Dr. Chuck Missler, Hour 2 of 2.
Dr. Chuck Missler, of Koinonia House (khouse.org). His background is with the Office of Naval Intelligence, where he had top security clearances and was the former Branch Chief of the Board of Guided Missiles and CEO for four defense contractors. He and his wife now teach Bible seminars all over the world, and they have written a number of books. You could say that his areas of expertise are military classified operations and Bible knowledge. In his military career, he was also an expert in cryptography (codes).
Q: What similarities between the history of UFOlogy and demonology have you found in your research?
A: Clearly the whole area of UFOs is a very difficult area because there's so much nonsense and deliberate disinformation. But when you cut through all that you end up discovering that there are accounts that are undeniable. They appear on multiple radar simultaneously, and radars don't have hallucinations. They also leave physical evidence - and it is disturbing, because they apparently violate physical laws. That's why I believe the competent researchers have come to the conclusion that they're hyper-dimensional. Not intergalactic, though that's a common myth. And it's interesting that both Dr. Jacques Vallee and Dr. Hynek refer to them as demonic - strange language for them - and say that they are deceptive.
There's another aspect to this, the military security that surrounds this area. It's disturbing to discover that the UFO area enjoys a higher security classification than our most sensitive warheads. That's probably the biggest mystery about Roswell and all of that; why is that still classified to this day, after all these years? I do know from personal experience that it's the subject of very serious studies. There was something called the Delphi Project for a while in which there were 432 occasions of formation flying that was studied, demonstrating that they were piloted by an intelligence. And there are literally thousands of classified photos. So the area is real, but very difficult to get your arms around because of the security that surrounds it.
Q: In Ch 4 of your book, Alien Encounters, you actually discuss hyper dimensions, parallel universes, super string theory, and talk about Flatland. In fact, I particularly enjoyed the discussion about Mr. and Mrs. Flat and their 2-dimensional world, but it made a great deal of sense when you imagine how disturbing a 3-dimensional exhibition would be to them in their 2-dimensional existence with its physical laws, in the same way we might be impacted when confronted with 5-10 other dimensional representations moving in and out of our reality. Can you talk about that?
A: As you begin to deal with hyperspaces you begin to realize that having more dimensions offers some very unusual properties, and it's very difficult to talk to people about more than 3 dimensions. It requires really special mathematics training. We in the third dimension can be more intimate with the people in that 2-dimensional world than they can be with each other.
That's a provocative thing to consider. It startled me to discover that Salvador Dali had a mathematical sophistication that was shocking. In his painting, "Corpus Christi," he uses and unraveled a 4-dimensional cube into 3 dimensions as his motif for the cross of Christ - the only place I'm aware of that a hidden cube has actually found application. You find them discussed in advanced mathematical treatises, but I was startled to see that Dali was that sophisticated mathematically.
The whole idea of being hyper dimensional is probably (and even point to that, in a sense) from the scripture. Because we discover that Jesus, after his resurrection, had some very peculiar properties in his resurrection body. That night he appears to them. In fact, that afternoon he accompanies these two guys on the Emmaeus Road, which is one of the more colorful passages of scripture, because Jesus Christ is talking about himself in the third person; you quickly realize that Jesus has an interesting sense of humor [Yes!]. But they all re-gather that night in Jerusalem behind closed doors; they're frightened, confused. So they're in a room with four walls, floor and ceiling - 6 sides - and he shows up in the middle of that space. They think they've seen a ghost and he invites them to touch him, saying that a spirit doesn't have flesh and bone as he does. He is obviously very physical, but on the other hand he enjoys a dimensionality that allows him to enter and leave a 6-sided space, apparently without passing through any of the six sides. And that's the kind of thing that only a mathematician can deal with. In fact I've encountered some that argue from that, that he must enjoy at least 11 dimensions.
A careful study of the scripture encounters the whole concept of hyperspaces. In fact, in I John 3:2 we have a very unusual passage; most people don't realize the physics nature of it, where John says, "Beloved, it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he shall appear we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is." In other words, we won't behold a representation of him - a photo is a 2-dimension representation of a 3-dimensional person. A hologram starts to break that down, but the point is that whatever dimensional reality he enjoys, we apparently will also enjoy. Because we shall see him as he is. So that's where hyper-dimensionality emerges in a form in the scripture.
