The Watchers: Ancient Entities in Modern Fatih (Truth and Shadow Podcast)
This conversation examines the biblical and theological significance of sinister spiritual forces, with a particular focus on the watchers and holy ones mentioned in Daniel and 1 Enoch. Scripture presents human history as a cosmic battlefield where unseen powers oppose God’s purposes, a theme often neglected in modern preaching out of caution, skepticism, or overemphasis on Christ’s victory. The discussion examines how early church fathers addressed these beings without embarrassment, how post-Enlightenment rationalism and modern esotericism have distorted our view of the supernatural, and how texts like 1 Enoch shed light on the origin of demons as the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim. Attention is given to passages such as Genesis 6, Psalm 82, Deuteronomy 32, Ephesians 6, and Revelation 12, showing their interconnection with the watchers. The narrative links ancient rebellion to contemporary cultural confusion, arguing that distorted echoes of the watchers appear in modern fascinations with aliens and fringe spirituality. Ultimately, the call is for Christians to reclaim a robust biblical theology of the supernatural, recognizing Christ not only as the Savior who comforts but also as the Warrior who conquers, and to prepare for renewed hunger for truth and deliverance in an age marked by deception and spiritual searching.
Episode on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/truth-shadow-podcast/id1714476896?i=1000723576738
Episode on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7kR9e6pmFJl6kUwA6jItYG
TRANSCRIPT:
B.T. Wallace: This is your nautical lantern on the dangerous seas of darkness. Let's push off from the placid shore of the status quo and explore what's beyond the horizon. I am your host, BT, and this is Truth and Shadow, your podcast of the supernatural. It is a silence that lingers, like an echo in an empty hall. Week after week, across thousands of pulpits and altars, the faithful hear words of encouragement, consolation, and moral guidance. Sermons lift up themes of love, forgiveness, reconciliation, family life, stewardship, and personal growth. All of these are true and necessary for the Christian life because our life is not built on fear, but on the promise of grace. Yet one sometimes notices a particular absence. The sinister forces—those fallen angels, disembodied spirits of the Nephilim, and those humans that cooperate with them—they are named in scripture, but they are left unspoken, as if the darkness were better ignored than acknowledged.
This silence is curious, for the Bible is filled with warnings. From Genesis to Revelation we are told that human history is not a neutral drama, but a contested space. The serpent in Eden, the Pharaohs of Exodus, the prophets confronting idols, Christ in the wilderness, the apostles warning of deceivers, and the prowling adversary, the devil himself—all testify that God's people are not spectators but participants in a war. And yet, how rarely is this war addressed in our regular liturgy? We are told of God's love, but seldom of the fact that his love comes under siege. We are reminded of Christ's mercy, but not that his mercy was won in open conflict against the accuser of souls.
Why the omission? Perhaps it is born of pastoral caution. The modern world is skeptical, often dismissive of spiritual realities. To speak of the devil, of demons, of powers and principalities risks sounding primitive or sensational. Many preachers fear their words will be misunderstood as superstition, or worse, as a descent into spectacle that distracts from the gospel’s central message. Others may wish to avoid frightening children, unsettling the timid, or alienating those who came seeking peace and not warfare. This instinct is understandable. Another reason is theological overcorrection. Some traditions, in their zeal to emphasize Christ's triumph, have muted the ongoing battle. The victory is already won, we say, and that is true. But in stressing this, the reality that the struggle still rages is left in shadow. We forget that though the enemy is defeated, he still thrashes, prowls, and whispers. Christ has triumphed absolutely, but the battlefield remains bloodied, and the faithful remain combatants.
There is also the cultural instinct to comfort rather than to awaken. Congregations are weary. They have bills to pay, marriages to tend, illnesses to fight. It can seem cruel to add the language of sinister forces to burdens already heavy. Better, perhaps, to speak only of God's gentleness and care. And yet, to omit the adversary is itself a kind of cruelty. For if the sheep do not know the wolf is near, how can they guard themselves? If they mistake every attack as mere coincidence, or every temptation as merely personal weakness, they are left vulnerable and unarmed. The result is a church that often appears surprised by evil—when corruption festers in institutions, when violence tears through families, when despair spreads like fog. We speak of psychological wounds, of social problems, of poor choices. These are real, but they are not the whole. Behind them stand powers ancient and cunning. If sermons never call them out, the faithful may never recognize the deeper struggle in which they are caught. In that silence, the sinister forces gain ground without resistance.
