July 8, 2016 Show with Douglas Van Dorn on “Giants: Sons of the Gods”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27, verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, We are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon,

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet

Earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Friday on this eighth day of July, 2016.

And I'm very excited about this program today. We are going to be dealing with a subject that I have never dealt with, at least as a full program, on Iron Sharpens Iron ever since we very first launched in 2006.

And I'm going to read a description of our topic today right from the way that this book is described because it perfectly sets up our interview for us.

Goliath, you know the story. But why is it in the Bible? Is it just to give us a little moral pick -me -up as we seek to emulate a small shepherd boy who defeated a giant?

Have you ever wondered where Goliath came from? Did you know that he had brothers, one with 24 fingers and toes?

Did you know their ancestry is steeped in unimaginable horror? Genesis 6, the

Nephilim. The first few verses of this chapter have long been the speculation of supernatural events that produced demigods and a flood that God used to destroy the whole world.

The whole world remembers them. Once upon a time, all Christians knew them. But for many centuries, this view was mocked, though it was the only known view at the time of the writing of the

New Testament. Today, it is making a resurgence among Bible -believing scholars and for a good reason.

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward. This book delves deep into the dark and ancient recesses of our past to bring you rich treasures long buried.

It is a carefully researched, heavily footnoted, and selectively illustrated story of the giants of the

Bible. There is more here than meets the eye, much more. Here you will learn the invisible supernatural storyline of the

Bible that is always just beneath the surface, lurking like the spawn of the ancient

Leviathan. It is a storyline no person can afford to ignore any longer.

Unlike other more sensational books on the topic, there is no undue speculation to be found here.

The author is a Bible -believing Christian who refuses to use such ideas to tell you the end of the world is drawing nigh.

Once you discover the truth about these fantastic creatures, you will come to see the ministry and work of Jesus Christ in a very new and exalting light.

Come learn the fascinating, sobering, yet true story of the real giants who played a significant role in the

Bible and still to today. And we are speaking of the book, Giants, Sons of the

Gods, by Douglas Van Dorn, pastor of Reformed Baptist Church of Northern Colorado.

Douglas Van Dorn received his Master of Divinity at Denver Seminary, and he is the author of Waters of Creation, a biblical theology of baptism.

Galatians, A Supernatural Justification, and the book we're discussing today, Giants, Sons of the

Gods. He's also written Covenant Theology, a Reformed Baptist primer. From the

Shadows to the Savior, Christ and the Old Testament, and the Unseen Realm, Q &A

Companion. He has pastored the Reformed Baptist Church of Northern Colorado since 2002, and he co -hosted the radio show

Journey's End from 2011 to 2012. He served at one time on the

Administrative Council of the Association of Reformed Baptist Churches of America, also known as ARPCA, and is presently working on the ground floor of starting up the

Reformed Baptist Network. He has been married to his wife, Janelle, since 1994. They have four girls, and he has climbed all 54 of Colorado's 14 ,000 -foot mountains, and also

Mount Rainier in Washington, and Mount Shasta in California.

Well, according to that statistic, I've only climbed one more mountain than he has. Just kidding.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron, Pastor Douglas Van Dorn.

Thanks for having me on, Chris. It's great to have you on, and it's great to be able to discuss with you this exciting and fascinating subject,

Giants, Sons of the Gods, for the very first time. Not only are you a first -time guest, but you're addressing a first -time subject on this broadcast.

And let me introduce to you, on air, my co -host as of late, the

Reverend Buzz Taylor. Greet our guest, Buzz. Greetings, indeed. I am looking forward to a very interesting talk today.

Be fun, Buzz. Yes, and if you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Doug Van Dorn, you can email us at chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence.

If you live outside of the good old USA. And this subject that we are addressing today is largely based on texts found in Genesis 6, verses 1 through 4.

Let me just read those verses for you. Now, it came about when men began to multiply in the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose.

Then the Lord said, My spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh.

Nevertheless, his days shall be one hundred and twenty years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them.

Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.

Quite a fascinating text of Scripture that has people arguing and debating over what exactly those verses mean, and other verses as well in the

Scripture that relate to those texts. And you could have people, as I've been saying lately, we've been dealing with a lot of issues on Iron Shepherds Iron, that not only do people in the same denomination often disagree upon, you have people in the same congregation disagreeing, and maybe even the same pew disagreeing as to their meaning.

And we'll be getting into that subject as deeply as we can within a two -hour time frame today.

And first of all, let me ask you, Doug, what was the first catalyst in your study of the

Scriptures, or in your life, that made you say, I've got to really study this in further depth?

Because it seems that whenever issues like this come up, you'll have a lot of pastors or even scholars say, we really don't know what that was, it's not really that important, it's not really relative to the

Church in the third millennium, as we have all these other issues that are far more important, facing us with Islam taking over the world step by step, and filling us globally with terror as they perform so many atrocious acts of terrorism, and there's men marrying men, and women marrying women, and homosexuals adopting children, there's all kinds of things that we're facing, and a lot of people just will fluff things like this off as something we're never going to know exactly what that means, so let's not really waste our time on it.

I, of course, am doing a two -hour interview with you on this, so I differ greatly on that view of just sweeping something like this under the carpet.

What made you say, I've got to study this deeply, and eventually you said, I'm going to write a book on this?

Yeah, the first thing that comes to my mind is the examples you gave of the sexual problems we have in our culture and Islam.

I actually, believe it or not, have a chapter in the book that kind of deals with some of those things, and how they're related to the giants.

So maybe we could get into that at some point, I don't know, but to answer your question there about what got me interested,

I suppose I've had a lifelong just fascination with antediluvian, pre -flood sort of stuff, and so I've read all sorts of crazy, crazy things.

I happened to be writing a book on baptism several years ago. It was right after I got my, it was right as I was getting my

MDiv at Denver Seminary. I was trying really hard to become a Presbyterian, and I couldn't do it.

So I was writing just for myself on the issue of baptism, and I started thinking about some stuff that Greg Beal would come out with in a year or two after that on the temple, and it's kind of its relationship to baptism, and the labor of baptism.

Anyway, so that's kind of, it's a strange way to talk about giants, like what does that have to do with it?

But I was thinking about cosmic temples, Beal into writing about the

Garden of Eden as a temple, and those kinds of things were, they were like circulating in the back of my mind.

So fast forward a few years later, I preach expositionally through books and the

Bible, and I happen to be in Exodus, and I suppose this was about eight or nine years ago now, and I was just doing some research on the internet, and I came across this article that for some reason had something to do, you know, with what

I was preaching on that week, but also kind of not, and I saw that the title of the thing was, it was an article that was in BibSac back in 2001, and the title was

Deuteronomy 32 .8 and the Sons of God. So I start reading this, and I find that this is like a 40 -50 page article on a textual variant in Deuteronomy 32 .8,

where if you go and read, like the NAS, it will say the Sons of Israel. If you go and you read the

ESV, it will say the Sons of God. So I was completely fascinated by this, and he doesn't talk about giants in there, but it's very closely related.

I was fascinated by it. I put it away and didn't think about it for about three months, and then

I was doing some research for something else. I came across a guy on the internet that sounded an awful lot like the guy

I had read in this article. It turns out it's the exact same guy, and I just started devouring all the things that he was writing about.

It turns out that his name is Michael Heiser. He works over as kind of the academic editor of the

Old Testament at Logos Bible Software, and he did his Ph .D. studies in something called the

Divine Council, which is this kind of court of the heavenly beings that help rule the affairs of the cosmos.

And you'll read about this in, like, Meredith Klein talking about stuff in almost all of his books.

He mentions it, but he doesn't really tell you what it's about. And so, I mean,

I was just swallowing this stuff up, because I had never heard anything about it. It was talking about the supernatural world for really the first time in my life from people that weren't, you know, really charismatic and grounded in the

Scripture, and I started following footnote trails and reading more of Heiser, and he starts talking about giants.

And that was when I said, all right, I really have to start thinking about this. So to get the thoughts out in my own mind,

I just started writing. And out came that book. Well, I'm glad you did. And let's not forget

Meredith Klein, one of the great women heroes of the faith. I'm just kidding. I say the same thing about Lorraine Bettner.

But anyway. Exactly. And Kim Riddle Barter. Well, you brought up something interesting, because it seems that as much as I love and cherish and treasure my

Reformed theology and my Reformed heroes, both past and present, and most of my books are by Reformed authors, most of the books

I own and have read. In fact, almost every Arminian pastor

I've ever met, even when they are anti -Calvinist, when I look in their libraries, the vast majority of the books they have are written by Calvinists, and some of them don't even realize that.

