What the Bible Really Teaches about Demons

can demons read your mind can christians be demon possessed today we're going to take a look at some of the most common questions people ask about the supernatural realm and in particular demons i am here with a friend an old testament scholar if you've studied in this world at all in terms of uh the unseen realm you'll recognize the name dr michael heiser i have his book demons right in front of me read it twice and each time i walked away going wow how did i not understand that even though i've been to seminary and gotten a doctorate how have i missed some of these things really really eye-opening dr heiser thanks so much for coming on the show yeah absolutely i should tell your audience i had the very same experience you know just i i was a doctoral student before i ran into things like psalm 82 and the deuteronomy 32 world view and i asked myself the exact same question how in the world could i have never seen this stuff before now and now i have a bit of an answer for that but back then it was like i was kind of shell-shocked well it felt like reading your book you were kind of going on a journey a little bit and taking us with you in terms of the things that you discovered going back to the original language second temple literature just going deeper than even the english writings which loses some of the nuance of understanding demons and angels etc we're going to unpack that we're going to take some questions from all of you who are joining us stuff you've wanted to know about demons but before we get there there's some groundwork we need to lay in terms of why so many christians and all so many non-christians have some unbiblical ideas about demons uh first if you're new to the channel make sure you hit subscribe because we've got some other interviews coming up including one with billy halwell who'll be talking about the case for the demonic realm today we're going to look at theology that's going to come up we're going to look at the evidence that demons are real even outside of the bible and a special interview this thursday with richard bachman one of the leading new testament scholars on the eyewitness accounts of jesus uh for now dr heiser one of the first questions i thought is you've written at least three books that i'm aware of on angels demons and unseen realm why would you write on this world of all the things that you could study i was i was providentially poked in the eye by god i mean that's that's really the best answer i could give you you know it as i relate in unseen realm that's that book preceded these other two unseen realm is sort of a genesis to revelation overview of biblical theology with an eye toward how the unseen world intersects with the human world intentionally in scripture and that was provoked by an experience i had as a doctoral student just sitting in church you know one sunday morning and killing some time with a friend who was also in the hebrew department and i don't know what the discussion was i can't remember what we were talking about but the way it ended was life changing he he just handed me his hebrew bible and said you need to read psalm 82 in hebrew and so i did you know and you find out there that god elohim is is castigating excoriating a group of gods group you know other elohim elohim l god stands in the divine assembly the care of elohim yishpot in the midst of the gods midst of the elohim he passes judgment and i i read that and it's like that sounds like a pantheon i mean i had no other word for it and it was like it was just shocking it wasn't hard hebrew it's just right there and you know that took me down a certain path you know providentially again i i was fortunate to after i asked the initial question how how did i never see this before i mean i'm not a newbie i'm a doctoral student you know in a hebrew you know bible program in a major university i've taught 15 classes i've taught five years on the bible college level i have two master's degrees you know how how did i not see this i've been to seminary i've been to bible college you know and and my second thought again providentially was i'll bet jesus knew this i let song apostles know it interesting there must be a way to parse this and that set me on a course and now you know in hindsight i'm not making this up this is not an exaggeration looking back i had one clock hour not credit hour clock hour 60 minutes in 15 years of undergraduate and graduate trading 60 minutes on angels and demons interesting now with that kind of neglect it it teaches you something passively like this stuff can't be important or else they'd spend more time on it and here i was sitting in a church looking at psalm 82 in hebrew and frankly just getting poked in the eye you know you get you know how it know you get to that to a doctoral program you've been in ministry for a while you kind of get the sense that okay i got the lay of the land here you know i i know most you know i know more bible than most people in church i can navigate questions you know i thought i feel called to do this and you know i'm on the right path and all of a sudden it's like you don't know you don't know anything it's like you you know nothing you know this this is so fundamental god okay i i remember sitting there thinking i got a dissertation to write you know how how in the world can i i can't let my mind just get get drawn by this by questions like monotheism i mean you know i'm supposed to have this figured out and it was it was just it just stopped me in my tracks and so one once i got into it i couldn't give up i had the answer to this then i started to run into second temple period inter-testamental period text it got into the into the supernatural world and and the fact that well we have we have a you know the satan figure you know we've got genesis 6 we've got what happened three rebellions not just one where the where did judaism get this crazy idea that demons are you know were the disembodied spirits of nephilim i mean it's all over the dead sea scrolls and like what are they thinking you know but i i hadn't been exposed to any of it zero okay and and that just sort of sucked me down the rabbit hole or you know got me into the ma into the vortex and and i couldn't give it up so it became you know part of my dissertation you know my dissertation was on the the divine assembly the divine counsel in second temple jewish literature and later texts in the hebrew bible and and it now i look back on it and think this is so fundamental what i now call the divine council worldview and the deuteronomy 32 worldview this is so fundamental to biblical theology that once you see it you can't unsee it it just shows up everywhere and and the wonderful thing is it the bible's filled with all these weird passages that we as moderns you know we are whether we like to to admit it or not we are believing skeptics because we were raised in a modern world post enlightenment and so we don't readily we're not predisposed to a a full supernatural worldview as christians we tend to be very selective about this and i'm not talking about charismatic you know tara's mania stuff i'm not charismatic you know i i don't i don't i don't have any background in that what i'm talking about here is we find it somehow intellectually respectable to believe in things like a trinity and the incarnation and the hypostatic union and the deity of christ but we can't believe in things like genesis 6 or like real principalities and we can't like affirm daniel 10's theology you know you know we walk at all these passages and it's like look look fellas they come from the same book okay how can this be intellectually coherent to embrace this set of things and reject this set of things and i i was i was confronted by that question that's just i was you know again i i took i took a good poke in the eye actually a few pokes in the eye again by providence that that i had to cross the rubicon so to speak this is going to sound so so simple maybe even simplistic but but i remember just sitting there as a doctoral student thinking you know i i have to make a decision whether i'm going to read the bible through the eyes of the people that god