The Bible’s Grand Story in the Unseen Realm

Part 2

I love books that offer a grand sweep of the Bible that ties the whole together through a theme like the Exodus or the Temple. Seeing how all of Scripture unites in multiple ways is enlightening and energizing for me.

In that regard, Heiser’s The Unseen Realm does not disappoint. As I noted here, his book is not just a catalog of spiritual beings. Rather he tells a remarkable story of God’s plan for creation from Genesis to Revelation through this clarifying lens.

And what is that story? “The Old Testament is basically a record of the long war between Yahweh and the gods, and between Yahweh’s children and the nations, to re-establish the original Edenic design” (p. 376). And the two wars are actually one, with rebellious spiritual beings using the nations in their battle.

Here’s how it unfolds. While initial conflicts emerge in Genesis 3 and 6, a turn comes, unexpectedly, in Genesis 10 which offers an apparently boring list of seventy nations descended from Noah and his sons. But these are the nations split up in Genesis 11 after the fiasco at the Tower of Babel. God doesn’t completely forsake them, however. In Genesis 12 he promises to bless them through Abraham and his family.

What is going on here? Moses offers a striking explanation of the episode at Babel: “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind [at Babel], he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage” (Deut 32:8-9 ESV).

God, says Moses, gave up the corrupt nations to their rebellion at Babel, turning them over to “the sons of God,” which is a reference to the divine council (a group of spiritual beings often referenced in places like Gen 6:2; Ex 15:11; Job 1:6; 2:1; Ps 82:1, 6; 89:6-7; etc.). The nations are disinherited from God at Babel and given over to the control of these equally rebellious “sons of God.” But God chooses one nation for his inheritance—through whom all the nations will eventually be brought back into the fold. That is, Israel.

As we know, that is ultimately fulfilled by God in the person of Jesus Christ, the unique Son, who accomplishes the task Israel failed to complete. When the New Testament then refers (as it does frequently) to the nations (e.g., Matt 28:19; Mk 13:10; Acts 1:8; Rom 16:26; etc.), this is more than a statement about a worldwide mission. It is a reclamation project which involves God’s plan to dethrone the rebellious spiritual beings who led the nations astray, and bring all peoples back to himself.

Many years ago I heard the phrase “territorial spirits” to describe how nations were guided by evil beings who had a certain geographic or ethnic domain. I was skeptical, thinking it derived from isolated and contested texts like Daniel 10:12-21. Heiser doesn’t employ that terminology, but he does use the phrase “the divine council cosmic-geographical worldview,” to describe what he sees as permeating Scripture (p. 349).

What difference does all this make? How does it affect our life in Christ?

Those are the questions I’ll address in my next post.

Image: Ziggurat at Ur, modern Tall al-Muqayyar, Iraq. Such temple towers were characteristic of Mesopotamia, 2200 to 550 BC, and was likely the pattern followed at Babel (see John Walton and Tremper Longman III, The Lost World of the Flood, pp. 129-42). Image by Abdulmomn Kadhim from Pixabay.

The Stephen Colbert of Punctuation

I’m reprinting here a review of one of my favorite books from a few years back. Enjoy!

Benjamin Dreyer is the Stephen Colbert of grammar, style, and punctuation—informative while always being cheerfully acerbic.

When he tells us in Dreyer’s English to never use actually, it is “because, seriously, it serves no purpose I can think of except to irritate.” When offering examples, Dreyer also gives us cause to smile. Honorary titles should be capitalized, as in, “Please don’t toss me in the hoosegow, Your Honor.”

You’ll have fun with this book whether or not you care or know that “the verb in a relative clause agrees with the antecedent of the relative pronoun”—not least because Dreyer hates that stuff too! Even as a decades-long copyeditor he still has to look things up in dictionaries and style guides. We should too!

His stance toward the nature of rules in English is one I have long advocated to authors. They are helpful, but don’t take them too far because spoken English profoundly affects written English (eventually, usually). And he chirpily breaks, bends, and bruises them all the time—once, for example, suggesting we “give it a good think,” right there in front of God and everybody.

Memorable tips abound. How do you tell if a sentence is passive (with the likely result of changing it to active)? If you can add “by zombies” to the end. “The floors were swept, the beds made, the rooms aired out.” Yep. Passive.

And here I can now confess that I could never keep straight the rule about restrictive and nonrestrictive commas because neither can Dreyer. But he has a dandy new name for it that makes all the difference.

Use the “only” comma, as he calls it, when the noun in question is unique. So “Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert, was born in 1843” because Lincoln only had one eldest son. But if more than one son could be under discussion and must be named for clarity—no comma. Thus “Lincoln in the Bardo concerns Lincoln’s son Willie.”

He also festoons his text with, well, I wouldn’t call them explanatory footnotes. They are more like asides. After offering three acceptable options for use of a possessive he concludes with, “You choose.†” At the bottom of the page we find, “†Psst. Take the middle option.”

What every one of you is wondering, of course, is how Dreyer’s English differs from my Write Better (available October 2019, since you asked). Dreyer’s book is a wonderful journey into the details of punctuation, grammar, and use of numbers, augmented by many lists of misspelled, misused, and miscellaneous words—all whimsically annotated. I say almost nothing about these things.

My focus is on larger strategies for writing which Dreyer does not —such as, how to find openings, focus on readers, develop a structure, battle writer’s block, be persuasive, make a compelling title, increase our creativity, use metaphors, and say more by saying less. The last part of Write Better considers how the act of writing affects our relationship with God.

The two books should be enjoyable and valuable companions.

Fifteen Minutes a Day

When I first entered publishing, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the folks at InterVarsity Press had a slogan for a reading program they were promoting: “Fifteen Minutes a Day Is Fifteen Books a Year.” The idea was that if you could give on average fifteen minutes a day to reading, over the course of a year you could read fifteen books.
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Vice President of Looking Out of the Window

I am off for July. So I’m running some favorite Andy Unedited blasts from the past. This was originally posted October 9, 2007.

The story was a legend in my family when I was growing up.

Once my mom went to have lunch with my dad, who worked as an executive at a company in downtown Minneapolis. When she got to his office she saw him behind his desk with his back turned to the door, looking out the window. She was so impressed by how hard he was working that she immediately elevated him to “Vice President of Looking Out of the Window.”
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Our Own Worst Electronic Enemies

I am off for July. So I’m running some favorite Andy Unedited blasts from the past. This was originally posted May 29, 2008.

When it comes to the digital future of publishing, we as publishers can be our own worst enemies.

Everyone seems to agree that electronic books will be a significant part of the world ahead. The only disagreement is how fast this new publishing environment will emerge and in what form. One of the major barriers to any form of digital publishing, however, are the permissions policies of publishers themselves.
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Publishing Is Like . . .

I am off for July. So I’m running some favorite Andy Unedited blasts from the past. This was originally posted May 12, 2008.

The key personnel gathered. “Listen,” said the publisher. “A publisher went out to publish. And as he published, some books fell on deaf ears. And the remaindering houses came and snatched up the excess stock at a fraction of its cost. Other books fell on hard-headed readers where the ideas were not able to root deeply in their minds. So as soon as the readers’ preconceived notions arose, the ideas from the book withered away. Other books fell among a huge glut of other new books and choked out the shelf-space, so the books were not seen. Other books fell into fertile minds and grew there, making a difference in the readers who in turn touched the lives of thirty, sixty or even a hundred other people.”
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