But having said that, it seems that our Reformed brethren shy away from things like this.

They shy away from talking about it. I recently had a program on the demonic realm and demon possession, and I interviewed a

Missouri Synod Lutheran minister and a missiologist who has had quite a bit of experience studying this in South America and other places.

And it seems that a lot of our Calvinist brethren shy away from it. What do you think the reason for that is?

Oh boy, I've talked with several friends about that very question for many hours.

I think part of it is that we just kind of love our heritage, and Calvin did not take the view

I take of this, and actually Luther didn't take the view I take of it. So kind of that was the trajectory of the

Reformation early on, so maybe it's just kind of implied that you just kind of take the

Augustine view of Genesis 6, that the sons of God are the children of Seth, and the daughters of man are the children of Cain, and it's just marriage between Christians and non -Christians.

So it could just be as simple as that. I think there's another explanation, which is that I just really think, and this is from my own experience,

I've been in this world now for eight or nine years, that there is a whole worldview of the supernatural that the

Bible gives to us, and the giants are part of that, but they're not the whole thing. But it's a worldview, and if you don't have the worldview, then you just don't have the category to think properly about supernatural things.

And so you're kind of left with, like I said earlier, the people that do talk about it, they don't necessarily have the worldview for it either, but they're not afraid to talk about it, and so you end up with some pretty strange things when they're talking about demons and so on.

Yeah, what I said to my Lutheran guest recently was that I think that, at least with my

Calvinist brethren, I know for a fact that Calvinists, and remember, I am one, folks, so I'm not bashing some group of people that I don't have an affiliation with.

Calvinists are terrified of guilt by association, and they really don't want to be lumped together with some of the fringe,

Pentecostal, and charismatic teachers and preachers and authors who have all kinds of sensationalistic things to say, and it seems like they just would rather not even address those things.

But I just want, before, I think Buzz wants to ask a question, but I just wanted to clarify something.

I don't know what edition of the New American Standard Bible you read that text in, but the one that I read from is an

NASB reference, and it uses Sons of God. Now, is that in Deuteronomy 32 .8?

Oh, I'm sorry, I'm talking about Genesis 6, 1 through 4. Yeah, Genesis 6 is consistently the

Sons of God, but in Deuteronomy 32 .8, Heizer actually calls it the Deuteronomy 32 worldview.

That's how important he thinks that scripture is. So that's the variant, yeah.

I think we've all had an experience before where we have learned a particular thing and we look at the scriptures and it's like,

I'm not so sure about that. And of course, adding to the list of not wanting to be guilty by association,

I appreciate what you said in your book also that almost all the time this is tied into end -time scenarios and they lose me right away.

But on the other hand, I can recall many times looking at the traditional view, thinking, well, you know, like R .C.

Sproul once said, if you come up with something that's been missed for 2 ,000 years of church history, chances are your interpretation is wrong.

But yet you point out that this has not escaped 2 ,000 years of the church's knowledge.

It's just our heroes didn't get it. Yeah, I mean, it's even more than that,

I think. I make the point in the introduction when I really kind of do an exegesis of Genesis 6 that for the first 250 -plus years, the giant view, the supernatural view, was the only view in the church.

It was the only one. And among Jews and Christians, it's the New Testament. And we have probably a score of references that are in the 1st and 2nd century, maybe more than that.

They're all misused. So there isn't a set -type view until really you get longer than America has been a country.

Oh, yeah. Well, I think everybody's waiting with bated breath in the audience as to what your view is because I don't think you detailed it.

Yeah, I was going to say, we better start when you've got four different views that are predominant that we probably need to understand before we get into the subject.

Yes, good idea, good idea. Yeah, go through the major views and tell us what your view is. Okay, so I would really say that there's really only two major views.

And to put them simply, there's a supernatural view of the sons of God. That is, the sons of God are heavenly beings.

And that's the older view held by all the earliest church fathers. The second view is what

I would just call a naturalistic view, and that's that the sons of God are children of Seth.

And that what's going on in Genesis 6 is something like what you find in the book of Ezra where the

Jews are marrying non -Jews and getting in trouble for it. So supernatural, non -supernatural.

Now there's another view called something like the divine kingship view. That's a view that actually

Meredith Klein has. But to me it's not really a separate view because you could actually believe that the sons of God are supernatural and their children in the

Nephilim are kind of like demigods. Or you could believe that in the natural view, because all that view is saying is that these men of renown were these dynastic kings of the early time after the flood.

And so it doesn't really make a comment on who they were in terms of what we're talking about there.

So I don't really, I mean it's an important thought. And I actually kind of think, yeah, they were kings and rulers.

But I don't take the natural view that he takes. So you believe that the sons of God, these giants, were angelic beings.

Were they fallen angelic beings? Were they angelic beings within the graces of God and His pleasure?

Or were they enemies of God? Where do you fit in that puzzle? Okay, so there's, let me clarify one point.

So in Genesis 6 you have three groups of people. You have the sons of God, and that is, who are they?

Well, I take the view, and for lack of a better word, I don't like the word but I'll use it, they're angels.

You have the daughters of men would be human women. And then the Nephilim, and a lot of people get this confused, the

Nephilim are the offspring of those two products. I see,

I see. Okay, so that kind of goes to that question.

Now the issue of, you know, were they fallen? When did they fall?

You know, there's speculation on that. We know that there was a fallen heavenly being that was in the

Garden of Eden and called Satan. You know, when did he fall?

I kind of take the view that he actually probably fell right about the time that Adam did because he got angry that God put man in the

Garden to rule, and he wanted to rule. And, you know, that's one question.

Were there others that followed him in the Garden? We don't have the answer to that. But certainly at the time that the sons of God committed the acts with the women, they were definitely fallen because this is viewed as an evil act.

And we do have, you already answered it to a degree, the question that our friend, our listener,

John in Phoenix, Arizona has. But if you want to expand on it, John in Phoenix, Arizona says,

My question for Mr. Dorn, Van Dorn it should be, is this, is this, where did the interpretation for Genesis 6 that the sons of God were angels come from?

Oh boy, it comes before the New Testament was written. It seems to come from Jewish tradition.

And so they were writing all sorts of intertestamental books between Malachi and the

New Testament, and this was the only known view at the time. And one of the main reasons why

I actually hold this view is because I'm convinced that Jude and 2 Peter are writing in that tradition when they start talking about this event.

And there are also, like Jude, for example, is citing the book of Enoch, 1

Enoch. He's citing it positively, and I have a little chart at the back of the book that shows that he's actually alluding to the book of 1

Enoch like a dozen times, actually quotes it one time. They're all positive allusions.

The quote is a positive quote. He quotes it as if it's true. And he's telling the very same story that Enoch is telling.

And so it seems to me that if Jude actually is doing all this with Enoch but yet he doesn't believe the main point of the first part of that book, then he really should tell us that because it's very deceptive for him to be affirming everything about it, but really

I don't believe what it's talking about with regard to the giants. And when you go in and read that book, we don't know the true origin of it.

Actually, Augustine, this is a strange quote. Augustine said that the reason why the church fathers didn't include it in the canon is because it was so old we couldn't trust it.

And so, I mean, I would never argue that Enoch should be in the scripture, but it's telling this story of the giants in the first 30 chapters or so, and then it's being alluded to and even quoted by guys like Jude and Peter.

And so, to me, that's a very powerful argument for the view. And we also have a listener in Clinton Township, Michigan, Jeff, who says,

Where did the giants come from in Numbers 13 if the flood destroyed the

DNA of these creatures? I read the Omega conspiracy by D .E.

Thomas, but his use of extra -biblical writings to make his case disqualified him in my mind.

Thank you all. Yeah, that's a tough question, and you really have to speculate when you get to that question, because we don't know the answer to it.

We know for certain that the sons of God and the Nephilim were on the earth prior to the flood, and we know for certain that they were there after the flood, so you just kind of have to go, well, how could that be?

And so the theories are, I think there's three or four of them, if I can remember what they are. The Jews had to wrestle with this.

The funniest one is that they believed that Og, who is the giant that Moses killed on the way into the

Promised Land, remember he had a, it's either a bed or a sarcophagus. It's like 13 1⁄2 feet long.

And so they said, well, he hitched a ride on Noah's Ark. I don't buy that one.

You could take the view that the flood was a local flood, and so some of them just didn't die.

I don't think that one works, because the text is telling us that all flesh died.

That seems to be kind of the point of it. So then you kind of are left with just a couple other ideas.

