You know, why does Paul
not use the word demon hardly ever?
But instead, he uses
principalities, powers,
rulers, thrones, dominions.
He uses all these geographical rulership terms.
Why does he do that?
You have... I approach...
This is gonna sound really, really odd but
I approached the biblical story the way the Bible does
As opposed to, again, you know, church tradition.
If you ask the average Christian,
You know, why is the world such a mess?
How did this go wrong?
What about cosmic evil?"
And the answer you're gonna get is,
oh, that's the fall!
That’s the fall, you dunderhead,
you know, haven't you read your Bible?
Well, yeah, I know it's the fall.
But if you ask the same question to an Israelite,
who had a Bible,
and a Second Temple period,
intertestamental period Jew,
that's not the answer you would get.
The answer is not the fall.
The answer is, well, there's actually three reasons
why the world just went haywire.
And why we have all this depravity,
why we have you know, supernatural entities
that are hostile to their Creator.
There's actually three reasons.
The first one is the fall.
Let's think about what the fall does.
The Fall gives us a death problem.
Okay, there is no more Eden.
Humans have lost immortality.
They are estranged from their Father and their Creator.
From this point forward, everything dies.
Everything has the same destiny.
You know, everything is going to wind up in the lap
of the original rebel.
Again, the Serpent, the Satan figure.
Everything is going to die.
And so in one sense
he is now the master and owner of everything.
He is, as the New Testament will call him later
'the god of this world.'
Why?
It's not because he's bigger and better than the true God.
It's because everything dies.
He owns it.
But then you have another rebellion.
You have the sons of God of Genesis 6.
And we've been taught since the 4th century AD
that there's nothing supernatural going on here.
So let's ignore that
even though all of the ancients took it the same way.
That is, you know, the sons of God we're
we're divine beings.
They come down.
Yes, you know that you have this cohabitation language
with women. They produce the Nephilim,
you know and you know, which become lethal enemies
to the Israelites, you know,
we get all that strange stuff.
But the real impact in Jewish thought
of this is that what happens here
leads to the proliferation and acceleration
of death and destruction through depravity.
We can we can unpack that a little bit later,
but that's that is why there's such a concern.
Then there's a third rebellion what happens at Babel.
Okay. I wasn't... I was a PhD student
before I saw this verse, believe it or not,
and I had read it dozens of times,
but I never saw it.
Because in PhD programs,
they don't let you read English Bibles for one thing,
you know, you have to read primary texts.
And we can read through Genesis 1 to Genesis 11,
and ask, well, where are the demons?
Like, where are the fallen gods?
You know, where's all this bad stuff?
And you're not going to see it.
If you go to Deuteronomy 32:8-9 you'll see it.
It says "when the Most High divided up the nations,
he divided them up, you know, fixed their boundaries,
he divided them up
according to the number of the sons of God."
And this is what the Dead Sea Scrolls read
in Deuteronomy 32:8.
A lot of your English translations will not have this.
They'll have "sons of Israel,"
"he numbered according to the sons of Israel."
Well that that's a head scratcher
because Israel didn't exist yet.
Israel's only is going to be birthed
after Babel
in response to… you know, God judges humanity.
He divorces himself for them.
He assigns the nations to
to lesser members of the heavenly host,
you know, who could become corrupt eventually.
And we find that out from Psalm 82
because that's why they're being judged
in Psalm 82.
The text actually means what it says;
God is judging the other gods.
Well, where'd we get them?
We got them at Deuteronomy 32,
that the sons of God who were appointed, allotted.
Deuteronomy 4 uses that language.
Deuteronomy 29 uses that language of them.
They are allotted to the nations,
the nations are allotted to them.
This is a punishment.
God still wants them ruled justly,
because they're imagers.
He's still interested in them
because he makes a covenant with Israel,
with Abraham to create Israel
right after Babel.
And in that covenant,
he promises that the nations will be blessed
through the, you know, the offspring of Abraham.
So he's still interested.
He wants them ruled justly,
but that's not what happens.
These entities sow chaos.
People listening to the broadcast.
Have you ever wondered
why when you're reading through Genesis 1 through 11
everybody knows who the true God is
and they are sort of relating to him
and he's relating to them
and then Babel happens and
and now we've got Abraham
and if we look at Abraham's genealogy
and then we have Terah,
and Abraham's brothers later
at the end of the book of Joshua,
they're idolaters!
Like, how did that happen?
Where did idolatry come from?
It just pops into this...
No, it comes from this event.
This is the origin of where we get these other gods
and how everything just goes haywire.
So if this is your supernatural worldview,
it explains a lot of passages in the Bible
about Israel being Yahweh's domain,
and everything else being under the dominion
of something else that hates Yahweh,
that hates his people.
It's Israel against the nations.
It's Yahweh against the gods.
The whole rest of the story is framed
by these three incidents.
Human depravity,
human evil, idolatry,
the whole bit.
It's all framed in Genesis 1 through 11.
Now, if this is your view,
what are you expected of the Messiah?
Will you expect Messiah to do more
than correct the fall?
Again, this is where we're at as in Christian theology,
Jesus came to so that we could have eternal life.
You know, the resurrection and you know,
we can be brought back into the relationship with God.
That's true.
That's true, but what but what we don't see
is how the work of Christ fixes the other two problems,
because we never see the other two problems.
We're never taught about the rest of this stuff.
You know, why is it
that we don't get any demon possessions
in the Old Testament
and then when Jesus shows up they're like everywhere?
You know, like, where does that come from?
Why would why would a Jew expect
the Messiah to have this as part of his profile,
that he'd be able to cast out demons?
There's nothing like that in the Old Testament,
at leads to our eye.
Why the expectation?
There's all sorts of questions like this.
You know, why does Paul
not use the word demon hardly ever?
But instead, he uses principalities, powers,
rulers, thrones, dominions.
He uses all these geographical rulership terms.
Why does he do that?
Because of Deuteronomy 32.
Where does Daniel get his theology about
the Prince of Persia,
the Prince of Greece in Daniel 10.
Did Daniel just think that was kind of a cool
like he was like working for Marvel at that point,
or DC, like I got a great story.
Let's just insert that then.
No, no, he's getting it from Deuteronomy 32.
That verse we never see,
because we're not reading English translations
that use the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Now, if you use the ESV, you're a little luckier here,
because it does that.
There are a few translations
that the committees actually again,
had had a bit of a revelation.
Why don't we include the Dead Sea Scrolls
in what we translate here?,
but, you know, not all of us are that fortunate, you know.
So we've got this whole cast of characters.
But the subtitle of the Demons’ book is
"What the Bible really says about
the powers of darkness."
The reason I titled that was because
not every power of darkness is a demon.
Okay, there's a whole different cast of characters.
Same with the Angels' book,
“What the Bible really says about
the members of God's heavenly hosts.”
Well, not every remember of the heavenly host
is an Angel.
Angel is a job description.
Okay, so we've got this, this huge cast of characters.
We've got a three prong problem.
We've got a messianic expectation
that's supposed to take care of all the mess,
not just one, one part of it.
And so we drift into the New Testament
and you would expect that this is what you see.
And you do.
But we just don't have our senses trained to see it.