The whole idea of the Nephilim, etc. may or may not be hyper dimensional, but there are apparently parallels to the world before the flood as described in Gen 6, and the kind of experiences that we will encounter eschatologically. The UFOs apparently are hyper dimensional. One of the questions is: where are they when you're not seeing them? In other words, they're not observed as they do this 'intergalactic' travel. They just suddenly appear; they materialize and dematerialize quickly, so that also lends itself to the perception of it being hyper dimensional, not intergalactic. And there are lots of other reasons why.
Q: There seems to be uniformity to the UFO appearances which makes me believe there are moments in which the entire craft has moved from wherever it is when we can't see it...Bible scholar Gary Stearman who believes that angels materializing may be both good and bad, and he referred to a celestial transportation vehicle and how the angels move in clouds, wheels, chariots, cherubim. In fact he cited I Chron 28:18, which refers to the pattern of the chariot of the cherubim. Do you believe that there's anything to that?
A: Oh, sure. Absolutely, because there have been lots of studies, even by NASA type characters, about the Ezekiel wheels, etc. Most of what I've seen is fanciful and doesn't really follow the text, but those descriptions lend themselves to conjectures about that. No question...by the way, you've put your finger on a very key issue here. It startles me to realize how many so-called 'experts' in demonology fail to perceive the difference between fallen angels and demons. We use the word 'demon' collectively, for the whole area. But being specific, the angels apparently have the ability to materialize, and dematerialize at will, because all through the scripture we find them just showing up. And we presume that the fallen angels have the same skills and substance as the good angels. But, what's interesting is angels, we know from the scripture, can take people by the hand, can engage in combat; one angel slaughters 185,000 Assyrians after dinner one night. You don't mess with angels.
On the other hand, the demons - especially as we encounter them in the NT - appear to be powerless except to the extent that they can influence, and even embody, a person, where they seem to always do mischief, and are a different kind, if you will. That leads to a conjecture by many scholars that the demons are the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim that drowned in the flood, or were killed or died for some other reason. And many people jump to the defensible conclusion that the whole idea of the Nephilim was Satan's way of 'increasing his horses.' We know from Rev 12 that 1/3 of the angels fell with Satan, so he's got a problem. He's got a 2 to 1 minority, and angels do not normally reproduce. But apparently through the antics of Gen 6 and others, they found a way to create a hybrid, and that hybrid apparently has utility to their agenda on the one hand; but on the other hand when it dies you've got a spirit now, that is a malevolent spirit of some kind ... that may be the demons. That is a conjecture, but does seem to be consistent with what we think we know from the scripture. That idea was very widely appreciated during the Dark Ages, because there's all kind of folk lore that accompanies - the incubus and all that business. But with staying with the scripture you can still build a case.
Q: Wasn't that the common position up until around the 5th Century, of what had happened with the Gen 6 story?
A: Yes, Africanus and others concocted the "Sethite" view, as a way of avoiding the discomfort and spookiness of what the text indicated, and this twisting of the scripture emerged. In fact there's about 12 different aspects of the scripture that shreds the Sethite view, but it doesn't matter. What's interesting about that view is that it's not only taught in seminaries, but it's the only view that's typically taught. We've encountered a number of senior executives in the Christian publishing trade who went to seminary, and when they encountered our book they got really angry - not at me - but angry when they realized that this view hadn't even been presented to them, what they felt should have been presented. What offended them was that the seminary environment doesn't even typically present the angel view of Genesis 6. They just present the Sethite view as if that is the rational accommodation of the text's message - which it isn't, by the way. The more you study that, the more you realize it does violence to what the text actually says.
Q: I'm living proof of that. My formal training was the Sethite view. And then over a long period of time, and just being honest about the scripture - and, by the way, even extra-biblical texts - none of them support the Sethite view. They all support this ancient story that this was an angelic experience. You mentioned the hologram; you have another book called Cosmic Codes, in which you talk about things like quantum teleportation, the universe as a hologram. Is that in any way related to this discussion of ET and hyperdimensions?
