus: The Israelites were on a journey, but they had a lot of tests, a lot of battles. In other words, not everything’s a battle. When you wake up in the morning and it’s manna again and it’s hot again, that’s not really a battle. But there are things that you overcome along the way. And I think what happens is that you can have these little breakthroughs all along the way and some of them are bigger breakthroughs. So when they had to defeat the Amalekites who were attacking them, the victory in that battle can be thought of as a breakthrough. If they don’t get that breakthrough the rest of the journey doesn’t happen.

So I look at a journey as having hundreds of breakthrough moments in it, where we face something that if we don’t overcome this, we’re going to stay stuck. Overcoming it doesn’t mean it’s the end of the journey. It doesn’t mean I’m done, but I am now able to move forward again. And I think there’s a lot of us that get stuck over and over and over again and we think, well, I thought I had my breakthrough? Why am I getting stuck again? It’s like, no, you just gotta have another breakthrough here because this is now probably something else that’s getting you stuck.

[12:11] Stephanie: Sometimes there is a breakthrough and a pivot there that’s bigger. But sometimes it’s kind of like little cross moments and big cross moments.

[12:23] Marcus: Yeah. For example, the really big breakthrough moment in this story is leaving Egypt, that is a big breakthrough moment. Leaving the wilderness and starting to go around Moab, big breakthrough moment. Crossing the Jordan river and conquering Jericho. These are big breakthrough moments. Then there are all these little ones along the way that are also important because if those don’t happen, we don’t get to the other things. I do think that there are little breakthroughs and big breakthroughs. There are stages and levels.

And one of the mistakes a lot of us make is this feeling that I just want to have that one big moment. And I’ll be honest, people like me can perpetuate the problem. We tell these stories about someone who came to see us and we had one session of inner healing prayer with them and boom, they went on their way happy. Or we came and we walked them through a deliverance session or something, and all of a sudden their compulsion went away and everything was better. And it leaves people thinking like, well, why doesn’t that happen to me? Why don’t I have one session with somebody and all of a sudden I’m zapped? The breakthrough happens. So that’s what we’re trying to temper, the expectation of that’s how it all works.

[13:31] Stephanie: Well, and I would even just contextualize stories like that because those are still depicting a bigger breakthrough for someone that solved a lot of the issues. But that doesn’t mean now they go off and they have perfect peace and maturity and harmony, in all of their life. But in that area there was a breakthrough.

[13:48] Marcus: Well, I’ll give you a classic example of it. I met with guy several years ago who was having a ***** problem and he had a significant breakthrough moment related to early childhood sexual trauma, where Jesus met him. And he had this amazing experience with Jesus. He identified and got rid of very tangible demons that were related to this. And all that happened in one session. But a year later he still had a ***** problem.

In other words, the breakthrough there wasn’t the whole breakthrough for everything that he needed. He was kind of relying on the “I am fixed now” idea. And so he didn’t do all the other things that you’ve got to do to walk in freedom and to grow in maturity.

[14:37] Stephanie: So kind of like when we’re building our joy pathways from different negative emotions where you could get a breakthrough. Or you could develop the skills to return to joy from shame, but you’re still struggling with anger.

[14:53] Marcus: Defeating a giant is important, you’ve got to win that battle with that giant to keep moving forward. But in and of itself, it doesn’t build the whole pathway in your brain. In the same way here, it wasn’t everything that they needed after beating that giant. They were still going to have to go into the land and there were other things that were going to have to happen. And so, yeah, that’s kind of what we’re getting at here with the story of Moses and the giants. Not all of us have giants to face. And that’s a metaphor for anything that is bigger than us, is overwhelming to us, and makes us feel like I can’t beat this in my own strength.

And being around people who walk you through that or seeing other people who get victory over those things that’s what we mean by the bigger brain. That’s what we mean by people actually feeling like, okay, I’ve seen it, I know that I can handle this. And I experienced that myself in getting trained in spiritual warfare things. I not only sat in with my parents, but I got to see other people do this as well. When I was teaching the Old Testament at Bethel, I would occasionally take students to go see some experienced people in the spiritual warfare area.

And so I got to watch several different people do it. And one of the things that it did for me is I was able to watch a lot of different people stay very calm, not raise their voice, not yell and scream, and walk people through the basics, but stay in control. To remain the person who is in charge of what’s going on here and not get rattled. It sticks with you because your brain sees that and says, okay, that’s how you do it. I don’t come in here and shout and scream and spit.

[16:38] Stephanie: It may be overlapping, but I was just like, oh, RARE spiritual warfare. R.A.R.E.

[16:45] Marcus:  That’s all part of it.

[16:49] Stephanie: So, we haven’t talked about RARE leadership on here a lot. Which is, let’s remain relational, act like yourself, return to joy, and endure hardship well. Another Marcus Warner acrostic for you. So, we’re also looking at how the battles we fight are often multigenerational, and we see that in this story. We have the generation that came from Egypt and we’re coming into the generation that is going to take the promised land. And do you want to talk about that?

[17:29] Marcus: Well, I do think that’s not uncommon. We hear a lot in spiritual warfare circles about generational iniquity or generational curses, and how the sins of the fathers can open doors for things to affect. So, we’re familiar with that concept that there can be generational negative consequences moving forward. But there can also be battles within families that take generations for breakthrough.

In other words, there are family level breakthroughs and culture level breakthroughs that are generally multigenerational. If I’m talking about my own personal, emotional thing, that’s not a multi generational battle.  But when I’m talking about the redemption of a culture or the redemption of family and the transformation of that, those things are often multigenerational. And God will have different specific things that he wants to accomplish in each generation towards his  ultimate goal that he’s after.

