Troublesome Topic: THE SPIRIT REALM

Nothing in the Bible necessitates this worldview that Michael Heiser is promoting. All the passages Heiser relies on have a reasonable explanation that does not require the Nephilim being demigods.

How does Heiser know that angels are God’s imagers? Not all of God’s creation has been made in God’s image in the same way we have been. Just because the angels were created by God does not make angels imagers or family members of God. These are nothing more than assumptions Heiser makes because he needs them to be true. The Bible calls them ministering spirits, not imagers or family members of God.

Heiser also grants himself considerable freedoms with the creation of the spirit realm, the nature of angels and demons, the relationship between spirits and humans, and the supposed God-given role of these powerful beings over various nations of men. The only “evidence” that, when Nephilim are killed, their spirits wander the earth causing problems for mankind, is in the 1 Enoch (pg. 325).

The Bible is not as clear as we would like about what Satan can do and cannot do but we are told what to expect from him – deceit and manipulation. But what about the Nephilim? We are not given any explanations about their limitations, or what we can expect from them.

The Biblical origin of demons is found most clearly in Revelation 12:9 where it is clear that Satan, who is identified in three other ways, is thrown out of heaven and to the earth, and his angels are thrown out with him. Revelation 12:9 is indeed referring to a time before Eden because time is not irrelevant in symbolism, and most of Revelation is symbolism. We know when Satan was kicked out of heaven – before Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Eden. And Revelation 12:9 tells us that the angels that rebelled against God along with Satan were kicked out of heaven with him.

According to 1 Enoch, the demons have their origin in the account of Gen 6:4 (Pg 325), but in the Bible, the demons are fallen angels, and that happened before mankind was created. Notice that Heiser goes with the extra-biblical sources rather than the biblical ones for the origin of demons.

We are being asked to believe that God made the spirits of the dead Nephilim part of His council of gods after they had sinned by promoting violence and witchcraft (according to 1 Enoch). Then other “angels” came to earth and did the same thing, producing more creatures like the Nephilim. And after they were killed, God once again made their spirits part of his council of gods even though they had been very wicked.

Michael Heiser implies that God was obliged to do so because that is how He had set up the universe – that the members of the spirit realm were part of his council. Even Satan is included in God’s council. Heiser says that God could not eliminate all of the Nephilim spirits because they were His children and therefore His imagers. He taught that the spirits were God’s imagers just in different ways than humans. This may be true, but we cannot say it with any certainty because the Bible never calls them God’s imagers. Michael Heiser states it as fact.

When the Bible tells us that there are spiritual forces at work beyond what we clearly understand here on earth, and God will judge them some day (see pg 157-158 and Is 24:23), we should not invent theories about who or what they are or where they came from. Doing so is especially onerous if God’s word tells us something different – such as the origin of the angels and demons. We do not have the liberty to rewrite those statements to our liking. If the theories of Michael Heiser stand against the teaching of the Bible, and they do, we should accept the vacuum and not try to fill it. There are reasons God did not tell us about all those things. Instead of reinterpreting almost all of Scripture, we should accept that God does not want us to know everything. Just because other religions of ancient times believed something, does not mean it can be injected into the Bible, but that is exactly what Michael Heiser does.

The next lesson is HOW POWERFUL ARE THE SPIRITS OF THE NEPHILIM AND OTHER MEMBERS OF THE DIVINE COUNCIL?