Show Notes
Are demons simply fallen angels? Almost everyone assumes so. In this episode of Between Two Realms, Pastor Andre takes the words we use loosely in ordinary Christian conversation, angel, demon, Elohim, and tightens them, and finds the Bible telling a stranger story than the one most of us inherited.
Angel names a job rather than a species. In Greek and in Hebrew the word means messenger: it describes what these beings do, not what they are. But scripture does not restrict the word to that narrow sense either. It also uses it as an umbrella covering a whole range of supernatural beings, some loyal to God and some in open rebellion, which is why Revelation 12 can put angels on both sides of the same war. And if that war is a war of messages, then it is a war about truth. Who do you believe? What do you believe?
From there the argument turns to the fall itself, and to the claim that gives the episode its shape: their corruption happened in stages. Revelation 12 seems to cast Satan down not once but twice within a single chapter, and Genesis 6, probably the most argued over passage in the whole Old Testament and the one sermons so often step around, reads as a distinct second rebellion. Taken the way ancient Jewish and early Christian readers took it, with the sons of God as spiritual beings and the Nephilim as the consequence, it gives the Old Testament a demonology of its own, and it changes what the Bible is doing when it touches the myths of the ancient world. It neither accepts the narrative of the ancient world at large nor rejects it. It comments on it. You all know about the flood. Here is what the flood was really about.
It ends where this channel began. You do not look over the natural world, or above it, or around it. You look through it to the supernatural world, and you do not let the modernist paradigm quietly demythologise your reading of scripture.
CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open: it's a war about truth 00:27 Title sequence 00:38 What has gone wrong with the world 02:40 Angel names a job, not a species 05:20 Revelation 12: a war of messengers 08:26 Not one fall, but several 12:36 Genesis 6 and the reading the church lost 19:52 Enoch, Jude and the flood traditions 29:02 What the Bible does with myth 32:08 Are there demons in the Old Testament? 41:58 Heaven itself is contested
REFERENCED ALONG THE WAY - Michael Heiser on angel as a term of function, on corruption in stages, and on the three categories of Old Testament spirits - The ancient Jewish and early Christian reading of the sons of God, and the later turn in Christian tradition that set it aside - 1 Enoch and the Book of the Watchers, and the flood and origin traditions of the ancient Near East, including Gilgamesh - Scripture: Genesis 3, Genesis 6, Leviticus 16, Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28, 2 Peter 2, Jude 6 to 7, Ephesians 1, 2, 3 and 6, Revelation 12
Next time we descend into Sheol.
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More from Between Two Realms
Is our world too small for the supernatural worldview the Bible gives? Pastor Andre asks whether one of the problems facing Christians is that our world has simply become too small: just not big enough to handle everything that the Bible talks about. We confess an invisible world, God, angels, demons, heaven, resurrection, the incarnation, spiritual warfare. But how much does that actually shape the way that we really imagine reality?
