Transcription
(soft music) (eerie music)
When Christians think about demons, they typically think of possession, or these narratives in the gospels where Jesus delivers someone from a demonic possession, someone who's seized by a supernatural power, but there's a lot more to the story and the backstory than that.
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There's this sort of creeping suspicion or creeping narrative that says, "Well, we really don't believe in these things. Those possessions accounts in the gospels, those are really just psychological conditions and other health problems." And it's like, okay, there are a couple that could go either way with that. But, Jesus doesn't command a brain abnormality to go into a herd of pigs over the edge and under the sea. They're just narratives that don't fit that.
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When it comes to the spiritual world, we are forced to use the language of our own experience, things we can process, distance, time, space. And the biblical writers are doing it because guess what? They're using words that they know and their audience knows. So they're taking things from their world, vocabulary, metaphors, and they're using those things to describe the indescribable.
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What we tend to do in Christian tradition, is the white hats are angels, the black hats are demons. Well, the text of Scripture doesn't really conform to that. Deuteronomy 32:8-9, "When the Most High divided up the nations, when He fixed their boundaries and their borders, He fixed their number according to the number of the sons of God." Now that's what the Dead Sea Scrolls say, it's what the new RSV says ESV, NLT, and a number of modern translations will follow the Dead Sea Scrolls, other ones don't. They'll read sons of Israel, instead of sons of God. And Sons of God is the demonstrably correct reading because of the Dead Sea Scroll material. If you think about the Babel event and say, "Well, why would God divide up the nations according to the sons of Israel?" That's the traditional reading that a lot of Bibles still have. Doesn't make any sense because Israel didn't exist at the time of Babel. And so people wonder, "Well, what do we do with that?" Well, the real answer is, that isn't what the original text actually said. And we wouldn't really know any of that had it not been for the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Now, the Septuagint also matters a lot. What the Septuagint sort of does, because it's Greek, is the translators of the Septuagint looked at all of this vocabulary for both good guys and bad guys in the supernatural world and they more or less made the decision that we're gonna call the good guys, angeloi, messengers, angels, and we're gonna call the bad guys, daimonio, demons. The early church was weaned, grew up on the Septuagint and there it's all angels and demons.
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There are some terms that we should sort of camp on just a little bit, and one of those is elohim. A biblical writer will actually use elohim of God, the God of the Bible, and lots of lesser beings, the gods of the nations. Psalm 82, the members of God's counsel, his entourage, the heavenly host, it will use elohim of the disembodied dead in 1 Samuel 28. It will use elohim of the sedim in Deuteronomy 32:17, again, which usually gets translated demons, but really is a territorial entity. But however we understand that, it's not the God of Israel, it's something lower, but it's still elohim. And the reason why that's okay for a biblical writer to do is that elohim is just a term you would use as a label on anything that by nature is a disembodied member of the spiritual world, good or evil. It's just if you're a disembodied entity and your natural estate is the spiritual world now, you're an elohim.
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An ancient person would build an idol, stone, wood, whatever it is. And they're not idiots, they know that they just built that thing. The idea wasn't that this is my deity and then it just dies there. The idea is that I will build this object as a home for a spiritual entity. They would do ceremonies on the idol like the opening of the mouth. Because opening of the mouth, that means it's alive because it takes in breath and all that kind of stuff just like someone who's breathing is alive. Well, they would transfer that thinking to this object, they would perform some ritual with the idea that when we open the mouth, the entity, the spirit entity, will come and inhabit the object or attach itself to the object. That's why in ancient texts when idols were destroyed, people aren't thinking, "Oh my god's dead now." No, they're thinking, "Man, when I get home, I gotta build another one. and then apologize for letting that happen to the first house and then do the ritual again and then the deity will come back and reside with me," or in this temple or whatever it is. So there's a connection, there's a direct connection between idols and elohim, gods, in the ancient world. They're not separable things in that one is real and the other isn't. The whole reason you created an idol was to get this real entity to attach itself to it and be with you so that you can barter with it. This is the essence of polytheism. You placate the gods, you believe that you need them on your side to live a good life.
