As always, I can only declare what I see. I know for certain there are things I don’t see, but it’s my instinct to make the most of what I do see. The problem is that I can see a lot better than I can explain. Still, I share this vision with others because they keep asking for it. Several people have asked questions privately that indicate I should try to declare things again. I’m trying to take advantage of my training to offer the same basic ideas clothed in different mental approaches so that everyone can get the picture. In particular, the questions concern comments I’ve made about Jews, Israel and the broader context.
The broader context is the Unseen Realm, of course, but far more than is covered in Michael Heiser’s books. We cannot make sense of the world from inside our mortal fallen existence. Without divine revelation, I am convinced nothing makes sense at all. God reveals Himself in terms of an eastern potentate big enough to have an empire. That was His choice of imagery, not mine. An eastern emperor would have a massive staff of people who hold specialized knowledge and privileges. Thus, the idea of a whole class of higher beings, of which angels are but one small portion, is simply too obvious to ignore. We humans are truly insignificant on that scale, and the role we play is in some ways no more than a football in a long game.
Humanity is little more than the symbol of a much larger drama. Our eternal destiny is more significant, but our current existence is almost wholly symbolic. Our mortal fates as humans is simply not important. The high moral outlook of the Bible is not about placing a high value on human existence; quite the contrary. What really matters is expressing the character of God to all of Creation, which is considerably larger than humanity. We get lost by making humans the subject when we are simply the object. What’s important to us should never be us.
The real drama consists of all the figures we cannot see with our eyes. It is the whole range of authorities in Heaven that shape our human existence. From our perspective, what really matters is the rebellion of the Devil. Keep in mind that terms like Devil, Satan and even Lucifer are all titles, not personal names. Individual personal identity is a human obsession; in the Spirit Realm, roles and titles are everything. We cannot know the identity of the major figures; all we have is the roles they play.
The role of Satan is more subtle and complex than we will ever understand. He is at the same time a rebel and faithful servant. To understand his role requires grasping how context shifts and what his role demands within the varying context. God has revealed the role Satan plays in our existence, and hints at the wider context of that role. We are told that this figure’s original assignment was roughly equivalent to Chief Bodyguard for God. His role included passing glory to God, and the prophets reveal that he tried to embezzle some of that glory for himself. His fundamental failure was insisting that he was high enough up the chain of existence that he warranted some worship.
This is what the prophecies point out as his characteristic flaw. Apparently he had no trouble convincing some of the staff in Heaven to embrace the same mistake. It was a political movement, but not the kind of thing where God just destroyed them all. He valued something in this situation that called for allowing them to keep on living, but with constraints. And in the process, God conceived a need to explain Himself to some unknown audience — not us. In the process of executing His discipline on His staff, Satan was confined in a prison outside of the Spirit Realm.
That prison was connected to the Garden of Eden, where God had placed a rather insignificant hobby of His — humans as gardeners. We can only guess, but it appears part of Satan’s original complaint was that all of our fealty went to God, and he got none of it. In the midst of this dispute with God, Satan developed a vile hatred for us. We can only speculate, but perhaps it has to do with resentment that God gave us immortality within the purpose of keeping the Garden. Satan doesn’t seem to hate the Garden, only humans.
As part of this dispute, Satan convinced others to embrace his clamor for God to allow himself and others on the divine staff to receive worship. This was the fundamental nature of his temptation of humans, too. It’s as if his whole repertoire rests entirely on this one thing, to tempt others to seek godhood. It’s important to understand that he wants the powers and authority of a god, and the best way to do that is to sucker folks into worshiping him. He’s trying to build his kingdom. That he was banished to a prison means that he’s trying to provoke God to put others in that same prison where he will reign.
But it’s not just suckering us into our demise; he gets his jollies from tormenting. This is another primary signature of his work. Anyone who delights in tormenting others is most assuredly serving the Devil. Side note: The Bible differentiates between a grisly execution (aiming at reputational shame) versus tormenting while alive (debasing).
At any rate, from the Garden, we humans did not so much lose our immortality as suffer having it masked by confinement in a mortal condition. Even saying that much is merely interpretive, a parable. It depends on how you look at it; it’s contextual. The whole thing is revealed to us in parables because the truth transcends clinical language.
Further, it’s not simply a historical decision made by a couple of representative humans; there’s something fundamental to the ineffable context. To be human is to be vulnerable to the temptation Satan offered. We would all have done the same thing had we stood in place of Adam and Eve. It is characteristic of being human. Satan took advantage of our natures and the rules we could not possibly understand.
In the midst of this setting, several events figure large in the Bible narrative as a way of filtering out all the other stuff that happened in the human realm. The whole point was not to record human history, but rather a narrative of the interaction between the Unseen Realm and the mortal realm in which we live. The way in which God makes His case before that unknown audience includes all the things recorded in the Bible, at least from our human perspective.
And as part of that process of revelation, we have the nation of Israel and the story of how God’s Chosen became Satan’s primary weapon against humanity.
In a way, it’s the greatest backstory ever told.