Supernatural: What the Bible Teaches about the Unseen World And Why It Matters

by Michael S. Heiser

For the Bible, any disembodied being whose home address is the spirit world is an elohim. The Hebrew term doesn’t refer to a specific set of abilities only God has. The Bible distinguishes God from all other gods in other ways, not by using the word elohim. For instance, the Bible commands the gods to worship the God of the Bible (Ps. 29:1). He is their creator and king (Ps. 95:3; 148:1–5). Psalm 89:6–7 (GNT) says, “No one in heaven is like you, LORD; none of the heavenly beings is your equal [1 Kings 8:23; Ps. 97:9]. You are feared in the council of the holy ones.” The Bible writers are pretty blunt about the God of Israel having no equal—he is the “God of gods” (Deut. 10:17; Ps. 136:2).

These biblical scenes of divine council sessions tell us God’s council members participate in God’s rule. In at least some cases, God decrees what he wants done but gives his supernatural agents freedom to decide the means. Angels participate in God’s council as well. In the original languages of the Bible, the terms translated angel in the Old and New Testaments actually mean messenger. The word angel is basically a job description.

You might have been wondering why God needs a council anyway. God shouldn’t need help doing anything, even in the spiritual world. He’s God! But the Bible is clear that he uses lesser beings to get things done. He doesn’t need a divine council, but he chooses to make use of one. And he doesn’t need us either.

I have wondered that too

Consciously thinking of ourselves as God’s agents—his imagers—means the decisions we make matter. Christians, no longer lost in sin, can fulfill God’s plan with the help of the Holy Spirit. We are here to spread the goodness of life with God and tell people who need the gospel how they can enjoy that too. Our lives intersect with many people. Their memory of those encounters ripples through their lives and through all the people whose lives they touch. We are a glimpse either of life with God or of a life without God. There’s no middle ground. The knowledge that all humans

Demons are the departed spirits of dead Nephilim killed before and during the flood. They roam the earth harassing humans and seeking re-embodiment. In books of the Bible that follow Genesis, descendants of the Nephilim of Genesis 6:1–4 are called Anakim and Rephaim (Num. 13:32–33; Deut. 2:10–11). Some of these Rephaim show up in the underworld realm of the dead (Isa. 14:9–11) where the Serpent was cast down. New Testament writers would later call that place hell.

Interesting. Unclean or impure spirits?

That God foreknew there would be divine rebellion and human failure doesn’t mean he made those things happen. Foreknowledge doesn’t require predestination.

Middle knowledge

God allotted the nations to members of his divine council. This is the Bible’s explanation for why other nations came to worship other gods. Until Babel, God wanted a relationship with all humanity. But the rebellion at Babel changed that. God decided to let members of his divine council govern the other nations.

God’s allotment of the nations to other gods frames the entire Old Testament. How? The rest of the Old Testament is about the God of Israel and his people, the Israelites, in conflict with the gods of the other nations and the people who live in them. That wasn’t God’s original intention. Yes, what he did at Babel to the nations was a judgment, but God never intended that the nations would be forever forsaken. When God made his covenant with Abraham, he made clear that “All the families on earth will be blessed” through Abraham and his offspring (Gen. 12:3 NLT). God was planning to bring the nations back into his family at some point.

In many instances, God’s appearance in human form is described as an encounter with “the Angel of the LORD

This is no normal angel. This Angel can forgive sins (or not). This Angel has the name of God in him. That expression is odd but significant. The “name” was an Old Testament way of referring to God himself, God’s very presence or essence.

In the biblical view of the unseen world, God has serious enemies, other gods he created who were once loyal to him but who went their own way. These rebel gods are the ones Paul describes as dark powers, the rulers, authorities, and thrones of the unseen world (Eph. 6:11; Col. 1:16). They’re still here. Nothing in the New Testament tells us they went away. They live to oppose God’s rule—and to deprive him of everlasting reunion with his beloved human family through the gospel.

Always read "gods" as elohim or spiritual beings

For example, the Bible teaches us that God was not only the source of Israel’s life—he was life. God is not of this earth, a place where there is death, disease, and imperfection. His realm is supernatural. Our realm is terrestrial. The earthly space he occupies is made sacred and otherworldly by his presence. The space we occupy is ordinary. God is the polar opposite of ordinary.

