Watchman on the Wall

Southwest Radio Ministries: 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. Today we conclude our conversation with author Micah Van Huss on his brand new book, Mythologies Decoded.

This October, we're bringing three conferences together for one unforgettable weekend in Bristol, Virginia. It's Prophecy in the News Live, October 22nd through the 24th. We begin Thursday with Apologetics, a full day devoted to defending the Christian faith and discovering why we can confidently trust the truth of God's Word.

Friday, the focus turns to Bible Prophecy: the Rapture, Israel, the coming Kingdom of God, and what scripture tells us about the days ahead. Then Saturday, explore the mysteries of the Bible: Verse, angels and the unseen realm, ancient mythologies, biblical giants, and mysteries you may have never heard discussed in church.

And we're bringing together Greg Patton, Dr. Kenneth Hill, Josh Davis, Micah Van Huss, Mac Dominick, and many more. It's October 22nd through the 24th at the Delta Hotel in Bristol, Virginia. But you need to register now. Seating is limited, the conference is just weeks away, and we don't want you to miss it. Make your plans, invite a friend, and reserve your seats today. Go to swrc.com right now and register for Prophecy in the News Live in Bristol. Or you can call 1-800-652-1144. October 22nd through the 24th in Bristol, Virginia. That's swrc.com. Register today.

For thousands of years, cultures around the world have told stories of gods, giants, heroes, and catastrophic events. But behind the mythology, could there be a biblical truth we've overlooked? Today we conclude our fascinating conversation with Micah Van Huss and his brand-new book, Mythologies Decoded: Echoes of the Bible. Here's today's host, John Ruane.

John Ruane: Hello and welcome again, friends, as we finish our conversational series with Micah Van Huss, the author of the wonderful new book Mythologies Decoded. It really is a fascinating study, and you will not regret getting yourself a copy, which you can do right now if you go online at swrc.com or call 1-800-652-1144. That's swrc.com online or 1-800-652-1144, and you will be happy that you did this.

We're trying to share information with you, trimming and cutting the very best we can because there's so much good stuff in this. So, let's start off with a whopper there, Micah. Why is it that monsters so often guard treasure, knowledge, or sacred places, no matter how you look through history?

Micah Van Huss: We're talking about a chapter in my newest book about the monsters, the oracles, and forbidden knowledge. Ancient stories often put treasure, secret knowledge, or access to sacred places behind a dragon, a serpent, or some kind of monster. That reminds us of the Garden of Eden, where mankind was cast out and the way back to the Tree of Life is guarded.

The myths seem to remember that something valuable was lost, but they usually offer power or secret knowledge as a way to get back what humankind has lost. We know from scripture that Jesus Christ is the promised seed to gain back that access to God.

John Ruane: Do you think that it's a matter of a traditional or an understandable fear that people would have had in ancient days of those types of oversized entities, monsters, or dragons, that it was something to get their attention and cause them to carry the story with them?

Micah Van Huss: I think the fear, the unknown fear of why mankind lost what they did, is part of it. But we also have to realize that these dragons were real. We know as Christians that dinosaurs were created on the same day as mankind, but let's bring it to after the flood.

We know that the Roman historians wrote about Alexander the Great's conquest, and in one of them in India, Alexander the Great and his men, around 300 BC, they ran into a 100-foot-tall dragon in India. They say its eyes were the size of a Macedonian shield. The Indians that lived there said, "Don't kill that dragon; that's our god, and we feed it every day, and we worship that god, so don't kill it."

There are accounts, whether you want to believe it or not, of giant dragons up to 300 BC. I mean, we even get to see St. George slaying his dragon in 900 AD. The dragon was only the size of a horse because it had gotten smaller over the generations. We talk about the firmament and the way the world was before the flood of Noah in my book, The Earth As It Was.

I believe that Noah took dinosaurs and dragons on the Ark. They didn't have to be massive creatures; he could have brought eggs or babies. So, yes, there are accounts of dragons. Bishop Bell's tomb had carvings of Brontosaurus on it in the year 1495 AD, only 500 years ago. There are tales of the Buru, a massive creature with a long snake head and an alligator-type tail in the Himalayas, last seen in 1949. It looked just like a dinosaur. A British explorer found that one. Back to the point, though, the monsters were prevalent in the Roman and Greek days according to those recordings. Now we don't see them now, but it doesn't mean they weren't true.

