The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible

by Michael S. Heiser

Psalm 82 states that the gods were being condemned as corrupt in their administration of the nations of the earth.

Was my loyalty to the text or to Christian tradition?

Friends, pastors, and colleagues at times misunderstood my questions and my rebuttals of their proposed answers. Conversations didn’t always end well. That sort of thing happens when you demand that creeds and traditions get in line behind the biblical text.

Our context is not their context.

They processed life in supernatural terms. Today’s Christian processes it by a mixture of creedal statements and modern rationalism.

First, many Christians claim to believe in the supernatural but think (and live) like skeptics. We find talk of the supernatural world uncomfortable. This is typical of denominations and evangelical congregations outside the charismatic movement—in other words, those from a background like the one I grew up in. There are two basic reasons why noncharismatics tend to close the door on the supernatural world. One is their suspicion that charismatic practices are detached from sound exegesis of Scripture. As a biblical scholar, it’s easy for me to agree with that suspicion—but over time it has widely degenerated into a closed-minded overreaction that is itself detached from the worldview of the biblical writers.

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. Since we live in a scientific age, we are prone to think these kinds of experiences are actually emotional misinterpretations of the events—or, worse, something treatable with the right medication. And in any individual case, that might be so—but the truth is that our modern evangelical subculture has trained us to think that our theology precludes any experience of the unseen world. Consequently, it isn’t an important part of our theology.

Deut 32:17

if it’s weird, it’s important.

The biblical answer is that the heavenly host was with God before creation.

morning stars

"Sons of God."

sons of God

The unseen world has a hierarchy, something reflected in such terms as archangel versus angel.

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

the sons of God are referred to as “morning stars.”

Ancient people thought the stars were living entities.

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

The household concept for the ruling families of ancient Egypt was that of a dynastic bureaucracy.

The singular elohim of Israel presides over an assembly of elohim.

The sons of God/the Most High here are clearly called elohim, as the pronoun “you” in verse 6 is a plural form in the Hebrew.

At no point in the Old Testament does the Scripture teach that Jews or Jewish leaders were put in authority over the other nations. The opposite is true—they were to be separate from other nations. The covenant with Abraham presupposed this separation: If Israel was wholly devoted to Yahweh, other nations would be blessed (Gen 12:1–3).

Since elohim is so often translated God, we look at the Hebrew word the same way we look at capitalized G-o-d. When we see the word God, we instinctively think of a divine being with a unique set of attributes—​omnipresence, omnipotence, sovereignty, and so on. But this is not how a biblical writer thought about the term. Biblical authors did not assign a specific set of attributes to the word elohim. That is evident when we observe how they used the word.

The biblical writers refer to a half-dozen different entities with the word elohim. By any religious accounting, the attributes of those entities are not equal. •Yahweh, the God of Israel (thousands of times—e.g., Gen 2:4–5; Deut 4:35) •The members of Yahweh’s council (Psa 82:1, 6) •Gods and goddesses of other nations (Judg 11:24; 1 Kgs 11:33) •Demons (Hebrew: shedim—Deut 32:17)3 •The deceased Samuel (1 Sam 28:13) •Angels or the Angel of Yahweh4 (Gen 35:7)

But God’s attributes aren’t what makes him an elohim, since inferior beings are members of that same group. The Old Testament writers understood that Yahweh was an elohim—but no other elohim was Yahweh.

As I explained earlier in this chapter, the word elohim is a “place of residence” term. It has nothing to do with a specific set of attributes.

They [the Israelites] sacrificed to demons [shedim], not God [eloah], to gods [elohim] whom they had not known.

Paul knew his Hebrew Bible and didn’t deny the reality of the shedim, who are elohim.

Another misguided strategy is to argue that statements in the Old Testament that have God saying “there is none besides me” mean that no other elohim exist.

We’ve already seen that Deuteronomy 32:17 refers to elohim that Paul believed existed. Deuteronomy 32:8–9 also refers to the sons of God. Deuteronomy 4:19–20 is a parallel to that passage, and yet Deuteronomy 4:35 says there is no god besides Yahweh. Is Scripture filled with contradictions? No. These “denial statements” do not deny that other elohim exist. Rather, they deny that any elohim compares to Yahweh.

To my ear, it mocks God to say, “You’re greater than something that doesn’t exist.” So is my dog. Saying, “Among the beings that we all know don’t exist there is none like Yahweh” is tantamount to comparing Yahweh with Spiderman or Spongebob Squarepants. This reduces praise to a snicker. Why would the Holy Spirit inspire such nonsense?

“Only begotten” is an unfortunately confusing translation, especially to modern ears. Not only does the translation “only begotten” seem to contradict the obvious statements in the Old Testament about other sons of God, it implies that there was a time when the Son did not exist—that he had a beginning.

monogenes.

genos

The term literally means “one of a kind” or “unique” without connotation of created origin.

The validity of this understanding is borne out by the New Testament itself. In Hebrews 11:17, Isaac is called Abraham’s monogenes. If you know your Old Testament you know that Isaac was not the “only begotten” son of Abraham.

Yahweh is an elohim, and no other elohim are Yahweh, so Jesus is the unique Son, and no other sons of God are like him.

The kingdom of God is the rule of God.

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.

The invisible realm is regularly overlooked, or talked about only in relation to God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. The two realms are not mutually exclusive or peripheral to each other; they are integrally connected—by design.

Many Bible readers note the plural pronouns (us; our) with curiosity. They might suggest that the plurals refer to the Trinity, but technical research in Hebrew grammar and exegesis has shown that the Trinity is not a coherent explanation.1

What we have is a single person (God) addressing a group—the members of his divine council.

Hebrew, all the verbs of creation in the passage are singular in form: “So God created humankind in his image, in the likeness of God he created him.” The other members of the council do not participate in the creation of humankind. They watch, just as they did when God laid the foundations of the earth (Job 38:7).

Among the list of proposed answers to what image bearing means are a number of abilities or properties: intelligence, reasoning ability, emotions, communing with God, self-awareness, language/communication ability, and free will. The problem with defining the image by any of these qualities is that, on one hand, nonhuman beings like animals possess some of these abilities, although not to the same extent as humans.

Defining image bearing as any ability is a flawed approach. This brings me back to my pro-life assertion. The pro-life position is based on the proposition that human life (and so, personhood) begins at conception (the point when the female egg is fertilized by the male sperm). The simple-celled zygote inside the woman’s womb, which pro-lifers believe to be a human person, is not self-aware; it has no intelligence, rational thought processes, or emotions; it cannot speak or communicate; it cannot commune with God or pray; and it cannot exercise its will or respond to the conscience. If you want to argue that those things are there potentially, then that means that you have only a potential person. That’s actually the pro-choice position. Potential personhood is not actual personhood. This thought process would mean that abortion is not killing until personhood is achieved, which nearly all pro-choicers would certainly consider to be after birth.

The term nephesh in these passages means conscious life or animate life (as opposed to something like plant life).

All these qualities associated with spirit require cognitive function, and so cannot be relevant until after brain formation (and use) in the fetus.

The turning point is the meaning of the preposition in with respect to the phrase “in the image of God.”

This last example directs us to what the Hebrew preposition translated in means in Genesis 1:26. 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...