The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible

by Michael S. Heiser

Taken together, these episodes are a theological morality tale about the futility and danger of trying to recover Eden on any terms other than those God has set.

The biblical writer wastes no time in linking this act to the earlier divine transgression of Genesis 6:1–4. That passage sought to portray the giant quasi-divine Babylonian culture heroes (the apkallus) who survived the flood as “men of renown” or, more literally, “men of the name [shem].” Those who built the tower of Babel wanted to do so to “make a name [shem]” for themselves. The building of the tower of Babel meant perpetuating Babylonian religious knowledge and substituting the rule of Babel’s gods for rule by Yahweh.

The incident at Babel and God’s decision to disinherit the nations drew up the battle lines for a cosmic turf war for the planet. The corruption of the elohim sons of God set over the nations meant that Yahweh’s vision of a global Eden would be met with divine force. Every inch outside Israel would be contested, and Israel itself was fair game for hostile conquest. The gods would not surrender their inheritances back to Yahweh; he would have to reclaim them. God would take the first step in that campaign immediately after Babel.

The Israelites asked “Where is Yahweh?” in the wake of God’s decision to send them into hostile territory. But Pharaoh and his people—and all the nations—asked a different question: “Who is Yahweh?” (Exod 5:2). They would find out the hard way.

Genesis 1 and 2 don’t provide the Bible’s only creation story. Psalm 74 describes creation as well—as Yahweh’s victory over the forces of primeval chaos. Yahweh brought the world into order, making it habitable for humanity, his people as it were. The creation act as described in Psalm 74 was theologically crucial for establishing Yahweh’s superiority over all other gods. Baal was not king of the gods, as the Ugaritic story proclaimed—Yahweh was.

Genesis 3–11 makes it clear that humanity failed miserably. Free will in the hands of imperfect beings comes with that risk. But the incident at Babel, foolish and self-willed as it was, shows us that there’s an Edenic yearning in the human heart, a desire for utopia and a sense of divine presence. But God would not trade his own version of Eden for humanity’s. He punished the nations with disinheritance. He would create a new people as his own portion. That inheritance was begun in covenant with Abraham and passed on through his family.

Egypt and her gods had been defeated, but the conflict with the gods and their nations was just beginning. Israel needed to understand that being Yahweh’s portion meant separation from the gods and the nations who stood ready to oppose them. The concept of realm distinction was fundamental to the supernatural worldview of ancient Israel.

Yahweh is so other as to be incomprehensible without the façade of something familiar. And yet for Israel, his otherness would need to remain an ever-present reality, sensed at all times. The concept of otherness was at the core of Israelite identity. Otherness is the core of holiness.

The generation who came out of Egypt is sentenced to die off outside of holy ground. The new generation under Joshua will wind up facing the same threat.

In the view of the biblical writers, Israel is at war with enemies spawned by rival divine beings. The Nephilim bloodlines were not like the peoples of the disinherited nations. 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. Viewed against this backdrop, Joshua’s kherem is a holy war begun under Moses in the Transjordan, specifically against the Amorite giant kings Sihon (Deut 2:34) and Og (Deut 3:6).6 The lives of Israel’s enemies were to be “devoted to destruction” as an act of sacrifice to Yahweh.

But Israel failed miserably in its mission, from the incomplete conquest to the splintering of the unity of its twelve tribes to the collapse of the Davidic dynasty into exile in Babylon, the very place at which Yahweh had decided to disinherit the nations and create his own people millennia earlier.

By God’s design, the Scripture presents the messiah in terms of a mosaic profile that can only be discerned after the pieces are assembled. Paul tells us why in 1 Corinthians 2:6–8. If the plan of God for the messiah’s mission had been clear, the powers of darkness would never have killed Jesus—they would have known that his death and resurrection were the key to reclaiming the nations forever.

In the bitterest of ironies, Babylon would swallow up Yahweh’s inheritance. The tables seemed completely turned. But appearances can be deceiving. The real irony, as prophets like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Habakkuk informed anyone who would listen, was that Babylon was Yahweh’s tool. Even as Judah was taking its last gasp, Yahweh was engineering the circumstances of an everlasting kingdom that could not be contained by geography. It would be ruled by a man who was also God, whose identity must be concealed long enough for him to die and rise again, so that the curse of sin would be overturned, the lord of the dead would lose his authority, and the eternal life of Eden would encircle the earth. All of that would play out in New Testament theology.