produced god prompted produced the thing their worldview and the worldview of the people they were writing to that were alive at the same time i have to decide to either do that or be content with filtering the bible through my own tradition and i liked my tradition there was nothing wrong with it you know but but it was like it and i knew that if you go down this road it's it's going to cost you some friendships it's going to cost you you know maybe a job it's going to it's not the norm just the simple idea i mean christians talk about interpreting the bible in context all the time oh look they used lamps back in in israel oh they had pots and pans and you know they had sisters okay okay i get it but but world view is a huge deal okay the biblical writers dude they were not us they are not us they don't look at the world the way we do they are predisposed to a supernaturalistic worldview and they confront us in scripture to me this is this has become an issue of biblical authority you know am i going to submit my post-enlightenment 21st century intellectual worldview to the worldview of the biblical writers can i can i do that and it was it was a little scary that's that's a great question because i i sense in the book there's a real honesty and willingness to say hey where does this lead even it makes us uncomfortable and and i appreciate that let's jump in the beginning you mentioned a whole lot of things i kind of want want to unpack a little bit for our viewers here and one is it seems like we read back stuff from the new testament into the old testament that probably wasn't there at that time and one of the distinctions you make early in the book is that the word demons only appears three times in the old testament depend on how we translate certain words why is that important to understand what's going on in the old testament and what are some of the different ways that these evil spirits are described yeah we we have us we have a significant problem with terminology i mean i i i do this on the gate in the angels book and i do a little bit over the demons book as well but the old testament has a very rich vocabulary for what's going on both the good guys and the bad guys that we lack almost entirely because of the flow of history and things like the old testament the hebrew bible getting translated into greek and then the new testament also being in greek so most of the time they quote the old testament they're using that translation a lot of the nuancing is just lost and and this is a classic example shadeem is the word you're referring to in the old testament it's not a demon like like you would think in in the gospels it doesn't describe that it's rather it can be and i think it is in those contexts in the old testament a territorial entity and the reason that makes the best sense is its use in deuteronomy 32 in the context of again the deuteronomy 32 world view that we can talk about but all you know that's just one example you know what do you do with that i mean how do you know unless you look you're a reader of the english bible and and even if you are let's just go down that that trajectory let's say you're just a reader of the english bible and you know you run across the word demons a few times but they don't possess anybody they're never cast out of anybody it's a very logical question to ask hey you know if there's no possessions in the old testament and exorcisms why in the world when jesus showed up and he starts doing this do they consider this a sign of his messiahship where did that come from there's no old testament precedent for it or so we think again because we're we're we're steered in one direction by again the way english translations are what they are but there's just a lot of terminology that's lost and in the end what i try to articulate in the books is that just generally you have three buckets three terminology buckets you've got terms for the heavenly host to describe what a member of the heavenly host is those would be your ontological terms okay what it is things like spirits elohim is actually one of these terms it's a generic term to describe any disembodied member of the spiritual world okay so there's lots of elohim we don't have polytheism in psalm 82. we have a we have a spiritual world populated with lots of spiritual beings sometimes they're called rookot spirits sometimes they're called elohim sometimes they're called holy ones you know whatever there's this vocabulary that tells you what it is you know and in that world only yahweh is distinct he's what i call species unique only he has certain attributes that are assigned to him by biblical writers and denied to all other elements you know that's important but this then you have another bucket there you have terms of rank and hierarchy sons of god is one of these you know it's language drawn from the royal court uh that you know the kings would give their relatives the best jobs you know family members you know the most important significant positions this is all it is you know then you have a third bucket that describes role or function this is where you actually get angel it's a messenger cherub a throne guardian guard sacred space same thing for seraphim seraphima and cherubim are not angels they're just job descriptions of any given member of the heavenly host this is why angels really are never depicted with wings because cherubim and seraphim are not angels in an israelite world okay but in our world we smash all this vocabulary together and the white hats are angels and the black cats are demons because that's the way we're taught in in church that's the way we're taught you know in church tradition you know throughout church history so a lot of it gets lost because of language a lot of it gets lost because of world view when you get to the bad guys you realize that okay we've got one rebellion in genesis 3 a supernatural being you know we know the story of the garden genesis 6 you've got another set okay now you've got a set sons of god that transgress you know the boundary of heaven and earth they produce nephilim when they die then their spirits you know one of the terms that are referred used in the old testament of the descendants the nephilim is rephaim you actually see them in shield in the underworld in various old testament passages that's actually where the second temple jews that you thought were crazy where they get this notion that demons are the disembodied spirits of dead nephilim giant that's where you get it in a few passages in the prophets and then you got a third set okay what happens at babel when the earth is divided up according to the number of the sons of god according to deuteronomy 32 8 and the dead sea scrolls so you got three sets of bad guys and the middle set actually breaks into two i mean you you know it's like it's a whole taxonomy that we are completely unfamiliar with completely and the reason it matters is when as you if you have this world view as a jew in the first century you expect the messiah to show up and be master and corrector and reverser of all three and jesus is what jesus says and what he does in certain places at certain times in his ministry those places and the terminology they have back stories to them that run deep into the old testament and in some of these you know he actually picks very specifically certain groups of these to say a certain thing or be at a certain place and do something we have lost all of that again because we don't live in this world we're taught as moderns to not see anything supernatural going on in genesis 6. we never see what's going on at babel because most of our bibles of deuteronomy 32 8 do not follow the dead sea scrolls so we we miss two out of the three rebellions we have an incomplete and confused you know taxonomy we don't know the vocabulary but here we are here we are here we are with my 60 minute my one clock hour of exposure to this in 15 years of higher education and i look back and now well it's no wonder it's no wonder and and you know again what i try to do in these books is scholars you know the the text geeks okay let's just be honest with you know who i am and who these kind of people are okay you know the hebrew people