Historical Books with Paul Keith Davis

In the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking; they were marrying and giving in marriage right up until the day Noah entered the ark. They did not understand until the flood came and took them all away. “For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the Days of Noah.”  

We need to know what went on in Noah’s day that was so traumatic.

The Bible says that no word may be added to Scripture and not one word maybe taken away from it. God has put His seal on the Bible and made it infallible. We go to the Greek and Hebrew at times because the English language is sometimes weak,in order to get a more complete understanding. But it is still the Word of God.

One of the greatest enemies of this generation is our 21st century mindset.  Our way of thinking is so far removed from the first century Christian mindset, that we do not even really understand what was being spoken when the Epistles or the Gospels were written. We do not understand what was in their mind when they heard the words we read today.

For example, Peter said in Acts 2 that what the people saw was a fulfillment of something spoken by the prophet Joel, which was emerging then. No one had ever seen tongues of fire come down on people. They had never seen people spilling out onto the streets prophesying and speaking in languages that they had no way of knowing by natural means.

The outpouring of Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost had occurred and already in the Church there were counterfeit anointing’s. The Bible calls these false apostles: those who were preaching a gospel contrary to the one that the apostles were delivering at that point in time.

In the book of Jude, the author is trying to make an analogy regarding a new spiritual conflict. Jude was trying to get the Jewish people of that day to understand something about this conflict and about the two spirits that were working simultaneously within the context of the Church. So, he wrote about the two spirits that were present in the Garden of Eden: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life, which is the Lord. These two run concurrently through history and will reach maturity at the end of the age. Jude was trying to prepare the people for this because of a central belief that these things could happen in their day.

We now know that we are a part of the final generations before the Lord’s second coming, because since 1948 Israel has been back in its homeland and Jerusalem is back in the hands of the Jewish people for the first time in 2,600 years. This is a prophetic fulfillment that no other generation can point to. Many believe that you and I will see the Lord return, or that our children will see it.

Jude, alerting believers to those operating under a false anointing, took something that his readers would definitely know about and understand. He said this conflict is very much like the day that Michael contended with Satan over the body of Moses. He delivers this in a matter of fact way, assuming that everybody reading his epistle will know what he is talking about.

But two thousand years later we read this and ask, “What conflict? When did Satan fight with Michael over the body of Moses?” There is no other reference to the event in the Bible, but Jude refers to it as fact and now its expression is a part of the eternal Word of God. Why would God put it in there if He did not want us to understand what that is all about? When the apostles wrote the epistles, what had been ingested came out in the letters they were writing to the churches, then, hundreds of years later, God directed people to make that the canon of Scripture.

Starting in 325 AD the Church entered a season that was known as the times of apostasy, when an organizational spirit entered the Church and where man was set over it. At that time the senators in Rome were trying to govern through politics and Constantine was trying to unite his two kingdoms. Constantine saw the power of Christianity and the traditions of the Senate, so he decided to take some of the realities of Christianity and mingle them with the traditions of Rome, to create a man-made political structure. Most of us live and even worship in a system that still has elements of that in it.

In that century things that had readily been accepted as Bible truth, going back to the days of Noah, were suddenly considered heresy and people began to say that everything in the Bible was not to be interpreted literally. When the Church went into apostasy and was no longer functioning in the supernatural realm they had a real problem: how do you explain away the book of Acts or the miracles of the Gospels? In order to “explain” this contradiction, theologians created the doctrine known as Cessationism, saying that such miracles were only given in order to establish the early Church – and so they tried to explain away the supernatural as no  longer in existence and for believers.

Things that were considered basic biblical principles were completely removed from the faith of the true Christian Church. Not only that, tens of millions were martyred because they would not believe it. Millions died because they refused to believe that Genesis 6 said anything other than what had been taught for thousands of years.

The false leaders of that day demanded that the teaching be rescinded that pointed back to the activity of angels on the earth be rescinded, even though the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) literally translates those words as, “the angels of God saw the daughters of men.”

The people who held to this literal, accurate translation of the scripture were accused of worshiping angels and were killed as heretics. Millions died for the truth being taught today. Hebrews 12:1 says we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses – people who gave their lives so that somebody could stand up and say, this is the way it was. Today more and more people all over the world are teaching about the fallen angels and the Nephilim. This is encouraging, because it is important to understand and we are going to have to deal with much that is evil and false in the coming years.

HISTORICAL BOOKS

Much of the history that people were acquainted with in the first Century church was removed in the third and fourth centuries following Constantine’s actions and so, throughout Church history, we have had no clue what references like those made by Jude are all about.