Some have said, well, maybe one of the people on the

Ark carried the genetic information, and they came along that way. And a lot of people will point to somebody like Ham or Ham's wife, probably.

I don't know if that's true or not. And then kind of the last option is that another group of angels, which, so there's one group that Peter says were thrown into Tartarus.

That's in 2 Peter. Tartarus is kind of the lowest point of hell. It's an unusual Greek word that he uses there.

It's not found anywhere else in the New Testament, so it's not talking about Hades. It's not talking about Gehenna. It's a very specific place that was known at that time, and he says that those angels were shut up there until the time of the end.

So if they're shut up, then what happened? Well, the only other idea is that another batch of them fell into the same thing.

And there may actually be biblical reason to believe this, believe it or not, from 1 Corinthians 11.

It's a whole kind of a bunny trail, but Paul talks about how women should have a head covering because of the angels.

And it's kind of a very similar language to Genesis 6, and there's actually been scholarship, you know, peer -reviewed journals that have delved into that very question with that text.

I think Bill Cosby also had a view on that. How long can you tread water? A good memory.

That's the hitching a ride on Noah's Ark. And we have to go to a break right now, and if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address again is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. We already have a couple of people waiting patiently to have their questions asked and answered.

And by the way, to our first two listeners already, you are getting, or I should say our first two listeners that sent in questions, you are getting a free copy of this book each, compliments of our guest.

So you have to re -email me your full mailing addresses so I can have those books shipped out to you as soon as possible.

And once again, that's chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. And we thank our guest for supplying those free books of his to give away today to our listeners.

And obviously we have a limited supply, so I don't know if we're going to be able to give all of you a free copy, but we'll get to as many as we can.

And we're going to be going to a break right now, and we hope that you stay tuned. And we'll be right back with Doug Van Dorn and our discussion of the

Giants, the Sons of the Gods. Hi, I'm Chris Arnsen, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, here to tell you about an exciting offer from World Magazine, my trusted source for news from a

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arns. And if you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours is

Pastor Douglas Van Dorn. And we are discussing one of his books today, Giants, Sons of the

Gods. And if you'd like to join us, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com

We have a question from Susan in Newville, Pennsylvania. And she asks, if it is clear from the

New Testament that angels cannot procreate, there is neither male nor female in the angelic realm, how could these creatures have been angels since they procreated?

I'm sorry, Chris, you broke up there at the very end. Really? Okay, I'm sorry about that. Basically, the guest, or should

I say the listener, Susan in Newville, Pennsylvania, wants to know how these creatures could have procreated if the

Bible says angels don't do that. Yeah, actually,

Dr. James Boyce from 10th Presbyterian has a series on Genesis, and he deals with that question very well,

I think. Jesus doesn't say that they can't procreate, he says that they don't. And he's not talking about fallen angels, he's talking about the angels that are in Heaven.

So I think that, you know, I get that question a lot, and I just think that it's a misreading of what

Jesus is saying. Okay. Well, Susan, you're also getting a free copy of the book, so you could learn more about this subject if you give us your full mailing address, and that's

Giants, Sons of the Gods. Thank you very much for writing today. This is an issue that some of our brethren who may be embarrassed by what we're talking about today, some of our brethren who are in these academic circles who are even embarrassed by Young Earth creationists, they think that we are single -handedly thwarting the spread of the

Gospel because we are mixing an unproven teaching that the

Earth is very, very old with the Gospel, and therefore, since scientists are in unison dismissing an

Old Earth, I'm sorry, a Young Earth. I mixed that up there for a second. Since scientists are in unison dismissing a

Young Earth, that we are basically embarrassing the Church and we are the cause of the more deep -thinking person rejecting the

Gospel. How do you respond to that kind of thing? I mean, have you heard this before?

I mean, I don't know if I'm the only one bringing it up. Yeah, I mean, I've certainly heard that with the

Age of the Earth questions. I mean, that was what Bill Nye was doing with Ken Ham, right?

So, as far as the Giants go, I mean, it kind of begs the question.

If the first Church for 300 years, this is what they believed, they certainly didn't seem to think that it was causing a problem with the advancement of the

Gospel. Well, I would agree with you. I'm just saying that there are those that try to give us a hard time about that, and it's unfortunate, because I think that that kind of thinking that would be opposed to serious study of these being real historic creatures as you've described them, an out -and -out rejection of that kind of thing is usually a doorway into liberalism, because you're just going to start denying a whole lot of things that the

Scriptures, the God -breathed, inerrant Scriptures have taught us. Yeah.

Well, we have very sufficient biblical evidence, at least we have to admit, for the existence of these creatures, because we get into exact sizes and things in the

Book of Deuteronomy and so forth. Could you tell us a little bit about the evidence we see for Giants in the

Scriptures? Yeah, that's a great question, probably the most important question we can deal with,

I think, today. My book is trying to be a biblical theology of Giants, so it takes us from Genesis all the way to the end of the

Bible. And believe it or not, there's an awful lot that's there.

People just don't really think about it. So when I'm helping people try and think about this for the first time, what

I like to do is I like to say, you know, you already believe in Giants, because you believe that Goliath was a real person, right?

And you believe that he fought against David, right? And David killed him. It's strange that people take that story of Goliath and they turn it into, you know, slaying all the

Giants in your life and completely spiritualize the thing, when he's actually a literal giant right there, fighting,

David's fighting. So when people can kind of grasp it, yeah, I guess I do already believe in Giants, don't

I? Then you start to ask, well, is there other biblical evidence besides just Genesis 6?

And sure enough, when you start reading even about Goliath himself, it gives you a genealogy and it says that he's one of the sons of Rapha.

And it gives, there's actually four, I think it's four others, making five total

Giants in the days of David that are mentioned kind of right together at the end of one of the books of Samuel.

I forget which one it is. And it's very explicit. I mean, it tells you their height, it tells you how heavy their armor was, it tells you who killed them, it tells you where they're from, it tells you unique features about them.

And it just kind of talks it like it's an ordinary thing. Of course there were Giants, everybody knows that. Yeah, so in other words, if you believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, you can't say this is allegorical or anything like that.

Yeah, I mean, Goliath was a real person. Well, I've heard people try to explain Goliath away by saying he had a particular pituitary problem and he was therefore, he had bad eyesight and all this stuff because he was a mutation.

Sure, you get that. I don't know that we can say that mutations are or aren't related to the supernatural question, and they could be.

How are we going to know that, right? Yeah. We do have a listener in Mastic Beach, Long Island, Tyler, who asks,

Are the mentions of the Behemoths in the Bible taken as Paleolithic creatures such as dinosaurs by most

Christians? Is it a common conclusion to the layperson? Well, Behemoth is not a person, he's some sort of an animal or a creature.

Right, right. Kind of related, but kind of not. Right, he said that they were Paleolithic creatures such as the dinosaurs. Right, yeah.

Yeah, but obviously you are saying that they are references to dinosaurs then? I know that some folks have said they were hippopotamus and, you know, other kinds of animals.

They try to dismiss the prehistoric, quote -unquote, animals that are often claimed by Old Earth folk or by non -Christians as predating the human race.

But obviously we as Christians do not believe that, that the dinosaurs necessarily predated human beings.

But anyway. Yeah, I mean, Leviathan and Behemoth are kind of the two characters there.

And Leviathan is a really interesting one because he actually is kind of a mythical figure and he's used that way in the scripture.

But also he seems to be used in a literal way. You know, when you're reading in the

Job there and he gives a list of all these animals, we don't say to ourselves, well, he's describing a hyena and so that's a mythical figure.

He's describing a hyena. And he starts talking about Behemoth and Leviathan at the same time. Same sort of a deal, like, of course he is.

That's Leviathan. I guess a lot of people raise their eyebrows especially because of the fire -breathing description and that kind of thing.

But as even I've seen in the past Ken Ham bring up in a conference or one of his scientists that was on a panel, there are even insects that can shoot flames out of themselves today.

The bombardier beetle, I remember. Yeah, there you go. Dwayne Gish's book had a very, very comical description of trying to evolve that mechanism.

Well, thank you, Tyler. You're also getting a free copy of the book that we are discussing today by Pastor Doug Van Dorn.

And thank you for participating in the broadcast today. We have

Harrison from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania saying that,

Have you heard of the incubus and succubus who are allegedly demonic creatures that can have sex with human beings?

If what you are saying is true about these creatures in the book of Genesis, why couldn't this be a reality today and not scoffed at by Christians?

Do you have any comment on that at all? I don't know if you've ever done any investigation on the incubus and succubus.