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Let's go to Deuteronomy 32:17. The Israelites are accused of not worshiping God, capital G-O-D, but instead worshiping sedim. And then the next line says elohim, that they had not known. So the sedim are called elohim in that verse. Now in the Septuagint, sedim gets translated as demons, daimonio. Paul quotes that verse, Deuteronomy 32:17, in 1 Corinthians 10:21 and 22, when he warns the Corinthians about not eating meat that had been sacrificed to demons. Now, here's the question, for all of you who wanna say, "Oh, it's just idols or just, objects of stone or whatever, and they don't have real entities behind them." Why would Paul care then? Are you saying that Paul didn't believe that demons were real? I'm sorry, but Paul did, okay? Paul quotes this passage using elohim of these other entities. That certainly did have idols made for them. In the biblical worldview, these were real entities that mattered because they were hostile and could lead people astray, away from the true God.
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If you go back and you look at the first rebellion, Genesis 3, and the figure that will eventually become known as Satan. The word Satan in Hebrew is not in Genesis 3, the serpent is never actually called Satan in the Hebrew Bible, in the whole Old Testament. This is how it works in the Old Testament, the first rebel gets cast down to the eretz, that's the Hebrew term for ground or land. It's also a term that can be used of the underworld. Why? Because in Israelite cosmology, the underworld was actually inside the earth. This is the realm that was associated with death. Why? Because you bury people when they die. And the being who's in charge of this or who's the cause of all this, is this figure from Genesis 3 who has been cast down to this place. Instead of being like the most high or above the stars of God, no, now you're gonna be like beneath the feet of mortals, the ones that you sought to lead astray and destroy. So, we get the carnal thoughts that actually are systematized in the New Testament.
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One of the things that comes up a lot is what's going on in the bad place, okay? Because you get prohibitions like in Deuteronomy 18 is a passage that a lot of people are familiar with that forbids certain practices that involve contact with the other side. For instance, Deuteronomy 18 very clearly forbids necromancy, you don't contact the dead, whether the dead is disembodied, human dead, or spirit beings who are just in the realm of the dead, you don't do that. There are some logical questions even from that just one point. Would God really give commands to not do something that you couldn't do? I mean, do we have a command, thou shalt not flap your arms and fly? Well, I'm good with that one, I'll never break that one. No, the whole logic of commands is that God commands things that are within the purview of human capability, that they actually would work. There are supernatural intelligences that are not friendly, that would just love to manipulate you and destroy you. And so what God is saying is, "Look, you don't do these certain things because these are rituals or habits or gestures of solicitation to other intelligences that, yeah, that will work." And it's not the point that God is a killjoy, He doesn't want you to know what's gonna happen, He doesn't want you to know this particular point of knowledge. The whole point of these kinds of prohibitions are if you get sucked into the spirit world on the dark side, or you traverse into it, you don't know what you're getting. It's not your realm, don't think you know what you're encountering, what you're being told. You don't have any feel for this space over here.
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When you look at some of these passages, there are interesting phrases like some of these spirits are called knowing one's. Well, what do they know? Well, they know lots of things because they've been around a whole lot longer than you have. They've seen what happens to people, to human civilization, they know what happens in the spiritual world. I mean, their knowledge base is a whole lot bigger than yours. And they can deceive you with that knowledge, don't listen to them.
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They're gonna give you information, they're gonna give you a 'secret' knowledge. But it might just lead to your own destruction. It might lead you to worship them, they'd really like that. Being worshiped, being followed, being obeyed, is appealing to supernatural beings in rebellion, because it's a way to subtract glory and worship from God who is their adversary, and also to empower them in such a way that you, who they want disposed of anyway, you make yourself more vulnerable to that. So those are the two sort of fundamental reasons why a supernatural intelligence, again, that is in rebellion already with God and that relationship, according to Scripture, is irreversible. There's nothing in Scripture that suggests that a supernatural being in rebellion can be redeemed.
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And so the only thing that you can do to get back at the judge who put you in the situation is to harm Him, to take glory away from Him, to harm the people that He does love.
