It’s not merely that humans are fallen. Heiser talks about the Three Rebellions of God’s elohim staff: the Fall, the great corruption through the Nephilim, and the deception and idolatry after the Tower of Babel. Humans are in a bad way, and in desperate need of redemption from the effects of all three.
Each of these Three Rebellions has put us farther and farther away from Eden and our native place in Creation. We are separated from our God’s design and our rightful condition. We live in a world that is hostile to what we have become, instead of responsive to our management. We don’t understand it fully and must fight manually for what little we get from it. And what we get isn’t worth very much because it’s tainted by sin.
Creation in general, and the natural world around us in particular, is not fallen. It is also not passive and neutral. We have taught on this blog for many years that nature is alive, sentient and willful (in a certain sense). Satan and his allies do not have any control over the natural world that is not available to us, if we choose to understand and exercise the authority God gave us in the Garden. Granted, the authority we exercise in our current condition is limited, but it’s way more than what is commonly imagined in western mythology.
Jesus lived among us in our fallen condition, but without the moral taint of the Three Rebellions. He wasn’t in His eternal form; He was constrained by our mortal condition, but manifested what we could be with redemption. He lived in the condition we could gain if we embrace His teaching. Thus, He walked on water, calmed the storms, healed the sick and delivered captives. He flatly said that we could do things like that if we follow Him. He also said that His authority would not answer our whims and curiosities and desires, but would answer to the purpose and message of His Father.
The full range of His teaching is not explicitly stated in the Gospels; the authors themselves warned of that. Rather, His teaching references a wealth of what was signaled indirectly in the Old Testament. Ultimate truth cannot be stated in dry clinical terms. It cannot be contained and circumscribed by words. Truth is not propositional; it is personal. Truth is another name for the Person of our Creator and His Son. Thus, the teaching of Jesus opens a door to the privileges we lost in the Three Rebellions.
Creation is also a Person, a manifestation of His Word. God imbued it with His own Person and character. It responds to His will. If we walk in His will, it is our best ally. It knows His will and cooperates willingly. When the Nephilim walked on this earth, they taught all of the ways of Creation’s activities, but denied the power and will of God. Creation does a lot of things simply because of its nature; it has habits and instincts. You can fail to understand the divine purpose, but still have some limited access to ways of manipulating the natural world (“magic”).
Thus, we would end up using the limited authority of the rebel elohim and the disembodied Nephilim spirits (AKA, demons). That authority is quite substantial, but it does not match that of Christ. Their authority can deceive and destroy; it cannot build. They don’t own the natural world, but they do understand it a lot better than we can with our senses.
If you enter into the Covenant of Christ, the authority available to you trumps theirs. Given our situation here in America, I warn that it requires you consciously submit to Christ as your feudal master, making Him Lord. That includes entering into a covenant community and embracing the tribal feudalism inherent in Creation itself. But the main point is that you be in a community of faith, because that’s where divine authority resides. You cannot access divine authority outside of that situation.
Do you understand that so-called ghosts and poltergeists are simply manifestations of how the natural world operates? They are not specifically demonic. They can be used to manipulate us if we don’t understand them, and that’s the point of telling you that they are normal phenomena.
When a human dies, their spirit leaves their body and this world. They do not hang around. However, the natural world may for various reasons remember their presence. In certain locations and under certain conditions you may encounter a resonance of the person manifested by the memories held within the natural world. They do this as a function of God’s divine purpose in addressing our moral situation, about His wrath and our need for redemption. This is one of the ways that Creation speaks His truth. The lingering sorrows of humans are manifested as if those humans were still present. And sometimes the physical elements may act on their own accord to seek our attention to these things (“poltergeists”). They are simply acting on their designed nature.
If you get spooked, it’s part of the same deception that caused Adam and Eve to hide from God in the Garden. They instinctively feared the wrath of God on their sins. They knew they had elements in their lives that required covering, and their covering was gone. It was gone because they surrendered to the authority of Lucifer, and he offers no covering at all. Thus, people who face these normal operations of the natural world are typically fearful of them. They can represent the wrath of God on whatever caused the sorrow that still resonates in that context.
Those things could hurt us if we are not covered. If we operate under the authority of Lucifer — the entire realm of human activity outside the Covenant — then we have no protection from the natural world. Creation is not our ally but our enemy. [Edit: Demons can also masquerade as ghosts and poltergeists, but with the Holy Spirit’s Presence, you’ll know the difference.]
The only way to escape the authority of Lucifer and his friends is to submit to the authority of the One who created all these things. The key to “miracles” in which the natural world is our ally is that we operate according to the authority and message of Christ. He said the simplest statement of His authority and message was in the command that we should love each other as He does. That means forming a covenant community.
From within that context, we are allowed to know instinctively what His will and message should be in any given context. We then can exercise one or more gifts that He grants to the community and message of the Covenant. You can live for the Covenant or you can live for the Devil; there are no other options for humans.
