When studying anything written or spoken, it’s important to pay attention to what’s stated and what is not stated. It seems so simple until you find people spouting off about something with great authority who fail at the basic level of “what does it say” and “what doesn’t it say.” We can’t move to what does something in a biblical text mean and how it applies until we cover the basics. The following is only three verses, but works as a helpful introduction to what I want to cover:
So the LORD gave Israel all the land which He had sworn to give to their fathers, and they took possession of it and lived in it. And the LORD gave them rest on every side, in accordance with everything that He had sworn to their fathers, and not one of all their enemies stood before them; the LORD handed all their enemies over to them. Not one of the good promises which the LORD had made to the house of Israel failed; everything came to pass (Joshua 21:43-45).
After doing a radio interview on a North Carolina station some years ago, I spoke with a woman off-air about the above three verses. I read it to her three times. It took that many readings to get her to see what the text said. At that point, I was not going for an interpretation. I just wanted her to see and admit what it said.
There are multiple examples of mis-reading the Bible or only hearing what people have said about what the Bible says. How many times have you heard that the “lion will dwell with the lamb”? It’s “the wolf will dwell with the lamb” (Isa. 11:6). The lion does show up later in the verse: “And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together.” Who cut off Samson’s hair? Many will say “Delilah.” Sounds reasonable since she was there when Samson’s hair was cut, and many people “have heard it said.” But she didn’t do the cutting. These are minor misstatements. No doctrine is besmirched if you get these wrong.
Some wrong readings can lead to massive doctrinal confusion. Someone said, “Some exegetes manifest a morbid desire to find ‘mountains of sense in every line of Holy Writ,’ and are constantly finding double meanings, recondite allusions, and marvelous revelations in the plainest passages.” The many ways the first four verses in Genesis 6 are interpreted is a good (bad?) example:
Now it came about, when mankind began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of mankind were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then the LORD said, “My Spirit will not remain with man forever, because he is also flesh; nevertheless, his days shall be 120 years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of mankind, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.
Nothing is said about fallen angels or demonic angels. A close reading of the verses might lead to the belief that the Nephilim are not the result of the union between the sons of God and daughters of men. According to what’s in these four verses, the Nephilim existed pre- and post-flood. If the flood was to wipe out the Nephilim, then why were they still alive after the flood? It’s supposed that Noah’s son Cush retained some of the demon seed DNA of the hybrid fallen angels-human women sexual union and the “mighty” hunter Nimrod was the result since the Hebrew word gibbor that’s used in 6:4 is also used in
Now Cush fathered Nimrod; he became a mighty one [גִּבֹּ֖ר/gib-bōr] on the earth. He was a mighty [גִּבֹּ֖ר/gib-bōr] hunter before the LORD; therefore it is said, “Like Nimrod a mighty hunter before the LORD.” (Gen. 10:8).
But these speculations are not found in those four verses. “Interestingly, some church fathers thought demons are not strictly fallen angels, but wandering souls of dead Nephilim—that is, departed spirits of hybrid offspring of women and evil angels who were killed in the flood (cf. Gen. 6:1-4).”[1] A “mighty” person does not mean he or she is a giant any more than a “giant of industry” or a “giant in his field” refers to people of unusual physical size.
The amount of speculation surrounding these four verses is astounding—everything from fallen angels copulating with human women creating a super race of beings called the Nephilim that may have built the pyramids to demons masquerading as friendly aliens like we saw in The Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” and the reptilian invaders in the TV series V. There are numerous variations of the story. It’s what is not mentioned that many interpreters latch onto with much speculation. David Albert Jones states, “This short paragraph from the book of Genesis is possibly the strangest passage in the entire Hebrew Bible.”[2] Hans Madueme offers a cautionary note, “Given the obscurity of the passage, we should not invoke it dogmatically for establishing an angelic ontology….”[3]
The four verses in Daniel 9:24-27 are used to create an entire prophetic system called dispensational premillennialism where we find the antichrist, the so-called church age requiring something called the “rapture of the church,” another yet future rebuilt temple, a covenant made with a single generation of Jews, the reinstitution of animal sacrifices, a nearly 2000-year gap separating the first 69 weeks (483 years) with the final week (7 years). Where would dispensationalism be without these four verses? Facebook is filled with people who appeal to these verses (or may not even know that their system is built on them) believing all the items I listed above are found in those four verses. They are not. See chapter 25 in Last Days Madness for more information on Daniel 9:24-27.