It is worth remembering that Christ himself never avoided calling out the darkness. His ministry is marked again and again by confrontation with demonic powers—casting them out, silencing them, rebuking them. The gospels present this as integral, not incidental, to his mission. Likewise, the apostles speak with the gravity of soldiers who know the battlefield. Paul warns of armor needed against spiritual forces of evil. Peter speaks of a lion prowling for prey. John envisions the dragon at war with the saints. Their preaching carried an urgency born of naming the enemy. What then does it mean that our pulpits grow silent where theirs thundered? It means the faithful are often sent into battle without recognizing it. And as such, they go to work, raise children, fight temptation, and wrestle despair, but they do so without being told that these daily struggles are not merely private, but cosmic. Their discouragement deepens, for they imagine their weakness is uniquely theirs rather than part of a larger struggle that even the saints endured.
To recover this truth is not to glorify evil, but to demystify it. To identify the sinister forces is not to terrify, but to clarify. Evil loses much of its power when unmasked. The church's task is not to dwell morbidly on darkness, but to reveal its reality so Christ's light can be seen more clearly. Only then can his victory be appreciated in its fullness—not as a gentle metaphor, but as a triumph over living enemies who sought the ruin of souls. Perhaps what is needed is balance. A church that speaks only of light leaves people naive to the shadow. A church that speaks only of shadow risks deepening despair. But a church that holds both together—the Christ the Shepherd who comforts, and Christ the Captain who conquers—offers the fullness of the gospel. Such preaching would not sensationalize the sinister forces, but neither would it hide them. It would equip the faithful with vigilance, courage, and hope. For if the early church knew that to follow Christ was to march into contested ground, then surely we too must remember that discipleship means more than comfort. It means going to war.
The silence of the pulpits must end. To speak of the sinister forces is to be honest about the world as it is—scarred, haunted, yet destined for redemption. It is to remind the faithful that though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we do not walk unarmed nor alone. To proclaim Christ fully is to proclaim him as both Savior and Warrior—the one who comforts, yes, but also the one who conquers. They don't preach this on Sunday morning. They don't cover it in your friendly neighborhood Bible study. But it's in the book—whispered through the prophets and echoed in the nightmares of kings. The watchers. The holy ones. Spiritual entities who descend and ascend, who defy categories, blur the lines, and leave behind a cosmic fingerprint on the story of humanity. Not demons, not angels—well, not exactly. They're something stranger.
They appear in Daniel like ghostly judges observing from the margins. They show up in Enoch as fallen rebels, lusting after flesh and birthing giants. And they loom behind the scenes of our world like dark stars—present, hidden, waiting. Evangelicals don't talk about them much. Maybe because we're scared. Maybe because it's easier to keep the war simple: angels versus demons, good versus evil. But scripture doesn't give us that luxury. It gives us mystery. And today we're going to step into it. Joining us for the first time on our show is Anthony Delgado, author of the book. We're going to be talking about the watchers and the holy ones. Hey Anthony, welcome to my show.
Anthony Delgado: Yeah, thanks for having me, BT.
B.T. Wallace: Of course. Since this is the first time you've been on my show, let's give the audience a little bit about you. Tell us your story.
Anthony Delgado: Sure. Yeah. So as you said, my name's Anthony Delgado, and I've been in ministry going on about 20 years now. I studied at Sterling College in Kansas, studied Christian Reason, and then I’m a graduate from Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I’m married, three kids, all older, almost all grown up. And I pastor a church in Southern California called Palmdale Church. I’m also an author. I love to research and write and think and dream.
B.T. Wallace: That's great. Some big stuff, man. The Bible itself doesn’t really seem to waste words, and yet right in Daniel we get this casual drop of the word “watchers.” This is the first time we see this word, unless we’re reading some of the more apocryphal texts. And they’re not just watchers—they’re paired with the holy ones, the holy ones of God. The audience who would be reading this should already know who they are, but if we’re reading the Bible straight through from Genesis, this is the first time we experience this word. So it’s like, yeah—the watchers, those heavenly beings. They do something. But the way that we treat it today, the way that we experience it in Sunday school or during a Sunday service, it’s just skipped. We’ve got this unseen realm going on, and it’s just background noise. So I’m curious: who are they, and why are we calling them the watchers?
