by Brian Godawa
Jesus Triumphant
Chronicles of the Nephilim
Book Eight
By Brian Godawa
JESUS TRIUMPHANT
1st Edition
Copyright © 2015 Brian Godawa
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.
Embedded Pictures Publishing
Los Angeles, CA
310.948.0224
[email protected]
www.embeddedpictures.com
ISBN: 978-1-942858-02-7 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-942858-03-4 (ebook)
Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001.
Other books by the Author
Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom
and Discernment (Intervarsity Press)
Word Pictures: Knowing God Through Story and Imagination (Intervarsity Press)
Myth Became Fact: Storytelling, Imagination
& Apologetics in the Bible
Chronicles of the Nephilim
Noah Primeval
Enoch Primordial
Gilgamesh Immortal
Abraham Allegiant
Joshua Valiant
Caleb Vigilant
David Ascendant
Jesus Triumphant
Jerusalem Judgment
Chronicles of the Nephilim For Young Adults
Enoch Primordial: Young Adult Edition
Noah Primeval: Young Adult Edition
Gilgamesh Immortal: Young Adult Edition
Abraham Allegiant: Young Adult Edition
Joshua Valiant: Young Adult Edition
Caleb Vigilant: Young Adult Edition
David Ascendant: Young Adult Edition
Jesus Triumphant: Young Adult Edition
Jerusalem Judgment: Young Adult Edition
When Giants Were Upon the Earth:
The Watchers, Nephilim, & the Biblical Cosmic War of the Seed
For more information and products by the author:
www.godawa.com
www.ChroniclesOfTheNephilim.com
Dedicated to the apostates
Of the Jesus Seminar, and the Jesus Project,
and to
True believers whose imagination
is in need of resurrection.
This is spiritual war.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to my wife, Kimberly, always; to Doug Van Dorn for his giant encouragement and theological input, including material on the satan; to Michael Gavlak for his valuable input; to Sarah Beach for her editing.
Note to the Reader
Jesus Triumphant is the eighth in the series of novels, Chronicles of the Nephilim about the Biblical Cosmic War of the Seed. Though it can be read as a standalone novel, there are characters, motifs, storyline histories and themes that have been carried over from previous novels in the series. Therefore, the true depth and riches of the story can be best appreciated and understood in that context.
And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever, just as you saw that a stone was cut from a mountain by no human hand, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold. But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.
Daniel 2:44-45, 35
For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.
1 Peter 3:18–22
Prologue
Tohu wabohu. Formless and void. The desert of Azazel was the haunt of jackals, the habitation of siyyim and iyyim demons, Lilith the night hag and her serpent Ningishzida. Here the night creatures howled, the centaurs dwelt, and the satyr goat demons danced upon the ruins of desolation. Chaos and disorder.
But it was not night, it was day. The demons seemed held at bay, their whisperings carried only by the winds.
Jesus bar Joseph stumbled on the rocky wasteland. His staff kept him shakily on his feet as he leaned on it for support. His hood barely shielded him from the scorching bright sun high above. The howling winds felt like waves of heat from a blacksmith’s furnace. His sandaled feet pained at each step with sunburnt exposure. His lips were parched, cracked and bleeding.
Water. He craved water. He had a headache, a backache, his entire body ached. He had been fasting for over thirty days now, he couldn’t remember exactly how many. He had lost track. Dizziness finally brought him to the ground, his knees stinging on the gravelly desert floor.
“Had enough?” The whisper penetrated him with a sweet malice.
He ingested dust from a gust of wind and coughed. It stuck in his dry throat and he suffered a coughing fit that made the burning even worse.
When he had finally calmed down, his blurred and watery eyes looked up at the being before him: At almost six feet tall, cloaked in a desert robe that could not hide the gaunt figure beneath. Deliberately androgynous with long flowing hair. A disturbed blending of male and female characteristics. Make-up accented serpentine eyes that melded beauty and malevolence. This being was confusion and chaos incarnate. It stared down at him with cool contempt.
“Nachash,” croaked Jesus. It was the name of that ancient tempter in the Garden, the first of many names through the ages; Accuser, Mastema, Sammael, Diablos, Helel ben Shachar, the Serpent.
“I am going by Belial these days. It has a nice ring to it.” Belial meant the personification of wickedness, treachery and rebellion.
Jesus’ throat hurt to speak. “I see you are disguising yourself in more humble appearance these days. Afraid of something?”