A: Oh, sure. Absolutely. Most people who write in that area have no background in cryptography, so that's one reason I think the book has done so well, because we have a tutorial in front, to really get into the manipulation of information. We discover the kinds of codes that we find in the Bible, and the manipulation we see in the DNA, are the same design. That's shocking enough. So it's a very provocative thing to realize that the frontier of every science today, whether it's microbiology or astrophysics, is really in the area of information - the information sciences. In microbiology the big issue isn't microbes in the traditional sense; it's really the coding - and we discover the DNA is a 3-out-of-4 error-correcting code. There's probably not one engineer in a thousand that knows how to design an error-correcting code. An error-detecting code, yes. The point is the sophistication of the information environment is staggering. So the Cosmic Codes does touch on the information side of this.
As far as quantum teleportation, most of those things in today's world are still pretty conjectural and they really depend a great deal on having some background, especially in particle physics. In fact, that's the other thing. Let's touch on that. One of the things that we all take for granted is this physical universe. We lay our hand on a desk, and it's firm, solid. It's kind of interesting if you take a look at the hydrogen atom. The ratio between the size of the nucleus and the size of the ostensible orbit of the electron is about 10 to the fifth power, which means if you were going to build a scale model of the hydrogen atom and use a golf ball as the nucleus, your electron would be three football fields away! It turns out that the 10 to the fifth ratio is just the linear difference. If you take the area of that you have to square it, so that would be 10-to-the-10th. If you want to deal with the volume you have to cube it, so if I say this desk is solid, and you said there's really nothing there ... you're more correct than I am, by the same ratio as one second has to 32,000 years. [I love this stuff. If I had my life to live over I might have gone into physics.] In other words, we suddenly realize that the universe that we're in, is actually an electrical simulation.
There was an article in the Scientific American in June 2005 about the constancy of constants. It turns out that some of the so-called constants of physics, scientists are now beginning to discover, may be changing. And that's got them alarmed because "that demonstrates that our physical reality is but a shadow of a larger reality." [We may see through a glass even more darkly than we imagined...]
Now just a few weeks ago in New Scientist, there's an interesting discovery.There's a project in Germany called the GEO600, and there's a huge contraption that they're trying to measure gravity with, and they've been frustrated because they have encountered a kind of noise. And the head of a lab in Illinois wrote them a letter that has caused an exchange of ideas, and what they think they have discovered is the granularity of the hologram - recognizing that the universe is really some kind of gigantic hologram. So, what's interesting about these frontier issues is we're beginning to realize that what we think of as physical reality is really a digital simulation; that we actually find ourselves in a virtual reality; and that the real reality is something larger, something more ephemeral, something less tangible to us. And the particle physicists seem to concur with this because they believe they have now discovered that we live in four discernible dimensions, three spatial - length, width and height - and the fourth is time. But those are four out of an actual ten; in other words there are six other dimensions that we're aware of only indirectly, because you could only discover those by some indirect techniques.
What makes that amusing to me is that's exactly what Maimonides - the 13th Century Hebrew sage - concluded from Genesis 1 that the universe has ten dimensions, four "knowable, and six not knowable." He did it from textual gymnastics, and it's interesting that he came to the same conclusion as we have by spending millions of dollars on atomic accelerators, and all he used was the text. The point is as we start dealing with things like UFOs or things like angelic beings the more sophisticated we are in terms of our understanding of hyperspaces, the more normal those things strike us as being. So a lot of our difficulties in trying to understand these issues, part of our problem, is that most of us haven't had the occasion to really study the nature or the boundaries of our own reality. The more you know about the frontiers of science, the more comfortable some of those concepts are.
Q: The Sumerians, referring to them as 'super geniuses', indicated that they had a method to manipulate science so they could move in and out of our reality. For those people who don't understand the angel view, the history of the Watchers, I want to make sure today that we have you explain the Watchers.
