Welcome to Watchman on the Wall, a daily outreach of Southwest Radio Ministries and SWRC.com. God is still on the throne, and prayer changes things. Welcome to a brand new week of bringing clarity to the chaos. This week, Mac Dominic reveals the spirits of the Watchers, and Donald Perkins will begin a brand new series that will help you and I understand the Book of Revelation. Friends, we continue to need your help. Historically, summertime giving is always slow, but this year, giving is at a critical level. We want to say thank you, though, to everyone who has been responding with gifts for the ministry. Unfortunately, we're having to further cut expenses, including reducing the number of radio stations we're on and eliminating staff. We need your help. Please continue to pray for Southwest Radio Ministries. Ask the Lord to provide the needed funds so that we can continue to proclaim the good news. And as you're led, please consider giving a gift to our Summer Relief effort. Your one-time and monthly gifts are needed. You can give when you call 1-800-652-1144. That's 1-800-652-1144. You can also give at our website, swrc.com. Thank you, friends, for your prayers and continued financial support. In June, we held our first ever Mysteries of the Bible Verse event in Cincinnati. One of the featured speakers was Mac Dominick. Today and tomorrow, we are going to listen in on the presentation he gave entitled, Jesus and the Spirits of the Watchers. Today, I'm going to teach two lessons, today and tomorrow. Today is part one. Please come back tomorrow for part two, because Micah tells me that part two is a lot more exciting than part one. So, tomorrow will be part two, and we'll round this out. So, it is in two parts, and the... And the first part is Jesus and the spirits of the watchers. So we're going to talk about what that's all about. And then in part two, we're going to talk about Jesus, the gatekeeper. Now, basically, these two presentations are a lesson on what Jesus Christ did between his crucifixion and his ascension. So let's just look at that right quick. After the crucifixion, Jesus died on the cross, we know that. We know he went into the underworld. If you've ever been to a church, has anybody ever been to a church that recited the Apostle's Creed? Anybody, okay. You know there's a line in there that says he descended into hell? Well, you know, when I was little I went to a church that did the Apostles' Creed, and that phrase always puzzled me, of Him descending into Hell. Well, and then we had some very famous preachers in recent years that came out and said, yes, Jesus descended into Hell, and He had to go to Hell and suffer the torments of Hell. because it wasn't enough dying on the cross. No, that is not right, folks. Jesus shed his blood on the cross to pay for the sins of every man and woman on the face of this earth that has ever lived. But he did not have to suffer the torments of hell, but there were specific things he did when he went to the underworld. And we're gonna use that word underworld because in the ancient Near East, they had what we call a three-tier cosmology. heaven above, the earth, and the underworld below. So we're gonna use that term, the underworld, you can call it hell, you can call it Hades, you might call it other things, but for the purposes of this study, we're going to call it the underworld. Then he rose from the grave, he sits at the right hand of God, And angels, authorities, and powers are subject to Him. Now we're going to find out all about this by looking at today, we're going to look at three passages of Scripture. 1 Peter 3, verses 18-22. 2 Peter 2, verses 4 and 5, and Jude, verse 6. So before we get started in that, let's have a quick word of prayer. Our Heavenly Father, we're so thankful to you for your precious and holy word. We're thankful to you for your Son, Jesus Christ. that he came to earth and died on the cross for our sins. Now, Father, I pray that as we look in your word, you will open our minds and open our hearts that we might be drawn closer to you and our lives might be changed because of the working of your word in our hearts, in Jesus' name, amen. Okay, all right, let's start with this. 1 Peter 3, verses 19 and 20. We're gonna look at 2 Peter 2, verses four and five, and Jude, verse six. This first segment we're talking about here is the fact that the Bible tells us that Jesus preached to spirits that are in prison. And here's 1 Peter 3, verses 19 and 20. by which also he went and preached to the spirits in prison which sometimes were disobedient when once the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah while the ark was preparing wherein a few, that is eight souls were saved by water." Now this is one of the strangest passages in the New Testament outside of the book of Revelation. What is this all about? Jesus went and preached to spirits in prison? What spirits? Well it said that which were sometimes disobedient when once suffering, when once waiting for the long-suffering of God, waited in the days of Noah. So the first rule of Scripture interpretation is we always interpret Scripture in the light of other Scripture, right? We know the Bible has a way of explaining itself to us. So let's look at a parallel passage here. In 2 Peter, the next book over, It talks about this same thing. 