Supernatural

What the Bible Teaches About the Unseen World - and Why It Matters

Michael S. Heiser

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781577995593
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Dr. Michael S. Heiser, a Scholar-in-Residence at Faithlife Corporation, presents fifteen years of research on what the Bible really says about the unseen world of the supernatural—unfiltered by tradition or by theological presuppositions. "People shouldn't be protected from the Bible, " Dr. Michael S. Heiser says, but theological systems often do just that, by "explaining away" difficult or troublesome passages of Scripture because their literal meaning doesn't fit into our tidy systems.

Who were the "sons of God"? Who were the Nephilim? Where do angels fit into the supernatural hierarchy? Why did God find it necessary to have the Israelites destroy the populations of entire cities—man, woman, and child? What relation does Jesus bear to the rest of the supernatural world? Dr. Michael S. Heiser tackles these questions and many more in his books Supernatural and The Unseen Realm.

In both books, Dr. Michael S. Heiser shines a light on the supernatural world—not a new light, but rather the same light the original, ancient readers—and writers—of Scripture would have seen it in.

After reading these books, you won't be able to read the Bible in the same way again.

Supernatural, What the Bible Teaches about the Unseen World—and Why it Matters presents this approach to reading and understanding scripture for the person in the pew. The Unseen Realm covers the same material but at a deeper, complex, and highly documented way, for pastors, the seminarian, or serious students of the Bible.

CHAPTER ONE

Believing the Bible

Do you really believe what the Bible says?

To some, that may seem like an odd question to ask in a book likely to be read mostly by Christians. But I don’t think it’s so odd. The Bible has some pretty strange things in it—things that are hard to believe, especially in the modern world.

I’m not talking about the big stuff, such as whether Jesus was God come to earth, who then died on the cross and rose from the dead. I’m not even thinking of miracle stories like the exodus, when God rescued Israel from Egypt by making a way for them through the Red Sea. Most Christians would say they believe those things. After all, if you don’t believe in God and Jesus, or that they could do miraculous things, what’s the point of saying you’re a Christian?

I’m talking about the little-known supernatural stuff you run into occasionally when reading the Bible but rarely hear about in church.

Here’s an example. In 1 Kings 22, there’s a story about a wicked king of Israel, Ahab. He wants to join forces with the king of Judah to attack an enemy at a place called Ramoth-gilead. Judah’s king wants a glimpse into the future—he wants to know what’s going to happen if they attack. So the two kings ask Ahab’s prophets and get thumbs up all around. But those prophets are just telling Ahab what he wants to hear, and both kings know it. So they decide to ask God’s prophet, a fellow named Micaiah. What he says isn’t good news for Ahab:

Therefore hear the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left; and the LORD said, “Who will entice Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?” And one said one thing, and another said another. Then a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD, saying, “I will entice him.” And the LORD said to him, “By what means?” And he said, “I will go out, and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.” And he said, “You are to entice him, and you shall succeed; go out and do so.” Now therefore behold, the LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the LORD has declared disaster for you. (1 Kings 22:19–23)

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?

Here’s another example, courtesy of Jude:

And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day. (Jude 1:6)

God sent a bunch of angels to an underground prison? Really?

As I said, the Bible has a lot of strange things in it, especially about the unseen, spiritual world. I’ve met many Christians who have no trouble with the Bible’s less controversial (at least among Christians) teachings about the supernatural, such as who Jesus was and what he did, but passages like this tend to make them more than a little uneasy, so they ignore them. I’ve seen that tendency up close. My wife and I once visited a church where the pastor was preaching a series based on 1 Peter. The morning he hit 1 Peter 3:18–22, the first thing he said after getting behind the pulpit was, “We’re going to skip these verses. They’re just too weird.” What he meant by weird was that those verses contained supernatural elements that just didn’t fit into his theology. Such as:

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit. After being made alive, 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. (1 Pet. 3:18–20 NIV)

Who—and where—were these imprisoned spirits? That pastor either didn’t know or didn’t like the answer, so he simply chose to ignore these verses.

As a Bible scholar, I’ve learned that strange passages (and lots of other little-known and little-understood parts of Scripture) are actually very important. They teach specific ideas about God, the unseen world, and our own lives. 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.

In the first letter the apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians, Paul got upset at how believers in that church were taking each other to court to settle disputes. It was a waste of time and emotional energy, he felt, as well as a negative reflection on the faith. He gasped, “Don’t you people know you’re going to judge the world? Don’t you know you’re going to rule over angels!” (1 Cor. 6:3, my paraphrase).

Judge the world? Rule over angels?

What Paul’s talking about in that puzzling verse is both mind-blowing and life-changing. The Bible connects the activities of supernatural beings with our lives and destinies. We will someday judge the world. We will rule over angels, just as Paul said. More about that later.

