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- [00:00]
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Sky, what if Jesus was serious about aliens?
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Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Skypod, brought to you by Holy Post Media and Sterling Cooper Draper Price. Grateful you are with us today, we are joined by our good friend, Holy Post, pundit, host of the Voxology podcast, Pastor Extraordinary Air Michael Carl Erie. Hey, Mike. How are you?
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A
Oh, hello, Sky. That middle name gets thrown around every now and again, and I flinch a little bit because I think someone's mad at me.
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B
Oh, does that happen? When you were growing up, the middle name was.
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A
That's right. You put the third. You put the third name in there. And it's over.
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B
It's over.
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A
Trouble.
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B
Well, we're getting into some trouble today because I have two topics I want to talk to you about.
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A
Yes.
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B
That I am so looking forward to. So here's the plan. We're going to talk about the Antichrist, and then we're going to talk about aliens.
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A
Perfect.
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B
Are you in?
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A
Perfect. Two topics that go together naturally.
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B
Yes, absolutely.
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A
I mean, and what if the Antichrist is an alien? So. Or, I don't know, the people have
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considered that, or aliens are the product of the Antichrist.
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A
Oh, bro. Okay, bro. The layers, the layers.
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B
Here's how this works. In case you're uninitiated to the wonders of the Skypod, this episode will be probably about an hour, and roughly half of that is available to everybody, and the second half is available only to those who are Holy Post plus subscribers. So if you're listening to this and you're, like, totally enthralled by the conversation, and eventually it just kind of fades away and my voice comes back and tells you you're not a subscriber, you're not a subscriber, and you need to go sign up for Holy Post plus to get the rest of the conversation. But I had to decide which half of this we were going to do first. Right, Right. So I thought. I didn't know which. I. I flipped a coin. So we're going to cover the Antichrist first.
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A
Perfect.
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B
And then about halfway through, we'll pivot to aliens. Here's the thing. I know you've been covering this on the Voxology podcast in a certain degree, and I've been.
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A
I've.
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B
I've loved it, been very intrigued by it. But the other reason that's been on my mind. Did you see? You know who Peter Thiel is, right?
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Yes.
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So, Peter Thiel, tech billionaire entrepreneur, started PayPal, started Palantir Industries. Like this AI cyber surveillance craziness thing. He has gotten some notoriety in the Last year. He's also, by the way, the sugar daddy who's bankrolled all of J.D. vance's political career. He's gotten a lot of notoriety in the last year because he's done a series of lectures, first in Silicon Valley and then very recently in Rome, very close to the Vatican.
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That's crazy.
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On his theory of the Antichrist.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And it's a little different. It's a little different. So I don't know how much you've read up on this, but his take is essentially the Antichrist is going to be a figure of peace who tries to solve all the world's problems, things like climate change and racism and nuclear war and all these different things. And he thinks the Antichrist is going to take the form of benevolent characters like Greta Thunberg, the climate activist, or government regulation of AI and the tech industry. So basically, everybody who could be an obstacle to his entrepreneurial pursuits.
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A
Sure seems that way.
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Is a potential Antichrist. Right. But when you combine that with what's been happening in geopolitics lately, with Israel and the United States going to war against Iran, which is all of the prophecy crazies come out of the woodwork at that kind of stuff. And who's the anti. Like, it's just in the atmosphere right now. So.
- [03:52]
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Mike Erie sky, my friend.
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B
So we're close in age. We grew up in the. In the Cold War era where everyone was the Antichrist. It was always. It was Gorbachev or it was Saddam Hussein or someone else. Who's the Antichrist, Mike? And am I? Are you? Is that what you're here to disclose?
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A
Well, I mean, I've thought about it. I said no. But you were offered the role. I would like. I would like to start. Would like to start a minor cult somewhere. I hear the money's great in that. So if that's on the table.
