Supernatural Session 20

I wanted to take a moment to share something with you that highlights that fact that what we are study is not just one person, or one books idea. I want to read the following which is an excerpt from the popular women’s ministry . So especially you ladies who follow this ministry know that this is from one of their theologians that is on staff giving information that is well know to scholars. Speaking of , it reads as follows....

“One of the challenging aspects of this passage involves how to interpret "gods." You may wonder why the first instance of "Elohim" is translated as God (Yahweh) but then the second is translated with a lower case "g" gods which creates this question. The first "Elohim" is translated as singular and therefore "God" because the subject is in the singular verbal form (stand). We translate the second as "god" because the preposition in front of it requires more than one (assembly or council).

This has resulted in Biblical Scholarship landing on two primary interpretive options. First, it could be translated as human rulers or judges. In fact, the NIV translates the passage with this assumption adding in the words "mere" and "other" in verse 7 in reference to the "mere mortals" and "other ruler." These additions are not present in the original Hebrew and are added to help reinforce the "human judges/rulers" interpretation.

The second and possibly stronger case for interpretation is to view the "gods" as spiritual beings or the "powers and principalities" referenced in . The Old Testament is rich with examples of a host that surrounds or is involved in God's "assembly" or "council" (; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; , ).

Further, passages like display a courtroom scene where the "gods" are put on trial being proven inept and incapable and therefore God will punish them. () The strongest case for this interpretation is once again found in . A literal reading of the Hebrew makes sense for the punishment of these spiritual beings to experience death like a mortal, something that would not make sense for human judges or rulers because as humans their death would be obvious.”

The Great Reversal

Aside from stories about Jesus in the Gospels—such   as accounts of his birth, death, and Sermon on the Mount—perhaps the most familiar passage in the New Testament is , where the Holy Spirit rushes upon the followers of Jesus at the day of Pentecost. It marks the launch of the fledgling church and the beginning of global evangelism in the name of Jesus.

As familiar as the passage is, there’s a lot more going on in it than most realize. is in fact designed to telegraph the campaign to reverse the post-Babel cosmic geography of the Old Testament, in which the nations other than Israel were under the dominion of lesser gods. What happened at Pentecost was a battle plan for infiltrating all the nations disinherited by God at Babel with the gospel of Jesus—an ancient strategy for spiritual war.

Pentecost

What describes as happening on the day of Pentecost was certainly unusual:

And when the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in the same place. And suddenly a sound like a violent rushing wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. And divided tongues like fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit gave them ability to speak out. Now there were Jews residing in Jerusalem, devout men from every nation under heaven. And when this sound occurred, the crowd gathered and was in confusion, because each one was hearing them speaking in his own language. And they were astounded and astonished, saying, “Behold, are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how do we hear, each one of us, in our own native language?” ( leb)

Some of the things that take us into the supernatural worldview of the Old Testament in that remarkable passage aren’t obvious in the English translation. The “rushing wind” associated with the arrival of the Spirit is a familiar description of the presence of God in the Old Testament (, ; ; ). Fire is also familiar in descriptions of God (; , ; ; ; ; ).

It’s clear from those references that God was present at the event and behind what was going on. His intention was to launch his campaign to take back the nations from the lesser gods he assigned to the nations (; ) but who became his enemies ().

God’s tool for doing that was the words of the disciples—hence the imagery of tongues. God enabled the Jewish followers of Jesus to speak to the rest of the Jews gathered at Pentecost—who lived in all the nations under the dominion of enemy gods. When they heard the gospel and believed, they would go back to their nations and tell others about Jesus.

Pentecost and Babel

The Tower of Babel incident was what gave rise to God’s decision to scatter the nations and put them under the authority of other gods (; ). At first glance there doesn’t seem to be much connection between that event and what happened in . But in the original languages, there are clear connections between the two.

Two key items in connect its events to Babel.

Divided & Confused

First, the flaming tongues are described as “divided,” and second, the crowd, composed of Jews from all the nations, are said to have been “confused.” In English, that may not seem particularly convincing. Luke is writing in Greek, and the Greek words he used here translated as “divided” and “confusion” come from and , both of which describe the division of the languages and nations at Babel and the resulting confusion.

Luke, the author of Acts, was a Gentile. He could only read Greek. Consequently, he was using the Greek translation of the Old Testament known widely then (and still today) as the Septuagint. It was the Old Testament of the early church, since few people could read Hebrew. Luke was thinking of the Babel event when he wrote .

But why make the connection? Think about what happened at Pentecost. The Spirit came as God so often had come in the Old Testament, with rushing wind and fire. The confusion of having multiple languages (which was a result of Babel) was removed when the flaming tongues enabled the disciples to speak in the languages of the Jews from all across the world gathered in Jerusalem for the celebration. Three thousand of them believed the message about Jesus ().

Those new believers who embraced Jesus as messiah would carry that message back to their home countries‌—the nations scattered at Babel. Back in , God had turned his back on the nations of humanity and, right afterward, in , called Abraham to establish God’s new people and nation. He was now going to gather people from all those nations he had rejected and bring them back into his believing family alongside Jewish believers descended from Abraham. In time, God’s kingdom would overspread the kingdoms of the enemy gods.

