The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible

by Michael S. Heiser

My conscience wouldn’t let me ignore my own Bible in order to retain the theology with which I was comfortable. Was my loyalty to the text or to Christian tradition?

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.

We view the Bible through the lens of what we know and what’s familiar.

Our traditions, however honorable, are not intrinsic to the Bible. They are systems we invent to organize the Bible.

Creeds serve a useful purpose. They distill important, albeit carefully selected, theological ideas. But they are not inspired.

many Christians claim to believe in the supernatural but think (and live) like skeptics. We find talk of the supernatural world uncomfortable.

the biblical writers and those to whom they wrote were predisposed to supernaturalism. To ignore that outlook or marginalize it will produce Bible interpretation that reflects our mind-set more than that of the biblical writers.

The Bible makes it clear that divine beings can (and did) assume physical human form, and even corporeal flesh, for interaction with people, but that is not their normal estate. Spiritual beings are “spirits” (1 Kgs 22:19–22; John 4:24; Heb 1:14; Rev 1:4). In like manner, humans can be transported to the divine realm (e.g., Isa 6), but that is not our normal plane of existence.

the word elohim is a “place of residence” term. It has nothing to do with a specific set of attributes.

The two realms are not mutually exclusive or peripheral to each other; they are integrally connected—by design.

A complete, perfect being has no deficiencies. God has no need of a council, but he uses one. Similarly, God did not need humans to steward his creation or, later on, to reveal that Messiah had come. But those were his choices as well. God delighted in creating proxies to represent him and carry out his wishes.

the original task of humanity was to make the entire Earth like Eden.

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.

But imaging is bound to our humanity. Regardless of ability or stage, human life is sacred precisely because we are the creatures God put on earth to represent him.

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.

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 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.

There is no biblical reason to argue that God predestined the fall, though he foreknew it. There is no biblical reason to assert that God predestined all the evil events throughout human history simply because he foreknew them.

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.

Whereas in Deuteronomy 32:8–9 God apportioned or handed out the nations to the sons of God, here we are told God “allotted” the gods to those nations. God decreed, in the wake of Babel, that the other nations he had forsaken would have other gods besides himself to worship.

Those disinherited would be in spiritual bondage to the corrupt sons of God. But Israel would be a conduit, a mediator.

We are the current and eschatological sons of God. Our status began with Adam, was rescued in Abraham, and was fulfilled in Jesus, heir to David’s throne.

as the kingdom of God is re-established on earth, the seventy nations will be reclaimed, a process that began with the ministry of Jesus and will continue to the end of days.

Genesis 10 clearly casts the human inhabitants of those nations as owing their existence to Yahweh, as they descended from Noah’s sons and, therefore, Noah—all the way back to Adam, Yahweh’s first human son. The Nephilim bloodlines had a different pedigree. They were produced by other divine beings. They did not belong to Yahweh, and he therefore had no interest in claiming them. Coexistence was not possible with the spawn of other gods.

Yahweh’s decisions in the original Eden meant that he would not overturn human (or divine) freedom in his imagers. Yahweh had chosen to accomplish his ends through imagers loyal to him against imagers who weren’t.

“the heights of the north”? This description would be a familiar one to Israel’s pagan neighbors, particularly at Ugarit. It’s actually taken out of their literature. The “heights of the north” (Ugaritic: “the heights of tsaphon”) is the place where Baal lived and, supposedly, ran the cosmos at the behest of the high god El and the divine council.13 The psalmist is stealing glory from Baal, restoring it to the One to whom it rightfully belongs—Yahweh.

The description is designed to make a theological point, not a geographical one. Zion is the center of the cosmos, and Yahweh and his council are its king and administrators, not Baal.

Jesus had to enable the disciples to understand what the Old Testament was simultaneously hiding and revealing.

“For just as the new heavens and earth that I am about to make shall stand before me,” declares Yahweh, “so shall your descendants and your name stand (Isa 66:16–22). Incredible as it sounds, people from the disinherited nations will return to Yahweh, out from under the dominion of their gods. Where Israel failed in that mission as a kingdom of priests (Exod 19:6) Yahweh himself will succeed. He will be the agent for his own mission. This is the story of how Eden will be reborn—a story told by the New Testament.

Yahweh—the visible, second Yahweh—has been part of the biblical story in the form of a man since Eden.

Jude has Jesus leading a people out of Egypt. The reference was to the visible Angel, who was Yahweh in human form, who brought Israel out of Egypt into the promised land (Judg 2:1–2; cf. Exod 23:20–23).

When God refers to Jesus as his “beloved” he is affirming the kingship of Jesus—his legitimate status as the heir to David’s throne.

The defeat of demons, falling on the heels of Jesus’ victory over Satan’s temptations, marks the beginning of the re-establishment of the kingdom of God on earth. Jesus himself made this connection absolutely explicit: “If it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Luke 11:20 ESV). And since the lesser elohim over the nations are cast as demons in the Old Testament, the implications for our study are clear: The ministry of Jesus marked the beginning of repossession of the nations and defeat of their elohim.7

As Jews gathered in Jerusalem for the celebration heard and embraced the news of Jesus and his resurrection, Jews who embraced Jesus as messiah would carry that message back to their home countries—the nations. Babel’s disinheritance was going to be rectified by the message of Jesus, the second Yahweh incarnate, and his Spirit. The nations would again be his.

Yahweh’s original intention was that all humankind would be his earthly family, ruling in cooperation with him and his heavenly family.

Paul tells the Ephesians that believers have a glorious inheritance among the holy ones.

He became as we are so that we might become as he is.

In the beginning, God made humans to image him, to be like him, to dwell with him. He made us like his heavenly imagers and came to earth to unite his families, elevating humanity to share in divine life in a new world.

Yahweh told these elohim that they would die like men (Psa 82:6–8)—that he would strip them of their immortality—there

The meat wasn’t really the issue; being involved in the sacrifice was. Apparently some in the Corinthian church had gone beyond eating the meat to actual participation, assuming that since an idol was just a piece of wood or stone, their participation wouldn’t offend God. Paul had to teach them that this wasn’t true,

They share in the reality of Christ’s divine body, which guarantees their participation in Christ’s attributes of incorruptibility and immortality.

Most aren’t going to pursue a PhD in biblical studies, where they’ll encounter the high-level scholarship that will force them to think about what the biblical text really says and why it says it in its own ancient context, far removed from any modern tradition.

it’s a good hermeneutical strategy to firmly grasp that they—the biblical authors—aren’t us while we seek to understand their thoughts. That doesn’t seem terribly profound, but it’s critically important to reading Scripture as it was written.

The content of the Bible needs to make sense in its own context, whether or not it makes sense in ours.

How the biblical writers tie passages together for interpretation should guide our own interpretation of the Bible.

Most of our exegesis involves breaking up passages and verses into their constituent parts, whereas the biblical writers were creating connections between texts.

How the New Testament writers repurpose the Old Testament is critical for biblical interpretation.