and the greek people everything i just described is like yeah we all know that because we study the primary sources there's nothing new here and there isn't but it's almost entirely new to the average person in church or someone who really wants to get in into the text of scripture and so i view my task as trying to take this content this high peer-reviewed content and making it decipherable you know to people with an eye you know toward how the supernatural and the natural world intersect intentionally in biblical theology well i think you do that well let me jump to some questions because it relates to the broader picture what you're talking about uh k stevenson says why is there demon possession in the new testament but not in the old testament it seems mysterious why does that pop up in the new but we don't see it ever in the old testament it's a mystery by omission in other words there's two ways to answer this one is the reality that the old testament itself is a very selective book okay okay we don't get the episodes of everybody's life even the biblical character's life like moses okay we get little little episodes in his life we don't get the full you know what happens every day and we certainly don't get that with every people or every person so it's it's an assumption and a flawed one to think that demons were not around possessing people in the old testament period and in the second temple period okay that's the first problem okay the second problem is again going back to my why would they expect messiah to cast out demons when there are no examples and that actually that actually really takes us into just some fascinating stuff i i i i'm a host of a podcast naked bible podcast and we did a full episode on psalm 91 i don't know a month or two ago and again i i just try to take scholarship and make it decipherable so i said do you know we don't realize that psalm 91 was actually one of the psalms discovered at qumran the dead sea scrolls and it was in a jar and it was it was lumped in with four other psalms that we don't have in the hebrew bible those four other psalms are exorcistic songs you know casting out demons and so a well there's evidence that you know they know about it and it's going on and that and the neat thing is is a lot of the vocabulary from those other four are found in psalm 91 if you read psalm 91 as as again a first century person or an israelite you would realize that words in english like pestilence plague the arrow that flies you know in midday and all this stuff there's four or five terms there in hebrew that are actually names of canaanite deities that the septuagint calls daimonion demons wow okay so you you know we did a whole episode on this basically showing that in in this in the inner testamental period there was a very strong tradition that david and solomon in the septuagint by the way psalm 91 is called the psalm of david but it's not in the masoretic text there's another angle you know but there was a very strong tradition that david and and solomon both had power to cast out demons and so when jesus comes along you know i i mean put yourself in in the shoes of the first century jew you know oh there's jesus again that's the carpenter's son what nutty thing is he gonna say today you know another fruit loop you know another one claiming to be the messiah and so let's go out and listen you know we don't you know i don't want to watch cnn so let's go watch jesus you know so we you go out there and jesus starts saying this stuff that you're not buying and all of a sudden he starts casting out demons and you look at that and you think well maybe we should listen to him it might be a good idea because the son of david the messiah we were taught to expect this based on on the precedent of david and solomon and that runs very deeply you know through their culture and here we got a guy that's saying i'm the son of david and he's doing this and it's like okay that's different let's pay attention you know i mean interesting there's a lot this psalm 91 is actually the psalm that that satan quotes to jesus in the middle one i mean what he picks that song i mean there's a lot going on here i don't want a rabbit trail but there's some really cool stuff in the temptation going on there with with that specifically there's a reason he picks that song no i want to go to in a minute i'm going to go to your question uh ben this is great but you mentioned the temptation and one of the things you talk about in the book is that the ancients in particular the jews would see natural disasters that there was kind of spiritual forces behind them so the desert was a place that was outside of kind of the kingdom and space of god and it was a dangerous place which helps us understand the temptation in a unique way that's where jesus went to be tempted by by satan so how did the ancients in particular the bible when they looked at natural disasters flood forest fires uh you name it did they think demons caused all that some of that how did they view that intersection between the natural world in the supernatural world you know they there's a couple of ways to approach this on the one hand it was very common again to to take things like meteorological phenomena and attribute it to divine activity because again you know they're this is a pre-modern world so that's very common in in canaanite you you see this in canaanite religion and other ancient or eastern religions all the time and some of the deities that were perceived or believed to be behind these things from other pantheons do show up in the hebrew bible but you have certain passages where those you know the usual suspects are sort of subservient to yahweh there's a there's a passage in habakkuk for instance where some of these these deities behind the forces are sort of just kind of in a in a retinue that they're like puppies on leashes you know it's that kind of thing and so for the for the israelite the biblical writer the whole point was that no god is in charge you know of all of this not we don't have other deities running around here causing this stuff god is behind what what we experience in life including you know natural phenomenon and and you know we you know we still think that today we don't think that when it rains you know god's up there shaking a cloud okay but ultimately we we do assign we do have a big enough view of god's sovereignty that he could do something like that and in other words it's not really that that far from where we're at but it was more or less you know chaos and the forces of chaos were under the thumb of the god of israel he was ultimately in control of these things it wasn't just something running amok you know like that now the the interesting you know thing as well is forces of chaos is is a term that that scholars like to to use to describe anything that is life-threatening or anything that is just makes life really difficult for for the ancient person think of it this way things like floods and earthquakes and in the desert are high they are the opposite of eden they are the opposite of the perfection that god created specifically for humans the habitable world that he made and so once eden erupts and chaos becomes you know unrestrained all the things that that make life miserable or are gets sort of cast as oppositional to god's original design and intent and so you have this what god wants and the opposite anti-eden and the desert was was thrown into this bucket because there's not enough water you can't live in a desert you don't you don't have enough to eat you don't have enough water yeah you can go there for a while but you hope you find an oasis and oh incidentally doesn't that remind you of eden a paradise garden okay so so he got this oppositional stuff going on and god you know tends in the patriarchal era god tends to to have encounters with people like trees not oases why because it's an identic image okay this is why this is how it originally was this is where god's presence originally was so you have these two things played off against each and part of that in the wilderness wanderings you know when when they do leviticus 16 with the scapegoats okay the the two goats yep the one that's