Anthony Delgado: Yeah, it’s a really good question. The Greek word behind watchers is egrēgoroi, and that’s probably even more meaningless to us than anything else. But the reason I say it is because it begs a question: why did we translate that as “watchers”? It does come out of the book of Daniel into English, and it also comes out of 1 Enoch into English—both from the Ethiopic and from the Greek fragments. In the rest of the Enochic literature it’s consistently translated as “watchers.” So it’s an interesting question: what on earth does that mean?
I think about it in two ways. One way is through pop culture. If you just Google “the watchers,” you’re going to get a lot of stuff from TV shows and movies. I really enjoyed the TV series Fringe, for example, and the watchers in that show are not divine—though you don’t find that out until the end. They’re humans from the future, traveling through time, watching, seeing things happen. They’re supposed to watch but not intervene. That tends to be a pretty standard media depiction of a watcher: a being, often supernatural—or futuristic or alien in the sense of extraterrestrial—that comes to observe but is not supposed to interact.
That’s interesting in the biblical narrative because the watchers in Daniel seem juxtaposed with the princes mentioned there. When the archangels show up, the princes are there to interact, but the watchers are there seemingly for another purpose. The Book of the Watchers, the first part of 1 Enoch, depicts the fall of 200 watchers. I like to think of it as historical fiction based on Genesis 6:1–5. Where Genesis says “sons of God,” 1 Enoch uses the word “watchers.”
It’s interesting how similar this is to pop culture portrayals. In 1 Enoch the watchers were in heaven, perhaps part of the principalities of heaven, but they descended to earth. And then they did the one thing watcher-type narratives always hinge on—they interacted when they weren’t supposed to. They saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and in 1 Enoch they married them and had children by them. That seems to have been entirely inappropriate based on their God-given designation as not human. So they went from being watchers—those who observe—to overstepping their boundaries. That’s who the watchers are.
Sometimes we think more broadly about them. If the watchers are synonymous with the sons of God in Genesis 6, that could also make them synonymous with the sons of God in Psalm 82 and Deuteronomy 32. Those would be the divine beings—what I don’t mind calling angels, though not everyone likes that—who were set up as the principalities over the nations, the cosmic rulers.
B.T. Wallace: Right. And something really interesting and puzzling for me is how the early church fathers specifically dealt with the supernatural compared to most of us today. They didn’t seem embarrassed by it. They didn’t try to pawn it off or simplify it away and say it was “just the human rulers” or other things that fall apart once you read the text. They didn’t dismiss the watchers. They explored the Nephilim. They acted like it was something they discussed regularly. You’ve got people like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, even Augustine, who go to lengths about who these beings are and what they can do.
When we look at them, it really changes our paradigm of existence. We like to imagine heaven and earth, or heaven, hell, and earth, in a neat picture: God on a throne, angels singing, harps and trumpets. But then there are these other entities—rebellious ones—who can fall and who can cease to be holy. And that seems to really stumble and trip up some people.
Anthony Delgado: Yeah. I think it comes from a post-Enlightenment inability to understand things from a philosophical materialist standpoint, where everything needs to be rational and synthetic. By synthetic I mean, if it’s real, then I can touch it. That would be a materialist view. So when we’re talking about spiritual things, people want to envision them in a tangible way, in a way that can be seen. Obviously, we have to add sensory descriptors to things that are spiritual. For example, in Ezekiel we see pictures of divine beings with eyes all around, wheels rotating with eyes covering them. When I read that—and I can’t prove this—but I think that’s a visual depiction of the watchers.
The rotating wheels have a lot of meaning behind them, but the eyes clearly indicate that they see in every direction. That imagery speaks to the function of watchers. You’re always adding sensory descriptors to intangible realities within a materialistic world. If you can’t hold together both levels—understanding history from a human or scientific standpoint and also reading scripture or ancient literature like 1 Enoch as conveying spiritual realities within a physical world—then you miss the point.