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When it comes to the second rebellion, the Genesis 6 episode, I think we need to see, again, in a different way, how this plays into New Testament theology. Is it a coincidence that that is dealt with and eliminated, effectively reversed, if you kill off all the vestiges of this by Moses, Joshua and David. You say, "Well, why would we care about that? Moses, Joshua and David, yeah, they're famous, we like those guys." What do they all have in common? What they all have in common is they are foreshadowings, prototypes, types of Jesus. I don't think it's a coincidence that you have those three individuals that are responsible for the elimination of at least this one aspect of this rebellion. I mean, just think about Jesus a little bit. He is the prophet like unto Moses, that's certainly true, but He's also superior to Moses, and He's superior to the law. This is a familiar thing that plays out in Scripture. The superiority like in the book of Hebrews, the preeminence of Jesus to the Mosaic system. With Joshua as the warrior, the human warrior, operating in tandem with the captain of the Lord's host, the angel of the Lord in the Old Testament, the leader of God's armies. Well, who leads God's armies at the eschaton? It's Jesus, the imagery is quite consistent there. In fact, it's actually blended when it comes to the whole Joshua situation. And then, of course, with David, again, He is the new David, He's the ultimate David, He is the king of Israel, He is the king of all the nations. So you get these passages and the prophets that talk really oddly about someone descending from David, ruling over a kingdom that includes Gentiles. This is in the latter prophets, this vision of the ultimate kingdom of God. And well, lo and behold, look who we have. There are a lot of these things that we can see, again, the connection points, but we don't wanna miss the fact that they actually having an attachment back to an origin point of supernatural evil that the Messiah is expected to deal with in reverse.
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One of the obvious items that comes up when I talk about the Deuteronomy 32 world view is what scholars typically refer to as cosmic geography. It creates a theology of when Yahweh then turns around right after Babel and calls Abraham and promises him a land, that sets up really the rest of the Old Testament, frankly, the rest of the Bible because you have then Israel, God's people, the descendants of Abraham, occupying this land, you have that play out, very obviously in the New Testament in Pauline vocabulary. Now Paul does use the word demons occasionally, but most the time he talks about the powers of darkness. It's with terms like principalities, powers, rulers, thrones, dominions, authorities, and what they have in common is they're terms of geographical dominion. And so Paul is getting his theology from this Old Testament stuff and they're different than demons. But again, they have a common enemy, they're evil, they're all part of the panoply of the powers of darkness. But the whole notion of attachment to specific regions and places, is what's going on here. So you get these stories Naaman and the leper, why does Naaman and ask for dirt? It's because he knows that Yahweh is attached to this place. He's gonna go back home to Syria. He's going to go back home and do his job, but he needs geography. He needs dirt on which to sacrifice and worship the true God.
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In the New Testament, Paul, to the Corinthians who are bickering among themselves, he says, "Will you stop taking your disagreements to these courts of law and having somebody arbitrate between you. Don't you people know that you're going to judge angels?" In Revelation 2 and Revelation 3, Jesus himself says, "To the one that overcomes, I will put him over the nations." Well, who's over the nations now? It's the gods in rebellion from Deuteronomy 32. They are going to be displaced and replaced in the New Eden, the New Earth, which is the final state, by believers. In other words, the new children of God replace the old children of God who are in rebellion. We are going to judge them.
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You'll actually get passages in Isaiah, terms for these critters that live in the bad places that are anti-Eden. You say, "Well, why pick on those animals? I love animals." Well, animals who live in the desert, what do they do? They live off the dead, they eat rotting flesh, they are, by definition, unclean for that reason, because their association is with what isn't Eden, what God didn't want for His people. And so all of that is colored by what happens in Eden to destroy Eden, death comes into the world. In fact, in the Septuagint, you'll actually get references to ass humans. There's this is weird language and you say, "Well, what's up with that?" The point isn't that, "Hey, back in the day in biblical days there were like ass humans, there were donkeys?" No, okay? The point of it is not literalism, the point of it is abhorrent mixture, freakishness, it's anti-Eden. It is chaos set against order. This is why the vocabularies used to convey to readers you don't wanna be in a place like this. This is the place where all of God's goodness, the thing is that He wants to give humans, the orderly life, the habitable space that He wants for humans, the Edenic conditions are all in chaos. It's an inversion and a perversion of the way things ought to be and the way God wants them to be. And so that becomes a powerful way of messaging that idea.
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A lot of this vocabulary and language and the way supernatural rebellion is just described generally and broadly speaking, chaos metaphors, a lot of it is traceable and derivative from Babylon. Babylon was a bad place because this is where the earthly attempt to kickstart Eden, this is where it died. Babylon was the one who conquered Judah, took the last two tribes and specifically the Davidic tribe, to whom that the promise of kingship was given and destroyed it all, destroyed the temple, took the people back to Babylon. And this is the period when many scholars, both secular and believing scholars believe that a lot of work was done to put the Old Testament into final form. And what they do is they seed a lot of the content with Babylonian imagery to communicate where we are now is not where we're supposed to be. We are on the enemy's turf, this is the place of chaos. It's being turned into something it was never meant to be and that God doesn't want it to be.
