The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible

by Michael S. Heiser

I still believe in the uniqueness of the God of the Bible. I still embrace the deity of Christ. But if we’re being honest when we affirm inspiration, then how we talk about those and other doctrines must take into account the biblical text. 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. Have no fear—it will be a fascinating, faith-building exercise.

The facts of the Bible are just pieces—bits of scattered data. Our tendency is to impose order, and to do that we apply a filter. But we gain a perspective that is both broader and deeper if we allow ourselves to see the pieces in their own wider context. We need to see the mosaic created by the pieces. The Bible is really a theological and literary mosaic.

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.

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.

Morning stars are the stars one sees over the horizon just before the sun appears in the morning. They signal new life—a new day. The label works. It conveys the right thought. The original morning stars, the sons of God, saw the beginning of life as we know it—the creation of earth.

Second, the label “sons” deserves attention. It’s a family term, and that’s neither coincidental nor inconsequential. God has an unseen family—in fact, it’s his original family. The logic is the same as that behind Paul’s words in Acts at Mars Hill (the Areopagus) that all humans are indeed God’s offspring (Acts 17:28). God has created a host of nonhuman divine beings whose domain is (to human eyes) an unseen realm. And because he created them, he claims them as his sons, in the same way you claim your children as your sons and daughters because you played a part in their creation.

The word elohim is a “place of residence” term. Our home is the world of embodiment; elohim by nature inhabit the spiritual world.

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 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.

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.

The garden of Eden, of course, is a lush, well-watered habitation (Gen 2:5–14). Ezekiel 28:13 mentions the garden of Eden (“garden of God”), but then adds the description that the garden of God is “God’s holy mountain” (Ezek 28:14).4 We naturally think of God’s mountain as Mount Sinai or Mount Zion. When it comes to garden imagery, the latter is spoken of in Edenic terms.

Like Eden, Mount Zion is also described as a watery habitation (Isa 33:20–22; Ezek 47:1–12; Zech 14:8; Joel 3:18). Whether Sinai or Zion, the mountain of God is, in effect, his temple.

verse 28: And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of heaven, and over every animal that moves upon the earth.”

Genesis 2:15 is also of interest. The man God has made is put in the garden for a reason: “And Yahweh God took the man and set him in the garden of Eden to cultivate it and to keep it.” The man’s job is to take care of the garden.

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

Eden is where the idea of the kingdom of God begins. And it’s no coincidence that the Bible ends with the vision of a new Edenic Earth (Rev 21–22).

Yahweh and said, ‘I will entice him,’ and Yahweh said to him, ‘How?’ 22 He said, ‘I will go out and I will be a false spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ And he said, ‘You shall entice and succeed, go out and do so.’ 23 So then, see that Yahweh has placed a false spirit in the mouth of all of these your prophets, and Yahweh has spoken disaster concerning you” (1 Kgs 22:16–23).

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. We’ll examine all that in more detail in the next chapter.

The book of Job does not identify the satan in this scene as the serpent of Genesis 3, the figure known in the New Testament as the devil. The Old Testament never uses the word saṭan of the serpent figure from Genesis 3. In fact, the word saṭan is not a proper personal noun in the Old Testament.1

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.

The attributes God shared with us are the means to imaging, not the image status itself.

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

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.

God may foreknow an event and predestine that event, but such predestination does not necessarily include decisions that lead up to that event. 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.

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

All of this means that what we choose to do is an important part of how things will turn out. What we do matters. God has decreed the ends to which all things will come. As believers, we are prompted by his Spirit to be the good means to those decreed ends.