From Fairy Tales to Reality

Intro

Im Ryan and this is my first time preaching. My messages are going to be more technical, more factual, they are going to get into some things that you may have never heard before.

Talk about schooling.

My Journey (keep this or change journey?) started when I was a sophomore in college when they asked the question, if Heaven is perfect, then where did Satans desire for evil first come from? (Tell that story.) And that led to other questions like what was satan doing in the garden of Eden to begin with?!

Asked pastor at the time and he tried to talk about it on Sunday morning for a sermon, but he Ultimately came to the conclusion… we will never know…

But that was not okay with me.

That brought me on a journey that eventually led to me wanting to become a pastor. To teach people about the hard questions, and the weird parts of the Bible.

After years of studying, I finally figured out the answer to that question… last year… 4 years later when I started taking theology classes for Seminary.

I realized I had the wrong definition of satan, the wrong definition of heaven, a false understanding of the rebellions in the Bible, a false idea of what the garden of Eden was… and so much more.

All of these beliefs came from things I was taught in church growing up. Things church tradition teaches, but are foreign to the Bible. And that… That is the stuff I want to teach people about.

So let’s get started.

Do you really believe what the Bible says?

To some, that may seem like an odd question to ask, especially in Church from the pulpit on Sunday morning. 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 who came to earth,

Or that Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead.

I’m not even talking about 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 person 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, in 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? Is that what the Bible is asking me to believe?

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 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.

As a Bible Student, 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.

So, we are going to talk about some things that I think a lot of you haven’t heard before. I want you to remove any filters you have, and open up your mind to new possibilities and new understanding.

We are going to take the Bible for what it says. We are not gonna change anything. If it says a word, then we are going to stick with that word and we’re gonna dig and we are gonna find out what that word means. We are not going to try to change it to align with an agenda, filter, worldview, denomination, or our culture.

We're gonna look at what the authors of the Bible really said and really meant by what they said. They had some understandings about things that have been lost over the years and over the generations.

And we're gonna look at this terminology that the authors of the Bible use and we're going to keep it the same.

You ready?

Lets start with some questions:

Is there a realm beyond our own that we cannot see?

Who is in that realm?

Does that unseen realm ever interact with our own realm?

What are angels? Do they still exist?

What are demons? do they still exist? Where do they come from?

Let's look at this passage in 1st Samuel 17:4 - then a champion came from God named Goliath who was from Gath came out from the Philistine camp and it was 9 foot 9 in height.

5 and he wore a bronze helmet and bronze coat of mail, and it weighed 125 pounds.

(Changed it into our measurements)

6 so this guy was a big brute he had armor that was bronze on his legs and a bronze javelin

was slung between his shoulders.

Now if you guys have been following Christ for a period of time, I encourage you to read these stories again- like in a new way. A fresh way. One without any filters applied.

Even if you've been following the Lord for a long time, I just want you to pay close attention to these stories again.

7 the spears head weighed 15 pounds.

So this guy was huge. Who is this guy? Or a better question would be, what is this guy?

Were there really giants?

Well that is a question we are going to have to ask ourselves as we get into the Old Testament because it comes up a lot.

And what does that have to do with today? How does that affect my life?

Well it affects our lives more than most people know, and hopefully ill be able to answer that for you.

Let's look a little bit more at this giant thing.

Numbers chapter 13

this is when the when the children of Israel were coming

into the Promised Land and they were opposed.

If you read the story in numbers you'll find out that they had tremendous resistance.

God promised them the land but there's tremendous resistance.

and part of the resistance was from a certain type of individuals called the sons of Anak.

13:22, They went up from the south and came to Hebron.. the descendants of Anak were there.

Who are the descendants of Anak?

I think when most people come across a big list of names or genealogies in their Bible, they typically look aver it. But that not being very good Bible student now is it.

Well Moses points out in Numbers 13:33 that the Sons of Anak were very unique… creatures..

Numbers 13:33 - And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”

Who are the Nephilim?

Verse 32-33

So they brought to the people of Israel a bad report of the land that they had spied out, saying, “The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height. 33 And there we saw the (Giants) Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”

So the Nephilim were giants.

Now this might be a challenge for some of you, but what I’m asking you to do today is believe the Bible for awhile. If it says that there were giants, then there were really giants.

Lets look at the New Testament.

Lets look at Jude 1:6— Jude’s bein weird there.

