DEMONS, FALLEN ANGELS & PRINCIPALITIES - Ephesians 6:12 + Colossians 1:16 - what it does and does not mean
7 “enemies” we “Wrestle/struggle/vibrate” (palē) against that are not Satan:
“rulers” ( archontōn or archōn )
"principalities” ( archē )
“powers”/“authorities” ( exousia )
“powers” ( dynamis )
“dominions”/“lords” ( kyrios ; kyriotēs )
“thrones” ( thronos )
“world rulers” ( kosmokratōr )
possibly 8 “darkness/shades” (skotos)
These terms mostly denote geographical domain authority in both the New Testament and Septuagint (and other Greek literature).
The “armor of God” - including sword - are defensive - relying on the risen Jesus in the person of the Holy Spirit to protect us. Be strong IN the Lord and in HIS POWER.
PRINCIPALITIES (Archon/Elohim/other gods) - cannot engage them directly as they are in heavenly realms IE “2nd heaven” between God and earth; “powers of the air”
Gen. 10-11 - mankind divided into 70 nations by God because of rebellion in Babel
See also 32:43
Masoretic:
“Rejoice, O Gentiles, with His people; For He will avenge the blood of His servants, And render vengeance to His adversaries; He will provide atonement for His land and His people.”
Septuagint/Dead Sea Scrolls:
“Rejoice you heavens along with him and let all the sons of God worship Him. Rejoice you nations with his people and let all the angels of God strengthen themselves in him. For he will avenge the blood of his servants and he will recompense those who hate him; He will purify his land and his people's land.”
***Deuteronomy 32:8, 43 were both altered when the Masoretic Text was produced AD 100 - 800***
Psalm 82
“Angels”, Heiser - pages 51-52, 145
In Psalm 82 the council ʾelōhı̂m under God’s indictment are being judged because of their failure to administrate the nations according to the principles of Yahweh’s justice (Ps 82:2–4). The result is chaos on earth (“all the foundations of the earth are shaken”; Ps 82:5). Miller elaborates: The maintenance of justice and righteousness is the foundation of the universe, the responsibility of the divine council, and the issue upon which hang both the stability of the universe and the stability and effective reality of the divine world.… It is against this background that one must look at one of the texts in which the council of Yahweh is most explicitly present, Psalm 82. It takes place entirely in the world of the gods, although what is clear from the story is that that world is totally ruled and controlled by the Lord. The psalm depicts a meeting of the “divine council” (v. 1) in which God rises and pronounces judgment on the gods. The reason for the verdict against them is spelled out in detail and unambiguous. The divine ones, the gods who are supposed to provide for order/righteousness among the peoples of the earth, have utterly failed to do so. They have shown partiality to the wicked and failed to maintain the right of the poor and the weak. The consequence of this is stated to be a shaking of the foundations of the world.… The text assumes that justice as the center of world order is a responsibility of the divine world as a whole. Failure to bring that about calls into question the divine world. Indeed its consequence is a decree against the divine world that relativizes it and renders the divine ones mortal. The gods are condemned to death. The fate of the divine world, of gods as well as of human beings, is determined in the divine council. The most dramatic instance of council members participating in God’s governance of the world is associated with judgment. According to Deuteronomy 32:8–9, members of the heavenly host were assigned as administrators of the nations: When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the LORD’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage. We learn from Genesis 11:1–9 that humanity was divided up into the nations at the Tower of Babel event. Yahweh’s division of humanity into the nations listed in Genesis 10, which descended from Noah’s sons after the flood, was a punitive act. God had decided to put his relationship with humanity as a whole on hiatus. After the nations were divided and allotted to lesser divine beings (“sons of God”), God called Abraham to form a new people—his “inheritance” as described in Deuteronomy 32:9.35 Through this new people, God planned to bless the nations in the future (Gen 12:3; cf. Acts 17:26). Deuteronomy 32:8–9 is foundational for understanding the remainder of the Old Testament. As Miller notes of the passage, “The order of nations is rooted in the order of heaven.” Though readers are given no timeline, eventually the sons of God charged with this task turn adversarial, seducing the Israelites into idolatry (Deut 32:17) and abusing their populations (Ps 82:1–5). God’s response is to pronounce their eschatological deaths at the day of the Lord (Ps 82:6–8; Isa 24:21; 34:1–4).