This is not to say myths are mere stories. When you study mythology, you find connections. Growing up, I was told Greek myths were just stories to help people live better lives, reflecting cultural values. But if you analyze them against Greek history, you find touch points. For example, Zeus taking the throne on Mount Olympus corresponds with the beginning of the Greek empire. That myth mirrors their history: a king on the throne of heaven as they formalized an earthly empire. This is more than allegory—it depicts truth in both the mythology and in biblical narrative. The purpose isn’t scientific or materialistic description but spiritual truth.
I completely agree that the church fathers were masters of this way of seeing. They could look through the narratives, interpret them, and develop theology of the spiritual world in a way that was helpful. They understood the mechanism at work. We tend to want to rationalize everything into one system, instead of letting the texts stand as they are.
B.T. Wallace: Yeah, it’s basically arguing from an atheist point of view. One of the things I grew up with was the idea that fallen angels became demons. Therefore the watchers are demons. But as I explored scripture more, and also other texts and early church fathers, I realized the picture is more complicated. In most of the Old Testament we don’t see demons. But when Jesus arrives, suddenly demons are everywhere—he’s casting them out, throwing them into pigs. Maybe the Nephilim, when they died in the flood, became disembodied spirits, and those spirits are the demons being cast out. That changes the paradigm. Fallen angels are not demons; the Nephilim spirits are demons.
But people like to simplify everything into neat categories—fallen angels equal demons, or everything fits in one pigeonhole. Yet scripture shows demons as born out of rebellion, violence, spiritual trespasses. They seem driven mad by their disconnection from both realms. They’re always looking for a body to inhabit. That’s what the text says. So we wrestle with the question: are fallen angels looking for bodies? They never had them to begin with, so why would they want them? Who or what is really looking for a body to inhabit?
Anthony Delgado: Yeah, I think to give some defense to the fallen angel argument, one of the three ways to read Genesis 6 could give credence to it. The first way is to read it as about humans, but I think you and I agree that’s not correct. The second way is to read it as spiritual entities having offspring with human women—that’s the traditional reading. The third way is sort of a hybrid that suggests there was some form of occult summoning of the watchers.
This would mean a watcher inhabited a human male, who then had children with a human woman. That would be a third way of reading the text, and I think it’s reasonable. If that interpretation is right, then their lust for human flesh, as you said earlier, could only be accomplished by them demonizing a human male. That could give credence to the idea that the watchers themselves were the ones doing the possessing.
The book of Enoch, while not considered scripture in most Christian traditions, is significant here. It’s only in some Orthodox traditions—specifically the Ethiopian canon—that 1 Enoch is considered scripture. But in many historical traditions it’s included in lists of important works. Several church fathers even called it scripture, though by that they didn’t mean canon but an important document. If you read 1 Enoch and take it seriously, you can reverse that paradigm and see connections in the Bible.
For example, in Enoch God says: “I gave human wives to impregnate and have children with, so they would not need anything on earth. But you were formerly spiritual, living the eternal life and eternally immortal. Therefore, I did not appoint wives for you. Your proper dwelling is in heaven because you are the spiritual ones of heaven. But now the giants produced from the spirits and flesh will be called demons on the earth, because the earth will be their home.” What’s happening is that the watchers had children with human women, and those children became giants. When those giants were killed, the question arose: what happens to them when they die? Enoch answers that they must remain on the earth. The afterlife was not meant for them; they were not supposed to be in heaven, nor do they have a place in God’s eternal plan. So their spirits remained on earth. The watchers themselves were condemned to earth unless cast into Tartarus.
You can ask, “Where is this in the Bible?” There is an interesting line of thought. The general Hebrew word for giant is rephaim. We often use “Nephilim,” which seems to be a more specific designation, maybe even a clan name. But the broader term is rephaim. In several texts this word is translated “departed spirits.” For example, Psalm 88:10 says, “Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the rephaim rise up to praise you?” Clearly in context it refers to the dead, implying that God is not going to raise the dead giants. Job 26:5–6 says, “The rephaim tremble beneath the waters and all that inhabit them. Sheol is naked before God, and Abaddon has no covering.” What’s beneath the waters? The pit, the abyss, Tartarus.