What does the persecuted church count as supernatural? Pastor Andre is joined by the show's first guest, his friend Dan, who has spent the last seven years working with the persecuted church, to test a common belief: that if God is still acting supernaturally in the world, he is doing it on the front lines. Dan's answer is yes, but it's a bit more nuanced than that. Christians under pressure see more of God, he suggests, and a lot of it is probably to do with our hunger, with whether we are looking for it, and with the things that get in the way.In this conversation Andre and Dan ask what we reach for when we say supernatural. We go big, they agree, and Andre suggests we gravitate towards whatever makes life easier now: healing, money, our best life now. Dan's biggest learning from spending time with persecuted Christians is their heavenly perspective: it's going to be okay, one day I'm going to be with Jesus. He remembers a North Korean Christian who told him, you don't realise Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have, and he passes on the story of a pastor who was told to convert or die and would not, whose family were absolutely devastated and yet pleased that his faith was still intact till the end. For Andre, the fact that someone is able to endure to the end is a profoundly supernatural thing, not a natural ability, and that is as true for Christians here as it is there. Christians can feel disenchanted with their faith, he says, because they fail to see the extraordinary work of God in the ordinary moments. Dan has a name for it: the everyday supernatural.Along the way: a pastor held at gunpoint who shared the gospel with his captors, and who says he has never found God to let him down; Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and the fourth man in the fire; Andre's own conversion, when it was as if God grabbed him by the scruff of the neck; his warning that the great temptation for Christians in the West is to hear stories like these and begin to target Muslims as the enemy, when Paul says our struggle is not against flesh and blood; evangelists whose attackers heard what could only be described as the sound of heaven, dropped their weapons and ran; and Dan's challenge that the persecuted church's experience is far more consistent with the New Testament than ours. God moving in miraculous ways is the norm, he puts it to Andre. We're just out of step with it.The conversation ends on forgiveness. Dan tells of a friend who prayed the Lord's Prayer whilst being attacked and forgave the people attacking him in the moment. Andre is careful to say that this is not about telling a victim they must forgive or else; these are people convinced that to be a Christian in this world is to be an agent of love. He recalls C.S. Lewis on miracles, doing quickly what the Father does slowly: forgiveness that happensinstantly is miraculous, and no less miraculous for being slow. Where the supernatural and the natural meet, Dan says, is loving our enemies.REFERENCED ALONG THE WAY- Open Doors: the list of the 50 hardest places to follow Jesus, cited by Dan- C.S. Lewis on miracles, as Andre recalls him- Scripture: Colossians (Paul's prayer for strength to endure), Daniel 3 (Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and the fourth man in the fire, the story named on air), Ephesians 6:12 (quoted), Ephesians 2, the Lord's Prayer, Matthew 5 (quoted: love and pray for those who persecute you)This conversation includes accounts of violence against Christians. Names and places in these stories are left out of these notes for the safety of the people in them.Website: https://between-two-realms.pages.dev/Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@Between-Two-Realms?sub_confirmation=1#persecutedchurch #forgiveness #supernatural #christianliving #christianpodcast
Heavenly minded, or no earthly good? Pastor Andre takes the old jibe, so heavenly-minded that they're no earthly good, and turns it round. He has never met a Christian like that, and the Bible seems to direct our thinking in exactly the opposite direction: if you want to be some good in this world, you've got to be heavenly minded. The church's real problem, he suggests, is that we're not heavenly minded enough, because when heaven stops being real, heavenly mindedness starts to look like escapism.
The atonement reaches both realms. Because our world's corruption is both visible and invisible, Andre argues, the salvation we need concerns both, and Christ has come not only to deal with material things but also with the immaterial: not only with matter, but also with spirit. In his view, Christus Victor is what Jesus came to do, and penal substitutionary atonement is how he has done it.In this episode Pastor Andre treats the atoning work of Christ as one diamond seen through its different facets, and warns against playing the models of atonement off against each other. From 1 John 3:8, he came in the flesh to destroy the works of the devil, he traces the Genesis 3:15 promise of one who would crush the serpent's head through the promise to Abraham in Genesis 12, and through Adam, Israel, David and Solomon, sons of God who all failed, to Jesus, the true Adam, the true Israel and