Their authority is now illegitimate. Of course , they will not willingly surrender power , and so that must be — and will be — taken from them . Humans still estranged from God are thus deceived and enslaved by powers unauthorized by the true king . That is the point of the Great Commission — setting captives free
Daniel 10:10-21 - the Archon over Persia, Javan and Israel described
All other NT instances:
Rom. 8:35-39 - Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: “For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Eph. 3:8-10 - I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, 9 and to make all see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the ages has been hidden in God who created all things through Jesus Christ; 10 to the intent that now the manifold wisdom of God might be made known by the church to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places
Col. 1:16 - For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him.
Col. 2:12-15 - you also were raised with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses, having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. Having disarmed principalities and powers, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it.
(Titus 3:1 in KJV, referring to human kings)
DEMONS (devils, unclean spirits)
- we can and must engage these as they are on the earth with us and are trying to stop Great Commission
See Gen. 6 and Enoch for origins.
See Jesus in the Gospels for revelation and engagement.
From “Demons”, Heiser in chapter 6 “The origin of demons”:
As the Watchers’ saga continues in 1 Enoch, the four archangels (Michael, Sariel, Raphael, and Gabriel) report the travesty unfolding on earth to the Most High ( 1 En 9:1–11 ). God responds by decreeing the coming of the flood ( 1 En 10:1–3 ) and ordering the offending Watchers be rounded up for judgment in the abyss: 9 And to Gabriel he [God] said, “Go, Gabriel, to the bastards, to the half-breeds, to the sons of miscegenation; and destroy the sons of the watchers from among the sons of men; send them against one another in a war of destruction. And length of days they will not have; 10 and no petition will be (granted) to their fathers in their behalf, that they should expect to live an eternal life, nor even that each of them should live five hundred years.” 11 And to Michael he said, “Go, Michael, bind Shemihazah and the others with him, who have united themselves with the daughters of men, so that they were defiled by them in their uncleanness. 12 And when their sons perish and they see the destruction of their beloved ones, bind them for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, until the day of their judgment and consummation, until the eternal judgment is consummated. 13 Then they will be led away to the fiery abyss, and to the torture, and to the prison where they will be confined forever. (1 En 10:9–13) The language of this passage (and others) is the conceptual source of statements in the letters of Peter and Jude regarding the angels who sinned at the time of the flood being sent to Tartarus and chained in gloomy darkness. 22 Sullivan notes, “Because the hybrid offspring were conceived on earth, their spirits are doomed to remain there.… [T]he conduct of these Watchers was significantly evil as to cause them and their hybrid offspring to be barred from heaven.” 23 But Enoch’s retelling of the divine rebellion in Genesis 6:1–4 doesn’t end there. In 1 Enoch 15 we learn that this episode is at the core of Jewish demonology. God, speaking to Enoch, says: 2 Go and say to the watchers of heaven, who sent you to petition in their behalf, ‘You should petition in behalf of men, and not men in behalf of you. 3 Why have you forsaken the high heaven, the eternal sanctuary; and lain with women, and defiled yourselves with the daughters of men; and taken for yourselves wives, and done as the sons of earth; and begotten for yourselves sons, giants?… 8 But now the giants who were begotten by the spirits and flesh—they will call them evil spirits upon the earth, for their dwelling will be upon the earth. 9 The spirits that have gone forth from the body of their flesh are evil spirits, for from humans they came into being, and from the holy watchers was the origin of their creation. Evil spirits they will be on the earth, and evil spirits they will be called. 10 The spirits of heaven, in heaven is their dwelling; but the spirits begotten in the earth, on earth is their dwelling. 11 And the spirits of the giants lead astray, do violence, make desolate, and attack and wrestle and hurl upon the earth and cause illnesses. They eat nothing, but abstain from food and are thirsty and smite. 12 These spirits (will) rise up against the sons of men and against the women, for they have come forth from them.