2 Peter 2, verses 4 and 5, and spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world." Alright, so now all of a sudden in 1 Peter we see the phrase spirits in prison. Here we see angels that sin. We know the spirits in prison were disobedient, right? And now we know these spirits were actually angels. And when did they sin? In the days of Noah. So what we need to do is figure out in order to figure out what's going on here, what angels sinned during the days of Noah? Oh, and one other little ditty here, it's interesting here that right before the comma there in that first sentence, for God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell. That word hell in the Greek is the word Tartarus. We know it other places in the Bible or in other ancient Near East documentation as the abyss, the abzu. This is a special place in what we would call hell. And so they were cast into Tartarus. This is the only time that this word occurs in the whole Word of God. But there is some word that is very common, and that is in Greek mythology. Because we find in Greek mythology that the Titans, and we don't have time to get it. Derek, maybe you're going to get into all that, but yes. We don't have time to get into all the Greek mythology, but the Titans were exiled to Tartarus by the Olympians. We'll just throw out a couple of names. Kronos, who was the leader of the Titans, was put in Tartarus by Zeus, who was his son, because Kronos wanted to kill him. Well, he actually wanted to eat him and all of his brothers and sisters. But in Greek mythology, Tartarus is a very common term. And in Greek mythology, they say that Tartarus is as far below the earth as the earth is below heaven. So we find this is very interesting and it becomes very relevant as you dig deeper into this study, but we see here that these angels that sinned during the time of Noah were condemned to this special place in Hell and they were chained in chains. So we're trying to figure out what's going on here. One more passage here, in the book of Jude, Jude verse six, and the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, hath he reserved in everlasting chains under the darkness unto the judgment of the great day. So we see another connection here, chains and imprisonment. and also angels. So we can conclude from these three passages of scripture, which are very strange, that as a matter of fact, I have heard stories, true stories, of pastors that were preaching through 1st and 2nd Peter, and they'd get to these passages, and they'd say, you know, these passages are so weird, we're just gonna skip over them, because there's no need for us to spend time spend time looking into them. Well, the late Dr. Michael Heiser said, you know what? If it's in the Bible and it's weird, it's probably very important. So that's what we need. We need to concentrate on these things that we don't understand because you know the Bible tells us In the book of, I believe it's 2nd Timothy or is it 1st Timothy, it says, study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman worthy. And so we need to study the word of God. And what we need to do is we need to take the text and we need to concentrate on the text. You know, all of us come from churches probably that have this tradition and that tradition, and unfortunately, sometimes these traditions don't quite line up with the word of God. We need to start setting aside our traditions and go to the book, because that's where God can use us, that's where God can change us, and we can learn answers to questions. deep questions if we just look at the text. So that's kind of what we're going to try to do here. So let's take these three passages of Scripture and look and see if we can answer some questions. Who in the world were these angels? Why were they incarcerated? Number three, what was this message that Jesus delivered? You know, it said that the Bible told us in our first passage that Jesus went and preached to these spirits in prison. So what was his message? And fourthly, will they ever get out? Have they got a life sentence? Or will they ever get out of these chains of darkness? Well, if we study our Bible, And let's go to the first question. Who were the angels? The second question, why were they incarcerated? If we study our Bible and we go back and we look at angels that were disobedient during the days of Noah, there is really only one answer, folks. And that answer is found in Genesis chapter six and the story of the watchers. Let me read that to you, Genesis six, 1-4. 