John Ruane: And the same thing could be said even today. We don't know all that might lie down underneath the sea farther than we're able to see. I'm always fascinated by those stories.

Micah Van Huss: I've been to Loch Ness, but I never saw the monster.

John Ruane: Do you think that there's a connection there, say with the great statue or the carving, however you want to describe it, of the Sphinx?

Micah Van Huss: We talk about the Sphinx in the book. The Sphinx is fascinating. The story of Oedipus—he's the only one who can solve the Sphinx's riddle, and the riddle is about mankind. But even though Oedipus can solve the whole riddle, he still doesn't understand himself and the disaster that's coming in his life. To me, the mythological tale of Oedipus and the Sphinx is a picture of human wisdom. A person can be smart but still spiritually blind. Scripture, of course, tells us He made the small things in the world to confound the wise.

John Ruane: And there are so many examples of stories like that. For example, you mention Medusa in one of your chapters, and the comparison between older stories and the possibility of mythology or maybe accurate retellings of long-ago stories.

Micah Van Huss: These stories, we compare Hercules to King David. They're both remembered as giant slayers. But there are important differences in that story specifically. Hercules, which is Heracles in one of the recordings, wins because mythology makes him a superhuman demigod.

David, on the other hand, wins because he's a young man, a small man, or a boy who puts his trust in the Lord. So God is glorified through David's victory whereas, as we said earlier in the mythological tales, Hercules or Heracles himself is glorified. That's again showing that these mythological tales are echoes of the Bible, and often distorted echoes that are not pointing to the truth of Jesus Christ and God's sovereignty.

John Ruane: And so that then would lead us into talking a little bit about the World Tree and what you have designated as immortality and heaven in your book. Why do you think so many cultures have a World Tree?

Micah Van Huss: When we're talking about the World Tree, Yggdrasil was the Norse version of the World Tree that connected all the different realms. Of course, we have the Tree of Life, and it actually is a multi-realm tree because the Tree of Life is in the Garden of Eden. Then it's not here on earth; it's in Paradise and it's in the new Golden City and the new heaven and the new earth.

Many cultures picture a great tree at the center of the world. It connects heaven, earth, the underworld, whatever realms are in that mythology. There are different ones. In the Norse mythology, Yggdrasil was the primary one. I think these traditions preserve a distorted memory of Eden and the Tree of Life and a time when God's realm and mankind were closely connected. Their realms and our realms were closely connected.

In the World Tree chapter, we're going to get into the questions on heaven and again the Tree of Life, which has been in a few different dimensions. It was a very fascinating study. In fact, the study of what heaven really is might be one of my favorite studies from this book.

John Ruane: Here on earth, do you think that biblical language about pillars and foundations actually are teaching a "flat earth"?

Micah Van Huss: No, I don't believe it's teaching a flat earth. Of course, the Bible often describes creation the way that people experience it, written in the days that it was, just as we would talk about sunrise or sunset. The question is how literal is Genesis chapter one? Is it more of a picture of God's sovereignty over creation than it is about the little details of everything that's going on?

The language when it comes to the flat earth and the pillars mentioned throughout mythologies, the foundations, the pillars of heaven being stretched out—a lot of it is poetic language about order, stability, and God's power. In my opinion, it's not meant to be a modern diagram of the shape of the earth. Of course, the scripture itself mentions the disk of the earth, the round earth. So even the Old Testament mentions the earth as being round.

No, I don't believe in a flat earth. I have seen experiments showing the curvature of the earth, such as filming a helicopter landing on the other side of a great giant lake and the helicopter completely disappears beyond the horizon. I also look up in the sky, I see the sun, the moon, and I know they're round. I don't necessarily believe in a flat earth, and I don't think that the Bible teaches a flat earth, though some of the mythologies do.