God need not change his plan in response to human weakness or the self-willed rebellion of a divine council member.

An omniscient, all-powerful being doesn’t need to cheat. He knows how best to win—and how best to misdirect his opponents.

Satan offered Jesus the nations that had been disinherited by Yahweh at Babel. Coming from the “ruler of this world” (John 12:31), the offer was not a hollow one. As the original rebel, the nachash of Genesis 3 (cf. Rev 12:9) had, by New Testament times, achieved the status of the lead opposition to Yahweh.3 This was part of the logic of attributing the term saṭan to him as a proper personal name.

It might sound hard to believe, but this event is first time in the entire Bible we read about a demon being cast out of a person. No such event is ever recorded in the Old Testament.

“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 if the intention wasn’t clear enough, in the next chapter Jesus does something dramatic to announce to all who understood the cosmic geography of Babel what was really happening: After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where He Himself was going to come (Luke 10:1 NRSV). Jesus sent out seventy disciples. The number is not accidental.8 Seventy is the number of nations listed in Genesis 10

that were dispossessed at Babel. The seventy “return with joy” (Luke 10:17) and announce to Jesus, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” Jesus’ response is telling: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (10:18). The implications are clear: Jesus’ ministry is the beginning of the end for Satan and the gods of the nations. The great reversal is underway.9

Jesus says he will build his church—and the “gates of hell” will not prevail against it. We often think of this phrase as though God’s people are in a posture of having to bravely fend off Satan and his demons. This simply isn’t correct. Gates are defensive structures, not offensive weapons. The kingdom of God is the aggressor.16

Hell will one day be Satan’s tomb.

We will be made like him (1 John 3:1–3). We will become divine.

The second Yahweh of Hebrews 1, who is the essence of Yahweh, was incarnated as a man to taste death for everyone. And since he became man, we are his siblings. Someday, Jesus will introduce us to the council—unashamed at our humanity. He became as we are so that we might become as he is.

WE SHALL BE LIKE HIM Joining God’s divine family is inextricably linked to the New Testament concept of becoming like Jesus—becoming divine. The academic term describing this point of biblical theology is “theosis.”5 As one evangelical theologian laments: The idea of divinization, of redeemed human nature somehow participating in the very life of God, is found to a surprising extent throughout Christian history, although it is practically unknown to the majority of Christians (and even many theologians) in the west.

Scripture is clear that immortality as a divinized human is the destiny of the believer, and that our present lives in Christ are a process of becoming what we are:

The judgment against the elohim in the divine council meeting of Psalm 82 had been linked to the repossession of the nations (Psa 82:8; “Rise up, O God, judge the earth, because you shall inherit all the nations”). So long as that could be forestalled and opposed, the struggle would continue. And since Yahweh had linked that repossession to human participation, the forces of darkness had good reason to suppose that they could drag on the long war against Yahweh.

Yahweh had lived among his people in the days of Moses and the monarchy, and they had been lured away from him.

The New Testament is silent on the origin of demons.6 There is no passage that describes a primeval rebellion before Eden where angels fell from grace and became demons. The origin of demons in Jewish texts outside the Bible (such as 1 Enoch) is attributed to the events of Genesis 6:1–4. When a Nephilim was killed in these texts, its disembodied spirit was considered a demon. These demons then roamed the earth to harass humans. The New Testament does not explicitly embrace this belief, though there are traces of the notion, such as demon possession of humans (implying the effort to be re-embodied).

The seed of Abraham, scattered to the winds in exile, turn out to function like spiritual cell groups secretly planted in every nation under the dominion of the hostile gods.

Baal was outranked only by El in Canaanite religion. However, Baal ran all of El’s affairs, which explains why Baal was called “king of the gods” and “most high” at Ugarit and other places.6 In Ugaritic texts, Baal is “lord of Zaphon” (baʿal tsapanu).7 He is also called a “prince” (zbl in Ugaritic). Another of Baal’s titles is “prince, lord of the underworld” (zbl baʿal ʾarts).8 This connection to the realm of the dead of course dovetails with our discussion of the themes associated with the serpent figure from Genesis 3. It is no surprise that zbl baʿal becomes Baal Zebul (Beelzebul) and Baal Zebub, titles associated with Satan in later Jewish literature and the New Testament.