T. A. McMahon & Sarah Leslie (Part 2)

Program Description:

Tom welcomes back Sarah Leslie of Discernment Ministries, Inc., as they discuss the subject of the Nephilim.

Transcript:

Gary: Welcome to Search the Scriptures 24/7, a radio ministry of The Berean Call with T.A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, we’re glad you could tune in. In today’s program, Tom continues his discussion with Sarah Leslie, editor and contributing writer for the discernment blogsight “Herescope.” Now, along with his guest, here’s TBC executive director, Tom McMahon.

Tom: Thanks, Gary. Joining us for today’s program--actually, this is our second week with Sarah Leslie. Sarah’s the editor and contributing writer for the discernment blog site Herescope. And, Sarah, again, thanks for coming back with us, and I want to just jump right into this. Last week, we ended with kind of a teaser, but this is an important issue that we do want to address. It has to do with the teaching today with regard to the Nephilim. I’ll read Genesis:6:1-4 [1] And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, [2] That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. [3] And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. [4] There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
See All.... I would say this is the central Scripture, these verses, at least two of them here, are central to today’s teaching of the Nephilim, and you’ll see how those who teach this, those who--not all, but many who are involved in the promotion of this have taken great liberties with the Scripture, and I think that’s being kind. Genesis:6:1-4 [1] And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, [2] That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. [3] And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. [4] There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
See All...: “And it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.”

Sarah, last week, as you know, we talked about the Scripture verses and, you know, back when you became a believer and when I became a believer thirty-some years ago, the idea was that, “Okay, well, here’s some verses, and we’re not quite sure how to interpret them, but we’ll take God’s Word for what He says.” But in terms of the understanding of that verse, people had different opinions. Some said that these were angelic beings that had intercourse with human women, and some said, “No, these were the sons of Seth, or of a godly line.” There were a lot of ideas about it. But the point I’m making here is that, well, fine. We can’t be dogmatic about these verses, so we’ll just look at it and try to understand it as best we can, and then kind of push on. Today, in my view, and I want you to speak to this, Sarah, nobody’s pushing on or very few are pushing on, they’re camping out on this with their own speculations, ideas, opinions, and so forth. Would you agree with that?

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. It’s one of the things about studying Scripture is when you get to some of these verses where we don’t know, we might never know while we’re here on earth what exactly these verses meant, I was always taught--you probably were too--that you just go on. It’s interesting to think about, but you don’t dwell on it, because we don’t know the answer for sure. There’s some things that happened before the flood that we may never quite understand until someday when we get to heaven.

Tom: Right.

Sarah: But one of the things that’s also a principle of studying the Bible is that the Bible is self-interpreting. The Bible gives us everything we need to know, and then if we are searching for an answer, we go and find other similar Scriptures and start reading and try to cross-match these Scriptures to see what God is saying, and look at the bigger picture, and that’s part of a really good Bible study to do something like that. But there’s a whole group in the evangelical world now who have decided that Scripture is insufficient and may have gone to outside sources, including very ancient, pagan, occult writings, and they have decided that they need to reinterpret the verses that you just read, and so they have concocted an entirely new eschatological scenario or scenarios based on their corruption of this Bible verse. It’s absolutely amazing.

Tom: Now, Sarah, you use the term and what I’ve read from you, and I’d like you to explain this to our listeners: post-modern prophecy teachers. Explain that to us.

Sarah: Well, post-modernism--I go back to Dr. Francis Schaeffer’s definition of post-modernism, which is basically he taught that post-modernism is where you no longer have any foundation in the Word of God anymore. You’ve developed mysticism and esoteric ideas, existential ideas, that kind of thing, and so you say there is no reality, there are no absolutes, God is changing, we are changing, we are evolving, and truth is evolving. That’s post-modernism. And we call the teachers who are teaching new things about this ancient biblical Nephilim, we call them post-modern prophecy paradigm teachers, or PPP, and the paradigm--the reason we put that word in is because they intend to have an entire paradigm shift in how the church views the end times, and this is very, very striking paradigm shift, because it ends up looking very similar to the paradigm shift that the New Agers are talking about.