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B
Okay. Well, seriously, though, what do. What do Christians, at least American Christians, typically get wrong about this whole concept of Antichrist from. What's the gap between what you actually see in Scripture versus the way it gets presented in a lot of both American popular culture and the evangelical subculture?
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A
Yes. Oh, Such an obsession over Antichrist when we were growing up, how figures like how Lindsay and others not only wrote, quote, academic books around prophecy, but then popularized it through Left behind series and Antichrist. One of the things we get wrong is that word isn't used at all in Revelation, which is surprising, I think, to a lot of people. In fact, the word apocalypse or apokalupsis The Greek word means the unveiling of Jesus. That's literally the first sentence. It's the unveiling of Jesus. It has nothing to do with the unveiling of the Antichrist. And so if we were reading it looking for the Antichrist, we've already read it wrongly because that's not what the book's about.
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B
It does talk about a false prophet, it does talk about the beast, it does talk about harlot on a dragon,
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all these other but beasts, but those. But apocalyptic literature, as you know, is symbolic and beasts. And that whole section is drawing from the book of Daniel. Beasts in Daniel are empires. They're not individuals.
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Right.
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And so, so, so the, the place Antichrist is used, surprisingly, is in 1 and 2 John. And it's used both in a future sense an Antichrist is coming, but in a present sense, many Antichrists have come. And it's not just singular one Antichrist, but it's many.
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B
Yeah, it's plural.
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Yes. And they come from inside the church, so they're counterfeit sort of believers. Yeah. So if you just take the text without, you know, interrogating it, and you have this sort of left behind hangover, you can find things that you think, oh, yeah, I could squeeze this into some sort of Antichrist motif. But if you just take the text without that overlay, then it's a whole different thing where Antichrist is just anybody or any spirit that denies that Jesus came in the flesh or came to be crucified or in some way, shape or form, deceives and promotes false teaching.
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Okay, let's kind of get down to brass tacks here and do it. Let's get a little, little Greek going.
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A
Oh, I love you.
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B
Most people know that the prefix anti just means against. Right. Christ. Christos in Greek just means Messiah or Christ. So the literal meaning of the word is a person, a force, a teaching, a thing that is against Christ. That's it. But for some reason we want to capitalize it and make it into a singular individual. And is that just because it makes for a better narrative?
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A
Oh, undoubtedly. And you have passages like one Thessalonian where it speaks of the man of lawlessness as a singular person. You're thinking, oh, okay, well, here we go. And this is also where you get the very infamous quote, rapture passage that I don't think really teaches the classic rapture.
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Right. I have a video on that. People can see it on YouTube.
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Yes, you do.
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Google Sky Jatani Rapture. And you'll, you'll get the whole Lowdown on that thing.
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Yes. And it's great. It's again, there is a cultural overlay that we just don't appreciate when we're young in the faith that is very American centric, very individualized, and very much focused on the end of history. Where when you encounter the text, Jesus is discouraging fascinations with the end of history. He's discouraging calendarizing and he's simply saying, listen, your job as the church is to be faithful, pay attention to the signs, which is interesting. And then he goes into the. He goes into these. These are called mini apocalypses in the end of Matthew or Mark or whatever that have to do with the fall of Jerusalem. They don't have to do with the end of the age. And so it's one of those examples where you can take a. And this is what Peter seems to be doing. He takes a biblical category that isn't quite as biblical as he's suggesting, and then he's filling it with his personal preferences and robbing it of any biblical context associated with Christ. The only thing that seems in his kind of matrix, the only thing that is Antichrist is stifling innovation or are promoting over cumbersome regulation, which, you know, obviously, you know, isn't quite exactly what
- [09:28]
B
the scripture had about. Okay, but. But Peter Thiel seems to be continuing this long line of American cultural, evangelical especially fascination with the. With this belief that there's going to be a singular figure that arises in the world who leads the world astray and is seen masquerading as an angel of light, some. Some benevolent force, but in reality is aligned against God and his church. And we all have to be careful not to be duped in and suckered in by this thing. But that's right. Let's go back to where Antichrist is actually mentioned. Like second John.