Oh yeah, I have. I like all things that are weird. Okay.

We can go backwards from Goliath or we can go forward. The way that I end the book is three chapters dealing with how

Jesus dealt with the giants. And really, to me, what I try to do is I try to tell a story.

I call it the story of the two seeds. It goes back to Genesis 3 .15. And it says that the woman will have a seed.

And we all take that as the first gospel and that's talking about Jesus. But then it says that the serpent will have a seed.

And so you can take that in a couple different ways. Jesus takes it figuratively.

When he calls the Pharisees, you know, your father is the devil.

He's not talking biologically there. But Genesis 6, and it's not

Satan himself, but it's kind of this idea that there is a fallen group of heavenly beings that are desperately seeking to destroy the line of Christ.

The seed is always involved with the story of these giants. The seed with David. The seed with Abraham.

Abraham deals with them. The seed with Noah. So anyway, you go all the way to the

New Testament, into Christ, and you go, well, Jesus never fought any giants. And that's where you have to understand one other thing about the early church.

And this was also a universal view. You find it with the Jews. You find it with the early

Christians. And I believe that you actually find it in the Bible. So one of the words that is used for these giants is the word

Rephaim. It's a synonym for a Nephilim. You find this in Genesis 14, what

I call the chapter of the giant wars. And you find it in Deuteronomy 2 and 3, where they're chronicling these giant beings that were cast out of the land by the

Moabites and Ammonites and so on. So Rephaim becomes a word that is used for a creature that's in hell in the

Old Testament. And they're often translated as the dead ones or something like that, because the word can mean dead or it can mean healer.

But the idea is that you have these Rephaim that are down there guarding the gates of hell.

It's like something out of Dante. So the view with the fathers, and I've got a whole bunch of quotes from like Justin Martyr and Uranus and so on, was that when

Nephilim died, his spirit didn't go to hell and it didn't go to heaven.

It stayed in the air. And so these become the demons of the ancient world.

And so his question actually might be more related than he knows to the story of the book.

Because an incubus and a succubus is kind of a subclass of a demon. So in other words, you're saying that these are real demons that we should believe exist, these demons that have physical, sexual intercourse with men and women.

The incubus is the one that allegedly has relations with men and the succubus.

I'm sorry, with women, and the succubus is the one that has sex with men. Yeah, so we need to be careful here.

One of the things that people get wrong, and this is just kind of classic Christian teaching that's just wrong.

People think that demons are fallen angels. And in the early view, that's not what they are. The demons are the dead

Nephilim. So they're the sons of the angels and human women that are breeding.

So if an incubus is a real creature, and I think it could be, and it's doing these kinds of sexual things to people, it's not in the same sense that you would find it with the sons of God.

Because demons are not embodied creatures. They're disembodied. And so the relations that they would be having are probably things that are going on in somebody's mind.

They're able to do that. I mean, they might be able to manifest some physical things, like slime and ghostbusters or something, but it's not like an embodied sort of a rape or something like that.

It's a different kind of a thing. Well, thank you very much, Harrison. And you are getting a copy of the book,

The Unseen Realm, which is the second book that we are addressing today by Doug Van Dorn.

And we thank you very much for asking the question and keep listening and keep writing. One of the things that has come up between even my co -host

Buzz and I, which I don't want to tick us off on too far of a tangent, but I have for the first time in my life begun to hear that Lucifer and Satan are not necessarily the same entity.

Where do you stand on that? Oh, that's a really interesting question. It's definitely related to this topic.

So let me answer it this way. You go to Genesis chapter 3, and we are all kind of told that there is this animal, a snake, and maybe some people even believe it had feet or something like that, and it lost its feet, and that Satan possessed it.

And I don't think that that's right, because Satan isn't a demon, and demons possess, but angels don't. I think

Satan is an angelic creature. So he by nature has a body of some kind.

And so the word that's used there is this word nachash, and then nachash can mean shining one, if it's used as an adjective instead of a noun.

If you go to the story of the bronze serpent with Moses, he lifts up a bronze serpent. So it's really strange, because it uses two words there for the serpent.

It uses the word nachash, and then it uses the word seraph, which is where we get seraphim, and they're used interchangeably.

So it'll say, God told him to make a nachash, and so he made a seraph. And so they're called serpents, but the idea is, there seems to be something else going on here besides just looking at a snake on a pole.

It's a shining one. It's a shining being. So then you come to where we get the word lucifer from, which is from Isaiah 14, and that lucifer is a

Latin translation of a couple of words, halel ben shechar, which is something like a shining one, sun of the dawn.

And so you get this idea of shining again where you get in the Garden of Eden. So the question is, is it the same person?

It's hard to know. The other problem here is with the word Satan. Satan is actually, probably more properly speaking, at least in the

Old Testament, it's a role that a heavenly being takes, and it's an adversarial role.

So you actually get the angel of the Lord being called the Satan when he confronts Balaam, but of course the angel of the

Lord isn't Satan, but he's acting as an adversary. So then the question is, is

Satan, when he's called that, when that word is used in Revelation, is it referring to a role?

Is it referring to a person? And you find differing opinions on it in the ancient literature.

Well, yeah, that, see, this is something that has just surfaced recently in my attention for the first time in my life, where Reverend Buzz may have been the first one to question that they are the same,

I don't mean the first one in existence, I mean the first person I know that questioned that.

Well, just to let you know, to play the devil's advocate here, or something like that, adversary.

But the thing I pointed out was it just seemed to me that this whole teaching that seems very prevalent on the fact that Satan is fallen

Lucifer has very scanty biblical evidence to build a whole theological structure on it.

Yeah, there's just a couple of texts that really have anything to do with it. Isaiah 14 is one of them, another one is

Ezekiel 28. Right, exactly. And that's a really interesting one because you've got this, it's called the

Guardian Cherub, and it's talking about the Garden of Eden, and he's walking around there with something called stones of fire, which

I think in the ancient mind actually refers to other heavenly beings. And this kind of gets into the other book, the

Unseen Realm, and kind of deals more with the sons of God than it does with the giants, but it seems like what's being said there, beginning of Ezekiel 28, talks about this place being the seat of the gods.

I sit on the seat of the gods in the middle of the sea or something. It seems what's going on there is that the

Garden of Eden is acting like this temple, which is a connection place between heaven and earth, and so you just naturally find humans and you find angels that are intersecting with one another there.

That seems to be what's going on at the Tower of Babel as well. They're trying to recreate the Garden of Eden, but they're not doing it

God's way, and they're also probably not trying to call upon Yahweh, calling upon somebody else.

We actually are going to a break right now, and if you'd like to join us on the air with a question regarding this very fascinating topic, giants, the sons of the gods, and anything that is in connection with the unseen spirit world and so on, give us an email.

We'd love to hear from you. We do have a couple of people patiently waiting to have their questions asked and answered already, and our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com

chrisarnsen at gmail .com C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com

Please include your first name, at least your city and state, and your country of residence, and I do have to apologize to our overseas and Canadian listeners that the winners of the books have to be residents of the

United States because our sponsor, CVBBS, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, who was kind enough to ship out all of our winners' books whenever we have them, which is nearly daily, they have requested that we limit the winners to United States residents because the shipping costs would be amounting to astronomical prices, and we do have quite a number of listeners in the

UK and Canada and other places, so we just extend to you folks overseas and in Canada our apologies that we can't get you free books, so just keep that in mind, but we still want to hear from you.

We would still love to hear a question from you, and as we just did the other day from Rugby England, we would love to hear from any of you from overseas or Canada.

chrisarnsen at gmail .com chrisarnsen at gmail .com Don't go away.

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That's lynnbrookbaptist .org. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen if you just tuned us in.

Our guest today is, for the full two hours, is Pastor Doug Van Dorn.

We're discussing largely today his book, Giants, the Sons of the

Gods. And if you'd like to join us on the air our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail dot com chrisarnzen at gmail dot com and if you could provide for us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA. And as far as a technical issue with the sound that seems to have developed

I'm not sure how we can resolve it right now but Doug, do you hear us okay right now or is it still going on, this technical issue?

Yeah, I'm hearing you right now. I'm getting some garbled sometimes and then also I hear myself echo right now.

Right now you hear yourself echo. Right. I have no idea why that's happening because on our side everything seems to sound crystal clear.

Sounds fine to me. Yeah, I apologize. I hope you can live with it brother because I'm not sure why. I can live with it. Okay. And we do have a listener.