Israelites needed to be reminded of the dark side of cosmic geography too. If the Israelite camp, and later the nation of Israel, was holy ground, the home of God and his people, then the terrain outside Israel was unholy ground. God had, long before Sinai, forsaken the other nations and given them over to lesser gods (Deut. 4:19–20; 32:8–9). He would one day reclaim the nations, but during biblical days, they were realms of darkness.

We don’t need a tabernacle or temple to mark sacred space. Our bodies are sacred space. Paul calls our earthly bodies a “tent” (2 Cor. 5:4) because we are indwelt by the same divine presence that filled the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle and the temple (Rom. 8:9–11). Eventually our body, the earthly home of our spirit, will die, only to be replaced by a “house not made with hands” (2 Cor. 5:1–3), a heavenly dwelling—the new Eden, heaven returned to earth (Rev. 22:1–3). Since God indwells believers today through his Spirit, each church​—​each gathering of believers​—​is holy ground. This is why Paul, when sadly telling the Corinthians to expel an unrepentant Christian who was living in sin, instructed them to “deliver this man to Satan” (1 Cor. 5:5). The church was holy ground. Outside the fellowship of believers was the domain of Satan. That was where sin and its self-destruction belonged. It’s time we looked at ourselves through supernatural eyes. You are a child of God, fit for sacred space, not because of what you do or don’t do, but because you are in Christ, adopted by God (Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:5). You’ve been extracted from the realm of darkness and “transferred … to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Col. 1:13). We must never, not for a moment, forget who we are in Christ—and what that means to the world.

We learned in Psalm 82 that these lesser gods became corrupt. They allowed injustice. People came to worship them instead of the Most High God. Thus, they became enemies of God and his people, Israel.

The goal was not revenge. The goal was to ensure the elimination of the Nephilim bloodlines. To the Israelites, the giant clan bloodlines were demonic, having been produced by rebellious, fallen divine beings. They could not coexist with a demonic heritage.

Our task is to imitate Jesus. We can, like him, care for both body and soul of our fellow imagers, leading them to faith in the King and strengthening their resolve to be loyal to him. It doesn’t necessarily take supernatural power to “bind up the brokenhearted” and “proclaim liberty to the captives” in the steps of the messiah (Isa. 61:1), but these are supernatural acts at the core. They demand resistance to darkness and strategic vision. No act of kindness will fail to be used by the Spirit to direct someone’s heart. No articulation of the gospel will be fruitless. Jesus’ kindness was congruent with his message. Neither diminished the other. This is a pattern any believer can imitate—and it is the job description for kingdom vision.

Satan’s loss of his claim over the lives of the children of Adam was not the only loss he suffered at the cross. His cohorts in rebellion, the supernatural gods (elohim) of the nations, would see their domains begin to vanish. The supernatural gods had been assigned those nations by the Most High, the God of Israel (Deut. 4:19–20; 32:8–9). We are not told when they became enemies of God, but they did. They had turned God’s own people, Israel, away from worshipping him to instead sacrifice to them (Deut. 17:1–3; 29:26–27; 32:17). Psalm 82, the psalm we looked at in chapter 2 to introduce the divine council, tells us these elohim abused their power and rewarded evil.

Salvation is not gained by moral perfection. It is a gift that comes by grace, through faith (Eph. 2:8–9). That in turn means salvation cannot be lost by moral imperfection. What is not at all gained by performance cannot be lost by poor performance. Salvation is about believing loyalty—trusting what Jesus did to defeat Satan’s claim and turning from all other gods and the belief systems of which they are a part. That is the message of God’s kingdom we are commissioned to tell to the nations (Matt. 28:19–20). And as we obey, the dominions of the enemy gods, the principalities and powers, shrink—soul by soul, moment by moment. The gates of hell, the realm of the dead, do not withstand the resurrection, and will not withstand the advance of the gospel.

Paul had a supernatural perspective on his own life. He viewed himself as an instrument of God. And he was. But so were all the other unnamed new believers who, after Pentecost, went before him from Jerusalem to infiltrate demonic strongholds where they lived. And so are we. If we are instruments of God in the same way Paul was an instrument of God, then why was he so much more influential and effective? One difference is that Paul understood what his life was about. He believed the powers that had dominion over the earth were real—and that the power behind and within him was greater.

