Zen Garcia's Gnostic Heresies & Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit
About this sermon
Dean Odle responds directly to teachings he attributes to Zen Garcia: the Cain serpent-seed doctrine, the claim that human beings are fallen angels in flesh, and the identification of the Holy Spirit as feminine Sophia. He contrasts these ideas with Genesis 3–4, 2 Timothy 3, Romans 8, Galatians 4, and other passages, arguing that the teachings arise from Gnostic texts, Jewish mysticism, and esoteric speculation rather than the biblical canon.
Chronological teaching outline
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Odle explains that prior agreement on biblical cosmology does not excuse later doctrinal error. He identifies three teachings attributed to Zen Garcia—Cain as the serpent’s sexual offspring, humans as fallen angels, and the Holy Spirit as feminine Sophia—and says the last makes public correction urgent.
Second Timothy 3 warns that deceivers grow worse while instructing believers to continue in the Holy Scriptures. Odle stresses that inspired Scripture equips the man of God for doctrine, reproof, and correction, and he defends naming public teachers when their teaching endangers others.
Genesis 4 explicitly says Adam knew Eve and she conceived Cain, while Genesis 3 describes both Adam and Eve eating fruit. Odle argues that turning the tree and fruit into sexual symbols produces contradictions and imports ideas the narrative itself never states.
The serpent-seed doctrine is traced to the Gnostic Gospel of Philip and the Zohar rather than the biblical canon. Odle describes these sources as expressions of ancient Gnosticism and Jewish mysticism, then contrasts their Cain traditions with Genesis’ plain account.
Odle distinguishes his view of Genesis 6’s fallen angels and human women from any claim that Cain was Satan’s child. He rejects the idea that humans are preexistent fallen angels working out evil through embodied experience, describing it as Gnostic salvation through secret knowledge.
An extended audio excerpt is played in which Garcia discusses human beings as angels in fleshly form. Odle says the clip contradicts later denials and insists that angels and humans are distinct orders of creation rather than the same beings at different stages.
A second clip presents the Holy Spirit as the feminine or mother aspect of the Trinity called Sophia. Odle begins his biblical rebuttal by arguing that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and that making the Spirit a separate feminine parent confuses the incarnation and the unity of God.
Romans 8, 2 Corinthians 3, Galatians 4, and 1 Peter identify the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ. Odle argues that grammatical personification of wisdom or feminine nouns cannot transform God’s Spirit into a goddess or female member of the Godhead.
Odle traces Sophia language to Gnostic goddess traditions and warns that applying a demon-goddess name to the Holy Spirit misidentifies God’s Spirit. Matthew 12’s dispute over Beelzebub supplies his comparison: attributing the Holy Spirit’s identity or work to a demonic source is spiritually grave.
The conclusion warns that teachers can speak many truths and still lead followers into destructive error when they add Gnosticism, occult mysticism, or other religions to Christianity. Odle appeals to Colossians and the pastoral epistles, urging listeners to stay rooted in Christ, the apostolic word, and the faith once delivered.
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Lightly edited for readability while preserving the speaker’s meaning and substantive statements.
- 0:00:20
and welcome everyone. You're listening to Prophecy Quake tonight. I'm your host, Pastor Dean Odell. It is December 5th, 2017. I can't believe it that we're already this close to 2018. I think 2018 is gonna be a very interesting year when it comes to Bible prophecy and end time events. But tonight we're going to address something that I talked about in some messages a few weeks ago. I've entitled tonight's show Zen Garcia's Gnostic Heresies and Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Now, I'm just gonna have to say upfront that it disappoints me to have to do this. I got to know Zen in the last, I don't know, couple of years, I guess year and a half maybe. He invited me on his show. Of course, we unified over the issues of being brothers in Jesus Christ, but really what brought us together was the topic of flat earth and the firmament and the enclosed system in which we dwell, getting back to biblical cosmology. And I wanna say that over that time period of getting to know Zen and being on his radio show with him, and I came to love Zen very much and appreciated what a lot of the stuff he was teaching and putting out there. Of course, I hadn't known him long enough to dig into everything, but of course, I went on different radio shows anyway of people that I didn't really know where they stood on everything, but just to share my testimony of how God opened my eyes to biblical cosmology again and what God was doing in that area, in that arena. But of course, things began to transpire over time, and one of the first issues that came up, and this was, I don't know, this was several months back, but I began to get emails, I began to get comments and emails and questions from people who watch our and listen to our ministry, and people began to ask me, where did I stand on the Cain-Servancy Doctrine that Zen was teaching? Of course, at that time, I didn't know he even taught it, so I had to go and dig in and see what he was teaching about. Of course, it's not a new doctrine or anything. It's not new to him. I had heard about it years ago from the Branamites, William Branham, the people that followed him, were into that back in the, what is it, the 40s and the 50s and 60s time period. So I knew about that coming from a Pentecostal background that there were people who believed in the Cain-Servancy era, and for those of you who don't know what that is, and I'm gonna address that in detail too tonight, that's the idea, the belief, that Eve really had sexual relations with the serpent, Satan, in the Garden of Eden. It wasn't eating fruit, it was having sexual relations,
- 0:03:21
and that Cain is the spawn of that, and there's a whole seed line from Cain. Now again, that's a belief, it's not biblical. I'll show you in a minute where that came from, but that was the beginning of me confronting Zen on taking teachings from Gnostic gospels, from Gnostic heretics, and using them as proof text to create what he was trying to put forth as Christian doctrine. And when it comes to establishing biblical doctrine, sound doctrine, you have to stick to the Bible. You have to stick to the 66 books of scripture here. I believe God preserved them, I believe God moved in that whole situation. I know there's people out there that don't believe this, but if you don't believe that God was able to preserve the books and to bring together the books to create the Bible that he wanted, then you already have a problem with your foundation. Your foundation is off. Psalm 12, God promised he would preserve his word from generation to generation forever, and of course, there's archeological evidence, manuscript evidence to prove that God's word, the Bible that we have today has been preserved just as God moved upon those holy men, prophets and apostles and evangelists and those men and the prophets of the Old Testament and those kings and also the apostles of the New Testament that the Holy Spirit moved upon them and inspired them what to write, and God preserved those words. People talk about sometimes books that were left out. They were left out for reasons, and it was the decisions of very godly men who were praying and discerning, who had connections, and again, it had to be connected back, especially New Testament books had to be connected back to the apostles, and when I say the apostles, I'm talking about the original, the 11 that were left after Judas, and then of course, the apostle Paul, and then I believe other apostles that were brought in, James and Jude, the half-brother of Jesus. So again, we have what God wants us to have. Now again, there's other books that I believe contribute that have historical value that have, now we know have some value in the sense of giving us some truth that we need, but listen, it doesn't matter what, if anything comes forth, any ancient writing, any documents, anything that claims to be from God or claims to be Holy Scripture, it must, or anything that claims to be a word or a prophecy or whatever, it's got to adhere.
