Radix Fidem Blog

In ancient Palestine, prior to the Conquest by Israel in roughly 1400 BC, there had arisen among the native Canaanites an appalling pagan religion devoted to a god called Molech. The name itself means “king” more or less. The idol for this god was normally a bronze oven, around which this god was formed, and multiple arms rather like the Hindu Kali.

The annual early spring rituals saw this oven fired up and heated until the bronze arms glowed. Then someone from the community of worshipers would place their own first-born infant son in these waiting arms, until all that remained was a smoking corpse. In the quaint terminology of their day, it was called “passing their children through the fire of Molech.” This screaming sacrifice sought to assure a good harvest of crops, and fertile herd animals.

In the standard mystical frame of reference from that part of the world, this scene symbolized the abject slavery of the people to their “king.” He owned them entirely; their lives were subject to his whims. The image was extensible, applying itself to a thousand acts, small and large, throughout the year.

The God of Israel was not like this. You gave your sons to Him symbolically, not in some ghastly ritual. He wanted them alive to serve Him and His covenant in building and maintaining what was truly the best of all possible worlds after the Fall. In the case of Israel, He paid the full price to redeem them from slavery, showing incredible signs and wonders, giving them freedom and their own home land. Then as clear  a revelation as could be offered in human language was handed to them with a full and open explanation as to why this covenant was as good as it gets. As we know from those Scriptures, they spent more of their history in ungrateful violation than in anything resembling even the most feeble compliance. The periods of compliance became increasingly rare. Their ingratitude extended to rekindling the fires of Molech for their children, a deity who had not done a thing for them.

This pagan deity serves as a perfect symbol of the implacable modern nation-state government in the West, and may other places, today. We are expected to render our children to the state, regardless of any expectation of pleasant consequences. Maybe it will turn out well; maybe not. But you and I are offered no real hope beyond bland assurances which are patently false. Nor can the state offer any plausible claims of having taken us from any previous servitude, but demands such servitude a priori from us. There is a fiction we have chosen to go along with this, but from the first day that system was a lie. It has always been the elite ruling us, controlling the entire public discourse and mechanisms for selecting who exercises power.

Molech threatened his worshipers with starvation and disease if they did not fulfill his demands. Sounds like the state, no? You are required to surrender your children as property of the state in a thousand ways. The state will decide if you are permitted to bear that child in the first place, and can change its mind capriciously without any accountability through its many servants. The state will decide where and under what conditions that child will be born, what you are permitted to do with it, feed it, what you must inject into its tissues and when. At the first sign of any irregularities, the state snatches the child from your home, as if you and the child were simply the property of the state, an asset for its comfort and convenience. Such is the logic of the nation-state.

My characterizing is according to the logic of Heaven; this is the way the Bible views things, a parabolic indication of something hard to put into words. This is “thus saith the Lord.” Do not pass your children through the fires of Molech by compromising with the state. You may think you have no options, but if you seek no relief from God by praying for guidance in how to build a better society, you have chosen Molech.

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.)

The inherent failures of Western Systematic Theology are most evident in Demonology.

In the first place, Systematic Theology is scarcely induced to recognize the divine, so it should be no surprise it handles demons poorly. They do appear in Scripture from beginning to end, though not always by that label. For example, the chief of demons, Satan, is labeled “the Serpent” in Genesis. If you have a poor grasp of Hebrew symbolic logic, you might conclude this is a literal reference to some primordial snake with legs. So Western evangelical teachings are shot through just such a silly notion. It carries them down endless wild goose chases.

Nor should we be surprised at the often comical notions taken by the less orthodox Charismatic notions regarding demons. When your epistemological assumptions undercut a proper grasp of the Hebrew Scriptures, and the Hebraic substrate of the New Testament, you leave people dangling, wide open to deception when they can’t quite buy your own obvious mistakes.

Popular forms of demonology arose against the utter failure of old line orthodoxy to take seriously the problem with demonic influences. With the dominance of Enlightenment rationalism, demons were viewed merely as a quaint notion from some primitive past which had to be discarded, or at least downplayed, in order to be serious scholars. The entire field of Neo-Pentecostal or Charismatic theologies is the result of closing off any access to the Hebrew epistemology, but refusing to deal with very real non-rational manifestations of the Spirit Realm. Lacking the clear understanding of the Hebraic logic, and seeing the failure of the orthodox rationalism, the Charismatics were left with little choice but to try using broken logic to process a very experiential religion and come up with something which seems to work.

