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.

REFERENCED ALONG THE WAY

- Michael Heiser on the serpent cast down to the Eretz, read through Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, and on a second wordplay on rock at Caesarea Philippi (a reading Andre says deserves more scrutiny than he can give it here)

- Augustine on Sheol as a foggy atmosphere around our world

- Aquinas on angels assuming human form, appearing to eat, and Genesis 6

- Meredith Kline on the sons of God as demonically driven human kings, and on earthly ectype and heavenly archetype

- Hans Boersma's sacramental ontology

- Scripture: Genesis 3:14, Genesis 6, Genesis 19, 1 Samuel 28, Isaiah 14, Isaiah 34, Ezekiel 28, Matthew 16, Luke 16, Romans 8:20, Ephesians 1:10, Colossians 1:20, Revelation 12

This is a follow-on from the episode on angels and demons, and it sets up the next episode on what we needed from a Saviour: someone to not only save people but also to redeem place.

Website: https://between-two-realms.pages.dev/

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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.

Website: https://between-two-realms.pages.dev/

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Most of us tell the story of the fall with only one character in it. Adam

eats, the world breaks, and everything that follows is about putting the

visible world right. But Ephesians 1:10 says Christ's redemption was always

meant to gather the whole cosmos, visible and invisible, under his headship.

So if heaven's corruption is missing from our doctrine of sin, heaven's

redemption goes missing from our gospel, and the good news gets smaller than

it is.

In this episode Pastor Andre takes up the trickiest question in Scripture:

where the serpent came from. Genesis 3 never explains how a snake learned to

talk, and it never explains why Adam and Eve were not surprised to meet one.

Reading Eden as the throne room of the cosmic temple, and following Michael

Heiser's work on seraph and nachash, he argues that the serpent is a

corrupted throne guardian who belonged in that room, and that Genesis 3 is

not resting on some earlier unnarrated rebellion. It IS the account of

Satan's fall.

Along the way: why Calvin dismissed the traditional reading of Isaiah 14, why

the church fathers were more divided than we remember, what Ezekiel 28 is

actually comparing the king of Tyre to, and why the better motive for the

rebellion is not naked pride but jealousy of a new image bearer made of dust

whom God intends to raise above the angels. Which is also why the enemy's

agenda has been anti-human ever since.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Cold open: nobody explains the talking snake

00:24 Title sequence

00:35 Reality is not only what you can see

04:12 But what went wrong?

05:19 The fall we only half tell

06:42 The trickiest question in scripture

08:24 Calvin pulls the floor out

10:06 Heiser, the seraphim and the nachash

14:27 He belonged there

16:38 Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14

21:10 Pride, jealousy and a new image bearer

24:34 Sabotage, not a coup

26:00 How evil came into the world

REFERENCED ALONG THE WAY

- Michael Heiser on seraph, nachash and Egyptian throne guardian imagery

- John Calvin on Isaiah 14:12 and the king of the Babylonians

- Meredith Kline on the serpent taking serpentine form

- The church fathers on pride and jealousy as motives for the fall

- Scripture: Genesis 1, Genesis 2, Genesis 3, Exodus 28, Psalm 8,

Isaiah 6, Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28, Ephesians 1:10

This is a follow-on from the episode on the divine council and hierarchy,

and it sets up what angels and demons actually are.

Website: https://between-two-realms.pages.dev/

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