“The jester from Galilee. I am impressed you can maintain your wits after so many days in my little home away from home.” Belial spread his hands out, gesturing to the dry deadly expanse around them. “I will admit that the advance of civilization has made it somewhat disadvantageous for the Watchers to reveal our true nature or presence. Yes, we are working more behind the veil than we did in primeval days. On the other hand, the way things are going, I can foresee an age when humanity has turned religion into pretty fictions, and blinded themselves to our reality. Imagine the influence we will then have on ignorant fools who no longer believe in us.”
In the days of Jared, before Noah, two hundred Sons of God had rebelled against the Creator, Yahweh Elohim. They left their habitation of a multitude of heavenly host that surrounded the throne of Yahweh. They came to earth at the cosmic mountain called Hermon in the northern reaches of Canaan. They were the Watchers who masqueraded openly as the gods of the earth. At eight feet tall with serpentine skin of beryl and bronze that would shine with emotion, they earned the additional name of Shining Ones.
But a
s the primeval past faded into memory, mankind’s knowledge expanded and its hubris grew with the promise of the Serpent that humans would become as gods. The Watchers became less obvious with passing time, as they sought to work more behind the veil of the supernatural world. As divine beings, Watchers could exert hypnotic effect on humans to see them in any appearance they desired. Thus, the eight-foot tall shining Belial made himself appear to be a mere five-foot ten being, both male and female, neither male nor female, a dissolution of gender, an abomination in the Law of God. But to Belial, such intolerant condemnation would not stop him from looking good. Unlike the ordinary, quite uncomely human before him, Belial still wanted to stand out from the crowd. He reveled in abomination.
Belial said, “Let us stop wasting time, Nazarene. I know who you are. I saw the entire circus show in the desert. The dreadfully smelly and theatrical Baptizer, the Holy Spirit descending like a vulture, Yahweh blathering from heaven, blah, blah, blah.”
Jesus drifted off in his memory to a mere month ago, where he had been baptized in the Jordan River not too far from this hellish wasteland. John the Baptizer had left the communal sect of Qumran by the Dead Sea to become a lone voice crying in the wilderness to prepare the way for Messiah’s advent. He was baptizing people in preparation for that arrival. But when he saw Jesus, he protested that he was not worthy to tie the thong of Jesus’s sandal, and that it should be Jesus who baptized John instead.
Jesus could remember the precious look on John’s face. A mixture of revelation and confusion, like he doubted what he had been proclaiming might actually be coming true. Jesus had chuckled and thought of dunking John in the water as a playful prank, but thought better of it because of the seriousness of the moment.
Baptism was a serious sacrament indeed. It was a symbolic ritual that recapitulated the cleansing waters of the Great Deluge. In the days of Noah, the fallen Sons of God had not merely come to earth to draw worship away from Yahweh. They also sought to corrupt humanity by violating the holy separation between heaven and earth. They mated with human women who gave birth to unholy hybrids of human and angel. These offspring were giants called Nephilim, and they were mighty warriors of old. The angelic/human crossbreeding had a second purpose: to corrupt the bloodline of the Messiah that was promised through the fully human bloodline of Eve. In the curse on the Serpent of the Garden, Yahweh had said, “I will put war between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall crush your head, and you shall strike his heel.” The violent sins of men and angels brought the judgment of Yahweh to cleanse the earth from abomination. But it was only the beginning of a war that would not cease until the promised Messiah came to crush the Serpent’s head.
Baptism was recruitment into that supernatural holy war that reiterated the waters of the Flood cleansing unholiness and evil from the individual’s life, in preparation for a new messianic world. But in the case of Jesus, it was much more. When Jesus was baptized, the Holy Spirit had come upon him, which was foretold by Isaiah the prophet, “Behold my Servant, whom I uphold, my Chosen One, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.”
Yahweh the Father then spoke the words from heaven, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
Those words were an allusion to a well-known messianic psalm of David where Yahweh spoke to the coming King.
“You are my Son; today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance,
and the ends of the earth your possession.”
But justice and inheritance were not merely a passive receiving of land rights. It was a hostile takeover from inhabitants that would not give up without a fight. The second part of that prophecy did not bode well for the powers of the earth.
You shall break them with a rod of iron
and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”
Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve Yahweh with fear,
and rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son,
lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,
for his wrath is quickly kindled.
But that was not the only Scripture of such ominous foreboding.
And the faithful were not the only ones privy to the prophecy. Even from the earliest of ages, the heavenly principalities and powers used the Seed of the Serpent to hunt down the Chosen Ones in each generation to try to kill them. Enoch, Noah, Abraham and others were protected by Yahweh from this murderous plan. The oracles of the pagan diviner Balaam and others foretold a divine star coming from the line of Jacob, a kingly scepter from Israel, a lion from Judah who would crush the skulls of the enemy and dispossess his inheritance.