killed the blood is applied to the sanctuary you know sprinkled on the ark and all that kind of stuff you know it it decontaminates the sanctuary it's never applied to people but i could go we could go for a couple hours on how we misunderstand the sacrificial system okay sure the day of atonement was like hitting the reset button like think of your computer analogy okay hit the button now it's restored to its pristine condition like when it was made ready for another year of use okay so it decontaminates sacred space and then the other goat is not killed but the high priest lays his hands on the head of the goat and they send it out of the camp into the wilderness well of course you'd send it into the wilderness because that's where all the anti-eden stuff is sin doesn't have a place in yahweh's sacred domain so of course you send it out you know and again there's a lot of you know crime and punishment and certain laws that are in leviticus that illustrate the same concept and this is not a ransom to to satan you know the leviticus 16 says the second goat was for azazel which is a it's not only a name of a demon in second temple literature it's a satan figure in second temple inter-testamental literature but even before that it was a demonic you know figure that that term okay it's not a it's not a ransom or a sacrifice to this other deity because it's not killed okay it's just driven away to where that that where the bad things are okay the bad things are outside of yahweh's sacred space where his presence is there's life there's abundance it's wonderful you know we're on the way to a land that flows with milk and honey again it's supposed to make you think of eden all right there's this wonderful place and and on on the way you know we're we're all together collectively in the camp of israel but outside the camp we don't want to be outside the camp because that territory is not sacred space to yahweh is it you know and again they get defined it gets defined as the opposite all this oppositional you know kind of thinking so of course they drive it out you know because that's where sin belongs it doesn't belong here and of course when satan when when jesus encounters satan the holy spirit drives him into the wilderness well where else would you expect to find satan of course he's out there you know he's not again in sacred space the holy land you know oh you know jerusalem you know it again it's it's oppositional binary kind of thinking yep it's there to illustrate eden and anti-eden this is so interesting transforms the way you read the new testament because i've taught old testament for years to high school students before i came to biola and i would teach the scapegoat they'd sacrifice one to decontaminate or cleanse them of sins send the other one away from the people with the blame but where they go in the desert and what that represented changes everything in terms of our understanding that ozzie zell was there a demon type being would get his due uh that's that's fascinating so tell me i started this 10 part series on like twitter instagram of like the strangest passages in the bible like like one one minute answers which is impossible but i asked people i said which ones do you want me to address and one of the top ones was genesis 6 the sons of god who impregnate these women are these angels like what on earth is going on now i know we can spend two hours unpacking this but like kind of as simply as we can you explain this mesopotamian background what is going on in genesis chapter six yeah well let's start with the familiar material so we have genesis 6 and i'm going to loop verse 5 in here because it's important not not just one through four but one through five and it's the sons of god cohabiting with the daughters of men and they have nephilim and blah blah blah blah and then somehow all that stuff leads to verse five and god saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth and every thought of the imagination of his heart was only evil contain like how how do you get from the first four verses to verse five so that's one question and what about all this weird stuff again that's the other question well if you go to the new testament peter in second peter 2 refers to the angels plural that sinned at the time of the flood okay let's you know final jeopardy question you know what what could that possibly refer to okay there's only one candidate and that's genesis 6. now in christian theology which sometimes veers into christian mythology we have this teaching you know i i i personally think this is paradise lost you know john milton we we need to blame him but that's probably too much that this idea well when satan fell when he became corrupt he took a third of the angels with him and that's what peter's referring to oh really can you show me a verse that says that okay surprise surprise there isn't a single verse in the bible that says a third of the angels fell when satan fell or before you know adam and eve or anything like that in fact if you use your bible software and you look up three or third and you know the word angel in the same verse it happens one time and that's the last book of the bible book of revelation revelation 12 and if you read that the war in heaven erupts in response to the birth of the messiah which makes a lot of sense satan's not happy okay we got to kill the child all right there's nothing in the bible about a third of the angels rebelling with satan so you've got one candidate now peter uses a very important term he says that that these these beings these angels are kept in chains of gloomy darkness they're sent to your english translations probably have hell or hades okay verb in greek is tartarado they're sent to tartarus it's an important term because that is the classical greek term for where the titans are punished and sent and imprisoned again there's a giant story in there and all this stuff so so peter's acquainted with that he's he also says captain chains of gloomy darkness you don't get that in genesis 6 do you no you don't let's get that detail we might get it from the greek story but he probably gets it from second temple material what books like enoch or the genesis apocrypha that's what we call it some of the dead sea scrolls they have these details in them and some of them actually refer to gilgamesh while they're doing it which is very interesting because if you go back and you actually search and somebody did this in 2010 his name is amar anus he's in helsinki he's a is a pineal form scholar can you can we can we find specific mesopotamian information because we all know that mesopotamia had these flood stories i mean that that's everybody kind of knows that you know from even youtube in the internet all right okay fine can you find specific elements about divine beings and then there's a flood and on the other side of the flood they're they're like quasi-divine they're like you know not really divine but only partially divine and giants all this all this weird genesis 6 four stuff and the answer is yeah yeah you can it's the mesopotamian al kahlua story and the bad guys in that story are imprisoned by marduk empire gods who wanted to destroy humanity with the flood the apocalypse said this is terrible we've invested a lot of time in these people you know we've got to we've got to teach you know preserve the knowledge that we gave them and blah blah blah they're the heroes in the mesopotamian story they're the villains of course in genesis you know but but there there is a there is a a mesopotamian backstory that accounts for every point of genesis six one through four and five because knowledge corrupts humanity you know if you're a mesopotamian you'd say no it doesn't it's why we're great that's why babylon's great astrology idolatry you know all this you know all the stuff that that you know babylon would be associated with and the biblical writers are no that just helps us destroy ourselves more efficiently you know it's evil it's wicked and so genesis 6 1-5 is is written as pushback against a mesopotamian worldview which lots of things in genesis 1 through 11 are they are pushback against the the pagan pantheons of other you know civilizations this