We have Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania who asks,

I hope this is not too far off topic but have you ever heard of two seed -in -the -spirit predestinarians, a very tiny sect that has almost vanished from American soil but at one time was a lot more prevalent and I believe the teaching was that the elect are the seed of God and the non -elect are the seed of Satan.

Where do you stand on this if you know anything about that? I've never heard of that heresy if it's a heresy.

I have heard of something called the Serpent Seed Doctrine that's taught by some of these TV guys and the idea there is that in the

Garden of Eden the serpents had relations with Eve and Cain was the actual physical product of that so it's kind of trying to take

Genesis 6 back to the Garden of Eden and you can't do that biblically because it's very specific. It says that Adam was the father of Cain.

If anything, I would probably take it the direction that Jesus does with the

Pharisees that their father is the devil not biologically but in a spiritual sense.

Yeah, I think that one of the teachers that you're speaking of is the host of the Shepherd's Chapel.

Am I right on that? Yeah, that's the guy. And I think he is no longer with us on this earth.

He's deceased. But he, I believe, was also from what I understand, a racist of some kind.

A lot of people use Cain and that kind of a thing to be racist. Yeah, that's right.

That's right. Now, in regard to practical theology and we as Christians battling the world and the flesh and the devil today what do you think the knowledge of these things can assist us with here in the 21st century?

Well, there's a lot of directions I could take it. There's kind of a practical thing and it can touch on the

Islam question, I suppose. But one of the big questions that people have about God when they're questioning

His goodness is why would God command the utter obliteration of all these people in the

Old Testament, right? And that's a very existential question and I don't know anything more practical than a question that actually keeps, you know, is it something they used to justify not believing in Him.

And that's definitely one of those questions. And when you understand this storyline that's going on, it's really a thread that goes from the beginning to the end of the

Bible. What you start to see is that, let me just kind of take

Moses and Joshua here. When Moses is told to go into the land, he has to go to the land of Ammon and the land of Moab and the land of Edom.

These are all basically his cousins from Esau and Lot going back into Genesis.

And what's interesting is God says you're not even to touch them at all. Don't do anything to them. Go straight on to their land because I will not let you touch them.

And yet we know how wicked these people were, right? It's when they come into the land that we see that God says these are the people that you are to exterminate, man, woman, and child.

And then it gives these lists. And these lists of names are the very same lists of names that you find in the giant wars in Genesis 14 and in the list in Numbers 13 where the spies go into the land.

Remember this story. This is a giant story. The 12 spies go into the land and they come back and they get this report.

And the report is that we saw the sons of Anak there. These are the

Nephilim. And the land devours the people. Well, a lot of people go, well, they're just lying to Moses.

And I think, no, that's not what's going on. What's going on is that these are giants. It goes back into the supernatural worldview.

These are an abomination to God because it's the crossing over of species between angel and man.

God says you're not supposed to do that. Jude's very specific in saying that they abandoned their proper domain and they were to be obliterated because this is the destroying of the kind that we find in Genesis chapter 1 and then again in Genesis chapter 6 when the flood story is taking place.

And so that question, why would he do that? He's not telling them to exterminate the human beings.

He's telling them to exterminate the giants from the land. And he had already done that very thing with the

Moabites and the Edomites in Deuteronomy 2 and 3 where they exterminated the giants as well.

That's what they were supposed to do. By the way, Arnie in Perry County, you're getting a free copy of the book

The Unseen Realm by our guest today. So, thank you very much for writing in. Very interesting question.

And our email address again is chrisarnson at gmail dot com chrisarnson at gmail dot com

We have BB in Carlisle, Pennsylvania who wants to know, as I understand it from the

Bible, the children of Adam are the ones out of which

God has saved his elect. Does that mean that any of those who might be living today that are from the genetic line of these creatures could not possibly be saved by the blood of Christ?

That's a really good question. I've wrestled over that. My best answer is that I think it's possible that they could.

I'm trying not to speculate, but go to the text. The best thing I've got is continuing along with that.

They go through Edom and Moab and Ammon and they get into the land. Moses is supposed to go to Sion and Og, the two kings of the land.

One of them is clearly a giant. The other one probably is. They seem to be related. And he basically says, let my people go through and I won't let anything harm you.

You'll be all right. And that's

God showing mercy and probably even grace to, at least on a physical level, to somebody that's clearly in the line of the giants.

So, these people definitely are half -human in the first generation.

Then after that, it's only morphing. So, I tend to think, yeah, they could be saved.

Very speculative question, though. So then, in other words, the NBA can have a collective sigh of relief?

Exactly. Well, now, that brings up another issue, though, that I want to ask about because I've seen some of the things on this subject that do border on the loony and the eschatological and all that stuff.

But what about skeletal remains and things like that? Do we have the evidence?

Of course, I watch a lot of things on YouTube, and I try to take everything with a grain of salt.

But when you see these skeletal remains of huge skulls and tall people and stuff...

Why couldn't that be true? Well, my first gut reaction is it's not. But on the other hand,

I want to allow for the fact that maybe it is and that this explains it. In fact, I saw a documentary on National Geographic where there was a discussion of they were looking for in Scandinavia skeletal remains of a giant that had long been a part of the legend of the community, but I don't think that they ever were able to find this skeleton.

But anyway, your comment. Yeah, I have an antithesis at the end. It kind of was more just for fun, but it addresses the topic.

I guess I have two ways of answering that. One is, if we do find anomalous things, anomalous bones, and let's say they label it as Neanderthal or something like that, who's to say that it's not actually methylene?

Right. The other thing is that the whole bone thing is a really tough thing.

So if you go back and you look at newspaper reports from, let's say, 1750 to 1925 in the

United States, you literally find thousands of them. Literally thousands of reports from all 50 states of these bones that were dug up, and they're anywhere between 8 and 12 feet.

And you find these printed in the New York Times just as a column.

Of course, there's giants. And they're talking about bones that are being dug up. I actually went to...

They're usually in these burial mounds that are found mostly in New England in the Ohio Valley, but there's a burial mound in Minnesota that was 10 miles from where my wife grew up.

And I got to go and visit this burial mound, and I found information of what was dug up in it.

And I think it was the Minnesota Historical Society Almanac or something like that.

And it turns out that the former president of that association lives in the town that she's from.

So I went over and talked to him, and I said, if you found a report like this in your book that you guys published from 1930, would you believe it?

He goes, of course I would believe it. You know, because it's not like it's some sort of a weekly world news or something like that.

It's not. It's sensational journalism. It's guys that are going in and doing archaeology, and they've got doctorates, and they're, you know, they're medical doctors.

They know the human anatomy and stuff. And here they are digging up these, you know, giant people.

The problem is that the bones seem to have all vanished, and it's created this huge conspiracy theory that they shipped all of the bones out to the

Smithsonian Institute, and they secretly got rid of them all because it destroys the evolutionary worldview.

Well, you actually stole the thunder of our next listener's question,

Jonathan in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, providentially just before you started speaking, sent in the question,

Is there any truth to the thought that the skeletal remains that the museums have are kept hidden because of the

Bible? I guess because they don't want the Bible to be proven true. I mean,

I think it's possible. People talk about conspiracy theories, and they like to get on, you know, giantologists for saying that there's the

Smithsonian cover -up, but to me it can work both ways. If you have a thousand newspaper articles that are independent and they're found all across, you know, the country over a course of 200 years, it's a pretty big conspiracy theory to say that all of them are lying or trying to do it to raise money for their town or something like that.

I find that just beyond comprehension. By the way, Jonathan, if you could send us your full mailing address,

I just have Carlisle, Pennsylvania. If you could send me your full mailing address, we'll have the copy of the book

The Unseen Realm by our guest Douglas Van Dorn sent out to you as soon as we have that in our greedy little hands over here.

And we thank you very much, Jonathan, for participating in today's program.

And again, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com. chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

So one thing that another questioner got you to reveal, which we didn't specifically ask you, is,

I'm assuming from an answer you gave, is you do believe that there are people alive today that are from the lineage of these beasts or these creatures.

Ha! You're being agnostic on that one. Okay, I'll let you remain agnostic then.

But you kind of tipped your hat, though. You said that you thought that they could be redeemed.

Did you not? Yeah, in their physical state, I think that that's a hypothetical question.

I take it just hypothetically. And I've had to think about it, because I know that I've had the question and I know a lot of other people have the very same question.

And we have another listener. We have CJ in Lyndonhurst, Long Island, who wants to know,

I hope this isn't too far off topic, but do you believe born -again believers can be possessed by demons?

