If you don't have the worldview of the people who produced the Bible - under inspiration no less, - you can't understand what they were trying to communicate in many respects. Biblical people weren't modern people. That's self-evident no matter how much we try to deny it.

God wants the world to function in an orderly way, not a chaotic way, so teaching humans to do what's right and what will make for the happiest life isn't going to be off limits.

How much of what the biblical writers believed about the supernatural world do I believe? They weren't us. We are products of the Enlightenment; they were not. So let's stop denying that reality. Rather than sitting in judgment on them from our Enlightenment perches, we ought to have them sit in judgment on us when it comes to informing us about the supernatural world. After all, what they wrote was ultimately overseen by God.

Scholarship aimed at truly understanding what the biblical writers meant often does not filter down into the church and through the pulpit to folks who show up on Sunday. I think that's just wrong, but scholars rarely make any effort to decipher their own scholarly work for people outside the ivory tower.

Rebellion against God results in being cast out of his service. God doesn't run the affairs of the spiritual world or our world with rebels on his payroll. They are cast to the Underworld (in the case of the Eden rebel), or a special place in the Underworld (e.g., the offenders of Genesis 6:1-4, who are, to quote Peter and Jude, "kept in chains of gloomy darkness" or "sent to Tartarus"). There are more divine rebels than that in the Bible, but hopefully that scratches the surface enough.

When biblical material touches on the natural world, we can legitimately use the tools of science. Sometimes that shows us - no shock here - that biblical writers didn't know as much as we now know about the natural world - but God knew that when he picked them, so that alone tells us that "doing science" that would satisfy a 21st century - and beyond - audience wasn't what God was interested in with respect to the enterprise of producing Scripture for posterity.

God doesn't save us to perpetuate a particular Christian sub-culture. He saves us to advance a supernatural kingdom that is not of this world.