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And I've got a couple of texts.
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Yeah, let's get into that because I think to understand the context in which John is writing and what he is trying to like Peter Thiel, regardless of what you think of the details of his argument, what he is trying to say is, hey, we need to be aware of this thing. And if we know what's coming at us up front, then we can be on guard against it. And in a way, John is doing that in his Epistle. He's saying, hey, there's this thing going on and it's bad and you need to be aware of it so you can guard against it. But what was the thing John was warning about that he labeled Antichrist.
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Yes.
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Which we're so removed from that context, we don't think about it. And you mentioned earlier that according to John, like this is something that arises within the church. Right. So what was that thing that John is writing about to warn.
- [10:54]
A
Yes. Such a good believers about? Yes. Well, let's. Let's look at a couple texts and see if we can pick up hints about what he's talking about. Dear children, this is the last hour. As you have heard that the Antichrist is coming. Even now, many Antichrists have come. This is how we know it's the last hour. They went out from us, the church, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But their going showed that none of us, none of them belonged to us. But you have an anointing from the Holy One. You all know the truth. I do not write to you because you don't know the truth, but because you do know it, and because no lie comes from the truth. Who is the liar? It is whoever denies Jesus is Messiah. Such a person is the Antichrist denying father and son. So in this instance, it's the denial of the crucifix. It's looking at Jesus and saying there's no way a crucified Messiah could actually be Messiah. There is another, slightly different definition he gives a couple chapters later. This is how you can recognize the spirit of God. Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. But every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of Antichrist which you have heard is coming and even now is in the world. Now, this case, the word flesh doesn't mean sinfulness, it means mortality.
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Right.
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It means the flesh blood of human bodies.
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It means the incarnation of Jesus.
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A
Yes. There was a very insipid form of a later teaching called Gnosticism, as you know, that was circulating, circling around. Paul deals with it too, in the early churches that denied that divinity and materiality could coexist.
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Okay.
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And so Jesus only appeared to come in human history.
- [12:47]
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Yeah, let's dig in. I love the influence of Gnosticism because I think it's still with us in many ways in a lot of parts of the church. So people need to understand this. Christianity spreads from ancient Judea throughout various parts of the Roman Empire and beyond. And everywhere it goes, it intersects with existing philosophical and theological beliefs and sometimes picks up those things. And in Greece, it picks up Platonic and Greek philosophy. And one of the dominant streams of Greek philosophy at the time was this notion which becomes known as Gnosticism, from the Greek word Gnostic, meaning knowledge. This idea that the material world is imperfect, it's bad, it's sinful, it's evil, and that there is this immaterial world, the spiritual world, which is idealized and perfect. And if you remember, like high school philosophy or maybe you took some in college, the idea of Plato's cave, where you have the depiction of the thing but the ideal is hidden behind, that's a little bit of kind of a Gnostic idea that the material things we see in this world are but shadows of the reality, which is immaterial. And so this idea kind of percolates into early Christianity, and it comes to the conclusion that, well, if material things are bad and imperfect and God is good and perfect, then God, who is spirit, can't possibly take on flesh and be material. So Gnosticism comes in and says, yeah, Jesus may have appeared to be human, or he may have appeared to have had a body, but it was just an illusion because God can't actually have a body. And if God can't have a body, then Jesus could not have died on the cross. And if Jesus could not die on the cross, then this notion of a physical resurrection of his body cannot have happened. And so this is the teaching that's spreading through early Christianity and John and Paul, others are going, people, if you deny the resurrection and you deny the crucifixion and you deny the Incarnation, you ain't a follower of Jesus. Like, this is garbage. The other thing it led to, again you are well aware of this, is if people come to believe, well, if only my soul, if only my immaterial spiritual side is going to be redeemed forever and not my body, then who cares? Who cares what happens to my body? Who cares what I do with my body? Who cares about sexual morality? Who cares about prostitution, who cares about marriage? Who cares about any of that stuff? Bodies don't matter. And that led to all kinds of weird justifications for immorality in the church. But here's where it's an interesting link because there's so many Christians today who have that same attitude, which is God's only interested in saving souls. He doesn't care about the world, he doesn't care about creation, he doesn't care about our bodies. All that, and it leads to really bad Christian teaching. To take a step back now to our original thing. This teaching, this idea is what John says is Antichrist, is Antichrist.
