What I Found Out About the Church and the Bible Changed How I Saw Christianity Forever.

By Pastor David Mercer September 2026

If you're reading this, chances are you already feel it.

Something is off.

Not in a way you can put your finger on. Not in a way anyone at church has the language for. But it's there.

A heaviness you carry into every morning. A dread that follows you around the house for no reason. You open your Bible, and the words are there, but something isn't landing. You pray, and your prayers feel like they stop at the ceiling.

The news gets darker every week. Politicians you used to trust say things that make your stomach turn. You look at your kids, your grandkids, and a fear rises in you that you cannot name.

And you think: Maybe I'm not faithful enough. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Maybe I just need to pray harder.

I know that feeling. I carried it for years.

I'd read Ephesians 6:12 a hundred times:

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

But if I'm being honest — I didn't really understand it. Not what it actually meant. Not what we were supposed to do about it.

Not until I stumbled upon something that changed everything.

It started with a question I couldn't answer.

A few years ago, I was studying Genesis 6 for a sermon series. I came across a verse I'd read a hundred times and never really stopped on.

Genesis 6:4:

"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown."

"And also after that."

Four words. Four words that broke open something I couldn't close again.

If the flood destroyed everything — every creature, every person, every giant — how were they still there after that?

The Sunday school answer didn't work anymore. So I dug. I dug into the original Hebrew. I dug into the early church fathers. I dug into what the apostles were actually reading when they wrote the New Testament.

And that's when I found out about the missing books.

Not one or two. Not footnotes or appendices.

Twenty-two entire books that were stripped from the Bible you and I grew up reading.

Books the apostles quoted. Books the early church treated as scripture. Books that name the spirits, the principalities, the powers — the very things Paul warned us about.

Gone.

And nobody told us.

The deeper I looked, the worse it got.

Your King James Bible has 66 books. But the 1611 King James — the original printing — had 80. The books weren't added later. They were taken out.

In 1826, the British and Foreign Bible Society made a decision. Not a theological decision. A business decision. Printing costs were rising, and the Apocryphal books were expensive to typeset. So they cut them.

Not because they were false. Not because a council of scholars determined they didn't belong. Because they were expensive to print.

And then those books disappeared from every Bible printed after.

But that wasn't even the worst of it.

There was a church — an ancient church, older than Rome, older than Constantinople — that never cut a single page.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

They received the gospel in the first century. Acts chapter 8 records it — Philip the Evangelist baptized an Ethiopian court official on the road to Gaza. That man carried the faith home. And for more than seventeen hundred years, through invasions, through isolation, through every pressure the world put on them — Ethiopia held the line.

They kept every book.

88 books. Not 66.

Including the ones that name what's attacking you.

"Sarah" — And the Conversation That Changed Everything

Last year, a woman in my congregation came to me after service. I'll call her Sarah.

But clearly, something deeper was happening.

When I dug into what the missing books actually said, I found passages linking spiritual oppression directly to:

• Named entities — spirits, principalities, powers — with ranks and assignments
• Specific tactics: fear, shame, intrusive thoughts, spiritual numbness
• A covenant that was broken, and protections that were stripped away
• Prayers and commands the early church used that we were never taught

The pages that explained what was attacking her — and how to fight it — had been taken out of her Bible before she was born.

So I Dug Deeper. And What I Found Shook Me.

The Book of Enoch — one of the 22 stripped from our Bible — names the fallen angels. Not vaguely. By name. It describes what they did, what they taught humanity, and what happened to their offspring: the Nephilim.

And the other missing books go further. They describe spirits that didn't leave after Genesis 6. Principalities. Powers. The rulers of the darkness Paul warned about in Ephesians 6 — with ranks, with assignments, with tactics.

These spirits are still here. And the books that name them, explain where they came from, and tell you how to fight them — those books were taken out of your hands before you were born.

This Is Not Fringe. The Apostles Knew These Books.

I know what you might be thinking. You might be thinking: These sound like extra-biblical texts. How do I know they're real?

Open your King James Bible to Jude — the book written by the half-brother of Jesus Christ himself.

Jude 1:14:

"And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints."

Read that again.

Jude — inside your Bible right now — is quoting the Book of Enoch by name. He calls Enoch a prophet. He treats his words as scripture.

Now go look for the Book of Enoch in your Bible.

It's not there.

A book that Jude quotes. A book that the apostles read, studied, and treated as the Word of God. It was pulled out — and nobody told you it was missing.

Jesus Himself referenced these events. Luke 17:26:

"And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man."

He expected His listeners to know what happened in the days of Noah. Not the Sunday school version. The full account. The Watchers. The Nephilim. The corruption of human bloodlines. The spiritual war that Genesis 6 opens the door to but never walks you through.