is no different now i will throw this out to your audience now i worked at logos for 14 years this is probably not a secret but i got everything free okay so when i came across anna's article in 2010 about the op kalu my first thought was how did i miss that well i did a search through all of the commentaries that logos has all the books everything the whole library i found two commentaries that mention the word they don't discuss the data they literally all they do is mention the word there i could only find two publications before 2010. this became a mission of mine okay wow kron big's book on the prime evil genesis and ann kilmer's article in a fresh rift deal with the material it wasn't until 2010 that somebody published all this stuff and what that means is that if you're using a genesis commentary that doesn't say anything about what i just said it is by definition obsolete okay it is obsolete so there's there's a truckload of data here that needs to be dealt with and it's not adequate just to say well that's that's just freaky i don't want to believe that hot mike how does how does genesis 6 work how does explain that to me scientifically and my answer is i don't know i don't know how it works can you explain to me scientifically how the virgin birth works how the resurrection works how the hypostatic union works you know here we are back to the selective supernaturalism yeah that's the point earlier seriously as soon as you tell me how you can rationally explain that in a scientific world view then you'll have me but until then it's an issue that i think we need to struggle with my again my answer is i don't know because i'm not a deity all right confession i'm not a deity okay so i don't really know what deities can or cannot do let me jump in and ask that just so i understand so people who try to understand genesis 6 from a natural standpoint like it's say the lineage of seth or kings on the earth during that day that's out something supernatural is going on all of those views fundamentally ignore the mesopotamian context for genesis 6 1-5 they don't deal with it at all and not only that but they have their own internal contradictions so the sons of god are the sethites got it does that mean that no women were godly and the daughters of men were evil or i guess that's that's the line of cane so so like they're all the women are evil and the sethites are good guys come on it falls it falls apart when you look at the details and not only that but did did somebody tell peter like could somebody have please told peter you know like like so that peter didn't get this wrong you know everybody in the ancient world i i can only think of one exception prior one text prior to the fourth century a.d that did not take the supernatural view this is in church history irenaeus is all over this thing is all over this stuff it you know all the jewish traditions are all lockstep okay it isn't until the time you know augustine's the one that really changed the tide and championed the sethite view there was a guy before him a few years before him julius africanus um rejected the the supernatural view of genesis 6 but but it was its champion was augustine and i i personally think that part of his resistance to it was his own um distaste for the maniches you know he when he was originally converted he was part of the manichaean sect and then he he left them and they and they reviewed books like enoch so i think he had a bit of an axe to grind okay uh there but for whatever reason he was the champion of the set fight view so just so i understand when the mesopotamian understand is brought in they're not saying this is a fictional story and critiquing it they're saying something to do with these kind of gods or demonic beings came down became embodied had sex with these women and he's critiquing the mesopotamian version of it but something like that really did happen supernaturally and we may not know exactly what it is right that that is it that's what's attacked okay against this event it's really it's really fun to go back people can find the the umar anus just just google drmsh.com and put in a-m-a-r-a-n-n-u-s and you'll find his article because it's public publicly accessible if you go back and look at that the catalog of of things that the supernatural beings in the enoch story teach humans at the time of the flood as part of this genesis 6 story the enoch's retelling of the story that list of things that that they teach humans to corrupt them you know and again to more efficiently destroy themselves and turn humanity toward idolatry you can find all of those things in the mesopotamian material yeah of teachings of the op interesting you know again there's just it's just point for point it's all the way across the board uh you know in mesopotamia archaeologists have found figurines of the ap column and in mesopotamia they they were they were good guys okay they were good good spirits all right and they would they would bury these figurines in building you know in like kind of like not headstones but uh like cornerstones they would bury them in building foundations and the the acadian term for them is mozzarella guess what that means means watcher which is the term he accuses for the sons of god in genesis 6. it's just bang bang bang is just right on down the road so again what i'm saying is if you want to understand genesis 6 1-5 you must read it against what it's shooting at and it's shooting at babylonian version of these pre-flood events it is trying to say this was a disaster this is this is part of the the chaos that is babylon here it is again you know and so i think it's an important thing because it does leak out into the new testament you know this oh yeah yeah it it it leaks out in the new testament and some interest i'll give you just one why are demons again if you're thinking like a first century jew demons or disembodied spirits of the dead nephilim okay why are demons called unclean spirits in the gospels and in the dead sea scrolls and in second temple literature there's a whole dissertation on this it's by a guy named wallin w-a-h-l-e-m i footnote him in the demons book it's because in the levitical world view unclean is defined by forbidden mixture that's what they are the term the term absolutely it's not because they're icky oh i gotta wash my hands now okay no it's because they're the product of a forbidden mixture why do the dead sea scrolls call them bastard spirits well because that's what they are you know i mean they have this terminology that we never sort of like with unclean spirits we never really think about it you know like like why why this term and not not some other term and again in the context of its wider world view it makes really good sense you know why they would use that term you know there are other things other passages it leaks into i think i think the watcher shows up in in revelation 9. that's i i can't prove that but i suspect that the the beings unleashed from the pit in revelation 9 that this is what it's referring to their final release before the day of the lord you know there's just stuff like that that that is so interesting i feel like we could do a whole show or two just on the genesis 6 passage because this is really a revolution in scholarship in the past decade which is a short period of time when it comes to scholarship that's changing how we understand this um let me ask you one ben i mentioned i was gonna ask this a while ago and then we're gonna go to the real kind of quick answer some of these practical questions people would have about demons but he says in psalm 72 it talks about the divine counsel and god pronouncing judgment over them would these beings be considered demons in our modern lens and he's asking about psalms 82. you also have this divine counsel in genesis 1. it seems to be in genesis 6 genesis 11. what is this divine counsel where it says let us make man in our image i think is related to this yeah divine counsel is a term that derives from psalm 82 and psalm 89 a few other places in the hebrew bible it it really it's just it refers to the heavenly host okay that's more familiar terminology for us i mean there there's rank distinction and all that