The reason Paul can say what he said to the Corinthians—and to us—is that the story of the Bible is about how God created us and desires that we be part of his heavenly family. It’s no accident that the Bible uses terms drawn from family relationships—such as sharing a home and working together—to collectively describe God, Jesus, the beings of the unseen world, and believers, you and me. God wants humanity to be part of his family and of his rule over creation.

We all know the concept as in heaven, so on earth. It’s drawn from ideas and even phrasing found in the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:10). 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. And we can’t appreciate the drama of the Bible’s story if we don’t include all the actors—including the supernatural characters who are part of the epic but who are ignored by many Bible teachers.

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.

In 2 Kings 6:8–23, the prophet Elisha is in trouble (again). An angry king sends troops to surround his house. When his servant panics, Elisha tells him, “Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” Before the servant can object, Elisha prays, “O LORD, please open his eyes that he may see.” God answers on the spot: “So the LORD opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.”

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.

CHAPTER TWO

The Unseen Realm: God and the Gods

People are fascinated by the supernatural and the superhuman. Just think about the entertainment industry in recent years. Thousands of books, television shows, and movies in the past decade have been about angels, aliens, monsters, demons, ghosts, witches, magic, vampires, werewolves, and superheroes. Many of Hollywood’s blockbuster franchises feature the supernatural: the X-Men, the Avengers, the Harry Potter series, Superman, and the Twilight saga. Television shows like Fringe and, of course, Supernatural and X-Files have dedicated followings even long after filming new episodes ends. And really, haven’t these things always been popular—in tales, in books, in art?

Why?

One answer is that they’re an escape from the ordinary. They offer us a world that’s more interesting and exciting than our own. There’s something about good versus evil, magnified on a cosmic scale, that thrills us. The epic struggle by the heroes of Middle Earth (Gandalf, Frodo, and company) against the Dark Lord Sauron in The Lord of the Rings trilogy has captivated readers (and now movie-goers) for over a half-century now. The more otherworldly the villain, the more spectacular the triumph.

On another level, people are drawn to other worlds because, as the book of Ecclesiastes puts it, God has “put eternity into [our] hearts” (Eccl. 3:11). There’s something about the human condition that longs for something beyond human experience—something divine. The apostle Paul wrote about this yearning too. He taught that it comes from just being alive in the world God has made. The creation bears witness to a creator, and therefore to a realm beyond our own (Rom. 1:18–23). In fact, Paul said this impulse was so powerful that it had to be willfully suppressed (v. 18).

And yet we don’t seem to think of the epic story of the Bible in the same way we think of our own tales of the supernatural in books, movies, and legend. There are reasons for that, and they go beyond the lack of special effects. For some, the Bible’s characters are too ordinary or grandfatherly. They don’t feel dynamic or heroic. After all, these are the same people and the same stories we’ve been hearing since Sunday school as kids. Then there’s the cultural barrier. It’s hard for us to identify with what seems like an endless parade of ancient shepherds and men wearing robes, like so many actors in your church’s nativity play.

But I think an even bigger factor in why science fiction or supernatural fantasy captures our imagination more easily is how we’ve been taught to think about the unseen world of the Bible. What I’ve heard in church over the years doesn’t just miss the boat—it makes the supernatural boring. And even worse, the church’s teaching emasculates the unseen, supernatural world, rendering it powerless.

A lot of what Christians imagine to be true about the unseen world isn’t. Angels don’t have wings. (Cherubim don’t count because they are never called angels and are creaturely. Angels are always in human form.) Demons don’t sport horns and a tail, and they aren’t here to make us sin (we do that just fine on our own). And while the Bible describes demonic possession in rightfully awful ways, intelligent evil has more sinister things to do than make sock puppets out of people. And on top of that, angels and demons are minor players. Church never seems to get to the big boys and their agenda.

The Gods Are Real

I asked you in the first chapter if you really believe what the Bible says. Consider this a pop quiz.

The Bible says God has a task force of divine beings who carry out his decisions. It’s referred to as God’s assembly, council, or court (Ps. 89:5–7; Dan. 7:10). One of the clearest verses about it is Psalm 82:1. The Good News Translation puts it well: “God presides in the heavenly council; in the assembly of the gods he gives his decision.”

If you think about it, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Believing the Bible
• Chapter Two: The Unseen Realm: God and the Gods
• Chapter Three: Once and Future Kings
• Chapter Four: Divine Rebellions
• Chapter Five: Cosmic Geography
• Chapter Six: The Word, the Name, and the Angel
• Chapter Seven: Rules of Engagement
• Chapter Eight: Sacred Space
• Chapter Nine: Holy War
• Chapter Ten: Hidden in Plain Sight
• Chapter Eleven: Supernatural Intent
• Chapter Twelve: The Cloud Rider
• Chapter Thirteen: The Great Reversal
• Chapter Fourteen: Not of This World
• Chapter Fifteen: Partakers of the Divine Nature
• Chapter Sixteen: Ruling over Angels
• Conclusion