The Bible presents us with a variety of terms for those beings who inhabit the spiritual world. Christian tradition has often merged these terms, creating confusion. I’ve devoted much of my academic career to these matters, and would invite anyone interested in the subjects of angels, Satan, and evil spirits to read (in this order):
· Supernatural: What the Bible Teaches About the Unseen World and Why it Matters
· The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible
· Angels: What the Bible Really Says About God’s Heavenly Host
· Demons: What the Bible Really Says About the Powers of Darkness
The first of these books is like this one—it’s not designed to be an academic discussion. The other three books are academic in nature (lots of footnotes and detail). There are thousands of notes and references in these books drawn from scholarly resources to support the content.
For the present, it may be helpful to review or summarize the supernatural world referenced in our presentation of the story of the Bible.
The Bible teaches that there is an unseen world—a world of spirit beings. These beings do not by nature have bodies, though they can assume physical form. The spirit world is “supernatural”—a world that is of a different nature than the physical world and beyond (“super–”) the natural, physical world.
God is a member of the spirit world, but is superior to it as its creator. God alone is uncreated and eternal. He created all the other spirit beings that inhabit the spiritual world just as he created all life in the world we know (I.e., the physical, material world).
The Bible describes the members of the spirit world with a variety of terms (e.g., Rom 8:38; 1 Pet 3:22). I’ve introduced some of them in this book. Some of these terms are job descriptions—ways of describing what a spirit being does. “Angel” is one example. The term means “messenger.” All that said, in the Greco-Roman culture of the New Testament, “angels” also became a term for any member of the heavenly host who had not rebelled against God. The term “demon” became the label for all who did rebel, despite the fact that “demon” had a variety of meanings in the ancient world.
The descriptive phrase “sons of God” is a family term that reminds us that God is the Father (Creator) of spirit beings. The term means more than that, though. I discuss the phrase in Supernatural and The Unseen Realm at length. “Sons of God” refers to a high rank in God’s “labor force.” It is drawn from the language of how a king’s children in the ancient world received high positions of responsibility. In the biblical story, the “sons of God” were assigned to rule the nations God had judged at Babel—a job that was more important than merely delivering messages (the task of “angels”).
Originally, all the members of the spiritual world were loyal to God. Things didn’t stay that way. As we read in this book, God shared his qualities with the members of the spirit world when he created them. One of those qualities was free will. Some of the members of the spiritual world exercised their freedom in rebellion against God’s wishes and God’s human family. Collectively, all spirit beings in rebellion against God and his people are the “powers of darkness.” Nevertheless, the Bible distinguishes God’s spiritual enemies during the course of the story of God’s desire to have a human family.
The Bible describes three such rebellions. The first occurred in the Garden of Eden. One of the members of the spiritual world wanted to undermine God’s desire to have a human family. In the biblical story that figure came to Eve as a serpent and deceived her. Later in the Bible labels like “Satan” (a term that means “Adversary”) and “Devil” (a term that means “slanderer”) became names for this original rebel.
Later in the biblical story some of the heavenly sons of God rebelled. They transgressed the boundary between the spiritual and physical world. The short book of Jude describes their sin as “not staying within their own position of authority.” Church tradition eventually came to (imprecisely) call these rebellious sons of God “fallen angels” to describe their “fall” from holiness, or “demons” to denote their wickedness. This despite the fact that the Old Testament never uses “angels” or “demons” of the rebels of Gen 6:1-4.
Lastly, the “sons of God” to whom the nations were assigned after the Tower of Babel episode became corrupt at some point of their assignments. Psalm 82 is all about their judgment. These territorial entities are the basis for the supernatural “princes” associated with nations in Daniel 10, as well as the “principalities”, “rulers”, “authorities”, “thrones”, and “powers” Paul wrote about in various passages (e.g., Eph 6:11-12). All these terms speak of geographical dominion, and so they are appropriate to describe the situation that emerged after Babel in the biblical story.
What Does God Want?
Michael S. Heiser