Proverbs 9:17–18 says, “Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is tasty. But he doesn’t know that her guests are in the depths of Sheol.” If that doesn’t sound like the temptation of demons, I don’t know what does. The word “demons” appears in the Bible repeatedly, but not in most of our English translations, which render it “departed spirits.” The translators likely thought that was a better choice. But demons are a specific class of departed spirits—the spirits of the dead giants.
So if you can get behind the language of the text, there are at least a half dozen other Old Testament references where you can see this. To me, we have every reason to believe that the gospel-era demons are tied directly to this Old Testament narrative of Genesis 6 and the fate of the Nephilim who died in the flood. Job 26 says the rephaim tremble beneath the waters, and Abaddon has no covering. That could very well be a reference to the giants destroyed in the flood.
B.T. Wallace: Yeah. One of the things I was thinking about with this idea—and its absence in most of our common preaching—is that in our postmodern world it’s really difficult to have a good grip on the supernatural. And I wonder if a vast majority of our fear of this is falling back into spiritism, which was really popular in the late 1850s and through the early 1900s. I wonder if some of our standoffishness in Sunday school, classes, or services is built on fear of a return to that—just as Augustine worried about worship of angels.
Anthony Delgado: I think you’re exactly right about the spiritism. A lot of the pseudo-Christian, pseudo-mythological movements—the Illuminati cults and so forth—fit under the broad category of esotericism. These esoteric religions all have some kind of root in Christianity, but many of them also engaged with texts like 1 Enoch. And not just 1 Enoch, but also 2 Enoch and 3 Enoch. Though in my view, the higher you go, the less valuable they become.
I don’t think there’s much to do with 2 Enoch, and 3 Enoch is actually a polemic against Christianity written by a Jewish author. In 2 and 3 Enoch, Enoch is transformed into an angel named Metatron. In 3 Enoch, he’s then asked to step down as the highest angel because humans should not be worshiped. That’s clearly a polemic against Christ. So the higher you go, the less value there is. Really, 1 Enoch is the only one worth reading, unless you have academic interest.
When you get into this kind of material, you end up in fringe territory. That’s part of why people are afraid of these topics today. They’re connected to esotericism and, in modern times, to things like the Satanic Panic. Most of the sensational stories in the 1980s—razor blades in Halloween candy, widespread occult sacrifices—were not actually happening. But because of that climate, many Christians came to fear even discussing the demonic.
Still, fringe practices do exist. I live in the desert, and sometimes when we explore we find goat bones—clear signs of sacrifices. So it’s not that it never happens. But the broader fear that anyone exploring these topics will slide into occultism has created an anti-intellectual impulse in parts of the church. Even though I’m not as deep into fringe discussions as some, I find value in approaching these things intellectually while still prioritizing the truth of Scripture.
Esotericism, however, is dangerous precisely because it mimics Christianity. It’s almost like ancient Gnosticism. Groups grab something strange from 1 Enoch or other texts, then try to interpret the entire world and the Bible through it. That’s what makes them dangerous. They twist Christian ideas and attach them to things that are meaningless, poor gauges of truth.
B.T. Wallace: Exactly. Augustine himself was part of a sect called the Manicheans, who actually incorporated angels into their worship. They treated them almost as gods. In his Confessions, he describes plainly what these groups believed before his conversion and how he came to embrace the Christian church. Some would say he threw the baby out with the bathwater, because he dismissed watchers and related traditions altogether, reducing it all to the “sons of Seth” interpretation of Genesis 6.
Anthony Delgado: He was very much ahead of his time with a number of things.
B.T. Wallace: Yes. And it wasn’t just him. There was also an apostate who argued that Genesis 6 was simply about the sons of Seth marrying the daughters of men. That interpretation gained traction, but it falls apart under scrutiny—especially when compared with the broader witness of Scripture. Look at Luke 8, where Jesus casts out demons into a herd of pigs (Luke 8:32–33). Then compare that with Deuteronomy 32, which says God “divided mankind, fixing the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God” (Deut 32:8, ESV). If you collapse all of this into the sons of Israel, it reduces the complexity of the biblical worldview.
Anthony Delgado: Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense. Keep going in Deuteronomy 32 and he calls the sons of God demons. So now, if you read it that way, you have to redefine “demon.” A philosophical materialist would be happy to do that—just call it something else.