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 the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them of wives of all they chose. There were giants in the earth in those days, and after that When the sons of God came into the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men, which were men of old, men of renown. For the purposes of our study today, we're not gonna deal too much with the children part of it. The children are called the Nephilim. But we're not gonna deal too much with that because the children were not addressed in our three passages there, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude. but we're going to concentrate on the actual angels that we're talking about. So we have three phrases or words here that we need to clarify when we look at this passage of Scripture. The first, the sons of God. What are these sons of God? Well, we know that in the Hebrew that phrase is benai ha Elohim. That phrase appears quite a number of times in the Old Testament and every time it appears it is speaking about angels. The most famous of those occurrences in the Old Testament is in the book of Job where the Bible tells us the sons of God came to present themselves before God and Satan came also. So we see that there were angels, and not necessarily good angels, that were the benai Elohim. We'll look at the definition of that word Elohim here in just a minute, but let's kind of finish up here in our verse. Second phrase we want to look at is the daughters of men. It's very important when you start figuring out actually who this was talking about because in the Hebrew we find that these daughters of men in the Hebrew are the daughters of Adam. Now let me ask you a question. If you believe the Bible, and you believe Adam and Eve were the first two humans that walked the face of the earth, and they had children, the daughters of Adam were who? They were all the women that existed at the time, right? There weren't different groups of women, there weren't groups that were... worse than others, better than others, or any of that, the daughters of Adam was every human woman that walked the face of the earth at that time. So the benai ha-elohim, the sons of God, saw the daughters of men, or the daughters of Adam, that they were fair. And finally, There were giants in the earth in those days. The giants, the word, the Hebrew word there is nephilim. There are folks that say that that word means fallen ones. There are others that say it's a loan word, that is a loan word from the Aramaic that says, that came in through the Greek, the Greek and the Aramaic, that says that they were, that just simply means giants. We know that in our Greek Septuagint translation of the Bible, and for those of you that are not familiar with the Greek Septuagint, that is the translation of the Hebrew into Greek somewhere around 250 B.C. That word there in the Greek is gigantis, and it simply means giants. Nephal simply means giants. Nephilim, there's not really any good definition for that, but people do say that means fallen ones. Not necessarily the case. I think that the Giants, the translation of Giants is a little bit better. And the reason, actually the reason the word Giants is in our King James Bible and other English translations is that the translators, believe it or not, went back to the Greek Septuagint for that word because they didn't know what Nephilim meant. So they went to the Septuagint and that's where we get giants in our English translation. God's name is Yahweh. He is the chief, the head of the Elohim. He is the creator Elohim. He created all the other Elohims, but He also is Elohim because He exists in the spiritual dimension. Other beings that exist in the spiritual dimension, The Divine Sons of God which we call, we will refer to many times in this conference as the Watchers. That is the Divine Sons of God are the B'nai Ha-Elohim. They are called Watchers in the book of Daniel chapter 4 if you remember When Nebuchadnezzar was condemned to seven years out in the woods and lived off the earth and ate grass and all that good stuff, the Bible tells us in the Aramaic it was by decree of the watchers. When you look at the book of Enoch, and we'll look at that here in a little bit, The Watchers are the term that is used for the Baniha Elohim, and from what we can tell, this is one of the second class of angels, or Elohim, that exist in the spirit realm. We also have the guardian angels, the cherubim, the seraphim, and there may be a few other terms that go along with that. we have the messenger angels. There are angels in Heaven, the spiritual realm, and I say in Heaven, it was a little slip of the tongue, that they are in the spiritual realm, that they are simply messenger angels. Then it's interesting because in the Old Testament The word Elohim is also used for small g gods, false gods, gods that are not truly gods, but this is a word that is used, that is translated from the word Elohim because these small g gods actually dwell in the spirit realm and we better realize that. We have part two of this fascinating presentation from Mac Dominick coming up on our next program. The entire Mysteries of the Bible Verse event is now available on DVD. All the speakers, all the presentations, all together in one collection. Derek Gilbert, Rudy Landa, Micah Van Hus, Greg Patton, Michael Hoggard, Josh Davis, and Mac Dominick. Order the Mysteries of the Bible Verse DVD set today when you call 1-800-652-1144. That's 1-800-652-1144. You can also order at our website, swrc.com. Mysteries of the Bible Verse, the complete event on DVD. 1-800-652-1144. Time to join Ministry President Dr. Kenneth Hill and Prophecy in the News magazine editor, Lise Kutschoff, as they preview the latest issue of the Prophecy in the News magazine, which is out and available right now. Well, I'm glad to be here today with Lise, and we are here for what purpose? We want you to know about the Prophecy in the News magazine. That's the reason we're