The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible

by Michael S. Heiser

What you’ll read in this book won’t overturn the important applecarts of Christian doctrine, but you’ll come across plenty of mind grenades.

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When you open your Bible, I want you to be able to see it like ancient Israelites or first-century Jews saw it, to perceive and consider it as they would have. I want their supernatural worldview in your head.

First, many Christians claim to believe in the supernatural but think (and live) like skeptics.

The second serious shortcoming is evident within the charismatic movement: the elevation of experience over Scripture.

Most of us noncharismatics would have to admit that our initial impulse would be to doubt. But we actually have a less transparent reflex. We would nod our head and listen politely to our friend’s fervent story, but the whole time we would be seeking other possible explanations. That’s because our modern inclination is to insist on evidence.

have a firm grasp of my own lack of omniscience. (So does my wife, for the record.)

My bibliography is nearly as long as this book. I mention this to make it clear that the ideas you’ll read here are not contrived. All of them have survived what scholars call peer review. My main contribution is synthesis of the ideas and articulating a biblical theology not derived from tradition but rather framed exclusively in the context of the Bible’s own ancient worldview.

In the ancient Semitic world, sons of God (Hebrew: beney elohim) is a phrase used to identify divine beings with higher-level responsibilities or jurisdictions. The term angel (Hebrew: malʾak) describes an important but still lesser task: delivering messages.2

Ancient people thought the stars were living entities.3 Their reasoning was simple: Many stars moved. That was a sign of life to the ancient mind. Stars were the shining glory of living beings.

The original morning stars, the sons of God, saw the beginning of life as we know it—the creation of earth.

he clarifies that he also knows that sacrifices to idols are actually sacrifices to demons—evil members of the spiritual world.

The Greek word translated by this phrase is monogenes. It doesn’t mean “only begotten” in some sort of “birthing” sense.

For years monogenes was thought to have derived from two Greek terms, monos (“only”) and gennao (“to beget, bear”). Greek scholars later discovered that the second part of the word monogenes does not come from the Greek verb gennao, but rather from the noun genos (“class, kind”).

The term literally means “one of a kind” or “unique” without connotat...

The story of the Bible is about God’s will for, and rule of, the realms he has created, visible and invisible, through the imagers he has created, human and nonhuman. This divine agenda is played out in both realms, in deliberate tandem.

Humankind was created as God’s image. If we think of imaging as a verb or function, that translation makes sense. We are created to image God, to be his imagers. It is what we are by definition. The image is not an ability we have, but a status. We are God’s representatives on earth. To be human is to image God. This

Since the heavenly council is also where Yahweh is, both family-households should function together. Had the fall not occurred, humanity would have been glorified and made part of the council. This is not speculation. In the last chapter we saw the beginning of the theological idea that humans are the children of God. It was God’s original intent to make them part of his family. The failure in Eden would alienate God from man, but God would make a way of salvation to bring believers back into that family

Ezekiel’s words draw attention to Eden as a seat of authority and action. There was work to be done. God had plans for the whole planet, not just Eden.

Cultivation of the garden and subduing the earth are not the same tasks.

We can see that the tasks of humanity, taken in tandem with the earlier observations that require Eden and Earth to be distinct, distinguish Eden and the earth. It makes no sense to subdue the garden of God. It’s already what God wants it to be.

Without genuine free will, imagers cannot truly represent God. We saw earlier that the image of God is not an attribute or ability. Rather, it is a status conferred by God on all humans, that of representing God.

These abilities are part of our being like God. They are attributes we share with God, such as intelligence and creativity. The attributes God shared with us are the means to imaging, not the image status itself. Imaging status and our attributes are related but not identical concepts.

Put another way, God did not intend to create imagers that did nothing. True, even if an imager accomplished nothing (say, an aborted human fetus), they would still be an imager.

If that was true even in Eden—the place on earth where the council was present—then being in the presence of God is no guarantee that free-will beings will never stray or act out of self-will. Only God is perfect. Beings that are lesser than God, whether human or divine, are not perfect. The potential for error and disobedience is by definition possible.2 Trouble could happen in paradise, and of course it did. God’s decision to create free imagers involved that risk.

You might think that all the risk was ours—after all, the world of humanity has suffered in its wake. But the only way in which there was no risk involved for God is if you define risk as the threat of harm. God cannot be harmed. But he can be grieved.

God does not delight in evil and suffering. Nor does he need it for his sovereign plan. The conundrums evaporate if we just allow the text to say what it says. We need to lay our theological systems aside, answer these questions like an ancient Israelite would have, and embrace the results.

We might wonder why God doesn’t do away with evil and suffering on earth. The answer sounds paradoxical: He can’t—because that would require elimination of all his imagers. But he will at the last day. For evil to be eliminated, Earth and humanity as we know it would have to end. God has a chronology, a plan, for this ultimate development. It could be no other way, given his decision to create time-bound humans as the vehicles for his rule. But in the meantime, we experience the positive wonders of life as well.

This passage clearly establishes that divine foreknowledge does not necessitate divine predestination. God foreknew what Saul would do and what the people of Keilah would do given a set of circumstances. In other words, God foreknew a possibility—but this foreknowledge did not mandate that the possibility was actually predestined to happen. The events never happened, so by definition they could not have been predestined. And yet the omniscient God did indeed foresee them. Predestination and foreknowledge are separable.

The theological point can be put this way: That which never happens can be foreknown by God, but it is not predestined, since it never happened.

Since foreknowledge doesn’t require predestination, foreknown events that happen may or may not have been predestined.

Evil does not flow from a first domino that God himself toppled. Rather, evil is the perversion of God’s good gift of free will. It arises from the choices made by imperfect imagers, not from God’s prompting or predestination.

There would be no Edenic utopia revived by human beings or other gods. It would be a painful lesson.

Jacob sees “angels of God” going up and down the structure, an indication of the presence of the divine council. Jacob also sees the visible Yahweh standing beside him (28:13)—the familiar language for Yahweh in human form we noted with Abraham.

The angel of God explicitly tells Jacob in verse 13 that he was the God of Bethel. Jacob had seen angels at Bethel and one lone deity—Yahweh, the God of Abraham. It was Yahweh who had promised protection, and to whom Jacob had erected the stone pillar. This passage fuses the two figures. This fusion is helpful for parsing Jacob’s subsequent divine encounters.

And Jacob remained alone, and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the dawn. 25 And when he saw that he could not prevail against him, he struck his hip socket, so that Jacob’s hip socket was sprained as he wrestled with him. 26 Then he said, “Let me go, for dawn is breaking.” But he answered, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” 27 Then he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” 28 And he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have struggled with God and with men and have

prevailed.” 29 Then Jacob asked and said, “Please tell me your name.” And he said, “Why do you ask this—for my name?” And he blessed him there. 30 Then Jacob called the name of the place Peniel which means “I have seen God face to face and my life was spared” (Gen 32:24–30).

3 In the womb he [Jacob] deceived his brother, and in his manhood he struggled [Hebrew, sarah] with God [elohim]. 4 He struggled [Hebrew, yasar] with the angel and prevailed: he pleaded for his mercy. He met him at Bethel, and there he spoke with him.6

He’s telling us that Jacob wrestled with God himself, physically embodied—and identifies God with the angel who said he was the God of Bethel.7

Egyptian theology linked Pharaoh and Egypt’s pantheon. From the fourth dynasty onward in Egypt, Pharaoh was considered the son of the high God Re. He was, to borrow the biblical expression, Re’s image on earth, the maintainer of the cosmic order established by Re and his pantheon at the creation.