B.T. Wallace: I mean, do you see what I’m asking here? We’ve got Jesus, we’ve got the interactions, we’ve got the Old Testament, but then we get Paul. Paul writes in Ephesians where he talks about principalities, powers, rulers of darkness, and spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places. We’re not talking about metaphors anymore. It really seems like Paul is pointing to a real connection between spiritual entities—powers and principalities—and things like the watchers we find in Daniel or 1 Enoch. Could these basically be the same spiritual entities?
Anthony Delgado: Yeah, I think so. That was my thought regarding Ezekiel. When I think through it, maybe “watcher” is their designation as a class of divine beings, something tied to their job description. But do we see them elsewhere? I think so. In Ezekiel, the beings covered with eyes could be a depiction of watchers. We have to pay attention to the imagery of Scripture.
So take Ephesians 6:12: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood… but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:12, ESV). This doesn’t make sense if we think strictly in terms of a three-tiered cosmology. By Paul’s day there should not have been spiritual forces of evil in heaven. John is clear in Revelation 12 that part of the incarnation-ascension sequence was the devil and his angels being cast out of heaven (Rev 12:7–9). So what does Paul mean? Likely, he’s describing beings originally designated to heavenly places but who abandoned that role—very much like the watchers described in 1 Enoch (“Your dwelling was in heaven, but you left…”; 1 Enoch 15.3–7). That fits with Jude 6, which says angels “did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling” (Jude 6, ESV).
So while Ephesians 6 may not be directly about the watchers, it’s almost certainly a reference to fallen spiritual beings in general, with strong resonance to the watchers of Genesis 6 and Enochic tradition.
B.T. Wallace: We also read about a sudden increase in knowledge. People start learning how to do things like forging weapons. I believe it even mentions the making of swords. That’s in 1 Enoch. And you read about things like makeup, which serves the purpose of seduction, or weapons of war, which in an agrarian society would have had no other purpose than killing other humans. These passages describe technology being given to humanity prematurely, through rebellion.
Then we look at today. Some televangelists I grew up watching would warn that there will be an increase of knowledge in the last days, and they’d point to verses like Daniel 12:4: “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase” (Dan 12:4, ESV). And you can’t help but notice: we went from horse and buggy in the late 1800s to space flight in the 1960s. That’s a staggering leap. It makes me wonder if, as inheritors of a supernatural worldview, we’re missing something. Maybe more is at play today than we admit.
Anthony Delgado: I think you’re picking up on a really cool pattern. I’m a big fan of Jonathan Pageau. I’m not sure how familiar your audience is with him, but he focuses heavily on symbolism, looking for patterns—not just biblical ones, but across all of creation. He studies how the world operates, how symbols work across cultures, and then draws those patterns back into Scripture. He gets criticized for it, with people saying he makes anything mean whatever he wants, but the reality is he’s pointing to consistent symbolic patterns.
It’s an interesting criticism, honestly, because he’s very orthodox—in fact, Eastern Orthodox—in his views on Christianity. He recently explained why he doesn’t believe he’s forcing things. He said it’s because you can find the same pattern at different levels: simple levels where it must mean what he says it means, macrocosmically applied to big things, and microcosmically applied to small things. It all connects together.
We see that in Genesis 2. In the garden there are two trees. Many interpret them as the “good tree” and the “bad tree”: eat from the tree of life and live, eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and die (Gen 2:9, 17). But another way to read it is “good tree” and “not yet tree.” There’s no indication that God designed Adam and Eve for permanent ignorance or that he never intended them to have a moral compass.
In my book The Gospel Is Bigger Than You Think, I use the example of a toddler. If you show a toddler horribly graphic scenes on a screen, they won’t look away. They won’t understand, and it will alter their reality. But as an adult follower of Christ, filled with the Holy Spirit, when I see something vile, my immediate intuition is to shut it off. That’s spiritual maturity—the ability to deal with knowledge of good and evil. So in the garden, Adam and Eve were not ready. The tree of knowledge of good and evil would one day have suited them, but not yet.
The Book of the Watchers in 1 Enoch inverts this. The watchers descend, have children with human women, and the giants consume everything people produce. When humans can no longer sustain them, the giants kill and eat humans, and even sin against birds and beasts. “So the earth brought accusation against the lawless ones” (1 Enoch 7.5, in James H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1).
