Before setting off on the next portion of our journey, we take a moment to consider the nature of things not obvious. Indeed, it's not obvious even in the text of Scripture, much less perceptible to those with dead spirits. We have mentioned how most writers in the Old Testament assumed an Israeli audience, with all the Hebrew assumptions, and all the Israeli lore no longer available to us today. What modern Jews might tell us seems wholly inconsistent with the Bible, as they have long ago discarded their original Hebrew world-view. Yet, in some New Testament passages we find Hebrew Christians citing some of this ancient Hebrew lore not found in the Old Testament. We must assume there is enough there for us to serve Our King, but that does not prevent us using His brand of spiritual logic to examine clues He left behind.
In particular, we refer to the revelation regarding Satan and his demons. It is necessary to begin pointing out their work at this point in our journey so the bigger picture becomes more clear to us. It's a part of the fuller picture Hebrew readers would have had as they read these ancient stories. The Kingdom logic says this: Since the data is scarce, so must our curiosity be about them. Poking and prodding and risking wrath is a worldly trait; cautious and respectful consideration of small things is a spiritual trait. It should be obvious Satan sponsors curiosity to the point of obsession, because this sin opens the door for him to twist our understanding of him.
Sadly, I must ask readers to discard most of what they may have heard from other Christians about demons. Even quoting Scripture can be deceptive if you read into it a meaning not intended. In John's Revelation, we find symbolic imagery aplenty, including discussion of Satan and demons. The Great Dragon is obviously their master. That his tail sweeps a third of the stars down to earth with him is obviously not literal, since nothing resembling such numerous celestial objects can be found on this planet. Nor should we even take the numbers literally. In general, the lesson is there are more of them than we'll ever know, and they are outnumbered roughly two to one by angels. All the standard folderol offering detailed descriptions of how they work and how to "take authority over them" is dangerously close to blasphemy.
Yet, we can know something about how they operate. We see a lot of them in the Gospels, as Jesus orders them to stop hurting people. How was it so very many of Jesus' nation were tormented by demons? The first answer is the utter failure of the Jewish leaders, the priests and Levites in particular, had departed from the original Hebrew mystical understanding of the Law. They had become Hellenized, in love with Western human rationalism. They were corrupt to the point of rejecting the correct explanations Jesus gave for what the Law required. This corrupted fascination with Western rationalism had been in place for over 200 years before Jesus was born, so the first line of defense against demons was utterly missing. The Jewish leaders were at fault for not being able to drive out demons, nor to keep them out, as the Law promised it could do.
Satan and his demons were cast to the earth, as it were. There is an implied reduction of privilege, a lost status and power. They were subject to the provisions of the Law of Moses and, by extension, the Covenant of Noah (the two Law Covenants), in the sense that observing those covenants defeated the demons in the sense of their possession of human lives as we see them in the Gospels. People with dead spirits remain fallen sinners, but God told Cain -- whose spirit was dead -- he didn't have to surrender to sin. Satan already owns the eternal destiny of the fallen, but he cannot simply possess their lives that way, unless there is some gross failure of human responsibility under law.
Even if the leadership fails, individual lawfulness will offer some protection. However, the Law Covenants recognized an additional layer of protection at various community levels, up to the national leadership. It should be obvious, even ignoring demons, a lawful leadership system tends to promote lawful behavior all the way to the bottom. But demons are involved in breaking down those layers of protection, too. Leaders with spiritual understanding are particularly pivotal, because Satan knows who they are. When spiritual people surrender to Satan, the consequences are far larger than if some fallen sinner surrenders on a particular issue. Demons target the spiritual most forcefully for the advantage it brings them.
Grace brings forgiveness in the spirit, but Satan may still own some of the consequences. God judges each detail in Heaven, and we may never know just exactly how each case comes out. This is where Job comes in; his story takes place between Noah and Moses. He is not a Hebrew, but his experience is fully applicable to the Law of Moses. Job is a spiritual man attacked by Satan. The first lesson is a spiritual man should not be chasing the earthly blessings of the Law, because he already has a foot in Heaven. Job's friends don't get this, and their reasoning is limited to Law, because they are not spiritual. They do not comprehend how Job's situation falls outside those bounds, which they assume to be universal. The Jewish leaders of Jesus' day suffered the same limited view, that God's favor is seen only in the blessings of this world, and spiritual enlightenment does not exist. We who are spiritual have to deal with this. The second lesson is we also have to deal with sorrow which seems unfair, until we fully embrace how we operate from a different plane. Job didn't quite grasp with his mind what his spirit should have seen clearly: God does what He does in our lives for His own reasons, and owes us no explanation at all. Satan is surely a factor, and we are not granted a full knowledge of such things, but are required to remain faithful (loyal) with our limited understanding.
However, when the spiritual element is removed, most things are written in stone, as it were. The Canaanites defied the Covenant of Noah, as had their progenitor from before the moment Noah cursed Canaan. His character infused itself into his descendants. By that open rejection, they invited demons. Their religious practices were filthy beyond description, and it served to increase the demonic presence in the land. When God sent Joseph to Egypt, it was necessary in part because that demonic outbreak was about to get worse by far. When it was time to leave Egypt, there was a similar outbreak of demonic power there. When the Israelites whined in the wilderness under Moses, they were inviting demons into the camp. When they invaded Canaan, they did not attack every city, only the places which served as the most demonic places of pagan worship. When they failed to finish the job, they left open the demonic presence on a permanent basis. David, as a spiritual man, beat them back from the nation at large, but left his household wide open to attack. Every king who compromised, spiritual or not, opened the door to demons who had been there a long time already.
When Jesus came into the land, do we not see what a demonic heyday it was? The very people who should have fully understood the demands of the Law Covenants had rejected the means to understand them. They traded away their Hebrew heritage of divine revelation, and demanded God operate according to such logic as man could develop on his own, outside revelation. God is not impressed, and Satan is enjoying himself. Things have not changed all that much since then, when it comes to demons and their work. Every nation since that time owes part of their history to how well they kept demons weak or strong. Modern nations today are still under that same system.
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By Ed Hurst
15 April 2009
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