Adversary – The Story Behind the Story

Earlier this month, I released my four episode miniseries Adversary: A Campfire Story.

Today, I wanted to share some fun, behind the scenes details that help explain what makes this story so special.

There will be spoilers for the story below. If you haven’t read Adversary yet, consider yourself warned.

Inspirations

Adversary was a blast to write and put together, and this is in part due to how many little things came together to make the story special.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but it would also be wrong not to say, the Bible is my biggest inspiration.

When reading the Bible, I love to picture what it would’ve been like to be there. I like to imagine the world of the Bible and put myself in the characters’ shoes.

This is especially true with the Gospels. What was it like for the disciples to follow Jesus? What did it look like, for Jesus to be fully human and fully God? What did it look like for Him to be without sin?

These kinds of questions are why I appreciate the attempts made by Biblical Fiction writers to bring readers on a journey of immersion into the biblical world.

I know it’s controversial to some, but this is why I really appreciate The Chosen.

The Chosen actually helped inspire Adversary in an indirect way.

I was thinking about the choices the writers made with the series, and I started considering the stories they didn’t adapt. There are a few, but the fasting and wilderness temptation of Jesus was an obvious story that they didn’t even touch.

It makes sense why they’d avoid it. The stories within The Chosen primarily center around the disciples. This consideration led me to a thought experiment: “If I wanted to tell the story of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, how would I go about making such an adaptation?”

Since I write stories, I don’t need to worry about the budget for special effects. The story could be as supernatural as it needed to be.

As fascinating as the Bible story is, one initial thought was, “Would this story be boring?”

After all, we all know how the story goes. It doesn’t actually have a ton of suspense because we know Jesus will succeed. We know Jesus is fully God and fully man, and we know He experienced temptation, but because of who He is, there is no part of the story where you think Jesus is about to break.

Also, there is a risk involved with telling a story with Jesus’ point of view.

Writing from God’s POV is inherently risky and generally frowned upon. Because I’m an imperfect, human writer, how could I presume to accurately portray the mind of Christ?

For me, this is where I had to draw the line.

But if you don’t tell the story from Jesus’ POV, how do you tell the story? It could be a distant third person point of view, but the more I thought about it, the more I considered a surprising option.

Speak of the Devil

Putting Satan at the center of the story doesn’t praise the enemy, but it actually puts the devil’s failure front and center.

By flipping the story into a failure narrative, the three passed tests become what writers call “try-fail cycles.”

Even though the ending is expected, there is a sort of suspense when impending doom is involved, much more so than a story with impending success.

Still, before writing the story I knew it needed something more.

As the story marinated in the background of my subconscious, new ideas slowly emerged.

The biggest idea that brought this story up to a new level: the mountain man angel.

Mister Grizzly

The idea for Mister Grizzly came from a couple different sources.

When I was in college, I read a story written by one of the professors. Titled “Unawares” (from the KJV translation of Hebrews 13:2), the story involved two men meeting at a campfire.

The vagabond who built the campfire welcomed the stranger and offered to share his coffee and stew, and he tells the newcomer two stories about people “entertaining angels” without knowing it.

The tale ends with the stranger saving the storyteller’s life, and he disappears, implying that he was an angel the whole time.

When I first developed and outlined Adversary, I’d forgotten about the existence of this story, but eventually I remembered and realized what an impact it had made, even when I hadn’t actively thought about it in so long.

The other big inspiration for Mister Grizzly was a man named Jim.

Some background information: I’m a pastor’s kid, and I grew up in a small town in Eastern Oregon.

My dad pastored the town’s Assemblies of God church, and as any good small town AG church does, we had a program called Royal Rangers.

Royal Rangers is essentially the Assemblies of God’s alternative to Boy Scouts. It combined traditional scouting lessons and activities with spiritual formation and Bible study. We learned knife safety and how to tie various knots, but we also earned patches for reading the Bible.

Jim attended our church, and for some years he was one of the Royal Rangers leaders.

Besides being a good leader and a strong Bible teacher, he had something else that made him special.

On a few special occasions, he became a mountain man.

He had period-authentic mountain man clothes, and when he wore them, he wasn’t Jim anymore.

One particular Royal Rangers camping trip, he told stories in costume and in character. Though I can’t recall the actual stories he told, and I don’t remember much else about that trip, the image of the mountain man telling stories to scouts at a fire always stuck with me.

Other Inspirations

Another thing that informed the camping scenes was the many times I went to summer camp as a kid, as well as the other church camp experiences I’ve had as I got older.

For example, I know of at least three different camps that have a cross at the top of the hill at the end of the hike. I don’t know if it’s tradition or coincidence, but the cross in Episode Four is not random!

The ropes course in Episode Three was a combination of two different ropes courses I’ve done before. (Okay, okay, I didn’t complete both of them. The cargo net is where I reached my limit!)

No city is mentioned on purpose. The story could be anywhere! I do name-drop Bi-Mart in the story, and Bi-Mart is only in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, so if you had to pinpoint a location for this story, it’d have to be somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

One last inspiration I almost forgot to mention is the BibleProject Podcast.

After I’d already outlined the miniseries but hadn’t written it yet, I stumbled on some episodes that helped me study the wilderness temptation story with fresh eyes.

In 2025, they had a series that focused on the concept of “the wilderness” in Scripture, and a whole episode was dedicated to the story of Jesus’ fasting temptation. One of the episodes also linked to an older episode that unpacks the short version of the story in Mark 1, which includes the detail that Jesus “was with the wild animals.”

Also, earlier in 2026, the BibleProject podcast had a short series on Psalm 1 and 2. One of those episodes led me to study Psalm 2 more closely, which eventually led to the decision to include the text of Psalm 2 in the climax of Episode Four.

The thing that really got my mind spinning was the famous line “Ask of me and I will give you the nations as your inheritance.”

I connected this to the final temptation where the adversary offers the nations for worship, thereby putting himself in God’s position, but it also contrasts with the relationship between God the Father and God the Son, both as portrayed in Psalm 2 and in the baptism scene preceding the temptation narrative.

Conclusion

So—memories of Royal Rangers, the few times I went tent camping, the many times I attended Christian camps, the specific memory of a mountain man telling stories, a short story I read in college, the Bible Project podcast, and the tv series The Chosen all had a part in bringing this story to existence.

Writing is just like that. You never know what’s going to stick with you in life, and you never know where the next idea will spring from.

Are you ready for a Q & A?

Do you have any questions about Adversary or any of my other stories?

I want to write blog posts more often, and I want to use that space to give more insight into my stories and to answer your questions.

For questions and feedback on Adversary, I’d love for you to fill out this form.

You may also contact me through the contact page here on my website, or you can email me directly at jered@jeredgering.com.