Then the text describes their rebellion: “Azazel taught men to make swords, knives, shields, and breastplates… he showed them metals of the earth and how they should work gold… bracelets, ornaments… the use of antimony, beautifying of the eyelids… and all kinds of costly stones” (1 Enoch 8.1–2). The result is seduction, violence, and premature technology—weaponry in an agrarian culture where such tools could only be used for killing.
The narrative concludes: “There was great godlessness, and they committed fornication… they corrupted all their ways. Semjaza taught enchantments… Baraqel taught astrology… Kokabel the constellations… and as men perished, they cried, and their cry went up to heaven” (1 Enoch 8.2–3, 9.1).
If that doesn’t echo Genesis 6:5—“The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen 6:5, ESV)—I don’t know what does. The Enochic narrative provides context: the watchers filled the earth with forbidden knowledge, the premature revelation of the knowledge of good and evil.
So what was patterned in the garden—the “not yet tree”—was corrupted by the watchers. They poured out heavenly secrets into human culture at the wrong time, leading to deeper condemnation. That pattern continues even today.
B.T. Wallace: Part of what you’re saying ties into the idea of being led by the Spirit—that’s what we would call a rightly formed conscience. So your conscience is formed correctly within what Paul describes as what was “handed down from us to you” (1 Thess 2:13). A lot of people today in the postmodern world are lacking that right formation. They’re not exposed to deep thought, to real understanding of the more important things. Instead, we see an explosion of interest in aliens, ancient astronauts, and now the idea of interdimensional beings. All of this seems to be a distorted echo of humanity’s collective memory of the watchers.
And what we’re faced with now is this: you’re a pastor, so you carry the burden of responsibility to develop rightly formed consciences in your flock. How do we respond to this, and how do we lead Christians into a biblically grounded conscience?
Anthony Delgado: Yeah, this has been part of my interest in the fringe lately. The more I encounter it, the more I realize I need to be at least semi-versed in these things. Just a few years ago I had no idea how deep the rabbit hole went with Bigfoot. If a church member had joked about going to Washington to hunt Bigfoot, I would have thought it was harmless nonsense. Today, I see there’s much more behind it spiritually.
I don’t have time to be immersed in every fringe topic, but I’ve been listening to podcasts where I can pick up tidbits about aliens and similar ideas. That way, when someone asks me about aliens, I now realize they’re not asking simplistic questions about life on other planets. They’re wrestling with deep spiritual questions about reality, deception, and the supernatural world. I was the one in ignorance. Now I want to know enough to help them.
Even when I don’t fully understand every fringe conversation, I can point people back to Scripture. I can show them how demonic deception works, where these beings have power, where they don’t, and where Christ and his Spirit empower the church. So when someone comes with questions about aliens, spirits, or other supernatural things, I can frame it biblically. I believe this neo-esotericism rising in society is only going to grow, and pastors, elders, and priests need to be more prepared.
B.T. Wallace: Yeah. I mean, this is something I wrestled with even as a kid. I grew up in the late eighties and nineties—we’re the same age, Anthony—and I was exposed to things like aliens, the alien autopsy video, and all sorts of speculative material. I was free to investigate to my heart’s content. A young mind raised on that sees more reality in Star Trek or Star Wars than in church.
But the thought that always stuck with me was this: even if there are entities on other worlds with their own technology, cars, airplanes, and trains, it has no bearing on us. Our concern is here, with our own spiritual understanding, our relationship with Jesus Christ, and the way creation was formed by him. We can entertain these ideas as thought experiments, but at the end of the day we are bound to earth with Scripture.
I know that “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16, ESV). And when I read the ancient stories—whether Greek, Roman, Viking, or even modern science fiction—they all seem to serve a purpose.
And I think that purpose is helping us recover biblical theology. I’d even call it a return to a pre-scholastic philosophy of theology. We need to divorce ourselves from the intellectualism and atheism that have infected Christianity. Instead, we should recover an understanding of Scripture, the gospel, the reality of the fall and rebellion, and God’s redemptive plan as it moves forward in our world. What do you think about that?
Anthony Delgado: No, I think you’re right that everything is a reflection—it’s almost like it’s by design. Imagine how strange Star Wars would be if Luke and Han were replaced with Hutts, and all the Hutts were young white men. The story would be completely different, even if their personalities and attitudes stayed the same. It probably wouldn’t have been nearly as popular.