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When it comes to the world of the powers of darkness, there are certain things that are just on the table. There's death, death is a big one. There is disorder or chaos, those things are 180 degrees removed from the world God created, for the human family that he wanted at the very beginning, they are anti-Eden. Now, things accrue to that, there will be agents of death.
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There will be agents of disorder, these supernatural beings. Their activity is gonna get described through either vocabulary or symbol or metaphor. Leviathan was a very familiar symbol in the ancient world, not just in Israel, in Canaan, but just broadly. This great dragon of the sea as being a metaphor for chaos. The dragon lives in the sea. The sea is a place that was feared. Why? Because you can't live in it. If you try to go live in the water, you're gonna die, okay? It's threatening, it's unpredictable. It can be calm one minute, and the next minute, it's gonna take your life. The things that live in it are foreign to you, because you live on the land, you're used to seeing the creatures there. But when you're out on a boat for a long period of time, you're gonna see things that you've never seen before and you don't really know how to process them.
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And the writers are using things that are familiar unfavorably, to describe spiritual threats to a human being. Again, it's a very simple strategy and when you really think about it, it's very effective.
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So if you wanted to know who or what is on the opposing team, okay? What's the roster? (laughs) You have things like death, you have destruction, you have wastelands, you have wilderness and desert, you have the creatures that live in these places that consume death, that are responsible for death, that if you go there would threaten you. Even after battle scenes, will figure into this. Places that are very clearly under God's judgment. Why? Because there's lots of dead people there. And the way those particular things are talked about, in many cases, are linked to Babylon. Why? Because Babylon is the chief enemy of the people of God, not only in the Old Testament, but people have a memory of that. And so they will use Babylon in the New Testament to testify to earthly threats. Again, linking these ideas to talk about human agents of chaos that oppose God and oppose God's people, and also supernatural agents that oppose God and oppose God's people. For the biblical person, these two worlds function symbiotically and the same set of tools could be used to describe either and both.
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Well, when you talk about the powers of darkness, you have to devote some attention to Satan. (laughs) Let's talk about Satan. Most people when they think of Satan, they will think of Genesis 3 or they'll think of Job 1 and 2, what scholars call the prologue of the book of Job.
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So we have a meeting, a divine council meeting, the sons of God are assembled. And then in English Bibles, Satan, capital S, shows up and God says, "Hey, where are you been? What are you doing?" And he said, "I've been running to and fro throughout the whole earth," and so on and so forth. And God says, "Have you considered my servant Job? Boy, he's awesome." And he talks Job up. And then Satan says, "Yeah, that's because he has a great life. If you took away everything that he had, he would curse you to your face." I mean, there's a confrontation there and that launches us into what happens to Job. It raises certain questions, well, why is Satan there? Like, is he still working for God? Is he on the payroll? What's going on here? And those are legitimate questions that we should talk about. But if you go down to Genesis 3, we get the familiar serpent in Eden story. And we don't get, even in English Bibles, we don't get the word Satan in Genesis 3 and that's because the Hebrew term for Satan is satan, it doesn't show up in Genesis 3, it's never used. In fact, you never get the term satan applied to the serpent, nachash, that's the Hebrew term for serpent in Genesis 3. You never get those two terms married to each other in the Old Testament, speaking of Eden. The Satan figure in Job 1 and 2 really isn't the devil. Hebrew does not attach the definite article, that's the word the in front of a proper personal name, and neither does English. So I'm not the Mike, I wouldn't talk about myself as the Mike. Every time the word satan occurs, it has the definite article. So it's hasatan, the Satan, that tells you it's not a proper personal name, it's not a specific entity. Are we gonna go with what the biblical text has or what are tradition tells us? So what we have in Job 1 and 2, is we have a member of the spiritual world, in this case, a functioning member of a board meeting. He's not evil and sinister, he's actually doing his job. Satan as a noun means adversary, that's true. But it could also mean something like challenger, or someone who looks around for people who are obeying or disobeying God and then reports on them. The whole point of these metaphorical descriptions is to remind us that God doesn't miss anything. It's all in the memory bank, it's all there, nothing is overlooked. Where it sort of transitions from I'm doing my job to challenging or becoming adversarial in relation to God, is when he questions God's assessment of Job. So he's questioning God's omniscience of the situation. He's also questioning God's integrity. Is God telling us the truth about Job? God says to the Satan, "Okay, I'll let you do anything to Job that you want to do other than kill him because we have to keep him alive so that his integrity will become known." And I'm gonna let you do whatever you want, because I don't want you coming back here and saying, "Oh, yeah, Job would have folded if you'd have let me do this." No, do whatever you want and we'll see who's right. This isn't the devil. So