stuff we don't need to worry about that for the sake of this question so it's it's it's the heavenly host and again what's going on in psalm 82 is god is angry and he's specifically angry at this group of elohim well who are they if you go back to again you brought up genesis 11 with babel now you your listeners have heard me say that there was a supernatural rebellion at babel and and some of them are if they read you know everybody if you read genesis 11 where are the demons there i don't see them well you're not going to see them if you go to deuteronomy 32 8 and 9. it says when the most high we know who that is again that's not difficult okay when the most high divided up the nations and he fixed their borders and we know when that happened that's battle okay because we get the list of nations genesis 10 that go with the genesis 11 story when the most high divided the nations and he fixed their borders he divided them up according to the number of the sons of god there's that phrase again sons of god it's always divine beings in the old testament and then verse 9 says but israel is yahweh's portion you know jacob is going to be his his allotted inheritance and what it what it means is that at babel god is fed up okay we had to fall i forgave you we had the flood i'm never going to do that again i thought that straightened everything out you know i told you to disperse i repeated the the the eudentic mandate to you you know go fruitful multiply you know we're going to kick start eating again here and look at what you're doing the narrative actually says as people in about there at babel saying let's build us a tower so that we don't have to disperse like exactly opposite what they're supposed to do and god has had it so what he does is he divorces humanity i've had enough i refer to this as the romans 1 event of the old testament you don't want me to be your god you're not going to listen to me let's see how that works and he assigns the nations these peoples that he creates at babel to other members of the heavenly host and he assigns members of the heavenly host to them there's two sides of that same coin and we know that's the case because if you go to deuteronomy 4 19 and 20 that's the parallels of deuteronomy 32 8 9 says the same thing that god allots you know the heavenly host to other nations not israel other nations deuteronomy 17 deuteronomy 29 i mean you got this whole thing through deuteronomy and what that means is that after babel the entire world as they know it all the nations are under dominion of some deity other than yahweh because he's had it and so what you what what god decides to do is okay there are placeholders now i'm going to go call this guy abraham and his wife and and they can't have kids so they're perfect because what i'm going to do is i'm going to supernaturally give them a child and i'm going to start over this is my new humanity israel and he makes a covenant with abraham and says now look i know i just divorced all the nations i was really ticked but it's going to be through you and your seed that ultimately all of them are going to be blessed so god wants the nations governed according to his own character according to his principles of justice he still loves humanity because they're they're created in his image they're his images but what happens in it we're not told when we're just told by the time we get to psalm 82 god is is angry and and if you read why he's angry with the other gods and he actually calls them sons of the most high in psalm 82 6. so it's a direct link back to deuteronomy 32. he's he's charging them with showing chaos among their nations enslaving their populations in just just treating people like garbage and he's had it and at the end of the psalm the psalmist rises up there it exclaims you know oh god you know rise up and take back the nations okay this is this is the vision this is what's going on in psalm 82 so god has had many dealings with his supernatural heavenly host some of them rebel some of them transgress genesis 6 some of them he gives jobs to and they either fail gloriously okay they fail what they're supposed to do after babel or they don't give a rip because we also learn from deuteronomy 32 17 that these shadeem again there's your territorial entity term it's not demon like in the gospels but it's a territorial entity which makes perfect sense because all the nations are under dominion by the way this is where daniel gets his theology there's another question we never ask oh the prince of persia prince of greece supernatural beings over geopolitical nations yeah i get it i get it hey where'd daniel get that i'll tell you where he got it he got it in deuteronomy 32 8 that's where we got it okay it's just biblical theology so you know god has had plenty of dealings with with the heavenly host and they're not all good we're told three times in job that god doesn't trust his holy ones well i guess not i mean he knows that they're not him they're not perfect in their nature he has given that he shared his attributes with them one of which is freedom free will and that goes all the way back to genesis you know what i don't believe genesis 1 26 has anything to do with the trinity you know and that's that's basically that's the basic view in church tradition and the reason i don't i'm going to read you something in genesis 11. this is the only place you get the lettuce language you know like in genesis 1 26 you see it in genesis 11 it says then they said come let us build ourselves a city tower with its top in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves okay you know unless we be dispersed we don't want to obey god boy that would be terrible let's just do this and then verse 5 it says the lord came down to see the city in the tower which the children of men had built and the lord said behold there are one people have all one language it's only the beginning of what they're going to do nothing they've proposed it will be impossible for them come let us go down and confuse their language now wait a minute if the lettuce is the trinity i would suggest that the other two persons are already down okay that's like standard trinitarian thinking this these persons are not like some of them are here and some of them they were not modalists okay yeah you know so if if this passage shows you that we're not talking trinity here we're talking god is speaking to his heavenly host and that makes the most sense in genesis you know also because why would he have to announce hey let's create humanity you know if if they all if they're members of the train they already know that they're not learning anything okay i mean because they're co-eternal and co-op nation you know how can they learn anything what what's the point so you know there's a number of obstacles to the traditional view of what i think's going on there's god had a supernatural family from the very beginning when it's job 38 sons of god witness to the creation of the world they're there watching and god says is my paraphrase boy this is cool you know what i like having a family i like creating beings like myself to be my children and to participate with me and doing stuff that i think needs to be done you know what i i'm going to try it again but i'm going to make them a little different i'm going to give them bodies this time i'm going to create embodied beings and you know what if i do that they need a place to live because they're embodied so let's create the world and and we're going to create you know humans we'll call them humans you know to live in this world and they can't come to us so let's go down there and live with the humans we'll take a little place of this earth and we'll call it eden and we'll live there because where god is his entourage is this is standard theophany throne imagery you know in the bible you know god goes down there with his his supernatural family his entourage he creates humans and in some way the plurals in genesis 1 26 telegraph now in some way the humans are like the members of the heavenly host and they're also like god let us create humanity as our imagers okay but yet when the creation happens in the next verse it's singular so god created them