A Six-Week Bible Study
Tuesdays at 6 pm · Pleasant Springs Church · Starts June 2
What is God like? Is He out there at all? And if He is, does He notice me? This study works through Michael S. Heiser’s short and powerful book What Does God Want? — a one-sitting answer to the biggest question a soul can ask. Across six Tuesday evenings we will unpack the Bible’s answer: God created us to image Him on earth, to live as His family, and to share in the redeeming work of Jesus Christ. All scripture read in Septuagint (LXX) and ESV side-by-side, in keeping with the Pleasant Springs tradition.
God Wanted a FamilySTART HERE
Why we exist. The supernatural family and the human family. What it means to be an “imager” of God on earth. Genesis 1–2 and Job 38.
What Went Wrong
The fall in Eden and the loss of the family. Why our world looks the way it does, and why God did not give up.
God Picks One Family
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Israel. Why God chose a single line to be the rescue mission for the world.
Jesus — God With Us
The incarnation. The Cross. The Resurrection. How the family is bought back by the Son who became one of us.
Believing Loyalty
What faith actually is — not bare mental assent, but allegiance to the risen Christ. Pistis, repentance, and the new birth.
The Family Restored Forever
The new heavens and the new earth. Revelation 21–22 and the wedding supper of the Lamb. What we were always made for.
Michael S. Heiser (1963–2023) was a Hebrew Bible and Semitic languages scholar (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) who spent his career making the world of the biblical authors accessible to ordinary readers. He served as Scholar-in-Residence at Logos Bible Software and Executive Director of the Awakening School of Theology & Ministry, and wrote The Unseen Realm, Supernatural, and many other books.
What Does God Want? (Blind Spot Press, 2018) is his shortest and most evangelistic book — written for a friend who simply wanted to know whether the Bible had an answer to the title’s question. It does. The book runs about an hour to read. This study unpacks it over six weeks so we can sit with each chapter, look up the Greek and Hebrew, and let it shape us.
Every passage in this study is opened in both the Septuagint (LXX) — the Greek Old Testament the apostles quoted from — and the English Standard Version (ESV). Where Hebrew matters we add it. We always read in two registers: the Author (what did the writer mean to convey?) and the Audience (what would the first hearers have heard?). That keeps us honest, and it keeps the Bible from being whatever we already thought.
Pleasant Springs Church — Discipleship School