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Yep.
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Nowhere near the way it's used in contemporary American culture or evangelicalism. Right. So, okay, Pastor Mike, how then would you counsel people in your church or who you are influencing? How do they apply this then, this whole concept of antichrists to 21st century American Christianity? Like, if it's not Greta Thunberg and it's not the Democrats overregulating AI, what is Antichrist today that we should be concerned with or at least paying attention to? I don't want to say worried or fearful of, but what is it that. How do you translate John's warning for today?
- [16:33]
A
Yes, yes. Oh, so good. I think in two ways that you've already, that you've hinted at. One is by denying the crucifixion is the determinative revelation of who God is. So I think one of the ways the American church has become Antichrist is their infatuation with coercive power. And so to say that Jesus is the Christ meant that that man that was crucified is the Messiah. And to make that statement carried a whole host of assumptions that would have been upside down in the ancient Roman world about how power and authority and glory work. So anytime we reinforce the hierarchies that the gospel tears down, I think we're participating in the powers and principalities or what Paul calls the patterns of this world or what John might call the spirit of the Antichrist, when we're denying that Jesus, that the way the kingdom comes is through a crucified Messiah, not a political one, not a kingly one, not a power over one, or a CEO. Thoughts? I heard Sharpen. Take a breath.
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B
No, because what I, I want to make sure I'm understanding you correctly. You're, you're kind of expanding the definition of Antichrist to anything because John seems to, to any teaching that seems to be opposed to the Christ we see in the Gospels.
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The Christ crucified. The Christ crucified.
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So it's not just Gnosticism, for example, it's not just a denial of the Incarnation. It's anything that inverts the teachings of Jesus and his revelation of God through the cross.
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That's right.
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Is Antichrist.
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A
Yes. Any person that denies Jesus is the Christ. Now you can read that in a salvific way and you can say, well, yeah, anybody that says that Jesus isn't Messiah is the Antichrist. And that's how I was always taught to read it. But in the context of first John, if you read the whole thing, it is very much concerned with the communal dynamics of the church as as the tangible witness to the resurrection of Jesus. And in those situations, denying that Jesus is Messiah means denying the fact that the kingdom comes through self suffering, love, rather than through all of the ways we can pull power.
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B
Let me test this a little bit and I'll give you a true scenario and you tell me if this is Antichrist. Okay? Yes, I'm sure you recall what year was it? 2003, 2004. The passion of the Christ movie comes out. The Mel Gibson movie, Right. It was a huge deal. I don't want to get into all that, but it was crazy anyway. A group of people I know went to see this movie, many of them theologically trained, some of them pastoral leaders or church leaders, whatever. And then I was part of this group and they debriefed afterwards the movie. And one thing that was really fascinating was the way people from an evangelical church background reacted to the film. And this is an over generalization, but for the sake of our conversation, just go with it. The general posture and reaction I heard from evangelicals was, wow, Jesus really suffered. That was terrible. That was graphic. It was awful. And I'm so grateful he did that for me, us all fine. The pivot came when it was, I'm so glad he suffered that way. So I don't have to, right? And it became, yeah, Jesus came in the flesh. He certainly died in the flesh. He was tortured and he experienced this horrific injustice of the cross, but he did all of that. So I don't have to live that way. I don't have to. I don't have to. And as I heard that, I'm going, oh, what about First Peter 2 where he says, Jesus left us an example that we should follow in his steps. And it's all in the context of suffering unjustly as he did. Or Paul saying, I want to share in the sufferings of Jesus so that some I may also attain to the resurrection of the dead. Like the message in the New Testament is, this cross isn't just for Jesus, it's a pattern. It's a pattern that we are to follow as well. So what do you do with the people who don't deny Jesus is the Christ, don't deny he suffered and died physically on the cross.
