The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible

by Michael S. Heiser

There it was, plain as day: The God of the Old Testament was part of an assembly—a pantheon—of other gods.

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

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.

The proper context for interpreting the Bible is the context of the biblical writers—the context that produced the Bible.1 Every other context is alien to the biblical writers and, therefore, to the Bible. Yet there is a pervasive tendency in the believing Church to filter the Bible through creeds, confessions, and denominational preferences.

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

We believe in the Godhead because there’s no point to Christianity without it. The rest of the unseen world is handled with a whisper or a chuckle.

One segment wrongly consigns the invisible realm to the periphery of theological discussion. The other is so busy seeking some interaction with it that it has become unconcerned with its biblical moorings, resulting in a caricature.

Gen 1:26 •Gen 3:5, 22 •Gen 6:1–4 •Gen 10–11 •Gen 15:1 •Gen 48:15–16 •Exod 3:1–14

•Exod 23:20–23 •Num 13:32–33 •Deut 32:8–92 •Deut 32:17 •Judg 6 •1 Sam 3 •1 Sam 23:1–14 •1 Kgs 22:1–23 •2 Kgs 5:17–19 •Job 1–2 •Pss 82, 68, 89 •Isa 14:12–15 •Ezek 28:11–19 •Dan 7 •Matt 16:13–23 •John 1:1–14 •John 10:34–35 •Rom 8:18–24 •Rom 15:24, 28 •1 Cor 2:6–13 •1 Cor 5:4–5 •1 Cor 6:3 •1 Cor 10:18–22

•Gal 3:19 •Eph 6:10–12 •Heb 1–2 •1 Pet 3:18–22 •2 Pet 1:3–4 •2 Pet 2:4–5 •Jude 5–...

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

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.

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.

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 connotation of created origin.

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.

Defining image bearing as any ability is a flawed approach.

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.

We are God’s council and administration in this realm. Consequently, the plurals inform us that both God’s families—the human and the nonhuman—share imaging status, though the realms are different. As in heaven, so on Earth.

But the literature of Ugarit proved very illuminating in other respects, especially as to where El, Baal, and the Ugaritic divine council lived and held court.

The distinction helps us see that the original task of humanity was to make the entire Earth like Eden.

The takeaway is that God rules over the heavenly realm and the earthly realm with the genuine assistance of his imager-representatives. He decrees and they carry out his commands. These points are clear. What is perhaps less clear is that the way God’s will is carried out and accomplished is open—imagers can make free decisions to accomplish God’s will. God decrees the ends, but the means can (and apparently are at times) left up to the imagers. This balance of sovereignty and free will is essential for understanding what happened in Eden. The choices made by human and nonhuman beings described in Genesis 3 were neither coerced nor needed by Yahweh for sake of his greater plan. The risk of creating image bearers who might freely choose rebellion was something God foresaw but did not decree.

He is, so to speak, Yahweh’s eyes and ears on the ground, reporting what he has seen and heard. The satan in Job 1–2 is not a villain. He’s doing the job assigned to him by God.

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.

Since the lesser elohim were also created as God’s imagers, they too must have free will.

This passage clearly establishes that divine foreknowledge does not necessitate divine predestination.

Since foreknowledge doesn’t require predestination, foreknown events that happen may or may not have been predestined. This set of ideas goes against the grain of several modern theological systems.

In other words, God may know and predestine the end—that something is ultimately going to happen—without predestining the means to that end. We saw this precise relationship when we looked at decision making in God’s divine council. The passages in 1 Kings 22:13–23 and Daniel 4 informed us that God can decree something and then leave the means up to the decisions of other free-will agents. The end is sovereignly ordained; the means to that end may or may not be.

All of this means that what we choose to do is an important part of how things will turn out. What we do matters.

What I’m suggesting is that, since there are immediate clues in the story that the serpent is more than a mere snake, that he may be a divine adversary, the term nachash is a triple entendre.