the question is, well, why does this term, satan, get applied to the serpent of Genesis 3? Well, just think about it. In the Old Testament, this term is never applied to the enemy. As time goes on, in the intertestamental period, it occurred to someone, "You know that serpent figure back there? He really was hostile to God and to humanity. He's God's adversary, he stood and opposed God. Let's use the word satan to describe that dude." And by the time you get to the New Testament, this is 400 or 500 years later, it has become, on its own, a proper noun. So you get a figure who's named Satan. So you have capital S, Satan, running around doing stuff. And the New Testament associates that figure with the serpent of Genesis 3. Now, if you actually did Bible study, and you look for all the places where angel or demon or anything, any language like that occurs with the word third or three, you're never going to find a passage that teaches that a third of the angels defected before the fall, in the entire Bible. There are literally zero instances in the Bible that actually teach this point. You will find it in Revelation 12, where we have a war in heaven that erupts. Well guess what? If we read Revelation 12, which is always a good suggestion, if you're going to do theology from a passage, you might wanna read it. If you actually read the passage, the war in heaven there is a response to the birth of the Messiah, the birth of the one who would rule the nations with a rod of iron. That happened a long time after the fall of Genesis 3. So there is literally no passage in the Bible that teaches a third of the angels rebelled with Satan, before the fall, it doesn't exist.
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And so if we really think about who this being called Satan was, he is an intelligent, divine being. Since he is free, but he's also not God. In other words, he's not perfect. There is the possibility, the potentiality of autonomy, seeking autonomy. And we see that reflected in passages like Isaiah 14, which I think and I'm far from being alone here, I think Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28, Genesis 3, they have the same divine rebellion backstory in play. And really, it's just a question of who puts it forth more directly among those three passages. But you have one particular being who wants to be the highest authority, wants autonomy, wants to be in the place of God, and makes that choice and suffers the consequences for it. As far as when? Well, I would answer that, I'm not trying to be clever here, I would answer that this way that as soon as he decided that this is what I want, and decided to act upon it and decided to reverse God's decision to create humans by getting them to fall presuming that they would be judged and just dispensed with. As soon as he reaches that point, then he is in rebellion. So if we read Genesis 3, that's about the best you can do in conjunction with God's decision to create humanity and put Adam and Eve in the garden and understanding, this is what God is going to do now, we have a human family just like we have you guys. Well now we have a human family, I'm gonna come to earth, I'm gonna give them this wonderful place and we're gonna coexist with them and help them and be, again, one big happy family. You have one being that says, "Don't wanna do that. I'm offended by that." Humans are a little bit lower than the elohim, that's what Psalm 8 actually says. That humanity is created a little bit lower than elohim. And so we have one of these beings that doesn't wanna submit to God's authority and says, "We're better, I'm better than these beings are and I'm not going to serve them." So I think all those things are factors into the what happened and the why.
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From the time of Augustine forward, we have demythologized, we have stripped away, we have denied that the events of Genesis 6:1-4 are supernatural. We explain away the sons of God episode with the daughters of men. That wasn't the case. For centuries, since it was written on through the intertestamental period, there's a an individual Julius Africanus, who, prior to Augustine, was the first one to reject the supernatural worldview, but then Augustine did and there are reasons why he did it, he had an axe to grind, I think, with some of the material in Judaism and in the Manichees, which was the Christian sect that he joined after his conversion that revered the book of Enoch, and the book of Enoch made a big deal out of this episode. And so when they had that parting of the ways, Augustine is just not mindful of the need for the passage, and frankly, just doesn't want to hear anything about it. And so the rest of the church, because of his stature, essentially follows suit. And so ever since we've had views of Genesis 6 that make the supernatural context of it go away. So we miss number two. And number three is we know all about the story of Babel, but we never really find Deuteronomy 32:8 and 9 because prior to the Dead Sea Scrolls, it would read that the nations were divided up according the number of the sons of Israel. And the few people that asked, "Well, how does that make sense because there was no Israel?" don't really have an answer. And so it tends to be largely ignored until we realize, again, through the Dead Sea Scrolls that it really says sons of God there and that takes us into this divine, there's something going on here. The Septuagint says angels of God, so it follows the Dead Sea Scrolls reading. So the natural question arises, well, what's the hierarchy? Is there a hierarchy? Are they on the same team? What's going on here? Because they're all elohim, they're all the same kind of being. But that doesn't mean that they don't have different powers and different degrees of power or different statuses. The original rebel is sort of viewed as having the highest status. And personally I think the reason is because that is the one who brought death into God's world and basically does the most damage to God's plan and God's people because everyone is now going to die.
