The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible

by Michael S. Heiser

My contention is that, if our theology really derives from the biblical text, we must reconsider our selective supernaturalism and recover a biblical theology of the unseen world.

Somewhere along the way, I came to believe that I didn’t need protection from my Bible. If you believe that too, you’re good to go.

The singular elohim of Israel presides over an assembly of elohim. A quick read of Psalm 82 informs us that God has called this council meeting to judge the elohim for corrupt rule of the nations. Verse 6 of the psalm declares that these elohim are sons of God. God says to them: I have said, “You are gods [elohim], and sons of the Most High [beney elyon], all of you.

The usage of the term elohim by biblical writers tells us very clearly that the term is not about a set of attributes. Even though when we see “G-o-d” we think of a unique set of attributes, when a biblical writer wrote elohim, he wasn’t thinking that way. If he were, he’d never have used the term elohim to describe anything but Yahweh.

The biblical use of elohim is not hard to understand once we know that it isn’t about attributes. What all the figures on the list have in common is that they are inhabitants of the spiritual world. In that realm there is hierarchy.

The biblical prophets love to make fun of idol making. It seems so stupid to carve an idol from wood or stone or make one from clay and then worship it. But ancient people did not believe that their gods were actually images of stone or wood. We misread the biblical writers if we think that.

What ancient idol worshippers believed was that the objects they made were inhabited by their gods. This is why they performed ceremonies to “open the mouth” of the statue.13 The mouth (and nostrils) had to be ritually opened for the spirit of the deity to move in and occupy, a notion inspired by the idea that one needs to breathe to live. The idol first had to be animated with the very real spiritual presence of the deity. Once that was done, the entity was localized for worship and bargaining.

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. Abraham had earlier fathered Ishmael (cf. Gen 16:15; 21:3). The term must mean that Isaac was Abraham’s unique son, for he was the son of the covenant promises.

Just as 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 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.

Consequently, the plurals inform us that both God’s families—the human and the nonhuman—share imaging status,

As in heaven, so on Earth.

The logic of idolatry we talked about earlier takes on new irony. Humans after the fall will resort to making objects of wood and stone that they must ceremonially animate to draw the deity into the artifact. But from the beginning, God created his own imagers—humankind, male and female. His desire was to live among them, and for them to rule and reign with him.

This is what Eden was about … as in heaven, so on Earth.

Eden was God’s home on earth. It was his residence. And where the King lives, his council meets.

The divine abodes of gods—the places they lived and where they met for governing the affairs of the human world—were portrayed in several ways. Two of the most common were gardens and mountains. Eden is described as both in the Old Testament.

The Old Testament has a three-tiered council structure like that at Ugarit. Yahweh is at the top.2 His family-household (“sons of God”) are next in hierarchy. The lowest level is reserved for elohim messengers—mal’akim (the word translated “angels”).

In Psalm 48:1–2, Jerusalem, the city of God, is said to be located in the “heights of the north” (tsaphon in Hebrew).

Mount Zion is the “mountain of assembly,” again located in the “heights of the north” (Isa 14:13).

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).

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).

Yahweh desires a kingdom rule on this new Earth that he has created, and that rule will be shared with humanity. 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.

Eden is described in Ezekiel 28:2 as the “seat of the gods.” The phrase should be familiar to modern readers. It speaks of governing authority (“county seat”; “Congressional seat”). 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.

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).

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.

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. Imaging status and our attributes are related but not identical concepts.

Neither of these events that God foresaw ever actually happened.

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

The events never happened, so by definition they could not have been predestined.

Predestination and foreknowledge are separable.

There is no biblical reason to argue that God predestined the fall, though he foreknew it.

There is also no biblical coherence to the idea that God factored all evil acts into his grand plan for the ages. This is a common, but flawed, softer perspective, adopted to avoid the previous notion that God directly predestines evil events.

God does not need the rape of a child to happen so that good may come. His foreknowledge didn’t require the holocaust as part of a plan that would give us the kingdom on earth. God does not need evil as a means to accomplish anything.

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. God does not need evil, but he has the power to take the evil that flows from free-will decisions—human or otherwise—and use it to produce good and his glory through the obedience of his loyal imagers, who are his hands and feet on the ground now.

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.

The curse levied at Adam (Gen 3:17–19) did not supersede God’s mandate to subdue the earth and take dominion. But it did make the task harder. The expulsion of humankind from Eden (Gen 3:22–25) turned a glorious dominion mission into mundane drudgery.

We seem to have an inner sense of need to restore something that was lost, but Eden cannot return on purely human terms.

Eve would suffer intensified pain in childbirth (Gen 3:16: “I will multiply your pain.”). There is no indication that, had she borne children before the fall, Eve would have felt no pain at all. She was human. And it was important that she bear children, since her childbearing would have some relationship to the destiny of the nachash and his deed.

This human threat to the nachash is fitting. The seduction to sin meant that Yahweh would have to be true to his word and eliminate humanity. The nachash counted on the justice of God to eliminate his rivals. God was just in this regard. Elimination from Eden did indeed mean death, but not in the sense of immediate annihilation. God would see to it that their lives ended, but not before continuing his plan. Humanity would die, but it would also, at some point, produce a descendant who would ultimately restore God’s Edenic vision and destroy the nachash.

After the fall, the only way to extend the work of God’s human council-family was childbirth. Eve was redeemed through childbearing (1 Tim 2:15). So were the rest of us, in the sense that that is the only way God’s original plan remained viable. Where there are no offspring, there can be no human imaging and no kingdom.

All who oppose God’s kingdom plan are the seed of the nachash.

The point being made by the curse is that the nachash, who wanted to be “most high,” will be “most low” instead—cast away from God and the council to earth, and even under the earth. In the underworld, the nachash is even lower than the beasts of the field. He is hidden from view and from life in God’s world. His domain is death.

The curses that followed the events in the garden bound the fate of humanity together with the seed of the nachash, all those who oppose the rule of God in either the earthly or the spiritual realm. The rule of God known as Eden would disappear, kept alive only through a fledgling humanity to whom God extended mercy.

The seed of the nachash is therefore literal (people and divine beings are real) and spiritual (the lineage is one of spiritual rebellion). This description has secure biblical roots. Jesus told the Pharisees, “You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father” (John 8:44), and called them “serpents” and “offspring of vipers” (Matt 23:33).

Everyone who is fathered by God does not practice sin, because his seed resides in him, and he is not able to sin, because he has been fathered by God.

the passages are about the same subject matter.10 They describe an episode from the time of Noah and the flood where “angels” sinned.11 That sin, which precipitated the flood, was sexual in nature; it is placed in the same category as the sin which prompted the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Genesis 6:1–4 is a polemic; it is a literary and theological effort to undermine the credibility of Mesopotamian gods and other aspects of that culture’s worldview. Biblical writers do this frequently. The strategy often involves borrowing lines and motifs from the literature of the target civilization to articulate correct theology about Yahweh and to show contempt for other gods. Genesis 6:1–4 is a case study in this technique.

THE DIVINE TRANSGRESSIONS OF GENESIS 3 AND 6 ARE PART OF A THEOLOGICAL prelude that frames the rest of the Bible.