John Ruane: One of the things that we had mentioned a little bit earlier in our discussions was the relevance of how people saw things in their time. For example, when we were talking about the Tower of Babel, a few hundred feet could have been monstrous height to them that they constructed. What do you think the Bible means when it uses the word "heaven"?

Micah Van Huss: The Bible talks about three different heavens and doesn't get into the layers. We're talking about the first heaven being the firmament, the water that surrounds the earth. The second heaven being the stars, the planets. And the third heaven being what we would think of as heaven, the spiritual realm.

This study in the World Tree chapter on heaven was so fascinating. Where to start? I guess the best saying would be to say that we as Christians don't go to heaven when we die; heaven comes to us. Not only do a lot of folks not realize—I didn't realize a lot of these things until I started studying and writing this book—is that we hear about a new heaven and a new earth and the millennial kingdom, but it's all pretty confusing because there's a lot going on.

When I talk about heaven, I'm not going to talk about the millennial kingdom. That is the thousand-year reign between the events in Revelation and the new heaven and new earth, but partially. We have the Tree of Life in Eden. God comes down to Eden and walks with mankind.

When Adam and Eve were kicked out of Eden, I believe that the heavenly realm separated from where it was partially converged with the earthly realm. So now we exist with two spheres next to each other, the heavenly realm and the earthly realm, not overlapping at all. Then when the new heaven and new earth is remade and the Golden City descends, they are one realm wholly, so even better than the Garden of Eden. The Tree of Life is there.

Southwest Radio Ministries: Friends, we are so glad to have you with us here today as we talk with Micah Van Huss about his excellent new book, Mythologies Decoded. If you would like to have a copy, and we hope you certainly would like to do that, you can visit the website at swrc.com or you can call 1-800-652-1144. Again, that's visit the website at swrc.com or call 1-800-652-1144 and get your own hot-off-the-press copy of Mythologies Decoded by Micah Van Huss.

Micah Van Huss: In Isaiah 65 and 66, it talks about the wolf lying with the lamb in the millennial kingdom. This is the thousand-year period between the end of the events of Revelation, where no valley is left where it was, where no mountain is left where it was, and the re-creation of heaven and earth. When I say re-creation of heaven and earth, I believe that the re-creation of heaven is actually the first heaven, the firmament, the water around the earth.

In the millennial kingdom, not only do we have the peace with the animals, you also have men being considered a child if they die at 100 years old. If you have followed any of my studies or listened to me talk on this program, I speculate, and I think I'm correct on this, that Adam, Noah, Methuselah, Jared, Enoch, the patriarchs, the pre-flood patriarchs that lived before the flood, they were not sexually mature until they were 130 years old. They were children and teenagers. They grew up very slowly, they aged very slowly, and that was because of the firmament.

Why do I believe that? Read scripture for yourself. How old was Adam when he had Seth? We're ignoring Cain and Abel who were part of the Garden of Eden type thing right after the Garden of Eden. But Seth was 130. It doesn't tell us how old Adam was when he had Cain and Abel. He was 130 when he had Seth. And the rest of the patriarchs, they're all 120, 130, 140, 115, except for Enoch. Enoch was 65. Even if you consider that, 65 years old before you can have your first child, there's something going on that we don't understand today.

I speculate that the lack of aging from the firmament, the water overhead, caused that. But we're also going to see, as I just said, in the millennial kingdom, which is our future, that men will be considered a child at 100 years old. It also says that men's lives will be as the lives of trees. So what is that? 500, 600, 700, 800, 900 years old? We know the patriarchs before the flood lived in the 900s.

When it says that the heaven and the earth will be remade after the millennial kingdom, I think it literally does mean the firmament being remade, the water canopy overhead being remade for the new earth. That's the way it was in Eden in my opinion, and that's the way it will be again.

But we see all kinds of things in heaven. We see white horses. God's armies ride white horses to come back at Revelation. And so we know that there are likely animals on the new earth. We also see in heaven tools. We see scrolls, we see books, we see tongs. So there are tools in the new heaven. The tongs in Isaiah 6, they grab the fire, the coal, and they put it on Isaiah's tongue. So you have tools of iron, tools of whatever metal—we don't know, but we know there are tools. There are books.