The Dead Sea scroll discovery in 1948 was the single greatest archaeological discovery of modern history. It gave authenticity and validity to fragments of documents that had been found during the eighteenth century and they are still finding things in the scrolls that we do not even know about yet. God supernaturally preserved those documents in the Dead Sea area, knowing that they would be pertinent to the end time generation who would need to understand what went on in the days of Noah.

In Israel, they have recently found a human femur bone that was three feet long. Should that really surprise us? The Bible says that once there were giants living and people are now discovering the evidence. They have found documents and scrolls in an old house in Cairo that date back to the first century. We know that not one word can be added to or taken away from the Bible, but dictionaries and commentaries have also been discovered and we can use them to gain further insight.

In the same way, I believe that God has given us some of the commentaries of the first century Church that have been preserved so that we can begin to read them and adjust ourselves to the first century mindset. We have books that have the DNA of that generation and we can read them to more fully understand the truth. That is how it was for the Jews and in the lives of the early Church. These are documents that many staked their lives on!

We will have to do that to fully understand what Peter was talking about in 2 Peter 2:4 when he said God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment.

JANNES AND JAMBRES

In the day Jude was written, all Jewish families had a book called Jannes and Jambres. It is an historical story telling of a confrontation that Moses and Aaron had with two magicians. Every Jewish believer had this book, just like every Jewish believer of that day also had the book of Enoch and the Testament of Moses. Sadly, no copies of this book exist today.

TESTAMENT OF MOSES

The Testament of Moses is an historical document which contains the exact quote that Jude used in the book of Jude. In the Testament of Moses, we discover this confrontation between Satan and Michael over the body of Moses:

“But at the end of the same year in the twelfth month of the seventh day, Moses the servant of God, died and was buried on the fourth of the month on certain mountain by the archangel Michael. For the devil contended with the angel and he would not permit his body to be buried saying, ‘Moses was a murderer. He slew a man in Egypt buried him in the sand.’ Then Michael prayed to God and there was thunder and lightning and suddenly the devil disappeared but Michael buried Moses with his own hands.”In another part of the book it tells of when Moses died on the mountain and Michael is sent to change the place of the body: “Then when the devil blasphemed against Moses and proclaimed him a murderer again on account of his striking the Egyptian, the angel, not bearing blasphemy against him, said towards the devil, ‘The Lord rebuke you.’”

THE BOOK OF ENOCH 

This is a valid historical document, but it does not carry the authenticity of Scripture.In some nations they include the Book of Enoch within Scripture, but I do not believe you can. I believe we have all 66 books we are supposed to have.

The Book of Enoch was not written by Enoch. It was written two hundred years before the Lord’s birth by someone who had accumulated the oral traditions of Enoch. In those days, history was not written down but passed orally from generation to generation and they had to tell it exactly the way it was. By the second century BC those oral traditions were put into a book.

Every believer in the early Church would have had the Book of Enoch, which is nothing but supernatural. Here was a man who walked with God and who went to heaven like we go to the store. He saw and read things, he encountered angels; he even had the fallen angels come to him and ask him to go to God and ask Him for forgiveness on their behalf, and the Lord sent him back to tell them, “I will not forgive you; not only that, I am sending you to prison.”

Around 1750, Dr James Bruce went to Ethiopia, found the Book of Enoch in its complete form and brought it back to Britain where it was viewed by various museums. Scholars began to study it and discovered that this was indeed a true historical book. The scholars that studied it, who were brilliant theologians, first thought the Book of Enoch was written after the Bible because there are so many similarities in it.

When the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered almost 200 years later, we found out that the book of Enoch predated the Lord Jesus by two hundred years. The-scholars’ conclusion was they could see similarities in the book of Enoch with what the King James Bible said. One hundred phrases in the New Testament directly relate to the book of Enoch and the Lord Himself in the Gospels quoted the Book of Enoch twenty-four times. Of course, Enoch got it from Him to begin with! God sovereignly protected it for our benefit and the book of Enoch tells us exactly what went on in Genesis 6.

The Book of Enoch is just an historical document, but the Bible is inspired. The people who wrote the Bible did not have the Gospels like we have now. Jude was just a believer writing a letter to some Christians and he had, like we have, a library of things such as the Jewish history, the Testament of Moses, and the Book of Enoch. In the seventeenth century, Sir Isaac Newton, prophesied that there is coming a generation of people who will insist upon the literal interpretation of the prophecies, and they will do so amidst great turmoil and persecution. That is us. We are insisting upon the literal interpretation of the Scriptures. I literally believe what the Bible says, that we are going to taste the good word of God and the power of the Kingdom age this side of eternity (Hebrews 6:5). We are insisting upon that literally and we have seen it in some measure in the people who have gone before us.

A copy of the Book of Enoch is available here in PDF format. The Testament of Moses is available here in PDF format. 

© David Powell, 2020