Supernatural Session 5

I ended the previous session with the thought that free will in the hands of imperfect beings, whether divine or human, can have disastrous results. That’s an understatement. Some catastrophes in the early chapters of the Bible, all of them involving both humans and supernatural beings, illustrate the point.

Recall that God decided to share his authority with both divine beings in the supernatural realm and human beings on earth. That was the backdrop to God’s statement, “Let us make humankind in our image” (, emphasis added) and the fact that God then created humans in his image. Spiritual beings and humans are imagers of God. We share his authority and represent him as co-rulers.

Free Will

On one hand, that was a wonderful decision. Free will is part of being like God. We couldn’t be like him if we didn’t have it. Without free will, concepts like love and self-sacrifice die. If you are merely programmed to “love,” there is no decision in it. It isn’t real. Scripted words and acts aren’t genuine. Thinking about this takes me back to the last of the original Star Wars movies, The Return of the Jedi. The spirit of Obiwan Kenobi tells Luke his father, Darth Vader, “is more machine now than man.” And yet, in the end, we find that isn’t true. Vader saves Luke from the emperor at the cost of his own life. He wasn’t just a programmed machine. His decision came from the heart, his humanity—his own free will.

But there’s a dark side to God’s decision. Granting intelligent beings freedom means they can and will make wrong choices or intentionally rebel. And that’s basically guaranteed to happen, since the only truly perfect being is God. He’s the only one he can really trust. This is why things could, and did, go wrong in Eden.

Trouble in Paradise

Think about the setting in Eden. Adam and Eve aren’t alone. God is there with his council. Eden is the divine/human headquarters for “subduing” the rest of the earth ()—spreading the life of Eden to the rest of the planet. But one member of the council isn’t happy with God’s plans.

Just as we saw in , there are hints in that Eden is home to other divine beings. In verse 22, after Adam and Eve have sinned, God says: “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil” (emphasis added). That phrase is the same sort of signpost we saw in (“our image”).

We know the main character of , the Serpent, was not really a snake. He wasn’t actually an animal. No effort to put him behind glass in a zoo would have been effective, and he would not have been amused. He was a divine being. identifies him as the Devil, Satan.

Some Christians presume, based on , that there was an angelic rebellion shortly after creation:

And there was war in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. And they did not prevail, nor was a place found for them any longer in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, the ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. ( leb)

But the war in heaven described there is associated with the birth of the messiah (, leb):

And I heard a loud voice in heaven saying,

“Now the salvation and the power

and the kingdom of our God

and the authority of his Christ have come,

because the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down,

the one who accuses them before our God day and night. (, leb):

Revelation 12:4–5 ESV

His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it. She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne,

Revelation 12:10 ESV

And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God.

The Bible gives no indication that, before the events in Eden, any of his imagers—human or divine—were opposed to God’s will or were in rebellion. Circumstances changed dramatically in .

The Serpent’s crime was that he freely chose to reject God’s authority. God had determined that Adam and Eve would join the family business, so to speak. They would extend Eden on earth. But the enemy didn’t want them there. He put himself in the place of God.

He said in his heart, “I will ascend to heaven and set my throne above God’s stars. I will preside on the mountain of the gods” ( nlt).

He got a rude awakening. Since the Serpent’s deception led to Adam and Eve’s sin, he was expelled from God’s home () and banished to earth—“cut [or cast] down to the ground” in biblical language ()—the place where death reigns, where life is not everlasting. Instead of being lord of life, he became lord of the dead, which meant that the great enemy now had claim over all humans since the events in Eden meant the loss of earthly immortality. Humanity would now need to be redeemed to have eternal life with God in a new Eden.

The fallout (pun intended) was a series of curses. The curse upon the Serpent included a bit of prophecy. God said Eve’s offspring and that of the Serpent would be at odds: “Then Yahweh God said to the serpent … I will put hostility between you and between the woman, and between your offspring and between her offspring” ( leb). Who are Eve’s offspring? Humanity. And who are the Serpent’s offspring? Well, that’s more abstract. The apostle John gives us examples—like the Jewish leaders who hated Jesus. “You are of your father the devil,” Jesus told them (). Jesus called his betrayer, Judas, a devil (). The Serpent’s offspring is anyone who stands against God’s plan, just as he did.

The Bad Seed

It didn’t take long for more trouble to arise. One of Adam and Eve’s children became a murderer. Cain killed Abel, showing that he was “of the evil one” (). As the human population grew in the biblical story, so did evil ().

Now comes another supernatural transgression that, although it may not be much discussed in Sunday morning sermons, had great impact on the expansion of wickedness on earth. This time there was more than one rebel. The evil contagion spreading through humanity in is linked to the story in about the sons of God fathering their own earthly children known as Nephilim.

The Bible doesn’t say much else in Genesis about what happened, but pieces of the story show up elsewhere in the Bible, and in Jewish traditions outside the Bible the New Testament authors knew well and quoted in their writings.

For example, Peter and Jude write about the angels who sinned before the flood ( gnt; see also ). Some of what they say comes from Jewish sources outside the Bible. Peter and Jude say that the sons of God who committed this transgression were imprisoned under the earth—in other words, they’re doing time in hell—until the last days. They’ll be part of God’s final judgment, something the Bible calls the “Day of the Lord.”