[18:23] Stephanie: We’re going to talk a little bit more about that in the next episode with the transition of leadership from Moses to Joshua. But I know you’ve said, regardless of the generation we find ourselves in, we can be the light in the darkness. Or we can be part of the generation that does something amazing, and there’s room for either thing. So there doesn’t have to be hopelessness if you are in a generation of darkness, you can still be a light.

[18:49] Marcus: Absolutely. Because some people are called to be that one person standing, swimming against the tide, and standing up in the midst of all of it. And there’s other people who are part of a generation of moving forward. I think the illustration I used explaining this to you earlier was my youth group experience. Watching my older siblings go through a very dead youth group where there was just not a lot of life in it. I didn’t see a lot of joy in going to youth group.

In fact, a lot of the people in the youth group were kind of known for being worldly and rebellious. By the time I got to the same youth group, the culture was changing, and the culture of the youth group was changing. And one of the reasons was there were several of us who were natural leaders who were coming into the group. And when the student leadership of the group was actually excited about God and actually setting the tone like, this is important, we’re excited about this. You could begin to see things change.

By the time I was done with that experience our group had grown from, like, 30 to 130. Thirty is the magic number here. We had probably over 30 people from that group going to full time Christian service. And I got to be a part of a generation where it was a breakthrough thing for the church. Now, I have to say, a generation later, that church hit really hard times.

The pastor had an affair, a couple of other pastors had affairs. It was a bad thing. But the group of us that went through that together even 30 years later, were like, oh, let’s have a reunion. Let’s get back together. Because there was just so much joy during that season that we were together. Whereas other people have had to be like, no, I’m the light in this darkness because these other people don’t seem interested in it. But God has a different calling for that person than he would for someone like me.

[20:55] Stephanie: Yeah. Thank you for that anecdote and for sharing from your personal story. I have an announcement here. It is a fun and exciting announcement. Do you wish you could meet in person with other people over deeper walk content? Our new Deeper Walk Joy Center in Hobart, Indiana is giving us new opportunities for gathering in person. And this summer we have several in person intensives happening and we’re very excited about that.

So I’m going to tell you a quick headline of what you could go find more information about if you are interested. So we’ve got Dan and Sarah Allison are going to be leading people through spiritual warfare tools and training. Melissa Finger will be leading an intensive on what every people helper needs to know about complex trauma. Dawn Whitestone will be hosting two things, a weekend of prayer for our children and a prayer ministry graduation and reunion. So we’ve got lots going on, especially if you are in or are interested in the School of Ministry. And for more information, I’m going to direct you to check out dwisom.org. Fun times.

[22:19] Marcus: There’s a lot going on. And one thing I’m excited about, that is I’m not teaching any of it. And it’s all good stuff.

[22:24] Stephanie: Yeah. And I’m gonna tell you why you’re not going to be not only not teaching any of it, but the next announcement is Father is going on sabbatical.

[22:37] Marcus: Yeah.

[22:39] Stephanie: Your first sabbatical ever in ministry, right?

[22:42] Marcus: Yeah. Practice retirement. I don’t know what that means. I’ll be gone for three months doing non-Deeper Walk things. So this will be the first time ever.

[22:52] Stephanie: Blessings on you. I’m so excited for you and for Mom.  And so just for the podcast to know, we are going to wrap up this series for you so we don’t leave you on a cliffhanger. And then the podcast will be going into sabbatical mode. I’ll explain more about what that means the closer we get to it. So you will be technically out in May, but the podcast, this series will go through May. So yes, just for your heads up, all you who are with us on the trail. And blessings to you, father.

[23:31] Marcus: Yeah, well, we’re looking forward to it. It’s going to be nice to finally do something like this after a long time. The goal is to go kind of get renewed, recharged and come back and have another strong ten years after this. You know, that’ll push me into my seventies. I’m looking forward to it because there’s just a lot of exciting things going on these days, and I think God’s got a special calling on this ministry.

And that’s really exciting to me. I remember not that long ago praying that God would give us a team. And now I look at our team and I’m like, this is an amazing team. And I’m just really delighted I can go off and do something like this and not have to actually worry at all because we’ve got such good people.

[24:26] Stephanie: Huzzah!

[24:27] Marcus: Yeah.

[24:28] Stephanie: Thank you, Lord. All right, well, on that note, any final thoughts for this episode on giants?

[24:36] Marcus: Let’s talk about Nephilim. No. I’m sorry. The idea of giants, it’s always been this metaphor for things that scare us. Because we can’t see any way to win this. And all of us I think have had things like this in our lives. You know, whether it’s a battle with anxiety, a battle with depression, a battle with addiction. Whether it’s just a common sin I fall into over and over again. I can’t understand why I can’t get on the other side of this. A giant could be my fear of what I see happening in culture, my fear of what I see happening someplace else. It just represents big and scary.

And it’s easy to say, oh, just trust God. Just let go and let God kind of thing. Let’s just trust him. Everything will be fine. That is actually where we want to get to, but it doesn’t mean we can just choose it and all of a sudden everything’s fine. That’s the point of breakthroughs. Every time that we have a breakthrough we grow a little bit in our ability to trust. And so what we’re doing is we’re overcoming something that is keeping me from trusting right now.

And so that’s what we’re really looking for in our breakthroughs. Where do I need a breakthrough in my life that will help me to trust God more than I do with this particular thing? Because sometimes I trust him a lot in one area, but I just get stuck trusting them with this. And that thing that you struggle trusting God for, that’s your giant that needs to be defeated.

[26:09] Stephanie: Alright, onward until next week. Thank you. Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to, like, comment, subscribe, and share with a friend. And hey, do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk Trailblazer. Thanks again.

We’ll see you back on the trail next week.