As a point of contrast, Spaceballs comes out, and all bets are off. The Han Solo character is half man, half dog. It doesn’t matter, because the film is designed as inversion. Inverting the tropes reinforces what humanity truly needs and desires by making a mockery of what should be abhorrent. The same principle applies today. The more bizarre our social experiments with sex and gender become, the more society—ironically—learns the truth of traditional ethics. By pressing extremes, culture exposes absurdity. In a sense, the left becomes more extreme, and in response, the whole of society is pulled toward center. The truth reveals itself, even through inversion.
So no matter how inverted society becomes, the patterning of truth still emerges. It manifests directly, cosmically, microcosmically, or even inversely, showing the absurdity of falsehood. That’s why I think truth is built into everything, one way or another.
B.T. Wallace: Yeah. And that’s really a call to action—what are we going to do going forward? I’m going to rail against postmodernism for the rest of my life, even if it hangs around. What I’d like to see is a return to something older, before scholasticism. The Renaissance injected atheism and agnosticism into Western civilization. It weakened our grip on the supernatural. But the supernatural war is still there. It’s raging. We’re in it. It’s unseen, undeniable. And I believe reclaiming an ancient worldview doesn’t weaken the gospel—it deepens it.
Anthony Delgado: I agree. Actually, I’d add that things might already be cycling back around. Notice the pattern. Modernism brought hard rationalism, demythologizing human thought. Postmodernism wasn’t really about recovering the spiritual—it was about relativizing truth. Post-postmodernity, which is where I think we are now, doesn’t care about truth at all. It’s all about self-expression and identity. Ironically, that turn to identity is itself a kind of spiritual searching, though with dangerous consequences.
Think of a place like North Korea. If the walls came down and they suddenly had religious freedom, the people would search wildly, grasping at anything spiritual. It would be a festival of demons. But out of that chaos, they would also learn the destruction caused by demonic deception—tyranny, oppression, bondage. And in the midst of that, the way of escape would become clearer: Christ.
That’s what we see in 1 Enoch as well—the watchers and their offspring filled the earth with tyranny and destruction (1 Enoch 8–9, in James H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1). But the hope of escape was with God. If demons bring tyranny, then people will eventually seek freedom—and the only true freedom is in Christ.
So I think it’s possible we’re on the front end of that kind of shift. Maybe it won’t be society-wide immediately, but I believe we’re entering a stage where the hunger for truth and deliverance will become more obvious. That’s why you and I are so interested in these conversations. We’re on the early side of something transformative. Most Christians aren’t talking about this yet, but the tide may be turning.
B.T. Wallace: True. Fantastic. Well, Anthony, as we wrap up, let’s talk about where people can find you. The links will be in the show notes, but go ahead and advertise for yourself for a minute.
Anthony Delgado: Sure. It’s kind of funny to say that. You can find everything I do on my website, anthonydelgado.net, or just search my name on Google. My website will be in the top three results. My book that we talked about today is The Watchers and the Holy Ones, which looks at the Book of the Watchers. I encourage you to take a look at it—it’s a short, quick read, and honestly one of my favorite things I’ve written. You can also find it on Amazon, and if for some reason you want to make a bulk order, you can do that through my website, either by email or possibly through an order form there.
My other book that came out last August is The Gospel Is Bigger Than You Think. We didn’t talk about that one much today, so I won’t plug it too much, but that’s also available. I’ve been asked often about how I work these themes into my preaching. If you’d like to see that, you can visit Palmdale Church’s website to find my sermons. I don’t claim to be the best preacher in the world, but I think I do fine, and it’s a way to see how these ideas are integrated into preaching.
B.T. Wallace: Cool. Thank you, Anthony. I appreciate your time.
Anthony Delgado: Yeah, man. Thanks for having me on.
B.T. Wallace: Thank you for listening. This is a free podcast based on the value-for-value model. If you find value in this or any episode, you can return that value by liking the show, subscribing to this channel, leaving a review, or sharing with a friend on your social media accounts. You can also donate on my website. Thank you again. This is BT for Truth and Shadow podcast. You are the light in the darkness.