the true king, who meets Satan in the wilderness, resists him and binds the strong man. In Mark 5 an entire legion of demons kneels in terror before him, and Andre reads the drowning pigs not as mercy to the demons but as sending them back to the abyss.Along the way: why the decisive turning point comes not in the wilderness but through Jesus' death and resurrection, where the tables were turned and Satan, the accuser of the brethren, no longer has any legal basis for accusation; how the two models of atonement come together; the harrowing of Hades, Matthew 27 and the keys of death and Hades in Revelation 1, and why, as Andre puts it, Christians are never described as being dead: we go up, not down; Ephesians 4:9 and the descent to the dead in the Apostles' Creed;the church as a sacramental icon of the kingdom, an outpost behind enemy lines and God's own temple, with Christ in the midst of his people; why churches are extraordinary, even though lots of people get hurt in them; the Great Commission and the Lord's prayer; and Babel, Deuteronomy 32, Psalm 82and Daniel 10, the cosmic geography Andre sees looming in the background of the Great Commission, which makes the local church the front line of the warfare. We needed a champion to come and defeat Satan so that we could beset free, and that warfare continues today through the church's mission.REFERENCED ALONG THE WAY- John Chrysostom on Colossians 2: there death received his wound, having met his death stroke from a dead body- Leon Morris's commentary on Matthew: Jesus as the Lord of both the living and the dead- Hilary of Poitiers on the opened graves of Matthew 27- Meredith Kline on Babel as an anti-God scheme, satanically conceived- Michael Heiser on the allocation of the nations according to the number of the sons of God in Deuteronomy 32- The Apostles' Creed: he descended to the dead- Scripture: Genesis 3:15, Genesis 9, Genesis 11:4, Genesis 12, Deuteronomy 4:19 to 20, Deuteronomy 32:8 to 9, Psalm 82, Daniel 10, Matthew 27, Mark 3, Mark 5, John 15, Acts 2, Romans 5, 1 Corinthians 3 and 6, 2 Corinthians 4, Ephesians 3, Ephesians 4:9, Philippians 2, Colossians 2, 1 Peter 2, 1 Peter 3, 1 John 3:8, Revelation 1, Revelation 2 and 3, Revelation 19, Revelation 21This episode picks up where the series left off, after the episodes on the supernatural in creation and in the fall, with a pointer of hope to the coming of Christ.Website: https://between-two-realms.pages.dev/Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@Between-Two-Realms?sub_confirmation=1#atonement #christusvictor #unseenrealm #biblicaltheology #christianpodcast
If Satan falls, where is he now? The Old Testament's most common word for the afterlife is Sheol, and Sheol is not simply hell. Everybody in the Old Testament goes there, righteous and wicked alike, and not everyone who goes down experiences the same thing. It is the realm the serpent was cast down to in Genesis 3:14, and it overlaps our world like a fog. In this episode Pastor Andre goes back to the curse on the serpent in Genesis 3:14, you will eat dust all the days of your life, and asks the question the language of humiliation does not answer: if Satan is a spirit, where does he dwell? Following Michael Heiser's reading of the curse through Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, the serpent is cast down to the Eretz, the ground, a Hebrew word whose range overlaps hugely with Sheol. The one who wanted to be most high is made most low, and for the first time in the biblical story his domain is created and given a name. Sheol is below the ground and part of the realm of the dust, yet it is not part of the visible material world, because the way the Bible teaches us truths about the invisible realities we cannot see is by showing them to us through visible realities we can see. Along the way: Augustine's picture of Sheol as a foggy atmosphere around our world, so that we are in some sense walking through the fog of Sheol, of Hades and of hell; how Hebrew Sheol became Greek Hades, Latin infernus and our word hell, and how the lake of fire got muddled in with it; Saul and the medium of Endor in 1 Samuel 28, and why she is terrified: not because a trick unexpectedly worked, but because seeing Samuel reveals that the man in front of her is Saul, the king who ordered mediums executed; why the law against consulting the dead exists because the danger is real, not because it is not; Genesis 6, Genesis 19 and Aquinas on angels who assume human form, with Meredith Kline's demonically driven kings as another option on the table; Hans Boersma's sacramental ontology and Kline's earthly ectype and heavenly archetype, mountain to mountain and earth to Sheol; Azazel, Lilith and the gates of hell at Mount Hermon; and Luke 16, where the fixed chasm sits between regions within Sheol, not between the living and the dead. And finally, from Ephesians 1:10, Colossians 1:20 and Romans 8:20, why God's redemptive intention was never limited to people alone or to the visible realm alone: the kingdom of God is actively reclaiming ground, not only people but territory temporarily ceded to the kingdom of darkness, though not everyone and everything will ultimately share in that renewed creation.