A: The Watchers are a little more elusive, but the key text for all of this subject matter is Gen 6. Many people fail to realize it's all one sentence (v. 1&2). "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 took them wives of all whom they chose." That's all one sentence. "Sons of God" is a term in the Hebrew that's used throughout the OT as a reference to a direct creation of God - namely, an angel. If you look at the Greek translation that was done three centuries before the Christian era, the Greek is very precise and they called
them what they were, angels. "The sons of God saw the daughters of men."Notice they weren't daughters of a subclass of men; it was men in general. That's important for another reason.
In any case, what they did when you get to the 4th verse..."there were giants in the earth in those days, and also after that when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them. The same became the mighty men, which were of old, men of renown." The mighty men were the gibborum. The word 'giants' there, in the English translation is actually a transliteration of of the Greek term 'gigantes' which doesn't mean giants, actually; it means 'earthborn.' They were giants, but that turns out to be incidental. In the Hebrew the word is 'nephilim,' which comes from the verb meaning 'the fallen ones.' The point is, what apparently happens here is that these fallen angels found a way somehow to create a hybrid, a creature that was abnormal called the Nephilim. And this was the causation of the flood of Noah, because there was a gene pool problem.
And that's what God does, he starts over. He picks eight. This event is recorded in virtually all the ancient cultures, and it's a widely understood view. In fact, in the Greek mythology you have the Titans, the gods, and the demigods, and they embody the same kinds of notions. The American Indians have these same traditions. What most people miss, in verse 4 it says "there were giants in the earth in those days, and also after that."
What many people don't realize, it didn't just happen before the flood. It apparently happened in the land of Canaan in anticipation of the return from Egypt. God had told Abraham that his people would be away for four centuries and then they would come back to the land. Well, that gave Satan four centuries to lay down a mine field. And, later, when Moses came to Kadesh-Barnea, and they sent in the 12 spies, in Numbers 13:33 it says there were Nephilim in the land in those days again. So the fallen angels again found a way to create these hybrids. And those angels are referred to three times in the NT as being incarcerated for a specific destiny. So, it's a spooky kind of thing to deal with, but it is the biblical text, and it's not confined to just Gen 6.
You really can't understand a number of aspects of the OT saga unless you understand the role these
strange creatures play. And why Joshua was instructed to wipe out every man, woman and child of four specific tribes. It's interesting as you study the book of Judges you find out that they didn't quite do what they were supposed to do. And if you study Judges geographically you discover that the areas where they failed to follow through and do what God said was an area along the coast, up in the NE (in Bashan), known today as Gaza, the Golan Heights and the West Bank. It's interesting that those same regions where they failed to destroy them, are still in dispute even to this day. That's why many writers - George Otis and others - have made the point that these things are strangely territorial, and that's always puzzled me because I would have thought these creatures that are beyond our physics wouldn't be necessarily constrained to any kind of geography. But apparently they are, and there seems to be evidence of that in the biblical texts. Daniel 10 and elsewhere.
The reason, of course, that all of this sparks our interest is because Jesus, in the Olivet Discourse, when he's giving an inside briefing to his four insiders about the second coming, said that as the days of Noah were, so shall the days of the coming of the Son of Man be. So whatever was going on there, will be intensified again near the end. And that's one reason so many people who have a biblical interest take the trouble to try to understand these issues. And there are a number of places where we find allusions to these kinds of creatures, even a little more ambiguous in terms of what is their role and what are they doing? The whole area of human reproduction seems to be at the core of this. That's why when you start studying these abduction issues that's probably the spookiest part of the whole study, because we discover among professional practitioners, they encounter people who have apparently had some very bizarre experiences - too bizarre to accept, and yet too consistent to deny.
Dr. John Mack is perhaps the most articulate spokesman for that area. I think he dealt with 176 of these cases. His point is (in his book?) that they are all above average intelligence, they have no prior psychiatric history, they have clearly been subjected to some kind of trauma, and there are details to their stories that are surprisingly consistent and disturbing. And these are people that would just as soon hide or bury these things because it destroys their lives. They get tagged as kooks and nuts, and you really have to draw out from them the details of what apparently transpired.