Peter and Jude’s sources are well-known to Bible scholars. One of them was a book called 1 Enoch. It was popular with Jews of Jesus’ day and with Christians in the early church, even though it wasn’t considered sacred and inspired. But Peter and Jude thought some of that content was important enough to include in the letters they wrote.

These sources speculate that the sons of God either wanted to “help” humanity by giving them divine knowledge, and then got sidetracked, or that they wanted to imitate God by creating their own imagers. They also include an explanation for where demons come from. Demons are the departed spirits of dead Nephilim killed before and during the flood. They roam the earth harassing humans and seeking re-embodiment. In books of the Bible that follow Genesis, descendants of the Nephilim of are called Anakim and Rephaim (; ). Some of these Rephaim show up in the underworld realm of the dead () where the Serpent was cast down. New Testament writers would later call that place hell.

These ideas show us that early Jewish writers understood the threat of . The sons of God were trying to reformulate Eden, where the divine and the human coexisted, in their own way. They presumed to know better than God what should be happening on earth, just like the original enemy had. Alteration of God’s plan to restore his rule ends up making a bad situation worse.

Not only was the episode of terrible echo of the seed of the Serpent—deliberate opposition to God—it was a prelude to worse things to come. During the days of Moses and Joshua, some of the opponents they run into when trying to claim the Promised Land were scattered giant clans (). These giants went by various names. In they are called the Anakim. They are specifically said to be living descendants of the Nephilim—the offspring of the sons of God back in . The Old Testament tells us Israelites were fighting these oversized enemies until David’s time. He took out Goliath (), and some of his men killed Goliath’s brothers to finally end the threat ().

Why This Matters

The prophetic curse on the Serpent and the divine transgression that followed are the early stages of what theologians call spiritual warfare—the battle between good and evil, the long war against God and his people. It’s a war fought on battlegrounds in two realms: the seen and the unseen.

As strange as these stories are, they teach an important lesson: God had divine competition when it came to human destiny. He still does. Opposition to God’s will for earth and humanity is alive and well, in both the spiritual realm and within humankind. But God has his own plans for how heaven and earth will be reunified. Hostile interference won’t go unpunished. Humanity is too valuable. God’s own plan for his human family won’t be altered or overturned.

These passages also teach positive lessons. While the long war against God can be traced back to God’s decision to create imagers, human and divine, who would share his attribute of freedom, God is not the cause of evil.

There is no hint in the Bible that God prodded his imagers to disobey, or that their disobedience was predestined. The fact that God knows the future doesn’t mean it’s predestinated. We know that for certain from passages like , which tells us about the time David saved the walled city of Keilah from the Philistines. After the battle, Saul learned that David was in the city. Saul had been trying to kill David for some time out of paranoid fear that David was going to take his throne. Saul sent an army to Keilah, hoping to trap David within the city walls. When David heard about Saul’s plan, he asked God:

“Will the leaders of Keilah betray me to him? And will Saul actually come as I have heard? O Lord, God of Israel, please tell me.”

And the Lord said, “He will come … Yes, they will betray you.” ( nlt)

David then did what any of us would do—he got out of the city as fast as he could. And that tells us why God’s foreknowledge of events doesn’t mean they are predestined. has God foreknowing two events that never actually took place. That God foreknew there would be divine rebellion and human failure doesn’t mean he made those things happen. Foreknowledge doesn’t require predestination.

We need to view the events of the fall in this light. God knew Adam and Eve would fail. He wasn’t surprised. He knows all things, real and possible. But the fact that God could foresee the entrance of evil and rebellion into his world, on the part of both humans and the divine rebel who seduced humanity to rebel, doesn’t mean he caused it.

We can and should view the evil we experience in our own lives and times in the same way. God foresaw the fall and was ready with a plan to rectify it. He also knew we would be born sinners and fail (a lot—let’s be honest). But he didn’t predestine those failures. When we sin, we need to own our sin. We sin because we choose to. We can’t say God willed it, or that we had no choice because it was predestined.

But God loved us in that “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (). 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.

God also knows—and we know, by experience—that bad things happen to people, even to Christians. Evil is in the world because people (and divine beings) have the freedom to do evil. Our God isn’t a twisted deity who predestines awful things or who needs horrible crimes and sins to happen so some greater plan works out well. God doesn’t need evil, period. His plans will move forward despite it—overcoming it and ultimately judging it.

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 doesn’t make mistakes.

We might also wish that God had never given humans freedom, but where would we be then? In choosing to give us freedom, God also chose not to make us mindless slaves or robots. That’s the alternative to having free will. But since freedom is an attribute we share with God, without it we couldn’t actually be imagers of God. God is no robot. He made us like himself. That wasn’t a mistake either. God loved the idea of humanity too much to make the alternative decision. And so he devised a means to, after evil entered the world, redeem humanity, renew Eden, and wipe away every tear (; ).

Our look at the long war against God is underway. God has a battle strategy. But the situation is going to get worse before he makes his first move.[1]

[1] Heiser, M. S. (2015). Supernatural: What the Bible Teaches about the Unseen World—And Why It Matters. (D. Lambert, Ed.) (pp. 35–45). Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

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