The origin of demons is tied specifically to the incident of the Watchers (Gen 6:1–4). 24 Reed summarizes the theology of Second Temple Judaism on the matter: The birth of the Giants is explored in terms of the mingling of “spirits and flesh” ( 15:8 ). Angels properly dwell in heaven, and humans properly dwell on earth ( 15:10 ), but the nature of the Giants is mixed. This transgression of categories brings terrible results: after their physical death, the Giants’ demonic spirits “come forth from their bodies” to plague humankind ( 15:9 , 11–12 ; 16:1 ).
Jesus makes a specific connection between the relatively ordinary events of exorcism and the defeat of Satan, between exorcism and eschatology. The list of nations in Acts 2 move from east to west then branches out at the Mediterranean. The list encompasses all the geographical regions reflected in the Table of Nations (Genesis 10) except for Tarshish (Spain), the final location Paul planned on preaching the gospel (Rom 15:24, 28). That reality is what frames the Great Commission—the call to reclaim the nations (“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” Matt 28:19). The goal was to bring Eden full circle—fulfilling God’s desire to have a human family with him forever. Punishing fallen spirits does not accomplish God’s original Edenic goal. Only the Great Commission accomplishes the ends to which God has been working as well as the defeat and punishment of rebellious evil spirits. The Great Commission is thus a comprehensive plan for spiritual warfare. The completion of gentile evangelism was necessary for a softening and redemption of his people, the Jews. Only when gentile evangelism is completed in God’s mind will the restoration of Israel be possible (“in this way all Israel will be saved,” Rom 11:26)...opposing world evangelism allows them more time to spread misery and destruction among humanity, the objects of God’s love and plan. This is the only definable “victory” the powers of darkness can hope to accomplish.
FALLEN ANGELS
- not relevant to Christians except during the final 3.5 years
1st mention in past: Gen. 6:1-4, 2 Peter 2:4, Jude 6-7 - kept locked in abyss, cannot bother us yet
2nd mention in future during Great Tribulation: Rev. 12:7-9 (Dan. 8:9-12??) - may even be same group of fallen angels. Rev. 12:4 traditionally considered to be speaking of "fallen" angels may not read that way upon closer inspection. May need to view those "cast down" between Israel's formation and Jesus incarnation as victims of Satan's actions rather than those on his side.
Satan and the End Times
Satan himself = a senior elohim with the task of protecting God’s throne (cherub = cover/grasp). He “quit” this job during events of Gen. 3 and henceforth became leader of the rebellion against God. That Satan tempts Jesus in the desert wilderness is not arbitrary. The Greek term translated “wilderness” ( erēmos ) is used in the Septuagint translation of the destination of the goat for Azazel (Lev 16:10) and the desolate place described by Isaiah that was home to preternatural creatures associated with evil spirits (Isa 13:9). Satan was offering Jesus rule over the nations abandoned by God at Babel.
Revelation potentially describes the release of the Gen. 6 Watchers, a precursor to the return of Christ, the day of the Lord, and their ultimate punishment (with Satan) in the lake of fire. Specifically, the scene in Revelation 9:1–10 of the “unlocking” of the abyss by a “star” (Satan) who is given the key is construed as the eschatological emancipation of the imprisoned Watchers led by Azazel/Abaddon.
Rev. 12:7-9 tells us that Satan and his angels will oversee the invasion of Israel and the final persecution of Jews and faithful Christians personally: “Then there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon and his angels. 8 And the dragon lost the battle, and he and his angels were forced out of heaven. 9 This great dragon—the ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, the one deceiving the whole world—was thrown down to the earth with all his angels.”
Whole new understanding can now be seen in v 10-11 - “The salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the ruling authority of his Christ, have now come because the accuser of our brothers and sisters, the one who accuses them day and night before our God, has been thrown down. But they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives so much that they were afraid to die.”
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