Troublesome Topic: EPHESIANS 6:12

Paul mentions the Devil in verse 11, then in verse 12 he refers to “rulers, authorities, powers of this dark world, and spiritual forces in the heaven places.”

Paul has just said that our battle is not against flesh and blood, i.e. not against the things we can feel with our hands and see with our physical eyes. Instead, our battle is against those things that we cannot see. So far everyone agrees.

Michael Heiser assumes that Paul mentions four groups in this passage because there are more groups of entities in the spiritual realm than Christians usually acknowledge; he assumes the existence of an entire council of gods that Christians usually ignore. He claims that Ephesians 6:12 is yet another proof of the council of gods.

However, there are other interpretations.

One is that Paul thought and spoke like a Jew because he was a Jew. Jews often spoke or wrote using parallelism, which usually involved saying the same thing twice or making a point by stating the two opposing sides of the issue. Although parallelism was typical of poetry, it also crept into their speech and writing on a regular basis when they weren’t writing poetry. It was just something they did. Here Paul said something twice and each one was doubled by using parallelism.

Another interpretation is what I call layering. In order to prove his point, Paul was employing the technique of layers; he was putting several synonyms together to make his point more powerful. In Ephesians 1:19 Paul uses 4 words for power/strength. That is layering. I think he is doing it again in Eph 6:12. In essence, Paul was saying, “our struggle is not against the things we can see, but against the forces we cannot see, whatever they are and however many there are.” He was not defining them, he was generalizing.

There is a spirit realm and there are levels of authority among the angels, and among the demons. That does not prove there is a council of gods. We should not ignore the existence of the spiritual realm, but neither should we accept Heiser’s assumptions as truth.