- [20:53]
A
But.
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B
But they don't accept that as a pattern that they are to follow. Is that also Antichrist?
- [20:59]
A
Well, let me say I don't know. But I suspect maybe John would put it in that category because of the conversation that Jesus has with Peter when Peter gets rebuked as get behind me, Satan Right. What was the context? The context was you're the Messiah, the Holy One of God, man. Bells and whistles and alarms going off. Yes, they get it. And then, you know, instantly Jesus corrects them, famously three times. He corrects them that he's going to suffer at the hands of the Romans and be buried and rise again. And Peter of course, rebukes him. And Jesus's response is to say, get behind me, Satan. Which means, stop trying to lead me, like, get behind me and follow me, Peter. Like you're representing the spirit of the opposer, the accuser, the slander. So I think that's Antichrist language right there. And so anybody who opposes that kind of Messiah, I think Jesus gives us permission to say, hey, that's just in partnership with the accuser. That represented a form of power and authority and glory that Jesus himself resisted. So I don't know if I'd go around slapping Antichrist on everything, but I would say that interaction strikes me as one that we don't lump into the category of Antichrist. But Jesus does even more strongly than John. Right, Peter? Get behind me, Satan, because you could not calculate a crucified Messiah and the fact that Peter would have to suffer with him.
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B
Right. That's the part. I don't know too many Christians today, at least personally, who would deny the horrors of the crucifixion for Jesus.
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A
Right, right, right, right, right, right.
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B
What they deny is that they are in any way called to follow that model. Right, yes. He did it, so I don't have to.
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A
That's right, that's right. And that I think is get behind me, Satan. Absolutely, absolutely. Because, I mean, even when Jesus is standing before Pilate, the definitive attribute of Jesus's kingdom is the unwillingness of his followers to fight to protect him. And so I just think, I think there's a picture that you can, that you can make that says, listen. Yeah, the Gnosticism that you're addressing is still very prominent now. It's not as explicit as it used to be, but it's, it's, it's the idea that there are secular jobs and sacred jobs or there's full time ministry and then there's everybody else where there's, you know, I have spiritual disciplines and then I do the rest of my life.
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B
Those dichotomies are not the popular rhetoric. This is the old hymn, I'll Fly Away, like just this, this notion that the world doesn't matter to God. He's just rescuing souls off of a sinking ship. Let it go down it doesn't matter like that. That's gnosticism in the 21st century.
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A
Totally.
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B
Or. Or the vision of eternity is I'm in this ethereal heaven and it's a spiritual realm and it's disembodied and there's nothing physical about it. And God doesn't care about the. He's just gonna let it all burn kind of. That's Gnosticism, or the influence of Greek philosophy continuing in Western Christian culture for 2000 years now.
- [24:04]
A
Absolutely. So I think that's one category John opens up for us. I think the other category John opens up for us is what we're talking about, the unwillingness of people to see Jesus as a messiah that doesn't just act for me, but gives me a pattern of life to inhabit. And instead use this Jesus in ways that we're seeing all over the place for agendas that are clearly anti Jesus. I don't have a better category for that than Antichrist. So when Pete Hegseth talks about this is a war that's favored by God, That's Antichrist. Absolutely. 100%, without a doubt. And again, it's not a figure per se. It's not this organized one world government that Peter seems to really fear. It is found within the church. When the people of God, I think, don't fully embrace the complete picture of Jesus as he's presented to us as the kind of messiah he is, does
- [25:10]
B
the same thing go the other direction? So I think, so good.