We can't take everything 100% literally because there is no death, no sorrow in the new remade earth when the Golden City comes to descend into God's throne room. But there is some sorrow. There are some things in heaven that I don't think will be in the future heaven. We have vials of plagues that are released in Revelation. If taken literally, there's no room for plagues to be in the new heaven. I think some of the things we see in scripture about heaven, which is not a lot, can't be fully transferred because there is death and those plagues and stuff in heaven and a few other things.

If you believe that Satan stood at the right hand of God, if that's what scripture's talking about in Zechariah chapter three and Jude verse nine, Satan arguing over the body of Moses, Revelation 12 where Satan is cast out of heaven—though I speculate that Revelation 12 is more cosmic in scope, less God's throne room and more the stars. The new heaven, this has been a fascinating study. There are so many things that will be in the new heaven that it was just fascinating to me to do this study.

John Ruane: There are some people, Micah, who would be worried or concerned about the fact that in this study we're perhaps forcing biblical meanings onto unrelated pagan stories. I think you've laid out a very clear and compelling case that that is not true. But how do you answer that question?

Micah Van Huss: That's always a danger, which is why I don't build the case on one symbol or one similar name. There are several details across the course of history and across scripture that line up: things like heavenly rebellion, the giants, the forbidden knowledge, flood, the sacred trees, lost immortality, the final renewal. If a connection's weak, I can call it a possibility instead of presenting it as a fact.

In fact, you know that I like to speculate a lot because I study the mysteries. Something is a mystery by definition because the answer's not readily available. So it's very hard to give straight-up factual answers and say this is how it was. If folks have read my books, if they've listened to me on the radio or presentations, they know I speculate a lot. I speculate biblically based, but there are no readily available answers to these questions. Again, this is what God has called me to do, and I love doing it, and I'm going to continue to do it because I've got all kinds of things I've still got to talk about. I've got my next three books that I've already been studying for a few years now. That's the definition of a mystery. Again, there is a lot of evidence, a pattern of evidence.

John Ruane: We've talked, you and I, at times past about treating the Bible as or in the original account. Sometimes there's disagreement and concern, such as the fact: is First Enoch considered scripture?

Micah Van Huss: No, I don't consider First Enoch scripture. Coptic Christians, Ethiopian Christians, they do. It's part of their canon. I'm not sure about the Orthodox. So I do not consider any book other than the 66 books to be inspired by God.

I do believe that there are some books that are correct history. I don't believe that my high school history book was inspired by God, but I'm not going to say that what's contained in it is incorrect. So we have all kinds of writings, and I'm not afraid to read those non-canonical writings. In fact, one of the books I have in the queue is about non-canonical writings.

John Ruane: You know that a lot of people argue, for example, you mention Josephus, and a lot of people argue about whether he was influenced or bought off by Rome. That's a perfect example.

Micah Van Huss: We're all human. My books—I'm a human. How do you know what I'm saying is sound? What I will commit to you is that I will speculate a lot, but I'm going to do it biblically based. In other words, I keep an extremely open mind, such as if you listen to the first segment we did on this, of the cosmic view that there are other planets with other intelligent beings that God Himself created. I keep a very open mind as long as scripture does not preclude it. If scripture says something, I'm going to take it at its word.

On First Enoch and some of the others—take for instance the Book of Jasher. The Bible mentions the Book of Jasher by name three times. Now, we don't know that the Book of Jasher that we have is the one that the Bible was talking about. The Book of Jasher that we have is a medieval translation. We don't know if that was translated from the original Book of Jasher.

Here's a very important thing to know: Jude verse 14 quotes the Book of Enoch. Jude literally quotes the Book of Enoch. Now again, I am not saying the Book of Enoch is inspired because of that. I don't believe the Book of Enoch is inspired. But from my studies, I do believe that there are a number of things in Enoch that are correct history and corroborating with the other verses in scripture that talk about the angels that are chained up, the knowledge that angels taught to mankind. It evidences to me that some of the things it was saying are true.