male and female he created them every every verse in the hebrew bible right if you have bible software every verb of creation with humanity as the object is singular okay there's there's no ambiguity here so what god's doing is he's announcing to his heavenly host i got an awesome idea let's do this and the reason it's plural is it telegraphs to the reader that somehow we are like them and like god and how is that well i'll tell you how it is we have the same father and the same creator he created them to be his proxy his representatives his agents to do things in that world that he once done and that's why he created humanity so the image of god is not a thing put in us okay we we're very vulnerable ethically if we think the image of god is equality it's in all sorts of ethical problems especially with abortion and all this kind of stuff yeah it's not a it's not a thing it's not a quality it's a status to be human at any level of development to be human is to be god's imager you you this is this is the embodied form the embodied extension okay these are my kids and and i want them to be my partners as well this is and it's democratized it's every human it's not just the divine kings okay like the ancient near eastern worlds everybody and and i mean this is this is just fundamentally important stuff and that's genesis one so what i do like in unseen realm is i say look here's where it starts by design what the gonna do the family and his children partner with his partners on earth because that's what god wanted to begin with and it blows up and god hasn't given up on it he's going to get what he wants he's going to get it back and he's going to look at humans again to to graft them back into this family and and you're going to have two tracks that follow each other through scripture you know why is it that holy ones in the old testament overwhelmingly used for supernatural beings it's never used in the plural in the new testament for supernatural beings you know how it's used though holy ones hogue in greek terrible translation saints it's believers wow okay in hebrews 2 believers that jesus who is our sibling presents god to us and us to god what does he do in hebrews 2 in the congregation it's in the council why do we what's the cloud of witnesses it's not just you know the people in hebrews 11. you keep reading hebrews 12 it's the innumerable festival gathering of angels you know why is it in first corinthians 6 when paul is trying to get the corinthians to stop bickering with each other he says look you people don't you know first corinthians 6 3 that you're going to rule angels you're going to judge angels what's he talking about well he's talking about the eschatological concept which we read about in revelation two and three that he that overcomes i will put him over the nations well who's over the nations now that would be the fallen sons of god when they're destroyed allah psalm 82 and you know several other passages in the prophets guess who replaces them guess who gets their jobs that would be us we are we we will be what god intended us to be from the beginning we will be fully brought into his council his host humanity was was created to be fit for sacred space i mean just think of that concept it's the most natural thing in god's head as it were to look at humans and think they belong with me you know in the end god is gonna he steers everything back to the new eden we're over the nations we replace the rebellious members of the council it's not a coincidence i mean there's all these things that just interconnect in scripture and and i i have found and i can look i'm putting myself in the same bucket here okay i'm no different than any of your listeners here we have people who care about the bible in our churches they they really do and they have lots of data points in their head but they have no framework for them wow they don't know where to put them so again i think what unseen realm and then angels and demons you know unseen realm is the is the is the structure it's the framework i say it's building the matrix okay and then angels and demons are kind of drilling down what i'm trying to do fundamentally is give people a worldview structure to understand their bible i'm not going to protect them from their bible anymore okay that's just i love it what yeah lost okay i'm not going to do it anymore this is your bible you know walk in it read it and enjoy it but you try to give them the structure and then try to orient people with a simple thought that i had again i had to have a poke in the eye read screen you will get so much more out of it if you read the bible not thinking that it answers your questions not thinking that it was written by modern post enlightenment people it wasn't written by us they're not us but read it with the israelite in your head read it with the first century jew in your head how would they have thought about this passage and you can do it you really can that's i i love that approach and that's what you do in the book i mean you take me and i have a doctorate and masters i've studied the stuff the languages it's amazing so those of you watching this this is there was a question that just came up that said are we exploring the questions whether demons are real or not in a few weeks i have on billy halliwell he has a new book coming out with an investigation of the demonic realm we're going to talk about the evidence for demons he interviewed me for that but i don't know if i made the book he mentioned that he talked to you when i chatted with him today we're talking with uh with with dr michael heiser about his book demons how do we theologically understand demons and put them together do you have do you have time if i just throw out there and get like the tweet responses to the most common questions people ask and i know it's painful because it's got to be fast but i would love to know okay these are the questions that people ask me all the time um are demons fallen angels no the the it's yes and no the terminology is wrong because angel is just a job description they are fallen supernatural beings in a sense they're actually second generation okay okay principalities and powers that's paul's terminology for the third group the deuteronomy 32 babel group they are definitely fallen supernatural beings they are out of the will of god oh good good job that was quick and by the way angels are functional so that's why you see human beings operating as angels is that correct or did i miss this well it's angelos it's a messenger okay in the angels book i have this question do do believers become angels like when we die and the answer is no but what happens is we we become glorified and we have certain of the attributes in glorification that they also have and so this is another good example where christian tradition has smashed those things together gotcha that's helpful can can demons be redeemed or satan be redeemed i don't believe so i think hebrews 2 specifically addresses this where basically god did what he did the plan of salvation specifically for humans and the proof of that in hebrews 2 is the incarnation in other words god became a man he didn't become anything else he became a man and and and the the focus of his redemptive plan is humanity not any other created being if demons and satan know that they're going to lose in the end why do they keep fighting now do they it depends how you define victory okay okay if you define victory as oh we're gonna kill god someday no they're not idiots okay they know that they're not morons if you define victory a different way then you do have a game plan and here's what i mean by that paul linked specifically the return of the lord and the day of the lord with quote the fullness of the gentiles again paul is informed by the deuteronomy 32 world view this is why he uses terms like principalities powers rulers thrones dominions instead of demons because these are all terms of geographical dominion he knows who he's dealing with his focus in his ministry because he's dealing with the nations is the third set of rebels okay and god says okay when when i have all extracted all the people i want from the nations and bring them back into relationship