Fixing Demonology

Wiping away the false demonology of Western Christianity, we can start fresh with a clear understanding rooted in God’s ancient revelation.

Satan and his fallen angels are outnumbered two-to-one. The Apostle John took pains to declare this in the symbolic language of the Apocalypse, describing the Great Dragon (Satan) as sweeping a third of the stars from the sky with his tail as he fell. That was an ancient symbolism going all the way back to Genesis. The symbolism of stars as angelic beings is easily obvious from the Tower of Babel narrative. That ancient ziggurat was simply an early astrological observatory, and Nimrod’s plan is a euphemism for communing with these heavenly beings to regain the power lost when mankind was expelled from Eden. Indeed, it was this sort of chasing after demons, who typically portray themselves as angels of light, which caused the pre-Flood society to be so despicable. People were messing with what we would call Black Magic, trying to regain those powers, often by seeking demonic assistance in the guise of worshiping spirits of the sky, etc.

The Laws of Noah were imposed by God on the fallen earth. That is, the code was already implemented in the existing cosmos, but fully declared in the business with the rainbow, and removal of our previously permanent cloud bank around the earth. The fundamental moral code of the universe was thus revealed, but the Hebrew symbolic literary style makes it hard to discern while wearing our Western rationalist lenses. So after the mess caused by a vast corruption where the unrepentant had managed to wholly seduce those who were trying to live right, the Lord cleaned up the mess and gave everyone a fresh start, using Noah to prophetically announce the requirements for the balance of history until the coming of Christ. Christ did not do away with Noah, but with Moses. Christ continued Noah as noted by the first council in Jerusalem. Paul notes in Romans 13 how the Law of Christ’s sacrificial love — His own Covenant of the Cross — would fulfill God’s Laws, but it needed some clarification to make sure his pagan contemporaries embraced the ancient ways as the path to understanding into what it is grace saves us. Meanwhile, those Laws of Noah continue applying to all fallen creation because they declare the very nature of things.

So if obeying Noah keeps demons out, then rejecting Noah is how they gain entrance. Their presence and power varies with the context and the level of human authority at which they are welcomed by this betrayal of God’s Laws. Individual households can obey Noah and escape some of the wrath due their entire nation because the national government is loaded with demonic presence. This is manifestly the case in the US. Our government was founded on Enlightenment notions, something Satan himself sponsored along with the likes of the Treaty of Westphalia and so forth. In the broadest sense, democracy assumes man is not fallen, that mankind is inherently good. This blatantly pokes God in the eye, Who said mankind was incorrigible repeatedly.

The US Constitution was a rejection of God’s Word, despite all the sanctified language about God as our witness, and so forth. The whole structure presumes a concept of the universe in direct contradiction of revealed truth. Part of Daniel’s condemnation of Rome as iron, then iron mixed with clay, depicts Rome beginning as a very poorly implemented Western tribal nation, which degraded into some pretense of a republic built on objective truth. In reality, it was all simply an excuse to destroy the ancient tribal ties of nationhood which God had ordained, then once broken and dehumanized, it was easy for some dictator to ignore every restraint and wallow in filth at the price of vast oceans of human misery. We learned nothing from this; our founding fathers did their best to emulate this failure in the Classical Studies.

Daniel said Babylon, evil as it was, could be represented as the golden head of the symbolic statue. This is largely because the Babylonian imperial rule respected the tribal system of government, and didn’t even dare to interfere with any subject nation’s religions. They assumed all of them were valid. While otherwise a very good government, in this the Babylonian rulers were mistaken. The New Testament says in no uncertain terms pagan deities were all demons, that there was ever only one true God. How could this God allow Daniel to serve on the imperial court in such a pagan atmosphere? How could He prosper Daniel and his friends in their study of the vast pagan literature of Babylonian libraries?

Indeed, how could God prosper Joseph, making him viceroy of Egypt when it necessarily meant Joseph engaged in pagan rituals of the court there? Wasn’t it evil of Joseph to enslave the whole nation in feudalism, using the extended famine to break the relative independence of the noble houses? Why didn’t Joseph campaign to reverse such an evil trend? Could it be we fail to understand what God considers good government? Either way, we have no record either of these great men of the Bible evangelized anyone to their personal faith, in the sense we today think of evangelism.

Again, the servant of God who embraces the Laws of Noah will in some measure be immune to the demonic powers in human governments. That alone would have been testimony enough. Each of these men were called by God to serve in these high places, rubbing elbows with vast armies of demonic powers. Daniel ran into a couple of delays inherent in his position when praying for an answer to certain perplexing questions. It was explained matter-of-factly, just part of the context, and Daniel would have to deal with it.

But the Exile itself was God’s penalty for constant surrender to the lies of demons. Every idolatrous compromise was a compromise with demons. God was not going to allow His Son to be born in that setting. Jesus had enough work on His hands with all the healing and deliverance from the vast horde of demons in His nation without that sort of direct call to demonic powers. Yes, the Pharisees, Sadducees and other minority religio-political parties in power were demonic enough, having left their nation in the grip of all sorts of demonic powers, but the original problem of direct challenge to God’s primacy was finally killed once and for all. Of all their horrific sins, the rulers of Judah did not ever again worship demons.

Instead, they simply rejected the ancient Hebraic intellectual legacy in favor of Hellenism, an Aristotelian approach to the Law. Examine every debate Jesus had with His opponents, and you’ll see He kept calling them back to the ancient Hebrew mystical understanding of things, versus their literalistic Western approach. That all of modern evangelical Christianity now embraces the same approach as the Pharisees is an unspeakable horror, because it cedes the very ground of understanding to Satan.

Western Civilization is not Christian in the purest sense of the term; it does not represent in any way the teachings of Christ. It is for the most part a corrupted Pharisaical caricature of Christ, a literalist rendering of a mystical Eastern religion. It’s no surprise evangelicals are so deeply mistaken about demons and why miracles and the Second Coming are the subject of such a carnival atmosphere. We don’t understand the basis for miracles, and we flatly reject the symbolic teachings on the Return of Christ. Somehow they are deluded by Satan to believe a bunch of self-proclaimed “Jews” who utterly rejected the God of Scripture and can’t even adhere to their beloved Covenant of Moses, which Christ ended and is no longer in force, can then claim to be God’s Nation returning to the lands from which God Himself drove them. This is because the Western churches bluntly reject the intellectual culture of Jesus Himself.

Western Christians will be utterly shocked when it becomes apparent in the near future God does not like Western Civilization, is not very pleased with modern evangelical religion, and is not behind that demonic state called Israel.

(Note: This and the previous two posts have been collected into a single article and updated. You can find it here.)