- 0:06:21
It cannot contradict, it cannot add to or take from the canon of Scripture that we have right here, Genesis to Malachi, Matthew to Revelation. Now, if you don't believe that, again, that's your problem. Your foundation is off, but the foundation, the way we, God has promised that if we would stay in the word, we would know the truth. He said if you would, John 8, he said if you would continue in my word, you will know the truth and the truth will make you free. You have to continue in the word. God said that his word was inspired, and I'm gonna read it. Matter of fact, let's just read some Scriptures tonight. First of all, let's go to 2 Timothy, 2 Timothy chapter three, and we'll just read here, I guess, let's just read from verse 12. 2 Timothy, we're just gonna let it fly tonight, and I don't wanna try to press anything. It's got a lot to cover. We may have Dr. John Strzazic joining us in the second hour, Hebrew and Greek scholar, former dean of seminary, but regardless, I asked him if he could, he might be able to join us in the second hour, but we're just gonna go through the Scriptures tonight, and again, let me say, and a lot of people are gonna think that why would you name names, why do you have to do this? Well, sometimes you really do have to name names, especially when it starts getting serious, and of course, as we look at Zen, Garcia's Gnostic Heresies, the Cain-Serpency doctrine is serious enough. I mean, any time you get off of Holy Scripture and you begin to veer away and add to or take from what the Bible soundly teaches, anything that contradicts, anything that's really weird and abnormal out there, away from the word of God, I mean, that's serious enough, and I explained that to Zen, that once you go down this road, you're beginning to teach others that it's okay to veer off into these strange areas, but the most egregious area that brought me to this point of saying, okay, this is enough, was Zen's recent teaching that the Holy Spirit is feminine or the mother part of the Trinity called Sophia. Now, the moment I heard this, of course, I've been walking with the Lord over 30 years. I got saved in the 70s, late 70s, came back to the Lord in 87. He called me to the ministry. So I've been in this thing a long time. I've been reading my Bible a long time. I've been studying the Scriptures a long time. I studied Gnosticism very early on because this is a subject that you're gonna encounter from time to time. So when I begin to hear these things, when I begin to see this stuff about the Cain-Serpency doctrine,
- 0:09:21
when I begin, definitely when I saw Zen teaching the heresy and the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, and there's no other way to put it. I know that that seems strong, but Sophia is a demon. The Sophia of Gnosticism is a goddess, and it is a demon. It is a deception, and the moment you attach and call the Holy Spirit Sophia, you're blaspheming the Holy Spirit. There's just no other way to put it. And it saddens me deeply, but this is a serious matter. And the reason this is so serious is because the unsaved or unsuspecting people or people who are becoming or about to become Christians born again and start following Jesus or new believers, this is a way, if they really begin to trust Zen, because he's right on many issues. Whether it be about biblical cosmology or Genesis 6 and the Nephilim and the Giants and all of that, I mean, he teaches a lot of things that are true. But again, all false teachers would not be able to deceive anybody if they didn't teach some things that were true. But the moment you get into this, really, this is just, this is so far off the rails that I can't believe that I even have to, it even has to be addressed in 2017. I mean, it really, Kevin and I were discussing this beforehand and it just really blows my mind that anyone could read particularly the New Testament and come away thinking the Holy Spirit of God is feminine mother and Sophia. But this is, listen, this stuff right here is clearly, and I'll show you, we're gonna go through this, clearly from Gnosticism. And I wanna show you as we get into this that it is biblical to finally put your foot down and to say, okay, enough's enough, and to name names. And that's why I'm doing this. But let's just read this. This is 2 Timothy chapter two, I mean, chapter three. And we're gonna read from verse 12. And it says, yay, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. But evil men and seducers, deceivers, shall wax worse and worse deceiving and being deceived. And then Paul tells this young pastor Timothy, what you need to do so that you won't be deceived by these deceivers, these impostors. He says, but continue thou in the things which thou has learned and has been assured of knowing of whom thou has learned them, and that from a child thou has known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith, which is in Christ Jesus. So he tells them, you're gonna have these deceivers and these impostors. It's interesting, the word seducers is the Greek word goates.
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