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

by Michael S. Heiser

and all the host of heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left;

Did you catch what the Bible’s asking you to believe? That God meets with a group of spirit beings to decide what happens on earth? Is that for real?

he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits—to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built.

Believe it or not, if we were aware of them and understood what they meant, as difficult and puzzling as they are, it would change the way we think about God, each other, why we’re here, and our ultimate destiny.

Don’t you know you’re going to rule over angels!”

From the very beginning, God wanted his human family to live with him in a perfect world—along with the family he already had in the unseen world, his heavenly host. That story​—​God’s goal, its opposition by the powers of darkness, its failure, and its ultimate future success​—​is what this book is about, just as it’s what the Bible is about.

The members of God’s heavenly host are not peripheral or insignificant or unrelated to our story, the human story, in the Bible. They play a central role. But modern Bible readers too often read right past, without grasping them, the fascinating ways the supernatural world is present in dozens of the most familiar episodes in the Bible. It took me decades to see what I now see in the Bible—and I want to share with you the fruit of those years of study.

But let’s not lose track of the question I asked at the beginning. Do you really believe what the Bible says? That’s where the rubber meets the road. It won’t do you any good to learn what the Bible really says about the unseen world and how it intersects with your life if you don’t believe it.

Elisha’s prayer is my prayer for you. May God open your eyes to see, so that you’ll never be able to think about the Bible the same way again.

For the Bible, any disembodied being whose home address is the spirit world is an elohim.

Second, God could just predetermine events to make everything turn out the way he wants. But he doesn’t. In the story of King Ahab, God let his heavenly assistants decide how to carry out his will. In other words, he let them use their free will. That tells us that not everything is predetermined. And that’s true not only in the unseen world—it’s also true in our world.

Every human, from conception to death, will always be human and always be God’s imager. This is why human life is sacred.

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.

free will in the hands of imperfect beings, whether divine or human, can have disastrous results.

God had divine competition when it came to human destiny. He still does.

The fact that God knows the future doesn’t mean it’s predestinated.

But God loved us in that “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:6–8). He loved us despite knowing what we would do. He not only gave us the freedom to sin, he gave us the freedom to believe the gospel and live for Jesus.

We might ask why God doesn’t just eliminate evil right now. There’s a reason: For God to eliminate evil he’d have to eliminate his imagers, human and divine, who are not perfect like he is. That would solve the problem of evil, but it would mean that God’s original idea, to create other divine agents and human beings to live and rule with him, was a huge mistake.

God always has a good reason for suffering. We just can’t always see it. In this case, though, Scripture makes it clear.

After they had oppressed the Israelites for centuries, it was time for Egypt and its gods to be punished.

Pharaoh had mocked God, and the tables had been drastically turned. As Paul would later put it, “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap” (Gal. 6:7).

That idea of God having a son—in this case, referring to all of Abraham’s descendants—is important. It takes us back to God’s creation of Adam and Eve.

As Adam and Eve had been God’s earthly imagers, Israel would now fill that role.

Even the heavenly council was there,

God wanted Israel to attract the other nations to come back to him (Deut. 4:6–8; 28:9–10). This is why the Bible calls Israel a “kingdom of priests” (Ex. 19:6)

Whether in the Old Testament or the New, salvation is never earned, or even deserved. It’s given by the grace of God in response to faith.

Regardless of what those other gods may say about salvation, the Bible tells us there is no salvation in any other name than Jesus (Acts 4:12) and that faith must remain intact (Rom. 11:17–24; Heb. 3:19; 10:22, 38–39). Personal failure is not the same as trading Jesus for another god—and God can tell the difference.

That kingdom would reach its final form at the end of days in the new global Eden of Revelation 21–22

Without an Israel, we would have no destiny. And that’s precisely why the gods and their followers would try again to erase Israel.

His realm is supernatural.

God’s own presence was marked by reminders of Eden. Many features of the tabernacle and the temple were designed to make people think of Eden, the place where heaven and earth met.

Who or what is “Azazel”? Some translations render the word scapegoat instead of Azazel. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Hebrew word in question is a proper name—the name of a demon.

Though unclean sinners, we are holy if we are in Christ. Though imperfect, our imperfections are overlooked because of Jesus. It’s that simple, yet that profound.

It was a rough way to start their second chance. God demanded that they face their fears—the terrors that had cost them forty years of aimless wandering. They had the God who had parted the Red Sea on their side. It was time they remembered that.

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.

Humans are weak. We might wonder why God bothers with us. But if we look back to Eden, we know why. God had committed himself to humanity. We are his imagers, and his earthly family. His original plan for ruling the earth included us.

Only by becoming a man could God ensure that a human king from the line of David would rule over his people without falling into sin and straying spiritually. Only if that king died in the place of his people and rose from the dead could God rightly judge sin and provide salvation all at the same time. Only by the messiah’s death and resurrection would fallen people still have a place in God’s family council, ruling in that renewed Edenic kingdom, as originally planned.

The life and ministry of Jesus may make more sense when viewed against that backdrop.

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.

Do you believe those things? The Bible puts them forth as givens. And that’s how Paul treated them in his own life.

God knew others would have to follow Paul’s goal for himself if the gospel was to reach every part of the earth. If we’re not actively trying to complete the task, we aren’t doing what we’re here on earth to do.

What do the ark, Noah, and imprisoned spirits have to do with baptism? And does this text say baptism saves us?

In other words, we are to live as Jesus lived.

It’s because we know God could have done something else but didn’t that his love takes on meaning. When a church talks only about the love of God without pointing out the irony of that love when placed against God’s other character traits, believers will take that love for granted. It might sound cheap, for instance, to people unaware of God’s holiness.

Whether or not we believe it, we are being watched—by both sides of the spiritual war.

The story of the New Testament is that a descendant of Abraham—Jesus—died and rose again to redeem not only Abraham’s ethnic descendants (Israelites/Jews) but also all the people among the nations who had formerly been disinherited from the true God. In the verses quoted just above, Paul called the inclusion of Gentiles in the family of God a mystery. It astonished him that people from the nations God had cast off, and which were under the control of other gods, could inherit the promises given to Abraham.

The believer’s destiny is to become what Adam and Eve originally were: immortal, glorified imagers of God, living in God’s presence.

One perspective looks inward; the other looks heavenward.

That is what the Bible is about, from Eden to Eden. That is your destiny. Your life now is not about earning your place in God’s family. That cannot be earned. It’s a gift. Your life now is showing appreciation for your adoption, enjoying it, and getting others to share it with you.

Our participation in God’s kingdom isn’t predetermined, in this sense: We are not mere robots performing functions programmed for us. That violates the whole idea of being God’s imager, his representative. We were created to be like him. He is free. If we do not have genuine freedom, we cannot be like him—by definition, we would not be like him. We are free to obey and worship, or rebel and indulge ourselves. And we will reap what we sow. Our sowing is not programmed.