Well, that's another really, really good question. I've actually changed my mind on this. My answer is yes,

I do think that they can be. Wow. You know, the typical argument is that the devil can't be in the same place as the

Holy Spirit, and so the devil couldn't be in our body, because that's the temple of the

Holy Spirit. And one of the things that kind of changed my mind on that, theologically, was that the devil goes into the temple in heaven, at least in the

Old Testament, the book of Job, with the divine counsel. The Holy Spirit is certainly there, and here's the devil going into the very throne room of God, saying, can

I do something to Job? So, the harder question is, what exactly is demon possession?

And I'm not certain that I would hold this kind of the same view that, you know, Charismatic would, or that you find in movies.

I just don't know. I haven't had to deal with it personally. I certainly believe that Christians can be outwardly harassed, oppressed, and they can be taught things that they're not supposed to believe, but I think there's a good possibility they could even demonize characteristics.

As someone who is within the realm of our theological circles, although he is a dispensationalist, a person who

I consider a modern -day hero of sorts is Dr. John MacArthur, and he was actually said that he was witness to an exorcism, and obviously

Dr. MacArthur is far from being charismatic, or from a fringe group, and he said that it was a young person, and I can't remember if it was a young girl or boy, but had superhuman strength and was throwing people across the room and so on.

Yeah, so he's a believer in the idea of possession.

I think also MacArthur takes the view that Christians cannot be possessed at the same time.

In fact, you're only the second Reformed person that I ever spoke with that does believe that Christians can be possessed.

The other was an evangelical free pastor I know who is now with the

Lord. He passed away not long ago, but he surprised me when he took that view. So there's only one of you left now.

Well, there's also only one of us writing on giants. Actually, that's not true.

I take that back, because I did a friend of mine who is a Hollywood movie writer named Brian Gadawa has an entire fiction series on the exact same thing

I'm talking about, on the giants, and he is a Reformed...

I think he's a Presbyterian guy and a post -millennial guy, but... Oh, what is his work? So it's called

The Chronicles of the Nephilim. Wow. Yeah, he does all sorts of radio shows, so if you want to have him on, he'd love to do it.

Yeah, you just got my co -host's attention like a dog in a butcher shop. I like science fiction and all that.

He's also post -millennial. I'm also post -millennial, yes. And really what he's trying to do is he's trying to tell...

I tell it in a theological way. He's trying to do it in a way of historical fiction, which

I just love it. I was going to say, his is probably a little bit more entertaining. Yeah, exactly.

And so we have basically got this information from you that you believe, unlike many in the more conservative realm of Christian media and literature, that these

Nephilim were the offspring of a marital union between angelic beings and human beings.

That would be the summary of that aspect of what we're discussing. And so in the realm of redemption,

Christ, as most of us who are Christians teach as far as his atoning blood, did not die for angels.

He died for human beings. That's correct. And so going back to the subject of the atonement, how could those folks be included, even in those days?

Because even in the... As Christians, we know that even the Old Testament saints were redeemed by the blood of Christ, even though it physically had not happened yet on this earth.

So how do you fit those into that realm of possibly being among those for whom

Christ died? I'm sorry, you're breaking up a little bit there, Buzz. Is the question about... This is

Chris, by the way. Oh, is that Chris? Sorry, Chris. Yeah, yeah, don't blame me for that one. Well, you did have something...

I've never done anything alike. Is the question going back to a Nephilim being saved?

Yes. I mean, the hard thing about it is that they are men.

Yeah, that's true. In terms of... They're human beings, so... An angel isn't, right?

Right, right. An angel is a different kind of a creature altogether. Actually, we have to go to just one final break right now, and if you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, write in before we run out of time, and our email address again is chrisarnson at gmail dot com, chrisarnson at gmail dot com, and please give us at least your first name, city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA. Don't go away. We're going to be right back with Doug Van Dorn and Giants, the

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Welcome back, this is Chris Arns, and if you just tuned us in for the last 90 minutes or so, our guest has been

Douglas Van Dorn, and we have been discussing his book,

Giants, Sons of the Gods, and also The Unseen Realm, a

Q &A companion, and if you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com, and we do have a couple of people waiting patiently, and we thank you for writing us, but before I return to our discussion,

I do want to plug a couple of events that our sponsors are holding in the very near future.

We have Christ Presbyterian Church, a congregation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Salt Lake City, pastored by Jason Wallace.

He is having a conference, not this weekend, but next weekend, in Salt Lake City, titled,

Who is Jesus Christ? And this is going to be a conference that features

Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, a dear friend of mine for over 25 years, who has been a guest in this program many times, and who

I have organized debates for since 1995. Dr.

James R. White is going to be starting off this conference on Friday, July 15th, at 7 p .m.,

by having a dialogue with a Mormon scholar named Alma Olred, that's

Alma Olred, who is an instructor at the Latter -day Saint Institute of Religion at the

University of Utah, and the dialogue will take place in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Auditorium at the

University of Utah. And also, on the following day, on Saturday, July 16th, at 7 p .m.,

Who is Jesus? is the theme of a public dialogue between Dr. White and a

Muslim imam at the Utah Islamic Center in Sandy, Utah.

And there are two other days of this conference, which concludes on Monday, and if you'd like more details about attending this, the phone number is 801 -969 -7948, 801 -969 -7948.

The website is gospelutah .org, gospelutah .org,

that is the website of Christ Presbyterian Church in Salt Lake. And last but not least, the email address for Pastor Jason Wallace is jasonopc, jasonopc, standing for Orthodox Presbyterian Church, at aol .com.

And last but not least, our friend Pastor Mac Tomlinson of Providence Chapel in Denton, Texas, he is participating in a conference in Maine, Buzz Taylor, my co -host on Stomping Grounds, he is going to be a part of the

Fellowship Conference New England, and that is going to be held at the Deering Center Community Church in Portland, Maine, and there are a number of speakers at this conference, including

Pastor Mac Tomlinson, and the theme is The Impossible, and if you want more information about this conference, you can go to the website that they have constructed specifically for the conference, fellowshipconferencenewengland .com,

fellowshipconferencenewengland .com, and we really want to thank, from the bottom of our hearts, Pastor Mac Tomlinson, and the folks, not only with this conference, but at Providence Chapel in Denton, Texas, for being a sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron, and helping us to remain on the air.

We thank you from the bottom of our hearts, brethren, and we always look forward to interviewing you,

Pastor Mac, whenever your schedule enables you to. And before we even continue with the specific subject that we had started off with,

Pastor Doug, I want to make sure that we let our listeners know more about how they can contact you at your church before you run out of time, and I forget to give your contact information.

I know that your website is rbcnc .com, for Reformed Baptist Church of Northern Colorado, rbcnc .com,

and you're writing, actually, just as it has with some other talented

Christian writers I know, your writing actually gave birth to your own publishing ministry. Why don't you tell us about that?

Yeah, I started off writing this baptism book that I told you about at the beginning of the program. Did you promise to give a free copy to my co -host,

Reverend Buzz Taylor, the Presbyterian? Nice try. Hey, Reverend Buzz, this is an argument you've never heard before,

I guarantee it. Well, we would love to have it. We would love to have it. So, anyway, yeah.

I didn't know there was such a thing. Well, you'll find out, Buzz. I wanted to get it out in some sort of a printed form, and so I started that publishing company, and I just kept writing, and next thing you know,

I got several books out. And what are the... Yeah, the best way to contact us is definitely through our website, rbcnc .com,

and we've been meeting since 2002 on the north side of Denver, kind of Boulder area.

Got a great church. We love it. And is it a 1689

London Baptist Confession Congregation? It is, yeah. And some of the other books that you have written,

I see, not only your book on baptism, but you have Galatians, A Supernatural Justification.

Tell us about that book and explain the title. Well, that kind of came right after the giant book, so I had all this stuff just in my mind, and I was preaching through Galatians, and so I do all...

I said the Supernatural Justification, so justification is the big one that, starting with Luther, everybody knows that that book is kind of the epicenter of the doctrine of justification, but from really the beginning to the end of that book, the supernatural world is just all over that book, and a lot of contact with the giant stuff in terms of the geography of the people of Galatia, Turkey, and so it was just a series of sermons that people wanted to have them book for them, so I put it into a book for them.

And what other subjects are under the umbrella of the title

The Unseen Realm Q &A Companion, one of the issues that we are... one of the books that we have been touching on today?

Yeah, there's really kind of two main ones that are definitely related. The Q &A

Companion is actually... it's a catechism, it's a question and answer about the various supernatural things that you can think of.

It starts off with God, and then it starts dealing with angels, and it goes into giants and so on.