Tom: Right. So, to say it another way, these people have gotten away from the Bible, okay? They have legitimized in their own minds, at least, extra-biblical information, and so if you would say to somebody, “Well, that’s an interesting theory, but can you give me chapter and verse?” Well, no, they can’t. And they won’t, because they’ve written off the Word of God as the only source of truth with regard to, you know, you mentioned eschatology, spiritual teachings, ideas, whether it be the last days, whether it be, well, from Genesis on, you can see it across the board in terms of the evolutionists who call themselves evangelicals and so on. They do the same thing. But it really means that the Bible is not the absolute truth. It’s not the Word of God, or if it is, it’s just part of the truth, and, you know, because one of the lines they use is, “Well, all truth is God’s truth.” I mean, that’s a super fallacy. But the point is that it is extra-biblical information that cannot be supported alone by Scripture, and that’s where we need to be. That’s why, you know, I mentioned this last week, Isaiah:8:20To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.
See All..., “To the law and the testimony, if they speak not according to this word, it’s because there’s no light in them.” And Jesus said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” So that’s where we need to be.

Sarah: Amen to that. One of the things that we early on discovered: these men are teaching that the reason God sent Noah’s flood was not because of what Scripture calls, “The wickedness of man and the imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” That’s what Scripture says. “The wickedness of man was great on the earth and every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” That’s pretty bad. That talks about how evil mankind was. They instead are teaching now that some sort of space alien, fallen angel, hybrid, disembodied spirit creatures came to earth and mated with human women and created hybrid offspring, and that was why God judged the earth, that Noah was the only pure race, that Noah was the only pure seed. Now obviously that has some pretty ominous overtones to it, and it is very close to an old heresy that came out of the Latter Rain Movement called “serpent’s seed,” which taught something very similar, and we’ve actually written a number of posts about it. But then, they take it a step further and they teach that after the flood, this corruption of human DNA continued, and they say that all of the giants that showed up after the flood had to have been these Nephilim hybrid creatures, and that the solution for them is that we have to destroy them, and of course this has very ominous overtones to it, too, because some of the teachers for this are actually talking about profiling children to see what kind of DNA they have. And one of the guys, L.A. Marzulli, is taking a trek to Peru to try to dig up alien skeletons, what he calls space alien skeletons of these Nephilim creatures with elongated skulls. Well, they’re Native American skeletons, and Answers in Genesis’ website has some very excellent articles about giants and DNA, and I encourage everyone to read them, because it’s solid science. It isn’t this wacky stuff that these guys are teaching. But it gets way worse than this.

Tom: You know, as I--maybe I said at the beginning of this program, this stuff is incredibly bizarre. But the problem is that’s part of the attraction. People want to know what’s new and what’s exciting, but in terms of substance, in terms of biblical substance, it’s ludicrous, it’s ridiculous, yet it is drawing people by the millions. The conferences that they’re putting together, the individuals that they have at conferences, we’ll get into that in a second, because I do want to talk about some of the individuals who are what I would call major players in this. But, again, people are getting excited about it, but one of the reasons is not everybody, there are certainly those who are discerning, who are Bereans, who are checking everything out according to the Scriptures, but the sad thing is that true believers--and sometimes, they just blow this stuff off like, “Well, it’s no big deal. These are wackos. These are this or that.” You know, whatever characteristic they want to apply there. But the sad part is many of those who are being drawn into this are believers; a lack of discernment, but these are our brothers and sisters in Christ who are moving in this direction or being entertained by this stuff, which is a huge problem.

Sarah: Actually, it is a huge problem. For example, I talked to a young man about 34 years old who I have to work with closely on an every-other-day basis, and he had gotten a bit captivated by this. But why? He’s a solid Christian, yet he was raised in the Star Wars, Star Trek generation, the science fiction generation. So in a lot of ways, Americans have been desensitized to thinking in terms of outer space and space creatures and space aliens, and so people like to speculate. They love to--“Well, maybe it was this, and maybe it was that,” and pretty soon they are entertaining these ideas or these suggestions or the writings or speakings of these men without really, really, really thinking it or even going back to Scripture. Now, one of the things these guys base their entire hypothesis on is the Book of Enoch, which is not in the canon, and they go back to all sorts of other apocryphal writings. They go back to pseudepigraphical writings and they go back to ancients, to Marian legends, they go back to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, if you can believe that, that’s one of the most horrific occult books in the history of mankind, and they incorporate all of this into their writings as though it were fact and truth.