to me bring them back into my family then the end will come the day of the lord and the lord will return well if i'm a principality and power and i know this by now i do you know before the crucifixion and resurrection i don't think they knew certain things based on what paul says in first corinthians two but if i know this now it's like okay what i'm hearing is all we need to do is keep the church from accomplishing performing the great commission we just blind people under our charge under our influence to the gospel check got that we get the church distracted or lazy so that this doesn't happen check check i'm good with that because we'll just kick this can down the road forever god has linked the return of his son and the day of the lord to these people thanks you know i mean it's like that gives them a reason to continue because how do they define victory we're still here yes we don't have authority yes our authority was stripped away paul writes this and now okay we get it but you know what we're not giving up our turf and we hate humans we're not giving up on blinding them and robbing yahweh of his children that's why we're here so we're going to kick this can down the road for a very long time if you define victory like that they're not doing too bad they're really not doing too bad i i think it was helpful you point out the book that that is their nature and they act consistently with their nature and can't help it that's what they are that's what they do is a piece of it as well this is who they are uh last question this is helpful pine creek says that polytheism is defined as the belief that many gods exist would heiser be a polytheist under that definition no because polytheism assumes an interchangeability and an equality of certain fundamental attributes that the hebrew the biblical writers do not presume so that's also what's wrong with henotheism in honorthistic systems they assume that the lead deity can be displaced at certain at some point it can be defeated toppled by somebody else in the pantheon or whatever competition the biblical writers aren't thinking that way at all again elohim let's just back up a little bit we are trained by our culture and by church when we see the letters g o and d on a piece of paper or on a screen we mentally our brain assigns and all these terms are important our brain assigns a specific set of unique attributes to the letters g o and d and so if you put an s on it oh we can't have that because they're supposed to be unique attributes that would be polytheism okay well the problem with that is that isn't how the biblical writers think about the word elohim how do we know because they use elohim of five or six different things that are not the god of israel that alone tells you they are not assigning a specific set of unique attributes to the term elohim so to have a multiplicity of elohim is nowhere near polytheism like we think of it but in the west in the modern west and scholars are no different i mean i i was bucking the trend in my dissertation this is this is essentially my dissertation stuff we don't there are very few exceptions we don't stop to wonder well maybe we shouldn't just ah priori assign a specific set of unique attributes to a certain term maybe we shouldn't do that because the hebrew bible doesn't do that now the theology that we have that yahweh the god of the bible is unique that doesn't come from the term elohim or any other specific term what it comes from is that the biblical writers will say certain things about this elohim that they won't say about any other and they will in fact deny the things they say about this one elohim to all the others and here i am talking about attributes omniscience omnipotence you know eternality those things are assigned to one elohim of the bunch again elohim is just a generic term for a spiritual being that's all it is there are elohim but only one of those elohim is yahweh yahweh is an elohim but no other elohim is yahweh that is not polytheism okay so there's other other beings with supernatural power from the divine realm but not with the same attributes as crowd and where we trip up is we we think attributes are linked to terms because that's how we do it in the modern west g o d equals this set of specific unique attributes well that's wonderful because elohim doesn't so what you know what instead of letting the biblical writer tell us what the term means we impose what we think about the letters g o and d on that term and that's where we mess up that's where we read psalm 82 and get freaked out but we don't need to because we bring our modern concept to the text we impose it and that's the problem that's one of the things that's so helpful about your book as you said even the septuagint the greek translation of the hebrew old testament loses some of the nuances and then into english it loses the nuances not inaccurate not misrepresenting but not fully capturing some understandings of evil spirits in the demonic realm and the old testament and that's why look those of you who are tracking with this conversation enjoying this i couldn't more highly recommend a book on this topic than demons it's thorough it's honest uh it's a scholarly book but it's very understandable if you're willing to do the work so if you're looking for a book that just says hey here's 20 questions on demons one quick paragraph answer this is not your book if you're looking to say okay i want to go deeper and i want to consider what actually the biblical worldview itself really teaches about demons and i'm willing to go places that may not be comfortable you are not going to find a better book now the question of are demons real where is the evidence that's one we're going to look at in three weeks have billy halloway coming on he has a new book coming out takes a journalist approach to the existence of demons and asks what's the proof what's the evidence are these beings real how do we know this that's more of an apologetic question we're going to look at next time for now i really want to thank dr heiser for coming on and encourage you to pick up his book demons i also have the book angels and another book of the title is that unseen realm did i get that correct all three of these excellent thoughtful biblically focused books uh related to demons and the unseen realm you rocked my world i'm going to say by reading this honestly i was sharing some with my wife i'm like hey check this out this is so interesting so i know this took just a massive amount of research and tom in your part so thanks for carving out some uh to join us here if you are new to this make sure you hit subscribe because we have some interviews coming up in fact third friday morning uh a uk scholar richard bockham is going to come on target the evidence for jesus and the eyewitnesses and it's nine in the morning because that's five o'clock in britain and he is he makes one of the most powerful cases uh that the biblical writers in the new testament the gospels in particular are eyewitnesses so believer or skeptic would love to have you join us and this channel is brought to you by biola apologetics so if you're interested get a certificate program to have somebody walk through formula with you how to study apologetics and part of it we have theology on angels and demons etc or if you thought you know what i'm interested in getting a masters take a look at the description below we would love to help partner with you to train you for your own understanding if you want to be a writer for your church for your studies to really learn and know apologetics better uh thanks so much for joining us hope as many of you possibly can join us friday morning with uh richard bachmann another one of my favorite scholars but again dr michael heiser can't thank you enough for coming on don't disappear i want to thank you personally but the rest of you we will see you very very soon thanks for joining us you

Channel: Dr. Sean McDowell

Views: 167,961

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Keywords: demons, demonic, evil, satan, Bible, scripture, angels, theology

Id: o4SbHoOZpQQ

Length: 73min 19sec (4399 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020