Q: And in many of those cases - you mentioned about manipulation of DNA - there is physical evidence to removal of ovum, scoop marks in their skin.
A: I ran into one where there was bone biopsies, and the person was not aware of it. And that clouded their credibility with the investigators because normally you couldn't have something like that, a very intrusive procedure, without being aware of it. But it turns out that those cases become very coveted case studies. One of the things that seems to be the agenda is a probing of the human reproduction system, and one of the conjectures that arises is that in the old days, back in Noah's day, when they indulged in whatever they do they ended up getting giants.
One of the things that may be going on is that as they do the same thing today the hybrids that they generate are diminutive, 3' high little green men or whatever. And what may be the difficulty they're encountering is the degeneration of the human genome. They find wheat seeds in the pyramids in Egypt and plant them, and they grow, amazingly enough, but they also have amino acids that we never even knew existed. And so there is a view by some that there has been a degeneration over the centuries, so they don't get the results that they did centuries ago. Who knows? We're suddenly in the area of fringe conjectures here. Dr. John Mack had a conference on this at MIT and he challenged the audience. He said if what these people are saying happened to the ISN'T happening, what is? Because there's too much consistency in these episodes to deny their existence, and yet the whole concept is disturbing to anyone.
Q: And then, of course, there is in the protoevangelium and in the OT the concept of the seed of Christ being in opposition to the seed of Satan. And then others like G.H. Pember who said the last days would repeat this invasion of Nephilim spirits and their influence upon the earth. It does make you wonder if this collection of biological matter - and it also includes animals - and there are tens of thousands of cases, so something definitely is happening. In your opinion is there some connection to these end time prophecies?
A: There's an interesting allusion in Daniel 2. We all remember the metal image of gold, silver, bronze and iron; and then there's the iron mixed with clay. And when Daniel is explaining those symbols in verse 43, as to the miry clay - the problem is that it's in Aramaic rather than Hebrew - but miry clay is clay made from dust; it tends to be brittle, is the idea. But he says, "as for the miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men" ... and it won't adhere. That's a very strange phrase, because he shifts to a personal pronoun: "they" shall mingle themselves with the seed of men. Grammatically, what that requires is that the 'they' are something OTHER than the seed of men ... in order to mingle with the seed of men. So, that immediately leads to the question of who 'they' would be. And there are two possibilities. 1) They are Nephilim, again, and not the seed of men. 2) The other possibility is that they are clones. I don't embrace #2 particularly, but the idea that 'they' refers to Nephilim seems to me more probable. But, whatever 'they' are, they emerge in an end time sense in a very distinctive way. And they apparently are prolific enough to be a meaningful demographic of society, because they're a significant factor in describing the rise and fall of these empires.
Q: Regarding alien abduction there is evidence that these have been stopped by calling on the name of Jesus.
A: I had an interesting experience when "Alien Abduction" first came out (one of his books). When I was doing radio interviews, I got a call from Hollywood from a producer there, and that always startles me because I don't travel in that crowd. He said that he knew a lot about this area, but was disturbed because I took the position that a Christian can't be abducted, and he said 'you need to do some homework and check the Andreasson affair..." Betty Andreasson is one of the classic examples, apparently a Christian in a spirit-filled fellowship and all of that, and she apparently had a couple of creatures in the middle of the night who took her off into an experience of some kind. But if you read her affidavit very, very closely it turns out that she wasn't abducted; they invited her, and she accepted their invitation [enough said...], and I take the position that that's not an abduction.
In fact, in our book that's what we try to point out to people. If they have some kind of encounter, they should not be bluffed, and they should not accept an invitation. I also argue they should not allow themselves to be hypnotized, and we have a little checklist in the back of the book that I would call spiritual hygiene. We have found out that those people who are Christians that have some kind of UFO experience - in every one we've investigated, the person involved had occultic involvement prior to accepting Christ.