Tom: And, because they put it in such, in some cases, sophisticated language that you’re impressed by the pseudo-scientific aspect of that, and you say, “Oh, well, I don’t know anything about that, but I’ll just take his word for it.” No! This is extra-biblical information at least, if not worse.

Sarah: Yes. It’s definitely extra-biblical, and a lot of it started back in 1997 with Chuck Missler’s book Alien Encounters. Almost every single modern prophecy teacher that’s into this refers back to Chuck Missler’s book as what changed them, what changed their eschatology. And so on our blog Herescope, I’ve been doing an in-depth review of this book, and what I’ve discovered is that back in 1997, we didn’t have the internet like we have now, and people couldn’t have gone out and checked the footnotes and the sources and the names he gives as these “credible experts and scientists,” and what I found out is that it’s all a bunch of hocus pocus; that he has gone out to leading New Age writers and leading New Age sources to get all of this information, including the really wackiest fringe of the UFO cults including the Pleiadians and the Raelians and groups like that to get information, and he presents it as though it’s factual.

Tom: Mm-hmm. Well, Sarah, since you mentioned Chuck Missler, let me give our listeners the subtitle for his book, and then I’ve got a question for you. The book is called Alien Encounters, and in many circles, Chuck has been the poster boy for non-believers, for those who are into this kind of thing, whether they be UFO researchers, or just speculators, whatever it might be. But the subtitle to the book is The Secret Behind the UFO Phenomena. Now, Sarah, I ask you, you’ve been through the book, you’ve researched it and so on, what’s the secret?

Sarah: Well, the secret is that the space aliens are Nephilim, and that they’re coming back to the earth to invade us--this is the new eschatology scenario--and that we’ve got to do something about it. It’s…Chuck Missler has always liked crazies, he’s always like conspiracy theories, so the book is full of all of that, but the basic gist of it is that these Nephilim are coming back, and there’s going to be this horrible end time crisis and deception.

Tom: Now, look, I remember--let’s go back. I remember when Spiritual Counterfeits Project, many others when there was a kind of great manifestation worldwide of UFOs and so on they dealt with it back in the 80s, all right? And the bottom line was these are demons, okay? That was their point. Does Chuck come to that point? Does Chuck come to that point here, being the secret? What’s the secret behind the UFO phenomena? Does he spell it out very clearly that these are demons?

Sarah: No. In fact, that’s one of the most interesting things I stumbled on is that these are fallen angels, he says, which are different, he says, from demons. So therefore, you don’t deal with them like you would Satan and demons. Yeah, now that opens a whole can of worms theologically.

Tom: Without a doubt. But once again, my problem here is if somebody would say, “Well, what do I need to know to really be aware of how false this is? And why would I say, or anybody else say that these are demons?” Well, going back to evangelicals who have dealt with this issue over the years, that’s the bottom line, that these are demonic. And why do they say that? Because it isn’t just a matter of the manifestations that really could be answered in terms of demons, being spirit entities, but it’s also the gospel that they present. It was called the Cosmic Gospel, and it’s so contrary to the Word of God that the only mind behind it, to say that, has to be the adversary, Satan himself, because it presents a false gospel, false messiahs, all of this stuff, and it’s been that way historically. But now, with Chuck and his book and these others that are writing about this, it’s not just Chuck--Tom Horn, you mentioned Marzulli, I.D.E. Thomas, Gary Stearman, Chris Putnam--I mean, we could go on and on and on. These guys have raised this to a whole new level of so-called “sophistication,” but it’s absolutely at odds, contrary to what the Scriptures teach.

Sarah: Absolutely. In fact, the idea of physics is coming from scientists, some of them very credible scientists, who also dabbled in metaphysics and put a metaphysical interpretation--that means a spiritual, occult interpretation--on the research they were doing. So a lot of what Missler writes sounds very scientific, you know? It sounds very scholarly and most people wouldn’t even know how to deal with it, except that some of the physics that he writes about I actually recognize as having been taught in college in humanistic psychology classes, which is very odd, but it came straight out of Stanford Research Institute, Willis Harman, that kind of thing. So this is very disturbing.