It says, “And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling—these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day.”

If you think that’s weird.. Peter is about to get weirder…

Lets look at Peter 2:4

For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to Tartarus, putting them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment.

That’s pretty weird too.

And the last question here…

What in the world is Moses talking about in Genesis 6? The first few verses are just absolutely bizarre.

Genesis 6:1-2

“When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose.”

What are angels? What are giants? What are sons of God? What are Nephilim? What are the descendants of Anak? Where is this place called Tartarus?..

WHAT IN THE HECK IS GOING ON???

So I really hope I can clear a lot of this up. It will take more than one message, but hopefully I can shed some light on this stuff.

Before we can understand what is happening, we have to have a foundational understanding of a few things.

So first let’s define some things so that we are all on the same page.

Supernatural

God is supernatural, He exists supernaturally God lives in another realm Something beyond our natural realm Something we don’t experience in the natural God created supernatural realm and the natural realm God chooses to live in the Supernatural realm and direct His operations from there God is not limited to the supernatural, he can interact with the natural however he wishes

We also have to understand that Ancient writers of the Bible had a different worldview than we do today. So when we read the Bible, we have to be in the mindset of an ancient person, or an ancient Israelite, or a first century Jew. If we do not do this when we read the Bible then we are reading scripture out of context.

For example.. if we had a small group Bible study and we had one of those ancient people there who wasn't modern at all, and we went around the room trying to figure out what a passage means to you, when you got to that person their answer is gonna be dramatically different than anything else you've ever heard before. and that's because they're ancient and we're modern. They have a different worldview and understanding about how the world works. So when we read the Bible, we need to be in the mind of the ancient writers.

These ancient people had a lot more interaction with the supernatural realm than we do today. People like Moses, Peter, Matthew, John, and all ancient people.. believed that there were other entities in the supernatural realm that were completely other than what we know in our natural realm.

So many people blow these things off and think these other gods talked about in the Bible are imaginary or man made, but the people that wrote the Bible believed these things and these gods were real!

*change wording* The worldview of the ancient writers was… just like there are people with different personalities, there is also in the supernatural realm creations of God with personalities.

God was not the only being in the supernatural realm, God creates multitudes of supernatural beings that at many times interacted with our modern realm. It is a very common occurrence in the Bible to see something in the supernatural realm interact with the natural realm.

So who are some of these supernatural beings?

Angels

So everyone has heard about angles. But much of what people think they know is only rooted in tradition, and not in the Bible. Angels don’t have wings, they don’t have halos, we do not become angels when we die…

Angels participate in God’s rule. In the original languages of the Bible, the terms translated angel in the Old and New Testaments actually mean messenger. The word angel is basically a job description. Angels deliver messages to people.

They deliver messages to people in many different ways. They can do a whole lot more than bring someone a letter. They are extremely strong, and extremely fast.

One Example is in 2 Kings 19.

700 years before Christ, the greatest world power to date Assyria attacked a small town, Jerusalem, and put it under siege. That night Hezekiah prayed, and one angel came and slaughtered 185,000 of the strongest soldiers on the face of the Earth. One Angel. And that sent a message.

Lets look at Hebrews 1:7

In speaking of the angels he says, “He makes his angels spirits, and his servants flames of fire.”

Hebrews 1:14 - “Are not all angels ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation?”

So Angels are spirit beings. They can interact with our natural realm to serve the purposes of God.

So what are angels? Their servants. God has created them to serve Him and to serve us.

In out natural realm Angels can look just like people. Some of you have probably had an encounter with angels without knowing it.

Hebrews 13:2 says “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.”

Sometimes I think my wife is an angel…..

Lets look at some more examples in scripture.

Matthew 4:11. This talks about Jesus in the wilderness. And after that time of testing and fasting it says,

“Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him.”

So the wilderness depleted Him so much that angels came and attended to Him.

So Angels serve Jesus. Jesus is superior to every angel. You know why? Because Jesus was never created, and every angel was created. They are created beings/created spirits. And they came to serve Jesus, not the other way around.

We are not to develop relationships with angels, we are to develop relationships with Jesus. And that is really important as we go on because forming relationships with other spirit beings is an issue that is brought up many times throughout the Bible.

Matthew 24:36 “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

Let’s focus on the word “knows”. This implies angels are intelligent beings. If they don’t know something that means they do know other things.