So that's what that book's about, and then the other related book, in some ways, is the Christ in the

Old Testament book. I take the view that's a pretty standard view that the angel of the

Lord is actually the pre -incarnate Christ, and that's related to what we're talking about, not...

just in terms of angels being heavenly beings and there being this council.

If you read something like Daniel 7, you see that Daniel sees this vision. There's these thrones, plural, that are up in heaven, and there's these beings that are on these thrones.

These books are open, and they're getting ready to judge. And then, then you see the

Ancient of Days, and then you see the one like a Son of Man, and so these thrones are occupied by other people, other beings.

And so the angel of the Lord, I think, is, you know, as the pre -incarnate

Christ, is the major character or actor in the entire

Old Testament, and we just... There's a lot of interesting ways to think about him that most people have not been exposed to.

So the book talks about typology a little, talks about the law, talks about prophecy, but then it starts talking about some other ideas that were, you know, tell us about Christ that we hadn't normally thought of, like the

Logos is one of those that we know from John 1 .1. And tell us something about, in summary, your book,

Covenant Theology, a Reformed Baptist Primer. This is obviously a subject of great controversy and debate, not only between our

Presbyterian brethren and Reformed Baptists, but even amongst Baptists, and even amongst

Calvinistic Baptists. You have some Calvinistic Baptists who believe the Old Covenant was a temporal and earthly covenant, and the

New Covenant is the one that has eternal promises, and so on. I don't know where you're coming from on that book.

How do you fall on the Covenant Theology book? I take a basic 1689

Federalism approach. I mean, I go through the Covenants in terms of the Covenant of Redemption. I believe that that's a real covenant.

I try to establish it in the Scripture, and then talk about it a little bit. Then I go to the Covenant of Works.

I believe that that is a covenant. Also, I use some of the language of like an O .P.

Robertson, the Covenant of Creation, the Covenant of Life. I talk about all those, why you could refer to any of those.

We just start looking at it from different aspects. And both of those actually have, well, no, the

Covenant of Works one actually has a relation to the angels that we're talking about today in that book. So there's a connection point.

And then I go through the Old Testament covenants, and kind of the unique contribution for me is

I actually see a covenant in the Old Covenant that most people skip over, and it actually becomes what

I root baptism in. And that's what's called Jeremiah and Nehemiah and Malachi call it the

Levitical Covenant. And most people just don't even talk about it in their systematic treatments of it.

And for me, it becomes very, very important because I think that Jesus is, and here's my argument,

Buzz. You ready for this? Okay. Jesus is, at his baptism, is obeying the ordination sacraments of the

Levitical Covenant, which happens to be a baptism and a clothing ceremony.

So... Well, I want to have you eventually come back on and address all of these books if you are interested and willing, and if God is willing most of all, obviously.

That would be fun. Great. And please tell us about your book

From the Shadows to the Savior, Christ in the Old Testament. Yeah, that's the

Christ in the Old Testament book that I was just talking about. Okay. Well, if anybody would like more information about these books, go to rbcnc .com,

rbc for Reformed Baptist Church, nc for NorthernColorado .com, and you can find out how you can order those books written by our guest,

Douglas Van Dorn. And we have been enjoying a fascinating discussion on all kinds of things that are supernaturally related and some things that are controversial, all of which are fascinating.

And we do have a listener in Suffolk County, Long Island, Christopher, who wants to know that in doing some research on demonology,

I have read that some of the church fathers believed that demons are those entities roaming the earth who will be cast into hell on the last day, but they have not yet been cast there because the final judgment has not come, and they are roaming the earth here with us today.

Does that view hold any weight with your guest? That demons will one day be cast into hell?

Yeah, certainly. No, but that they are roaming the earth today. That they're roaming the earth today, yeah.

Yeah, so we were talking a little bit about this earlier, that the idea of a demon is a dead methylene.

It's not a fallen angel. It's a category mistake. And so because they're a half -breed, and you actually find this in most ancient cultures, believe it or not, and the

Christians were just one of those, that the demons are these creatures of the air, and they're roaming the earth now.

But there's no question that the New Testament tells us when Jesus confronts

Legion, He says, Have you come here to torment us before the appointed time?

Yes. And so there's no question that they're going to be punished. Yeah, and I actually apologize because I left out a couple of very important words from this question, that they are the disembodied spirits of the damned who are waiting to be cast into hell on Judgment Day.

Yeah, that would be... That's a different thing. Right, right. That's talking...

The disembodied spirits of a person, and I would guess it would probably be the damned would be a fine way to talk about it, would be a ghost.

So a ghost and a demon are not the same creatures. And actually, there's a biblical theology of all of this stuff going on in Leviticus and so on.

So are you saying that there is a possibility that ghosts do exist and that they bother people and annoy people?

Yeah, I actually believe that that's true. You know, when there's prohibitions for not contacting the dead,

I don't think that God is telling that to Israel because it couldn't happen. I think he's telling it to them because it could happen.

And they're forbidden to cross over. So when we contact the dead or when we do seances or any of those kinds of things, or, you know, we're interacting with their realm.

We're crossing over as they talk about it. The giants is the opposite. It's them interacting with our realm, crossing over in a way that they're not supposed to.

And God put these two realms in, they put them separate. He put them separate. And we belong to this domain.

They belong to that domain. And unless he gives them permissions, such as when an angel comes and talks to a prophet or something, we're just not supposed to do that.

Right, well, of course, there is that classic example of what you're talking about where Saul has the sorcerer or the medium conjure up Samuel.

Now, do you believe that that was really Samuel? Or I know that a lot of folks are just totally baffled as to what to do with that story.

Right. And I think they're baffled because they don't have the category for the fact that crossing over is possible.

It's not that it's not possible, it's that it's forbidden. Those are different things. And so what was

Saul's problem is that he wasn't supposed to go to the Witch of Endor to cross over, and he did.

And what happens, the funny part of the story is, you know, she calls up this Elohim, and Saul goes, well, tell me what he looks like.

And she describes him, and he's like, oh, no, it is Samuel. Right. He's completely shocked.

And so, yeah, I think there's no question that was him. So it's almost like the Whoopi Goldberg character in Ghost, where she was shocked that actually something worked.

You know. Right. Now, obviously, a lot of what goes on today with these mediums who, in fact,

I have a relative who is really enamored with mediums and has visited mediums, a

Roman Catholic relative. I know that the Roman Catholic Church officially prohibits that, but you could see the logical leap from praying to dead people as in the saints and wanting to seek out the counsel of a medium and have contact with your dead relatives and loved ones.

Well, Chris, this is really, really interesting, and it's really scary, too. I think

I was reading this in Augustine's City of God. It's like book 8 or book 9. And he starts talking about how the

Greeks would, they would take these demons and they would, and it wasn't just the

Greeks that he was just talking about them in particular, but you find it everywhere, the idea of what an idol is.

An idol isn't a being with its own existence, as if people 3 ,000 years ago were too stupid to know that they actually made that and that it was nothing.

The idea of an idol is that it's a house and that a spirit being comes and dwells in that house when you have the right incantation or whatever.

And so then it becomes a kind of a medium where you can control the entity and yet you can do things for you.

And so this is where the idea of, in the Old Testament, you're not supposed to deal with idols because idols are crossing over.

It's a form of crossing over. So they would do this with demons or with what they would call the gods, what

I would call like fallen angels. But what's so scary about it is that this finds an exact complement in Roman Catholics what they do with saints.

It's exactly the same thing. Wow. And what

I was going to say is that obviously there's a combination of charlatanry going on today as there always has been.

But what you are saying is that it's not necessarily always and that there could be some of these mediums that it's never the right thing.

It's always occultic and evil and satanic. But they could actually be conjuring up departed people, you're saying, who are obviously lying if they're saying everything is wonderful and good.

Yeah, I think actually you find this in that story of the Witch of Endor. Like, he's surprised. In other words, this doesn't normally happen even for the

Witch of Endor. It's not like she can normally just do this. And yet all of a sudden, here it is.

It's like right in front of them. So I think there's a lot of huckster stuff going on in that whole business.

But every once in a while, you better watch out. Yes, I have had, as a guest on this program, a young lady,

Jennifer Nizza Hofacker, who was a guest at the urging of my former pastor,

Mike Gadosh of Solid Ground Christian Books, who sponsors this program. And she gave quite a convincing story that she believed that these things that were happening to her.

She's renounced them, of course. She's a Christian. But she believes that they were real things that were occurring, and that she is still plagued, she said, unfortunately, not with the frequency when she was involved in it, but she's still harassed, she said, by what she believes are demonic spirits and so on.