I remember Hal Lindsay and another fellow and I had a deep discussion about this back in those days, and one of the conclusions that we came to, as we compared notes...the classical procedure to accept Christ in the formal churches used to include a renunciation of Satan, all his works and ways, as part of the procedure of accepting Christ. It was an explicit renunciation of any prior involvement with Satan. We don't do that anymore. We're so anxious for someone to come down the sawdust trail, that we fail to realize that there may be something deeper that needs to be dealt with, and the idea of an explicit renunciation of the history - whether it's a piece of property or whether it's a person - seems to be a required element that should accompany what we're doing. [This is critically important. The will of the individual is key to demonic possession and tampering. Many of these people have generational demons that are passed down. Sometimes they aren't even aware of it, so this renunciation should always be done, especially in this time when demonic activity is so prolific.]
Q: Are there factors that would make a person more likely to experience abduction, either personal behavior or even, some people believe you can have material items in your possession; you don't want to get rid of them but maybe these items could even invite these kinds of things.
A: Could be. [They absolutely do invite them.] I think this gets into the whole issue of the occult. And there is good scriptural reason to separate yourself from objects of that kind. A lot of people when they travel to Polynesia or Asia or somewhere will pick up one of the religious objects as mementos. [These so-called mementos are often laden with a curse.] Many people saw The Exorcist, which was written about a true situation which started with a person messing around with a ouija board. That seems harmless enough, but it isn't. [It's extremely dangerous as an entry point.]
These things are called entries. Dungeons and Dragons and such role playing games [and now video games, also] may be more dangerous than people are generally aware, because they can provide an entry to these malevolent beings. So, they do seem to need an entry. [It's all about a person's will - these entities harp on this all the time, how they must get the person's legal consent. They operate under this sanction, and if you read much about this subject you find that the demonic world greatly resents this restriction, but they are bound by it.]
Q: The reason I asked that is because you had said that in your research, in every case of abduction that each one of these people in one way or another had some kind of occultic past. Also, a lot of these abductees also claim that they're receiving messages that are being channeled to them by aliens. Is there some common theme to that?
A: Yes, that's one of the things I believe was one of the reasons that both Jacque Vallee and Hynek came to the conclusion that they were malevolent, because those messages betray an intention to deceive, and that's contrary to the popular folk lore. A lot of people think that these UFO beings are here to help us, give us new technology, whatever. That's in total contrast to what the real experience is from the records. That's one of the reasons that someone who is biblically literate the things take a very clear posture of being malevolent, not helpful.
Q: Also, some prophecy students believe that if there is in the future some grand UFO alien manifestation - some armada of ships filling the sky - that this could play a role in great deception. Are you one of those people?
A: Yes, probably so. Because one of the most difficult things in biblical theology is this whole issue of the harpazo - the rapture of the church - and there's just no way to imagine what that will be like. In other words, it has to be the most preposterous doctrine in fundamental Christianity, on the one hand. But, I'm reminded of what Richard Fayman/Thayman (sp?) of Cal Tech ... he has a similar situation; he talks about particle physics - and he says the quantum theory in particle physics is absolutely ridiculous; the only thing it has going for it is that it happens to be unquestionably correct.
The harpazo, the rapture, is such a strange idea. Unfortunately, though, it is very clearly so described by Paul in I Thess 4 and I Cor 15, and this may surprise some people, but you can actually find it alluded to in 3-4 places in the OT. But the point is that trying to visualize the Father, Son and Holy Spirit saying, "Go get 'em," and the gathering of the church - that's got to be the biggest shock that the earth ever had or ever will have.
Some people think there's going to be an awful lot of people raptured; others say probably not as many as we think, but the point is that there are attempts, apparently, in the New Age world to almost lay down the cover story. And we talk about that in the book (which one?), because Mark Eastman (the co-author) took that on and got some people to really wade through the New Age literature and took up the strange attempts to anticipate it. The idea being that's it's the Christian's commitment to these beliefs is that standing in the way of man's progress, and the people who hold these Christian view have to be gotten out of the way in order for mankind to move to the next level. So they have these various contrived explanations which would seem to be an attempt to explain the sudden disappearance. [New Age literature going back at least as far as Helen Blavatsky talk about this very thing. The Christians are their greatest problem - this is a universal theme - and all of their occult literature, right up to the present, says that the Christians will need to be 'removed to another dimension' because they will thwart the plans for a 'peaceful and loving' world. And, to add insult to injury, they can't nail down the time of this event. I believe the manifestation of the UFO 'landing' will be used as some sort of ploy to explain away the rapture. It's unclear of the exact timing of this planned event, but it's possible it will be immediately following the rapture - although there isn't agreement on this issue.]
