I refuse to dispute with Scripture. You can bet I’ll dispute over Scripture. That is, I will debate with you what it actually says, but I’ll never hide or confuse the issue intentionally. I can point to a wealth of consistent scholarship about Hebrew intellectual assumptions and how they differ from what we have around us today.
In Hebrew literature, context is everything. For example, in the Ancient Near East (ANE), you would never stick your nose into something without good intel. That means you have your people on the ground at the scene, or close enough to observe. You would further insist on having things evaluated by people you trust, people who have taken the time to know what you value and how their mission fits into your broader agenda. It was all intensely personal and labor intensive. Whereas we make a demigod of objectivity, they would have sneered at the mere possibility of being objective about things in this world. God could remake reality on-the-fly, so don’t waste your time.
God made all things. There are no useful details on that because it’s beyond our comprehension. That’s partly because we are fallen. Again, the details are sketchy how that came to be, but that’s not important. What matters is the painful truth that we don’t operate on His level; we are stuck inside a very flawed and constrained false reality. Indeed, God said He would not enter this sphere of existence because simply touching it would destroy it, in the sense that His holiness would dissolve the whole thing as we know it. He has some peculiar and unknowable reason for keeping things as they are for now. So He’s personally involved through proxy agents, many of which are not human.
Those agents are described in Scripture as angels, beings who can manifest in a more-or-less human form when necessary. However, they are hardly human. Perhaps in more modern terms, they are moral abstractions that express God’s divine will. The whole point of Hebrew literature as revelation is to offer a working model of reality. The point of revelation is to bring attention back to Himself, because nothing will do more for us than to reach out to Him. What we have now is not what God had mind, not what He wanted for us. Whatever it was that we could have had, and could some day recover, requires first that we make Him Lord.
So it stands to reason the angels would not suffer our limitations, but understand them fully. For them to enter our realm of existence means entering a system of constraint not native to them. They don’t have to be visible nor have any particular form at all, but have been known to appear in a human form. Their essence is to express God’s moral intent within the context of our fallen state. They represent a redemptive presence, a personal expression of His compassion on our foul estate.
What we see in Scripture narratives about the appearance of angels is more about meeting the people where they were than about expressing any kind of absolute truth. Don’t read that sort of thinking back into Scripture, because it’s foreign to the mindset of the writers. There is no such thing as objective reality and no body of objective truth extant separately from God’s Person. What you see around you is deception itself, in a sense. This is the damaged and broken remains of something real, a collection of shadows. The Hebrew worldview is naturally closer to reality, being the product of divine revelation itself, but not obligatory upon us in every detail. Rather, it is obligatory to become familiar with that worldview if you plan to understand Scripture.
Our minds are designed to handle multiple frames of reference. From that basis you can shape your own approach to making God Lord of your life. You can create your own system, but don’t you ever pretend your system is somehow binding on others. Just because it makes sense to you doesn’t mean it should make sense to someone else. For all our vast attempts to formulate a standard system of logic, we cannot possibly all see things just alike. There is sure to be some overlap, but you can’t possibly rise to anything more than a functional grasp for your own use. It’s not that we can’t rise to logic, but neither we nor the logic is capable of discovering ultimate truth. It as to be revealed, and revelation is inherently personal. It’s moral, not factual.
You aren’t required to think of angels as literal truth. Seeing actual agents from Heaven is rather what the Hebrew people would expect; it wouldn’t challenge their ability to obey. God is not interested in useless distractions. He addresses you where you are in hopes you’ll allow yourself to be dragged out of that mess into something better. If it works for you to see it more as a matter of God’s character manifesting itself in the natural world instead of angelic entities pushing things around, fine — go for it. Take upon yourself the accountability to invest yourself in serving God and working out some internal system of organization so you can implement that divine call.
Meanwhile, don’t ever sneer at anyone else’s system. They may well be far closer to God’s intent for them than you are to His intent for you.
In terms of how things work, demons are those angelic beings under the dominion of Satan. In other places I describe how Satan is our enemy, but not God’s. Rather, Satan is God’s divine jailer and lictor. Every great ruler of the ANE had a very high-ranking official who kept the jail, typically a debtor’s prison of sorts. It isn’t precisely buying your way out of hell, but of satisfying the debt owed on your head.
The whole thing was described in terms or ANE feudalism. Your Lord is involved in some kind of domain-building. It was seldom so crass as pure monetary profit. He valued people more than property. People can be moved as opportunity provides, but real estate was fixed to the ground. A nomadic existence was the essence of their assumptions about life. Besides, without talented servants to populate your holdings, land meant nothing. If you transgress your Lord’s plans for building His empire, you would cost him something; it would be a loss. You would incur a sort of debt. The jailer would assume the ownership of that debt and you would serve him until that debt was repaid. He wasn’t required to be nice about it, so the longer you stayed in his service, the more likely you were to die before your time.
So abstract this image and understand that humanity is born into Satan’s jail, born under a transgressor’s debt. There is all kinds of ways to resolve that debt, and the provisions are quite generous, but you have to accept the terms. The debt is regarded as incurred by your disloyalty. Redemption from that debt starts with a resolve, a commitment of personal loyalty to serve the Lord in building His domain. Otherwise, all you do is enrich the jailer, Satan.
But Satan can’t do anything without God’s permission. Moreover, in terms of influence in this world, Satan’s power is outnumbered two-to-one, as it were. That is, the Bible says that there are two angels for every demon. I’ll leave it to the reader to consider what that says about how goofy humanity is about staying with Satan when the exit from his service is so very easy.
On the other hand, the entire thrust of Western Civilization is to counter God’s truth. It was bad enough in ancient times with their odd mixture of pagan and heathen cultures. But that was all a rather common ground compared to the vast distance we have to travel these days. Departing Satan’s clutches has never been harder in terms of human awareness. It’s rather like having to install an entirely different operating system on a computer. The hardware is just fine either way, but the outcome is radically different in terms of what you can do with it. It’s not enough to simply remove the malware and change the settings; you have to start from scratch with an entirely different orientation.
When discussing angels and demons, we start with a huge mass of painfully sick and perverted lies. All the crap in movies and ghost stories is just that — crap. The whole thing is the result of pagan mythology and pointedly contrary to Scripture. Nothing in this universe twitches without God’s permission. Whatever is at work on our level of existence is not something we need to fear. It can’t drag us screaming off into Hell. By default, that’s where we are all headed in the first place. In general terms, the torment of human suffering and sorrow is all one thing; only our subjective sense of awareness makes any difference. The fallen plane of existence is all shadows and lies in the first place.
Nothing requires you to think and operate in terms of angels and demons literally present around you. What is required is that you understand the moral implications of the imagery in the context of Hebrew Scripture, and apply that moral discernment to your own existence.