- [25:14]
A
I see it sky so good.
- [25:16]
B
All right. I obviously agree with you that when you take the values of the world about power and coercion and violence and aggression and all those things, and you say this is the way of God or this is the way of Jesus, you go, no, no, it isn't. That's Antichrist. Right. You're calling something of Christ which is not of Christ, it's Antichrist. That's one direction. Then there's the other direction where there are things which are truly of Christ that are of his kingdom, that are congruent with the character of God as revealed in Scripture. And people come along and actually say, no, that thing is Antichrist. And I have something specific in mind here. But the popular messaging that empathy for the wrong kinds of people is ungodly, it's sin. Right, like that. And I'm. Or you could say the dehumanization of certain people, that's. That's fine because God endorsed doesn't like those people. Or when some people are valued or seen as equal in Dignity and rights. But they're not. They don't have certain qualities. People will call that ungodly, that. Why are you treating those people with dignity and respect when God condemns them? Is that also Antichrist in the other direction?
- [26:34]
A
Yes. Yes. What does Isaiah say? It's naming. It's naming evil what is good and naming good what is evil. Absolutely. Absolutely.
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B
I think where we get hung up on all this is when we don't throw around the accusation of Antichrist the way John does, because we again think of it as, well, it's the devil incarnate in some way. It's an agent of Satan in the flesh that's doing terrible deception, all that. But what you're saying, what I think the New Testament is saying, is whenever there are ideas that are contrary to the way of Jesus, it is technically antichrist.
- [27:09]
A
Yeah. You are hooked into the powers and principalities that are literally antichrist. Absolutely. And that means I can be too. I mean, that means I'm constantly. I mean, for the New Testament, you know this, the powers and principalities are pervasive. We're not in neutral territory. This is all contested space. And so anti Christian Christ is. It's a mode of life and a mode of believing and it's a mode of reversing Christ that hooks into the powers and principalities. But, you know, I think that one of the ways I've learned to understand spiritual warfare is far different than, and this applies to Antichrist too far differently than seeing an angel or a devil. But it's more how the community, because so much of Paul's teaching is in spiritual warfare. In Ephesians is all about how the community like treats each other. Like, that's the spiritual warfare. And so when people don't treat each other well, Paul keeps attributing that to the work of the powers that are Antichrist. So I do think there's room there to say that there are churches that are aligned and that are promoting the kingdom. And there are churches in the name of Jesus that are opposing his work. And I don't have better words than what the Bible gives us.
- [28:29]
B
And that's a good kind of place to wrap this up. As John warns communities of believers about the spirit of Antichrist in their midst, and they have gone out from among us. It's a warning for within the church community.
- [28:42]
A
That's right.
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B
It isn't that there's some big bad leader at the un.
- [28:46]
A
That's the thing. We're never encouraged to go figure out who this is.
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B
Right.
- [28:51]
A
We're just encouraged to pay attention to the people that have come out from us who are deceivers and deny the basic tenets of the faith. Faith, Absolutely.
- [29:04]
B
Speaking of the Antichrist, Barack Obama. Oh yes, some people accused of being the Antichrist repeatedly during his administration. Maybe still today. A couple weeks ago he gave an interview, I think it was on a podcast or on YouTube. He gave an interview and somebody asked him about are aliens real? And he said, yeah, I think. Don't worry, this is not the end of the episode. There's actually plenty more. But to listen to the rest, you need to be a Holy Post plus subscriber. So head over to holypost.com skypod and sign up for just $5 a month. Not only will you get uninterrupted episodes of the Skypod, which means you'll never have to hear this dumb announcement again, but you'll also get access to everything else at Holy Post plus, including episodes of Getting Schooled by Caitlin Shess, bonus interviews, live streams, the Holy Post Book Club, exclusive merchandise, and a whole bunch more. And you'll get the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that you're supporting our work of creating smart, pro neighbor Christian content. So head over to holypost.com skypod and subscribe.