If you don’t embrace and absorb the message of Michael Heiser’s Unseen Realm, you cannot gain a proper biblical perspective on human politics.
There is no scholarly excuse for rejecting his thesis; the evidence is simply overwhelming. The Hebrew people up to the time of Jesus clearly believed in the Divine Council of elohim serving in God’s courts in Heaven. They believed in a multitude of heavenly creatures; they believed that some of them fell from their exalted positions and gave birth to the Nephilim (regardless of the mechanism). They believed that all the creatures we call “demons” are the disembodied spirits of these Nephilim. This kind of mythology colors the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament.
If we don’t buy into it, we will not be able to understand the gospel. Nor will we be able to understand the political mess of the world today.
If you can grasp the concept of the Elohim Council as rather like Persian satraps serving the Persian emperor, then you’ll understand how God does not micromanage things the way most western minds instinctively assume He would. It’s not a question of what He notices, but how He established procedures under His authority. It doesn’t make sense to us, maybe, but it is what He revealed as His “management style” in His Word. At the Tower of Babel, God divided humanity among his Elohim Council members, and then raised up the Nation of Israel as His own personal domain.
They failed to follow through on their end of the Covenant. The modern State of Israel is not biblical Israel. Rather, Jews in general, and Israel in particular, are the people of Satan (“synagogue of Satan”). They rejected the Messiah and the inherent plan for their nation. Their patron deity is the Devil; God passed the earthly nation over to Satan at the Cross. The Jews are Satan’s personal property.
The religion of Islam is beholden to some other pagan deity, and because of the partisan divisions within Islam, the net effect is that they serve multiple pagan gods. This is how the elohim rule as God’s satraps among the various Islamic countries. The Elohim Council does business that way among human nations and kingdoms. Every human political entity on this earth is captive of one or more Elohim Council members. While many of the council members are allied with Satan, they aren’t wholly subservient. Further, some of the satraps aren’t fully onboard with the Devil’s agenda, and may be somewhat more friendly to God’s agenda. Yet, not a single human nation belongs to God.
Thus, we recognize that the bombing of Gaza is a moral wrong on one level, but it’s just routine affairs on another. If you get all wrapped up in promoting Zionism or denouncing it, you are playing into the hands of the Devil and his allies on the Elohim Council. Do not oversimplify things; don’t be a fool who embraces linear logic and false dichotomies. Both sides are evil for different reasons.
The same goes for America’s invasive presence in Syria, Iraq and just about anywhere else on the planet: it serves a pagan deity. America is not a covenant nation by any definition in the Bible; it is a pagan nation serving several different members of the Elohim Council. Our government is incapable of doing good except by accident.
Human slaughter is evil on a basic level; you cannot engage in it individually with a clean conscience before God. (It’s a matter above any individual authority.) However, there is another level of consideration here — there are Elohim Council members at work. They build nations that are generally evil or misguided, controlling vast numbers of defiled people whose lives are forfeit under God’s justice. Whether or not they include any Elect is really not the issue, since the Elect go to Heaven regardless (from our level of consideration). Rather, the tragedy is that some members of God’s Elect never get to harvest their Covenant blessings, except to the limited degree they embrace the Covenant individually.
It’s a tragedy that Creation must endure the injustice of ignoring the Covenant, along with the injustice of human slaughter. It’s also par for the course. This is quantum logic, processing and evaluating on multiple levels. If all you see is the injustice on one level, then you’ll get emotionally invested in a lie. You’ll be distracted and not see the hand of God and your Covenant duty to Him.
Everything we seek to do by conviction should be understood as a matter of the Great Commission. You are supposed to infiltrate the domains of the rebellious Elohim Council and help to free the Elect to know Christ as their Lord in this life. That means you only pretend to give human allegiance to various human authorities. This is our commission from Christ. They cannot own your heart, only some portion of your fleshly performance.
It does have some parallels in our understanding of espionage only because the non-elect people around us are incapable of understanding how it all works. They aren’t privy to the secrets in the sense of the big picture. It’s not that we are hiding our ultimate loyalty; quite the contrary (in most cases). But they have no capability of understanding the balance point for us internally. They will be perplexed if they are paying attention (though at any given time, most do not pay attention). That’s the opening for our witness of Christ.
So, serve your earthly masters with excellence. That’s a part of your witness. Play along when your convictions permit, and don’t be afraid of conflict that arises from obeying your convictions. That’s part of your witness; expect those conflicts to arise. Invest yourself in the witness, not the human career goals. The Elohim Council members, masquerading as deities, will not appreciate our invasive presence in their schemes, but there is not a thing they can do to prevent God speaking through our witness and calling out to His Elect wherever we find them.