I say these things because I have been directly involved in both traditional evangelical, and even fundamentalist, orthodoxy as well as the Charismatic movement. Both failed me and my own encounters with spiritual realities. That spiritual reality forced me to engage Hebrew intellectual assumptions with a will.

The truth need not make sense to Post-Enlightenment rationalism. It is ineffable, which is why Jesus taught in parables. The ultimate truth of things cannot be stated plainly in rational discourse and match Aristotle’s categories. They cannot be clinically described, only symbolically indicated. Hebrew logic is symbolic and indicative, not analytical and descriptive. Hebrew texts must be read from the Hebrew viewpoint. Aristotle’s categories only work for as far as they go, which stops dead at the boundaries of observable reality. Reaching beyond into the Spiritual Realm requires a departure, a recognition of things beyond the intellect. You simply must absorb revelation as it is.

Demons are fallen angels. So much is commonly understood, but with such a poverty of grasp of all things spiritual, entirely because of the assumption it can be understood on the human level, we end up ignoring the reality of human nature. That reality includes a spirit which can be brought to life, and put in charge over the intellect. The living spirit “reasons” as it were on a spiritual level, completely outside the boundaries of Aristotle’s assumptions, and far above human intellect. Failure to develop a consciousness of this higher faculty is the primary failure of Western theology. We aren’t supposed to understand angels and demons; we are supposed to implement in our minds a mode of life which assumes their presence and powers by recognizing the limits of what we can know.

The world is fallen. Aside from the Creator Himself, any entity which enters within the fallen realm must of necessity respect the limits placed on that realm by the Creator. Angels and demons don’t lose their power, but are confined by the limitations of the realm itself. Both recognize those inherent limits, but demons will lie about them. Our primary understanding of those constraints comes from the Covenant of Noah. In a sense, demons are bound by the Law of Noah. The entirety of their efforts in our lives and in our world is to seduce us off the path of observing the Law of Noah.

When you embrace that covenant willfully, you gain a measure of immunity from demonic activity. The boundaries are not precise as we tend to think of such things in the West, but they are inescapable for both humans and spirit beings. If you are under grace, you are in a position to gain the authority which comes with compliance with that Law of Noah, but without having to worry overmuch about the provisions of that Law. However, if you lack the Hebraic approach to understanding grace, you are horribly crippled in claiming that authority. You won’t get there, except by accident. Your immunity from demonic activity will have huge holes in it unless you approach things from the spiritual reasoning of the Spirit Realm.

Verbally announcing your authority under the Blood of Jesus and other such incantations are ludicrous is you don’t actually operate in the name of Jesus. The concept of “in His Name” is not native to our Western culture. Spoken words have no authority on their own; it’s not magic. Ritual acts and words mean nothing if they don’t arise from a spiritual reality. It requires diving into the Ancient Near Eastern cultural background to realize what is required to properly use such phrasing with any meaning. If you are under the Blood of Jesus, you cannot claim much if you don’t know what it requires of you. You can’t attack the strongholds of Satan in Jesus’ Name if you aren’t actually walking in His authority as a faithful servant of His Divine Court. Simply because you believe you recognize those terms does not qualify; you have to know them from the biblical perspective, the Hebraic perspective.

It boils down to this: Walking obediently to the Covenant of Noah grants you that authority. You have to understand it all from the Hebrew intellectual culture, so that you will read the Scriptures as they were written, not through some perverted goggles of Western rationalist assumptions. You have to think in Hebrew terms, and process the meaning of the Law of Noah from a spiritual frame of reference. It requires recognizing how your spirit communicates down to your mind, and how you discern what is required of you in any given context. Grace means you will surely fail, and still come out clean, not that you can simply run along whatever path appeals to your Western sensibilities. Charismatics are notorious for mistaking emotional stirring for the move of the Spirit. Even those without a living spirit can choose to embrace Noah and Hebrew logical assumptions and find sufficient forgiveness to obtain a level of faithfulness which restricts demonic power in this realm.

You defeat the demons because you fulfill the Laws of God. If you understand the Law of Moses as a contextual expression of the Covenant of Noah, you’ll be miles ahead of the game. You need not bind yourself to Moses, of course, but use Moses as a particular example of Noah. You can gain the authority of obeying Noah by walking in the Spirit, but you can’t claim that without spiritual thinking. Having a spiritual birth does not itself immunize you from demonic activity in your life. It does remove the final penalty of the Fall in Eternity, but it does not give you a free pass in this realm. Regardless of their lies about it, demons are forced to respect the limits of the Laws of God for this fallen realm. If you don’t understand those Laws as revealed, they have the upper hand, and your witness will fail in many and magnificent ways.