And she had asked a previous guest how to find remedy in that.

Other than the obvious, she does frequently pray and read scripture, and so on. Do you have any other advice since she had asked that question to a guest not long ago?

I think the right thoughts about who God is, understand that it is real, I think. I wouldn't doubt that it's real,

I'll put it that way. And trust that God is superior. So the way

I end the book is that Jesus has this victory, and we get the human side of his victory at the cross, but what's often missed is that his victory is over the principalities of the air and darkness.

This just barely starts to get into what the whole worldview is about, but the very short of it is that Jesus' death on the cross has very important ramifications for these entities.

And he's superior to them in every possible way, and his death was a defeat of them.

And they don't have the right over Christians, they just don't have the right to do what they want to do to us.

And I think it's important that we believe that that's true, especially when they're harassing them. I brought this up during my interview with the

Lutheran missiologist who wrote about demon possession and demonology and so on and exorcism.

And I am from Amityville, Long Island, and obviously there's a connection.

I lived in Amityville my entire life. Is that house real? Yes. Well, let me put it this way.

The house is a real house in Amityville where Ronald DeFeo, who is still serving a life sentence in prison,

Ronald DeFeo murdered his parents and all of his siblings. I believe there were five siblings.

And one of those siblings was a classmate of mine and close friend in elementary school,

Mark DeFeo. And he murdered his whole family.

There is speculation that it could have been to just receive an inheritance since he would be the sole remaining heir.

His father had money, and he was a drug addict. He now claims that his sister, one of his sisters, had murdered his parents and siblings, and him having a struggle with the gun with her, he killed her accidentally.

That's what he is saying now, and that wasn't actually his first explanation.

His first explanation was that he was hearing demonic voices telling him. But the question has been to people that know him from Amityville, do

I think that this was real? That the house that is there was haunted or whatnot?

Because obviously the Lutzes, George Lutz and his wife, whose first name escapes me, wrote the book,

The Amityville Horror, which became a bestseller and has spawned I don't know how many sequels and movies, maybe 20 by now, that have really nothing to do with the original story.

But people have asked me, what do I think of that? I used to for years say, yeah, it's just a bunch of nonsense, it's a hoax.

But after I saw recently a son of George Lutz, George Lutz and his wife are now deceased, and George Lutz's stepson, who always despised

George Lutz, and thought that he was a cruel stepfather, when he could have, when he for the first time surfaced for an interview, and he's now an adult, and was never agreed to an interview before, he could have, in his anger and hatred toward his stepfather, just dismissed the man as a liar.

But he said that even though he despised his stepfather, that these things, these really bizarre supernatural things were occurring, and he said that he believes it's because his father,

George, was very heavily involved in the occult, and had Ouija boards, and had all kinds of books on witchcraft, and satanic spells, and all this.

So, in your opinion, could these manifestations of things flying around, and Ou's coming from walls, and all that, and voices, and all that stuff, could that have really been, after all, real things happening there?

I mean, so I've never experienced anything like this personally. It's just me thinking about it.

And you had earlier asked about a practical question, and, you know, this is kind of a practical question.

I actually fear that there's a lot of people that have these experiences, that they're afraid to tell anybody, because they'd just be, you know, shut down immediately.

And I want us as Christians to be thinking well and biblically about these issues, and instead of, so that the only people that you can go to are kind of kooks, that they don't have any kind of an idea of how to deal with this in a biblical way, but at least are willing to talk about it.

That's another reason why I wanted to write on this topic, is that I want people to know it's okay to think about these things.

And so that, you know, that's a long way of saying I think that it's possible that those kinds of things take place, yeah.

And, again, what would you say that these entities are? Are they ghosts?

Are they demons? Are they both? Like, for instance, why is it that in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man is in hell?

Now, obviously, many of us believe that there is a waiting place that is not the final lake of fire that the damned are in, because the final judgment hasn't come, just as there is some kind of intermediary state before the final glory we receive in heaven for those of us who are saved.

I don't know what your opinion is on that, but that seems to be a prevalent view amongst reformed people. You have to take that in conjunction with some of these other things, like the instance with Samuel, you know.

And there's just a lot of stuff we don't know. Are the people that are in Hades, which is, I think, like you said, it's a different place than Gehenna.

Is there any ability to move back and forth? I mean, I don't know the answer to that question entirely, because I'm gladly not there.

We do have... Tyler, again, from Mastic Beach, Long Island, wants to know, are you aware of King James' book on demonology?

I don't know if he means... No, I'm not. I don't know if he's referring to the actual

King James of the King James Bible fame, or maybe you could clarify that before we run out of time,

Tyler. But I have not heard of that either. Sorry about that. We couldn't help you, Tyler. Well, I want you, since we only have five minutes left,

I really want you to unburden your heart and summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today before they leave this program.

That's a great question, Chris. To me, the giant story, it's a thread, and it's a really fun thread to think about, to be honest with you.

Yes, it is. It's really interesting. People don't talk about it. And I want people to know that giants are all over the

Bible. They're literally all over the place. But to me, that's the subplot, and the main plot of the giant story is that there's somebody who is defeating them, and that's what the conquest is all about.

And you think about the person who went into the land of Canaan, and you think about what his name is.

His name is Joshua, and in the Greek, his name is Jesus. And I don't think that that's a coincidence.

I think God planned that ahead of time, and it's going into the

Promised Land to cast out that which is unclean, and that's what those preachers were.

And in his providence, he left them there to torment people up until at least

David's day. There's an interesting thing in Joshua where the sons of Anak are not all killed, but some of them are left, and there's three cities, and one of those cities is

Gath. And that's where Goliath comes from. And so, you know, they're kept in the land, and it's because the promised seed to Eve had not come yet in the old covenants, and it wasn't until he actually became incarnate as a human being.

You know, angels can take physicality. They're called, in Hebrew, they're called Ish, which is a word for man, but they're never called

Adam, which is the word that we're called. And Jesus became Adam.

He became a human being. And he did that having been the angel of the

Lord in the old covenant and now Adam in the new covenant, because he's the Lord of Heaven and the

Lord of Earth. And his victory as a man did what

Adam was supposed to do in casting these creatures. And it's the same story, right?

The conquest of Joshua is really the same story as Satan and Adam in the

Garden of Eden. He didn't cast Satan out like he was supposed to. And the

Lord Jesus does that, and he starts it with his ministry, where he's actually literally casting out demons, and then he dies this, you know, victorious death that if they would have known they were crucifying the

Lord of Glory, Paul says, and he's talking about the heavenly being. He said they never would have done it. It was hidden from them, because it spells their defeat.

And his cross is their defeat, and his resurrection is him becoming, you know, alive again, and his ascension is that he is ruling over Heaven and Earth.

And to me, that's the funnest part of the story. That's the eschatology of it, where so many guys that write on giants go astray,

I think, is that they start speculating into the future, and you don't need to. What's happened is way greater than what

I could speculate about. Jesus is the great victor of Heaven and Earth, and that's really what the story's about, and that's what

I want people to know and understand. Very quickly, we'll squeeze in one more listener,

Jen in Nassau County, Long Island. In Genesis 3 .14,

it says, The Lord said to the serpent, Because you have done this, Cursed are you more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field.

On your belly you will go, and dust you will eat all the days of your life. This seems to be confirming the idea of it losing its legs that you seem to dismiss earlier.

If you can comment on that very quickly. Sure, that's language that's used throughout the

Old Testament for the casting down of a heavenly being, and it's really the language of cursing and being brought low.

And so we want to read that story literally, and what I'm suggesting is we can read it literally, but in a different sense.

So, Satan, as a heavenly being, is a literal being, and he was literally there.

I believe he was literally there in a shining, angelic form that happens to perhaps look serpentine, but it's shining, and that's what the word means.

And when he's cast low to the ground, it's the exact same language you find in Isaiah 14. I think it's the same language that you find in Ezekiel 28, and I think you also find the language in something like Obadiah, where the heavenly being is being cast down to the ground.

And it's the language of cursing, it's the language of kind of losing immortality, and yeah, so that's my view on that.

Well, thank you, Jen, for writing, and you are also getting a free copy of one of our guest's books.

Thank you so much. I want to thank you so much, Doug Van Dorn, for being my guest today, and I want to remind our listeners his website is rbcnc .com,

R -B -C for Reform Baptist Church, N -C for NorthernColorado .com. We look forward to having you back very soon, brother.

Thanks, and if people want to get a hold of the books, they're all available on Amazon, either in paperback or Kindle.

Great. I want all of you to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.