The incredible part of all this is the list of nations in and the order they are presented. If you looked them up on a map, you would move from the east, where the Jews had been exiled at the end of the Old Testament in Babylon and Persia, westward to the farthest point known at the time. They cover the same distance and scope as the nations listed in —the ones put under the lesser gods.

We Wrestle Not against Flesh and Blood

Most of the book of Acts is about Paul’s missionary journeys. Paul was the apostle to the Gentiles—the person initially sent by God to start churches in the nations outside Israel. Paul’s journeys and life circumstances, such as his arrest by the Romans, took him ever westward.

In his New Testament letters, Paul often talked about the spiritual forces opposing his ministry and the spread of the gospel. His vocabulary for the evil entities whose domains he violated in the wake of Pentecost shows that he understood the Old Testament’s cosmic geography. Do you notice a common thread running through Paul’s terminology (drawn from the ESV) for the unseen forces of darkness?

• rulers/principalities (; ; )

• authorities (; ; ; ; )

• powers (; )

• dominions ()

• lords (; )

• thrones ()

All of these words denote geographical rulership. In fact, these same terms are used in the New Testament and other Greek literature of human political power holders. Paul’s language is that of domain authority. It reflects how the Old Testament depicts the spiritual world’s relationship to the human world: the nations set aside by God are under the dominion of spiritual beings hostile to him and his people.

“I Will Go to Spain”

The book of Acts ends with Paul journeying to Rome. Paul was a prisoner, and he was going to Rome for two reasons: to appeal to Caesar and to spread the gospel. But Paul knew that to reclaim the nations under the hostile gods, he had to get to the end of the known world at the time. In Old Testament times, that place had been called Tarshish. In Paul’s day, it was called Spain. Paul had to get to Spain to complete his mission. His words to the Romans before his imprisonment tell us he fully intended to go to Spain—to the westward end of the earth in his day—to reclaim every nation for Jesus:

I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a while.… When therefore I have completed this and have delivered to them what has been collected, I will leave for Spain by way of you. (, )

Paul was motivated by the realization that God’s plan to restore his kingdom had been launched in his own lifetime. He believed that when “the fullness of the Gentiles has come in” then “all Israel will be saved” (). He thought he was to finish what Pentecost had begun.

Why This Matters

Paul had a supernatural perspective on his own life. He viewed himself as an instrument of God. And he was. But so were all the other unnamed new believers who, after Pentecost, went before him from Jerusalem to infiltrate demonic strongholds where they lived.

And so are we.

If we are instruments of God in the same way Paul was an instrument of God, then why was he so much more influential and effective? One difference is that Paul understood what his life was about. He believed the powers that had dominion over the earth were real—and that the power behind and within him was greater.

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

Paul didn’t know how big the world really was. He didn’t know about North America, South America, China, India, Norway, Australia, Iceland, and many other places. God did. God knew the task of spreading the gospel to all the world would ultimately be much greater than Paul could comprehend. God knew others would have to follow Paul’s goal for himself if the gospel was to reach every part of the earth. If we’re not actively trying to complete the task, we aren’t doing what we’re here on earth to do. If we want God only so he will come to us to meet our needs, then we’re more like the people at Babel than we are like Jesus, the Twelve, and Paul.

Another implication of the passages of Scripture we’ve examined is that the notion of demonic strongholds is biblical. We aren’t given a full description of demonic zones or turf boundaries, or even a spiritual pecking order for the dark side. We are told, however, that the unseen powers see earth as their domain. We’re told those powers resist God’s kingdom and don’t want people to become part of God’s plan to spread his good rule everywhere. That means we should expect resistance we can’t explain with logic or empirical evidence and we can’t defeat it on our own. God has given us his Spirit and unseen agents of his own to help us further his mission (; ; ; ).

The real question to ask ourselves is this: What would our lives be like if we woke up each day with a view of the world and its supernatural influences that matched Paul’s? What if, each day, our lives were organized around our knowledge of our status as part of God’s family, tasked with delivering siblings from darkness? What if we lived intentionally, knowing that each decision we make and each word we speak isn’t randomly purposeless? What if, instead, we believed unseen intelligences all around us use our decisions, our actions, our words to influence other people—for good or evil—whether or not we see or know them? Our jobs, our income, our talents, even our problems are of no consequence when it comes to knowing who we really are, and will be, and why we’re here. We cannot see the supernatural world—nor can we see the microscopic world—but we’re inextricably part of both.

Early believers thought this way. As we’ll see in the next chapter, they believed the world around them was enslaved to darkness that would one day yield. Despite the fact that the battle was literally them against the hostile world and its powers, they quietly produced the global thing we call Christianity, with God and his unseen agents working with them. They believed the spiritual conflict was real and that, ultimately, they couldn’t lose. We’re living proof that they didn’t.[1]

[1] Heiser, M. S. (2015). Supernatural: What the Bible Teaches about the Unseen World—And Why It Matters. (D. Lambert, Ed.) (pp. 127–135). Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.