Snapping fingers and a voice brought the delirious Jesus back to the moment. “Jesus. Hello, Jesus. Stay focused now. Look at me.”
Jesus looked at the creature. He wanted to gag as much from the ugliness of evil as from his spasming shrunken stomach.
Belial sniffed long and deep and said, “Just smell that. It’s heavenly.”
Jesus’s senses came alive with the sweet warm smell of freshly baked bread. His stomach cried out ferociously.
Belial’s words were sing song seductive. “Well, look what we have here. I believe it is exactly the stone ground wheat bread your own mother, that blessed Virgin, used to bake for you.”
Jesus was still on his knees. He looked over to see a loaf of steaming hot bread, fresh from the oven, sitting on a group of rocks not three feet from him. It had been pulled apart ready to eat. He could see the flakey crust, some of it floating away in the damnable breeze. Steam rose from the soft light brown interior. It took everything in Jesus’s soul to keep from reaching out and stuffing his mouth with the tempting sustenance of life.
But it was not real. Belial was not a creator, he was a mimic and a master of illusion. He could manipulate the senses to create just about any hallucination with which humans could deceive themselves by.
“If you are the Son of the God, command these stones to become loaves of bread. I want a worthy adversary, not a sickly weakling.”
Jesus had the power to do so. He had after all provided manna for the children of Israel. That was true heavenly bread, the food of angels. And he had provided water out of a rock to satisfy the thirst of thousands of Israelites as they wandered in the wilderness. He could taste that sweet cool refreshing water right now in his memory. He had gone so very long in his fast already. Perhaps it was time to feed himself and get to work with his plan.
No. He had to finish what he started here. He replied to Belial, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
The mirage of bread faded away.
“Oh, aren’t you a holy self-righteous Torah-thumping zealot. You think you are the only one who knows the Scriptures by heart?” Belial spit out in Jesus’s native Hebrew, “‘The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.’” He paused venomously. “I know what you are doing. It’s all so pathetically typological. And over the heads of common Israelites I might add.” Typology was Yahweh’s technique of repeating spiritual truth through repeating patterns in the Scriptural story he was unfolding in history.
“Yahweh is obsessed with his Exodus as if it is the only miracle ever accomplished in history. Now, you are setting yourself up as a new Moses to deliver the Israelites out of my worldwide empire of Rome.”
Belial was evil, but he was not stupid. Jesus sat up on the ground to listen. He pulled his hood down and placed his staff at his feet.
Belial continued, “Yahweh has sought to hide his plan from me since the beginning of creation. But then, like an idiot, he writes his little hints all over his Scriptures, that he leaves out in the open for any angel or elohim to read—and he thinks I am too ignorant to figure out the narrative.”
&
nbsp; Jesus listened expectantly. He was patient, even with such condescending bluster.
“When Yahweh created the heavens and earth, the land was a desert of chaos, tohu wabohu, formless and void. Just like Moses was in the desert wilderness with Israel, and you are in the wilderness of Azazel right now. And all that desert chaos is what Yahweh seeks to push back to create his covenant order. Am I right so far?”
Jesus gave a slight nod of approval. Not bad. But there was so much more to it than that. Moses had wandered forty years in the desert for Yahweh to prepare him for the exodus, Israel wandered forty years in the desert before she could enter her Promised Land of the covenant. And now Jesus had fasted for forty days in the desert in symbolic unity of preparation for his entry as king of the new exodus of Yahweh’s people out of their latest slavery under the new Egypt.
Belial continued his rant, “Yahweh pushed back the sea and crushed the heads of Leviathan in order to establish his covenant with Moses and Israel, which was the creation of order out of chaos. Then he pushed back the waters of the Jordan for Joshua’s armies to cross and slay the Anakim giants of Canaan. It’s that mythical thing of gods conquering the sea and river to establish their new world order, or should I say tyranny? So I gather you have yet to conquer your body of water. What will it be, drink up the Dead Sea? That will leave you thirstier than when you started, you know. With all that salt leftover from Yahweh’s childish temper tantrum over Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Jesus managed a slight smile at Belial’s accusations. There was always a certain silliness to the self-righteous blame-shifting of evil. But his lips cracked open with pain, reminding Jesus of his purpose here. Belial could see it and was delighted with the slightest of suffering in his nemesis.