Q: And to deceive the world...
A: Yes, you put your finger on it. A very key point. The one thing we really do understand, from the scripture cover to cover, is that Satan's primary weapon is deceit. He is the Deceiver. And, in fact, there's even a specific reference to a specific lie in 2 Thess 2, that God will send them a strong delusion that they should believe 'the' lie (it says 'a' lie in the KJV but it's actually a definite article: 'the' lie), and it's a very specific delusion that God will allow him to spring. And, that's the other thing, by the way ... it's my personal suspicion that the whole reason that the rapture is not timed - everything else in eschatology, if you do your homework you can sort of
sequence, at least.
But the one thing that is elusive is the timing of the harpazo, and it's my personal suspicion that it's designed to catch Satan by surprise [absolutely; my suspicion, too], because when that springs, Satan knows he's got a short window of time to do whatever he's going to do. I think part of the dynamics here is to catch him by surprise. So that, to me, is the ultimate refutation of these people who try to set dates and have their little charts and diagrams, and they have their hypothesis about the possible dates, etc. I'm also starting to get in some of these interviews 'what about 2012?'
Q: Right now, evangelical institutions, mostly, are leaving the question of ET, astrobiology, whatever, to the Vatican, to the History Channel, to Hollywood, and all of the above is fashioning a very specifically tuned kind of answer that goes along with what you were saying a moment ago that seems to be kind of a setup for delusion, for deception. My question is: why - for the most part - are evangelical institutions not addressing this issue? I was a pastor for 25 years; I realize you have to feed the sheep. You can't get up and talk about UFOs every week [!], but you also do need to have some position on the contemporary issues of the world. If you don't, they're going to hear from a Wiccan or anybody else that can provide them some kind of an answer. Why is that happening, and do you think the time has come for evangelical ministries to be willing to at least have some position on this??
A: Oh, absolutely. [I couldn't agree more strongly.]I think eschatology is not a peripheral issue. It's a very central issue. I think that eschatology is so challenging to a pastor because, unlike some of the other areas, it really requires a grasp of the whole counsel of God. You can't indulge in one-verse theology, with eschatology especially. That's one reason it's so challenging, and that's why many pastors are intimidated by trying to even tackle it.
But there's another side to this that I think is very interesting. I believe your eschatological view will derive from your hermeneutics. If you really take the Bible seriously, take it literally, you tend to move to the high view of the Scripture - in contrast to what I'll call the 'soft' view, hermeneutically; that you think it's just allegorical, symbolic, fine. If I know your hermeneutics, I can predict where you come out eschatologically. [Yes.] And, from your eschatology you really get your ecclesiology. You know, the seven letters to the churches, it lays out in advance the whole ecclesiastic history of the planet earth, and if I know from your ecclesiology, that closes the loop and determines your hermeneutics. If you have a very high view of scripture...the point is, it's circular. In the sixty years I've studied the Bible, again and again I've had to amend my views as I learn more. But it's always been in the direction of taking it even more seriously than I did before. I discovered so many things that are hidden.
In today's world, with the information we have you can get to the Hebrew or Greek without knowing the languages because the software is available free of charge. So we have the availability of the Word of God that's more available to the average person than ever before in the history of the world. So we're without excuse to really do our homework. But I think the field of eschatology is tragically shunned by many because it is challenging because it really does impose a grasp of God's whole program from beginning to end. It's not just end times. [This is my greatest fear, that the church is not dealing with Satan's contemporary deceits to any extent whatever. This leaves the sheep wide open to him.]
http://www.khouse.org/ - Missler's main website (Koinonia House)
http://www.studycenter.com/ - Missler's online campus for Christians
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Royal Heir
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