The final four verses paradigm is found in John’s epistles (1 John 2:18, 22; 4:3; 2 John 7), the only verses that use the word “antichrist.” Similar to what we find in Genesis 6:1-4 where supposedly the union of fallen angels and human women result in a population of giants, the theoretical end-time antichrist becomes a mighty devil-possessed religio-political leader hell-bent on destroying the world in what the Bible describes as “the great tribulation.” (Matt. 24:21 does not call what happened before that first-century generation passed away “the great tribulation.” See chap. 16 of my new book Prophecy Wars).
Prophecy Wars: The Biblical Battle Over the End Times
There is a long history of skeptics turning to Bible prophecy to claim that Jesus was wrong about the timing of His coming at “the end of the age” (Matt. 24:3) and the signs associated with it. Noted atheist Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) is one of them and Bart Ehrman is a modern example. It’s obvious that neither Russell or Ehrman are aware of or are ignoring the mountain of scholarship that was available to them that showed that the prophecy given by Jesus was fulfilled in great detail just as He said it would be before the generation of His day passed away.
Buy NowThose who push this end-time antichrist scenario are hard pressed to find what they claim in the above four antichrist verses.
Benjamin B. Warfield (1851-1921), Professor of Didactic and Polemic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1887 to 1921, had this to say about the modern attempt to construct a biblical antichrist from unrelated Scripture passages:
We read of Antichrist nowhere in the New Testament except in certain passages of the Epistles of John (1 John ii. 18, 22; iv. 3; 2 John 7). What is taught in these passages constituted the whole New Testament doctrine of Antichrist. It is common, it is true, to connect with this doctrine what is said by our Lord of false Christs and false prophets; by Paul the Man of Sin; by the Apocalypse of the Beasts which come up out of the deep and sea. The warrant for labeling the composite photograph thus obtained with the name of Antichrist is not very apparent.[4]
There were “many antichrists” in John’s day, and their presence was evidence that it was the “last hour” (1 John 2:18). The composite antichrist theory has led to innumerable antichrist candidates for nearly two millennia.
To see how many times the antichrist has been the topic of discussion in history read Frank Gumerlock’s book The Day and the Hour: Christianity’s Perennial Fascination with Predicting the End of the World. He lists antichrist suspects in the early church (page 10), Middle Ages (page 89), the sixteenth century (page 115), various antichrist suspects from AD 1600-1900 (page 231), and 20th century antichrist suspects (page 286), none of whom fit the antichrist verses.
The Day and the Hour
Throughout Christian history, bizarre fringe groups and well-meaning saints alike have been fully convinced that events in their lifetime were fulfilling Bible prophecy. In The Day and The Hour, Gumerlock spans two thousand years of conjecture on the last days, disclosing the dreams and delusions of those who believed that their sect was the 144,000 of Revelation 7; that the 1290 days of Daniel 12 had expired in their generation; that the "Man of Sin" of II Thessalonians 2 was reigning in their time; that a Rapture of the saints, a Great Tribulation, a Battle of Armageddon were just around the corner; or that a Millennial Kingdom was about to dawn.
Buy Now[1] Hans Madueme, Defending Sin: A Response to the Challenges of Evolution and the Natural Sciences (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2024), 311, note 108.
[2] David Albert Jones, Angels: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 110.
[3] Madueme, Defending Sin, 311, note 108.
[4] Benjamin B. Warfield, “Antichrist,” The Expository Times, XXXII (1921), 358. Reprinted in Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield — 1, ed. John E. Meeter (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1970), 356.