That walkthrough existed. It was in the Book of Enoch. And it was in every early Christian's hands.

Until it wasn't.

But Here's the Worst Part

Most believers today have never even heard of these books.

Not because they're hidden in some dusty archive. Not because they're written in a dead language. But because they were deliberately removed — and the removal was never announced.

The people who decided what went into your Bible and what didn't — they weren't all shepherds. Some of them were politicians. Some of them were businessmen. Some of them were more concerned with maintaining power than preserving truth.

Ask yourself: why would someone strip the pages that name the enemy, describe his tactics, and hand you the weapons to fight him?

Why would someone tear out the very books that turn a scared Christian into an armed one?

And for more than a hundred and fifty years, they've kept it that way.

Until now.

I Went Searching for a Real Solution

Once I understood what had been taken, I had one mission: get those books back. For me. For Sarah. For my entire congregation.

I went online. I searched for "complete Ethiopian Bible in English."

And I found chaos.

Knockoffs on Amazon with terrible translations. Self-published compilations cobbled together from random internet sources. Editions that claimed to have the "full Ethiopian canon" but were missing half the books.

I wasted over $300 on three different versions before I realized none of them were real.

One of them didn't even have the Book of Jubilees — one of the most critical texts in the entire canon. Another had Enoch but butchered the translation so badly it read like a parody.

I was about to give up.

Then I found FaithMade.

The FaithMade Complete Ethiopian Bible in English

FaithMade did what nobody else bothered to do. They compiled the complete 88-book Ethiopian canon into one English edition. Every book. Every chapter. Every verse. Nothing missing, nothing added.

Here's what's inside:

All 66 books of the Bible you already know — Genesis through Revelation, unaltered.

Plus the 22 books that were stripped:

1. The Book of Enoch — the book Jude quoted. Names the Watchers, the fallen angels, the Nephilim. Describes the spiritual hierarchy your Bible references but never explains.
2. The Book of Jubilees — the book that reveals why one-tenth of the demons were permitted to remain on Earth. Contains the prayers Noah used, the angel remedies, and the covenant timeline the Western Bible skips entirely.
3. The Book of the Covenant — the final instructions. What Christ communicated to the church about what is coming, and how to stand when it arrives.
4. 1, 2, and 3 Meqabyan — books found nowhere else in the world. Preserved only by the Ethiopian church. Describe the corruption of religious leadership and the faithfulness God requires when every institution around you has fallen.
5. Plus the prayers, the names of the spirits, the angels assigned to your family — the operational knowledge the early church used to fight the war Paul described in Ephesians 6.

Everything your King James has — plus everything that was taken from it.

What the People Who've Read It Are Saying

You Don't Have to Wait for Permission

Nobody in your church is going to hand you these books. No pastor is going to preach through the Book of Enoch next Sunday. No Bible publisher is going to add the missing 22 back in.

Why are you still reading the version with pages missing?

Special Offer — While This Batch Lasts

The FaithMade Complete Ethiopian Bible comes with:

• The complete 88-book canon — large print, cream-and-gold ornamental edition
• A free companion 300+ hour audiobook — listen to every book, including the ones you've never heard
• A 365-day money-back guarantee — a full year. If it's not what I've described, send it back. Every penny returned. No questions.

Thousands of Christians have already opened this Bible.

And once you've read what was taken from you — once you've seen the names, the prayers, the principalities, the full picture Paul assumed you already had — you will never unsee it.

The dread behind you will have a name. And you will know what to do about it.

Get the Complete Bible →

Final Thoughts

I want to be clear about something.

I am not telling you your King James Bible is wrong. I still preach from mine every Sunday. I still read it every morning.

But it is incomplete. Not because someone made a theological judgment. Because someone made a business decision. And that decision cost generations of believers the context they needed to fight the war they were born into.

The heaviness you carry — it's not your fault.

The silence when you pray — it's not because God isn't listening.

The fear you feel for your children — it's not paranoia.

Something is real. Something is ancient. And the book that explains it, names it, and arms you against it — it exists. It has existed for more than seventeen hundred years in the hands of a church that never bowed to the pressure to cut it.

I gave a copy to Sarah. The woman from my church who sat across from me with shaking hands.

Three weeks later, she came to me again. Different woman. Upright. Steady eyes.

She said: "Pastor David, the dread behind me is gone. I don't know how else to say it. It's just gone."

I do know how to say it.

She got the rest of the Word. And the Word did what it has always done.

"So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God."— Romans 10:17

To your faith made complete,

Pastor David Mercer