here. And I'm glad to have been asked to come and to share the microphone with you. Thank you so much. It's a treat to get to share the microphones with you. We're not actually at the same microphone. That's right, we share two microphones, and that's good. But here's what's going on. The Prophecy in the News magazine has taken on the challenge of being one of the premier Christian magazines in the United States and in the English-speaking world. You're scaring me, Dr. Hill. Well, we're no longer just a magazine. We're now one of the leading magazines because people are quoting from us and people are saying, I saw it in the Prophecy in the News magazine. And we're starting to have a real impact upon the Christian community. And I'm excited about that because we have some of the finest writers. and some of the brightest folks that are giving us information and writing things for us. And so it's very good to acknowledge that and to thank them for what they're doing. Because I look at the list of authors this time, wow, you've got some good ones. We do, and we are very blessed to have many different authors from both sides of the pond writing for us, and that's so exciting and honestly makes us feel very privileged to be able to feature their work. Indeed, and Bill Federer is one of those on this side, and he has A silence equals consent, as he's writing about it. And he asks, how could Christians, Christian adults, be lulled into not caring what happens to children? It is a question that has to be answered. It is, and he does in numerous ways in his book, Silence Equals Consent, that he is allowing us to excerpt in this particular magazine. I'll give you just a hint of how he responds in one particular way, and he says it's local, local, local. Become involved in your local boards and decision-making groups. because that's how we can involve us and our children and their teachers and their schools in heading in the right directions. Many years ago, when the Department of Education was being founded, at the federal level. Dr. Noah Hutchings, who was a friend of Prophecy in the News and the head of Southwest Radio Church, went on tour telling people why it was not a good thing to have a federal education department. And so that goes along with what Bill Federer is telling us, that we need to do local, local, and local. We have the 100th anniversary as well as the Scopes Monkey Trial. It's been something that's been talked about now for a hundred years, and we have our staff evangelist, Josh Davis, has written an article for us in honor of the 100th anniversary. at the suggestion of one of our listeners, our longtime listeners. Josh is going to look at the fact and fiction of the historic trial because, of course, there's a movie in Here at the Wind that has some fictionalizing going on there. The trial itself ended up pitting creationism and evolution, although that's not its original intent. Josh looks at that And also we have a J.R. Church classic article, Redeemer Kinsman. We always do. We always include J.R. Church because he's the founder of our magazine. This is a beautiful piece by J.R. on the original kinsman-redeemer of Ruth, the book of Ruth, and then Jesus as our kinsman-redeemer one day soon. Well, we have many articles, but they're all driving us in the same direction, and that is toward being better Christians and doing our job better as it relates to the work that we're supposed to be doing for our children and for the adults as well in our community. and for the world as a whole. Indeed. And this magazine, this issue of the magazine, is one that I would just heartily recommend because it contains so much good information and direction for those of us who have questions. And I think that folks will understand very well that we are not to despair, that there is a blessed hope. Indeed. And we're to keep looking up. Amen. And if you want to get a copy of this magazine or previous magazines or future magazines, the way to do that is to go to prophecyinthenews.com online. You can also go to prophecyinthenews.tv. They go to the same place. There are online forms that one can fill out there, or you can talk to a human, which we love to do. So please call us if you wish at 1-800-652-1144. And you can ask for Tabetha, although anyone can help you with that. In our first segment today, we heard Mac Dominic begin his presentation on Jesus and the spirits of the Watchers. To learn more from Mac Dominic, we have the four-part DVD series, Deliver Us From Evil. All four of these DVDs will unveil the interdimensional rebellion, retribution, and reconciliation from creation to the kingdom. Inside, you'll learn about the birth of the gods. Hours of instruction on these topics are yours when you order the Deliver Us From Evil Collection by MacDominic. All four of these DVDs can be yours with a gift of $60 or more today. Simply call 1-800-652-1144. You can also order this collection at our website, swrc.com. Tomorrow, Mac Dominic continues revealing from Scripture the spirits of the watchers. Be sure to tune in on your favorite radio station or by subscribing to our daily Watchman on the Wall podcast. Watchman on the Wall is a production of Southwest Radio Ministries and is supported by faithful listeners like you. Visit SWRC.com.