For instance, the Book of Enoch says that before the flood, when mankind could no longer satiate the giants, the giants began to eat men and drink their blood. "Oh, that's just mythology; that's not..." The Bible says that the giants ate mankind in Numbers chapter 13. They gave an evil report of the land; it was filled with people that ate the inhabitants of the land, and there we saw the remnant of the giants. So scripture even talks about the giants eating people. No, there are a lot of non-canonical writings, fascinating things. I don't take those as inspired, but again, I study the mysteries, so we study a lot of things outside the fringes, maybe.

John Ruane: One that seems to cause a great deal of trouble in this world today, this question perhaps the last one: does the Divine Council mean that Christianity is polytheistic?

Micah Van Huss: No, because these members of the Divine Council, we don't worship them. They are not more powerful than God. When I say they are gods, I'm talking about lowercase gods. I'm talking about fallen angels. In fact, God Himself calls fallen angels gods in scripture, so I'm not being blasphemous.

Yahweh is the Creator of all of them. The ancients saw these fallen angels as gods because they were outside of our realm, outside of our understanding. They did powerful things that we didn't understand—ancient man, even modern man. They were the gods to the old people; they were the fallen angels.

As I said, in Deuteronomy chapter 32, verse 8 and 9, there are 70 nations divided after the Tower of Babel. God chooses Israel, and there are 69 lowercase gods placed over the other nations. So these are the gods of old. The Divine Council is not a pantheon.

In fact, let me qualify real quick the Divine Council. That was chapter one of my last book, Angels Eternal. The Divine Council is one of the ways that God chooses to administer His creation here on earth. We see that in First Kings chapter 22, verse 19, where a spirit stands before the Lord and all the spirits are gathered around the Lord in heaven, and they're debating about what to do about the human king Ahab. A spirit stands in front of God and says, "Let me do this; let me do that; let me be a lying spirit in the mouth of his prophets." And God says, "Well, how are you going to do that?" and the spirit says, "On this manner and that," and God says to the spirit—an angel—"Go and do it." That is the Divine Council. God doesn't need a Divine Council. God knows all. He doesn't need a Divine Council, but just because God doesn't need it is no argument against its existence. God does not need a church, but that is how He has chosen to operate. God did not need to create humanity, but that is how He has chosen to operate.

So God has chosen to administer certain things on the earth through angels. In fact, Nebuchadnezzar—it's the Watchers in Daniel chapter 4. This is by decree of the Watchers, by the word of the holy ones, that Nebuchadnezzar would go as a beast and eat. We do see the Divine Council in scripture and no, it doesn't mean we worship multiple gods. It just means that there are a lot of entities that ancient man considered to be gods that are not.

John Ruane: Something for sure, there's much to study and always more to study and learn, and that is our good fortune. We thank you so much for being with us for this series with Micah Van Huss, the author of the brand-new book Mythologies Decoded. And what a wonderful study it truly is, and thank you so much for being with us today.

Southwest Radio Ministries: After reading this book, you may never look at ancient mythology the same way again. In Mythologies Decoded: Echoes of the Bible, author Micah Van Huss challenges you to look beyond the fantastic stories of gods, giants, titans, floods, and cosmic battles and ask whether something much deeper has been preserved within them.

Could these stories be fractured echoes of events recorded in Genesis and elsewhere in scripture? Micah explores the Watchers, the Nephilim, Divine Councils, ancient catastrophes, and the flood, showing how similar memories appear across cultures throughout the ancient world. The result is a fascinating journey that will help you better understand biblical mysteries, ancient history, and the remarkable connections between scripture and the stories humanity has carried for generations.

Get the brand-new Mythologies Decoded: Echoes of the Bible by Micah Van Huss today. Order at swrc.com or call 1-800-652-1144. Decode the mythology and discover the echoes of the Bible. Mythologies Decoded. 1-800-652-1144. Tomorrow Josh Davis will have the latest headlines from the end times, so be sure to tune in. Watchman on the Wall is a production of Southwest Radio Ministries and is supported by faithful listeners like you. Please visit swrc.com.