If I had to define an angel it would be this: Angles are divine spiritual beings, created with supernatural strength and speed and sent by God into service on divine mission to care for believers as they inherit salvation.

So I said in that definition that angels are divine spiritual beings, let me define that further.

What is a divine being? A divine being is a being that was created by God. They have an origin. They are divine in the sense that they have characteristics of God himself.

**reword Maria help me** In the Old Testament, the Bible calls spiritual beings elohim. Elohim is a word that can represent any spiritual being. Just like the word “human” can represent any one of us, elohim is the spirit version of that.

God is a Spirit, and those that worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and in Truth.

So God is a spirit.

God is an elohim… but no other elohim is God.

These angles that are in this Unseen realm are also spirits (elohim). So in this sense we can call them divine beings. Divine beings are not human beings. They are spirits, they don’t have physical bodies, they are created by God.

Unfortunately throughout the centuries and eons, many people groups have mistaken angles as God.

And they called them gods….

In ancient times when people would have an experience with these beings, these elohim, that were so supernaturally strong and fast and unearthly…humankind has thought these angles or gods (little g) were the one true God.

That is a concept that we really need to get in our minds.

???? Add this or no????*** So many people read verses about having other gods before Yahweh, or worshipping idols, or worshipping other gods, and for some reason people say tv, phones, instagram, TikTok are gods and idols to us today. But that is not at all what these verses are talking about. Any time you read “idol” or “gods” in scripture it is referring to the worship of elohim, or angels (if you wanna call them that) that people worshipped as if they were the one true God, Yahweh.

Anyways…. elohim are beings that come from God, and are created by God that share many of His attributes and characteristics.

But I want you to understand that these Elohim are absolutely incomparable to the one true God that we worship.

————————————***** reword

Angelic Rankings: need to reword and rearrange this section.

As you read scripture there seems to be rankings of divine beings.

Hierarchy is sometimes difficult for us to discern in the Old Testament, since we aren’t used to viewing the unseen world like a dynastic household (more on that following), as an Israelite would have processed certain terms used to describe the hierarchy.

When the Old Testament talks about spiritual beings, it often uses words like: council, assembly, court, princes, and words describing a royal hierarchy or structure. This means that there is a hierarchy of spiritual beings / a hierarchy of elohim.

I am only gonna talk about three levels here because it is what I want to focus on. Angels, Archangels, and sons of God.

In the ancient Hebrew world, sons of God (Hebrew: beney elohim) is a phrase used to identify divine beings with higher-level responsibilities and jurisdictions. The term angel (Hebrew: malʾak) describes an important but still lesser task: delivering messages. And Archangel, which means Chief Angel.

So the unseen world has a hierarchy, something reflected in such terms as archangel versus angel.

We just talked about angels, which of these three is the lowest level. Which just means they have less responsibility and jurisdiction.

The second level is Archangels.

————————————****** end of reword section

Occasionally we see archangels in action in scripture.

Paul writes to the Thessalonians in These 4:16 and says “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.”

One Archangel is actually named in Jude. Jude refers to Michael the Archangel. He is the only one that is ever named.

But this shows to you that there is a hierarchy involved in the Unseen realm, according to the writers of the Old Testament… Well.. and the New Testament…

Gabriel is often considered an archangel.. but he is actually never called that in scripture. So it is conjecture and most scholars believe that he is an archangel.

Now the highest level, on top of the archangels are the sons go God.

The sons of God are the highest rank of divine beings.

Before we understand the sons of God, we need to understand something that is very important in the contest of these rankings.

And that is the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament.

There is one angel that is distinct and unique from all other angels. In the Old Testament He is called the Angel of the Lord.

He appears a couple of times in scripture, and the way He is described sets Him apart from any other Angel. One of the things that sets Him apart is that He is allowed to receive worship. No other angel is supposed to be worshipped, but the Angel of the Lord is.

So what does that signify, that the angel of the Lord is allowed to receive worship?

It signifies it’s Jesus. Pre-incarnate Jesus.

Before Jesus came to Earth and became man, this member of the God-head manifested Himself in the Old Testament as the Angel of the Lord.

When someone saw the Angel of the Lord, they were seeing a pre-incarnate Christ - the second member of the God-head.