Tom: You know, Chuck has done some really good things in the past. I’ve spoken at prophecy conferences with him and so on, but I have a concern here, and as you do, as well, that--and I know people that have known him for a long time, spoke with him about this issue--you need to get back to the Bible, to the Word of God. I mean, this stuff is not as complicated, although it’s maybe entertaining that way, but it really--it’s something very simple. These manifestations, UFO manifestations, this is not just occultic, but it’s demonic, and that’s the simple truth, and we need to get back to the simple truth and not buy into all these speculations and opinions and ideas and, you know, many of which are New Age, many of which are just occult, many of which are, as you said, this is the “new quantum mechanics,” all of that, quantum physics. It’s bogus, and we don’t need that. We need to get back to the Word of God.

Sarah, I want to take you to a recent event. I know you weren’t there, but you’re aware of it. I’m talking about the Pike’s Peak Summit Conference put on by Prophecy in the News which features many of the people that I just mentioned, Missler was there, Stearman, Marzulli, Horn, all of these guys, and it sold out. It’s huge. Now, what do we do about this? Obviously we’re a rescue operation. We’re trying to get this information out to people. But these people seem to have this on a big-time roll.

Sarah: They do, and honestly, up until the last couple of months, we’ve been the only ones writing about it, at Herescope, and it’s just almost by accident that we even stumbled onto this. I had--one of my research friends gave me a copy of Tom Horn’s book Apollyon Rising 2012. Well, of course that book is all about the Mayan prophecies that were supposed to be fulfilled in 2012, and Tom Horn wrote as though those were credible prophecies, and another one of my research associates, Gaylene Goodroad, had gone to a Red River Bible Conference in which she had run into a booth where they were selling Tom Horn’s book, and she comes out of an Eastern mystical worldview, too. She got born again from it, and she wrote a whole book that’s published online called My Life in the Way, because she had a number of black belts and that kind of thing. So because we both came from that Eastern mystical worldview in our testimonies, when we started reading this, we recognized what we were reading, and so between the two of us, with the help of some of the ministers that we work with at Discernment, we began to start writing about this, and we have written a multitude of articles. That’s what we’ve focused on the past couple of years, and just trying to sound the warnings, because so much of this is based on totally extra-biblical sources that are straight out of the occult. It’s very alarming.

Tom: Sarah, I couldn’t agree with you more. We’ve only got a minute or so left in our discussion here, but that’s what we recommend that believers do, not only check out your website and so on, but bottom line is they’ve got to be into the Word of God. They’ve got to ask the Berean question, “Give me chapter and verse for that.” If it’s not according to God’s Word, if they can’t find the relationship there--I’m talking about very specific relationship--if it’s not there, they have to blow past it, or encourage others who buy into this, friends and so on, to “search the Scriptures daily to see if these things are so.” What would you add to that, Sarah?

Sarah: I would just say that getting old Bible commentaries, staying in the Word of God, and just being skeptical, on not entertaining--I mean, some of this is very vivid imagery, it’s very captivating, very intoxicating. Stay away from it. It’s not good.

Tom: Amen, amen. Well, Sarah, thanks so much for your input. …We’ve raised some eyebrows, but--and I know people will be upset, because we named names and dealt with that, but nevertheless, if the Bereans who were Jews in the synagogue of the Greek city of Berea, if they were challenging--commended for challenging the Apostle Paul-- that’s where we need to be, that’s where we ought to be in Jesus’ name.

Sarah: Amen.

Tom: Amen.

Gary: You’ve been listening to Search the Scriptures 24/7 with T.A. McMahon, a radio ministry of The Berean Call. We offer a wide variety of resources to help you in your study of God’s Word. For a complete list of materials and a free subscription to our monthly newsletter, contact us at P.O. Box 7019 Bend, Oregon 97708. Call us at 800.937.6638. Or visit our website at the bereancall.org. I’m Gary Carmichael. Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you can be here next week. Until then, we encourage you to Search the Scriptures 24/7.