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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