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That is the thing that disrupted everything. He gains, if I could use the word, preeminence in the dark hierarchy for that reason. He has done the most damage and so he is rightly perceived as the worst of the bunch. You have one member of the divine council who to quote Isaiah 14, "Wants to be like the most high, wants to be above the stars of God." So you have one individual who wants to be the boss. And the problem was the hunger, the thirst for autonomy, for superiority, to be in control. And that is at the heart, really, of sin, it's self-determination, and rejecting the notion that anyone, even God, should tell me how to live my life. That is the heart of the way the Old Testament and really the Bible presents sin and its problem.
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I think one of the better questions that I often get is do these divine rebels, are they still members of God's counsel? Because they don't go away, they're not obliterated and destroyed. And I think, at this point, we need to think about a couple of terms here. One is divine counsel and the other one, is the broader term, heavenly host, okay? If we didn't have rebellion, those two terms would be absolutely overlapping, they'd be absolutely synonymous. But the fact that we do have rebellion, yes, they're still a member of the heavenly host, because they're still a member of the spiritual world. That's different than asking and saying, are they members of the divine council? Because the divine council, by definition, in the divine council scenes are those who assist God in governance. These guys aren't assisting God, they're in opposition. So I don't think that divine rebels are still part of the divine council, they're not on God's payroll, they're not showing up for work on Monday, because they don't have a job anymore, okay? So there's a distance there but nevertheless, they are still members of this thing we broadly call the spiritual world.
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This is a world that doesn't conform to spatial understanding and distance and latitude and longitude. You have this distance and this adversarial relationship and yet they still occupy the same space that is the spiritual world. I do think that there is a separation, again, between them. I mean, you get indications of these things in Scripture, which I sort of take more along the lines of defining role relationships and limiting authority and ability, for instance. I don't think it's a mistake that when Jesus sends out disciples initially, He starts his ministry, He starts preaching about the kingdom of God. "The kingdom of God is among you, the kingdom of God is here," and all that kind of stuff. And then he sends out disciples. It's interesting that he sends out 70, or 72, depending on whether you're using the Septuagint or the traditional Hebrew text, but it's a reference to the nations that were disinherited, because that's their number. Up until this point, this being, this entity, Satan, has owned everyone and everything. But I'm here to tell you that if you are a member of the kingdom of God, this being, Satan, has no claim on you at all.
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It says though, the prosecutor has been thrown out of court, God doesn't need to hear what you've done, He doesn't need to hear why you deserve death, He doesn't need to hear that death is your destiny. If you embrace me as Messiah, and you join the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, problem solved, he has no claim on you at all. And so this, my ministry, my message is the beginning of him losing ownership of the world. This is where it begins. What spiritual warfare is, is the growth of the kingdom of God, the Great Commission, and the diminishing of the other kingdom and the way that's accomplished is telling truth, you speak truth to lies. At the end of the day when we talk about the powers of darkness, and let's be honest, they sort of get most of the stage time when we think about the supernatural world. The one thing, though, that I hope you take away, is structurally, the way scripture presents this to us and in the instance of three rebellions, and more importantly, how Jesus, and what he does in the cross is specifically aimed at curing and reversing all three. The stuff we've talked about here, these are not accidents of Scripture. These are not things that you more or less have to make up, these correlations. The correlations are there, they are in the text, the language in the New Testament connects to the language of the Old Testament. This is intentional, it's strategic, it's intelligent. And so if you have one takeaway, is to think about what Jesus did in response to not only the problem of our mortality, eternal life, but just how wonderful and how in an all encompassing way, what Jesus does in the New Testament and how it's talked about, covers the gamut of all of these forces of supernatural darkness and what they're about. Not one of them gets missed and nothing gets unaddressed.
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