The Angel of the Lord first appears to Hagar in Genesis 16. Hagar was having a really hard time, she’s been ostertchsized and it says “The angel added, “I will increase your offspring so much that they will be too numerous to count.”” Gen. 16:10.

So this Angel said He Himself would multiply the descendants of Hagar. This Angel of the Lord was God doing that.

Then Hagar said, “You are the God who sees me,”(in verse 16:13.) She said that to the Angel of the Lord, so again this Angel is completely different.

Another time we see the Angel of the Lord is in Genesis 18 when He appeared to Abraham at Mamre. It says “Now the Lord appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, while he was sitting at the tent door in the heat of the day. (Gen 18:1)

The Lord is not communicating through an Angel, but the Angel is god Himself.

Moses at the burning bush is another example of this. The Angel of the Lord appeared Moses from within the Burning bush and spoke to Him.

(Exodus 3:2-4)

There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.” When the LORD saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!” And Moses said, “Here I am.”

Now we shouldn’t be surprised at these rankings. We see it everywhere, we see it in this Earth in this realm. We see it in the military we see it in business, we see rankings everywhere.

In the New Testament we also see rankings. Paul wrote to the Ephesians in Ephesians 6:12 “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

What are rulers… what are authorities… what are cosmic powers…. What are spiritual forces of evil…

See the majority of educated scholars see rankings in this verse.

These are rankings of darkness. Where did that come from? Well God originally established rankings… but they rebelled.

I’m getting ahead of myself… lets go back to rankings of created divine beings…

So there’s messenger angels, there’s archangels, and then there’s sons of God.

The highest rank of divine beings are called the sons of God.

Lets look at Psalm 8 and take a look at what David began to see. David was a king of Israel, but he was also a prophet of God.

Psalm 8:3-6

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet:

So David was conscious of the supernatural and all this stuff and he’s just in awe like… “what is man?! That you are mindful of them?!”

You and I can’t do what these spiritual beings can do. We don’t have the strength, we don’t have the speed, we don’t have the connection… but there is something special about man. It says “You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor.”

There is something special about us the angels don’t have. And that is the image of God.

You are created as an imager of God. Everything that you think, say, and do as God designs it is to image God.

You reflect His presence from the inside… You speak His word from your heart. It’s all about imaging. That is what God’s original intent was in creating humanity… was to be imagers of Him and His will and His plan.

So the sons of God…

Lets take a look at the oldest book in the Bible… Job

There’s some insight in job that other books don’t have. You know Job had this interaction with God, He lived for God. He was a tremendous person…. And then literally… all hell broke loose against him. And you can read the story, we are not gonna get into that whole thing right now because there’s too much there…

But we are gonna look at Job chapter 38. Job Comes to this place where he is in so much pain and torment. And he is not exactly sure how to process all of this. And he’s processing it in the same way that probably you or I would process it too… Just questioning God… and we’re just sayin “why is this going on? Ive done this and this and this and it just seems like it hasn’t panned out and my life is terrible… and where are you God?!”

Job is going through that, and he begins to question God… and then God has something to say back to Him… We see God’s response in 38:3-the rest of it.

And I think He was gentle. I think God was okay with it.. He can take our questions…

But it got to the point where He said “Job sit down… Ive got something to say… This is your father speaking…”

So God sits down Job and says” Brace yourself like a man!!; I will question you, and you shall answer me.”

Almost kind of taunting him saying “You’ve had a lot to say… not listen to me…”

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.”

So God is like “Tell me! Since you know so much”….(Kinda sassy)

He says “who foxed it’s measurements? Surely you know!

Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were the Earths foundations laid? Or Whose it’s core in place???”

“Job? Come on… Talk to me!”…..

Verse 7 “while the morning stars sang together”… we know from other scriptures that the morning stars were angelic beings. I don’t have time to get into that but you can look it up.

(Verse 7 continued) While the morning starts sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy?

And we know that the sons of God are angelic beings.

These creations in the Heavenlies were with God when He created everything… and job where were you?

In closing

I want to talk about a Hebrew word again in more detail. Now if you were familiar with this word before I talked about it earlier, I want you to suspend all your previous understanding for a minute.

34 min

Prayer

Heavenly Father I want to thank you. I just pray for us that we will have an open mind and open heart so that the things you want to show us we can gain an understanding of. We thank you for everything you have created in this realm and the realm that you are operating from. And help us to cooperate more with your direction and your operations.