But what are these ‘powers’? Paul lists several in Colossians 1: ‘thrones and lordships and rulers and powers’. A similar list in Ephesians declares that Jesus is lord over all ‘rule and authority and power and lordship’, and over ‘every name that is invoked, both in the present age and also in the age to come’.28 That obviously includes both what we would call ‘earthly’ or ‘political’ rulers and what we might call any ‘non-human’ or ‘supernatural’ quasi-personal ‘forces’ that stand behind the ‘earthly’ rulers. They already feature prominently in significant biblical contexts such as
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