Another implication of the passages of Scripture we’ve examined is that the notion of demonic strongholds is biblical. We aren’t given a full description of demonic zones or turf boundaries, or even a spiritual pecking order for the dark side. We are told, however, that the unseen powers see earth as their domain. We’re told those powers resist God’s kingdom and don’t want people to become part of God’s plan to spread his good rule everywhere. That means we should expect resistance we can’t explain with logic or empirical evidence and we can’t defeat it on our own. God has given us his Spirit and unseen agents of his own to help us further his mission (1 Cor. 3:16; 6:19; Heb. 1:13; 1 John 4:4). The real question to ask ourselves is this: What would our lives be like if we woke up each day with a view of the world and its supernatural influences that matched Paul’s? What if, each day, our lives were organized around our knowledge of our status as part of God’s family, tasked with delivering siblings from darkness? What if we lived intentionally, knowing that each decision we make and each word we speak isn’t randomly purposeless? What if, instead, we believed unseen intelligences all around us use our decisions, our actions, our words to influence other people—for good or evil—whether or not we see or know them? Our jobs, our income, our talents, even our problems are of no consequence when it comes to knowing who we really are, and will be, and why we’re here. We cannot se...

The notion of sacred space gets brought into the New Testament in a dramatic way. All we need to ask is, “Where is the presence of God right now?” While God is everywhere, he specifically dwells within each believer. Believe it or not, you are sacred space. Paul very clearly wrote that “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 6:19). The same is true of the ground where believers gather as a group. Writing to the church at Corinth, Paul told them collectively, “You are God’s temple” (1 Cor. 3:16). He told the Ephesian believers they were “members of the household of God … a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” (Eph. 2:19, 21–22).

But viewed in the context of the Old Testament idea of sacred space, that statement means that wherever believers gather, the spiritual ground they occupy is sanctified amid the powers of darkness.

In essence, baptism was a loyalty oath and a message to the demonic powers (as well as any people present) of just whose side you were on in the spiritual war. Ancient Christians understood this better than we do today. Early church baptismal rites included a renunciation of Satan and his angels because of this passage.

When our worldview is attuned to God’s plan to rescue people from every nation, making them part of God’s family, we are not of this world. Being of this world is to be absorbed by the world’s concerns and living accordingly. Unbelievers should be able to tell from our speech, behavior, ethics, and attitude toward others that we’re not cynical, selfish, or harsh—that our focus is not on getting ahead or on using people. We should not live to gratify ourselves. We are to be the antithesis of these things. In other words, we are to live as Jesus lived. People wanted to be around him because he wasn’t like most everyone else.

A third implication of what we’ve discussed in this chapter is that the powers of darkness know whose side we are on by our behavior. They are not stupid. They see our loyalty to God, and they see us act on our decisions to follow Jesus through things like baptism and resistance to sin. But they also see us when we act disloyally to God, and they understand what vulnerability that introduces into our lives. Whether or not we believe it, we are being watched—by both sides of the spiritual war.

For us today, believing loyalty means embracing what Jesus did on the cross, because he was God in flesh. Our ethics and behavior (our works) aren’t about becoming loyal enough for God to embrace us. We follow his commands because we’ve already chosen him. And his commands will lead to our happiness and contentment because they steer us away from the destruction of self and others. They provide a glimpse of life in harmony with God and the rest of his family—our family—seen and unseen, in his kingdom, the new Eden. Our Purpose—We All

The key to seeing ourselves in this picture is to firmly grasp that God is still working his plan even when we can’t see it. We cannot genuinely claim to believe in the unseen, supernatural world while not believing that God’s intelligent providence is active in our lives and the affairs of human history. God wants us to live intentionally​—believing that his unseen hand and the invisible agents loyal to him and us (Heb. 1:14) are engaged in our circumstances so that, together, God’s goal of a global Eden moves unstoppably onward. Each of us is vital to someone’s path to the kingdom and the defense of that kingdom. Each day affords us contact with people under the dominion of darkness and opportunities to encourage each other in the hard task of fulfilling our purpose in an imperfect world. Everything we do and say matters, though we may never know why or how. But our job isn’t to see—it’s to do. Walking by faith isn’t passive—it’s purposeful.