Angels, Demons, and the Unseen Realm

Introduction 

We’ve all heard of angels and demons, but what if I told you that there's more than meets the eye? The ancient Israelites and the Early Church believed so. Paul writes in Ephesians 6:12, "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places". He wasn't just talking about the devil. Paul understands that there is a full-blown war in the unseen realm, and we are smack-dab right in the middle of it. And it's not some small minor conflict. It is a full-on Lord of the Rings-level war. 

Before we can delve into the spiritual realm, we need to clarify who's who, which side they're on, and dispel any misconceptions or myths. Let's start in Psalm 82, verse 1. Can someone please read it? "God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:". The word for God, both in uppercase and lowercase, is Elohim. The word Elohim is not a proper name, but rather a term for a place of residence. All spiritual beings are Elohim, but not all Elohim are the same. Let's start with the upper-case God. That's Yawheh, and based on the Old Testament and the Trinity, it's safe to assume that this is God the Father talking. Another name for Yahweh is Beney Elyon, which means "Most High", signifying how He is sovereign over all creation, both physical and spiritual. As for the lowercase gods, this is where we begin to delve into spiritual warfare, so we must understand who they are.  

What Spiritual Beings are There? 

In the Old Testament, we commonly see spiritual beings who are not Yahweh, such as angels or cherubim, but there's more than just these. There are also beings called Beney Elohim, which translates as "sons of God". Scripture clearly states that they exist in Job 38:7, where Yahweh asks Job, "when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?". These are non-trinitarian, non-angels that existed when God created the universe. They are not angels, who we'll cover in a second, nor are they a part of the trinity, as I just stated. They are distinct elohim that play a key part in God's story of redemption and in the Bible as a whole. They also make up Yahweh's divine council, which we'll come back to when we cover the hierarchy of Heaven.  

Next up in our cast of spiritual beings is angels, and this is going to be fun. The word "angel" comes from the Greek "angelos", which means "messenger, envoy, one that announces". The Hebrew word is mal'ak, which means "messenger". That is the entire job of angels. To deliver messages. They are the postal service for Heaven. God needs a message delivered to humans, and He doesn't want to speak to them directly as He does to the prophets? He sends an angel. Another thing about angels: they don't have wings, and look like humans. Angel is a job title, like writer, IT professional, or teacher. Also, that physical description I just talked about? That's when they appear to humans. What is their true form? Unknown. The Bible never says. 

Finally, there's Cherubim. These beings are like the military of Heaven, standing guard at the boundary between Heaven and Earth. They are described as hybrid creatures, a collage of different animals that look a little different each time they appear. They first appeared at the boundary of Eden in Genesis 3:24, making sure that the rebel humans could not reenter. The best description we have of them comes from Ezekiel 1:5-14, where Ezekiel describes the Cheribum as having feet like calves and faces of humans, lions, oxes, and eagles, human hands, and wings, and "their appearance was like burning coals of fire" (Ezekiel 1:13). The reason they are mashups of all the creatures is because they are a symbolic representations of God's creation, which is why in Isaiah's vision, the Cheribum are singing. After all, everything that fills the earth is God's glory, and thus through the Cheribum, all creation offers praise to God.  

Now there are a couple of other spiritual beings that I've yet to cover, like Shedim, but I will in a bit, so hold on. Now that we have our cast of characters, bar a couple that I'll introduce shortly, let's cover the hierarchy of Heaven. 

The Hierarchy of Heaven 

Imagine Heaven like the Executive Branch of the US Government. You have God, who is the President, the divine council is the Cabinet, the Cheribum is the military, and then there's all the agencies and whatnot. Let's begin with God. 

God is at the top. He rules over all creation, both physical and spiritual; He can't sin, and he is the only one who is truly perfect this side of the 2nd coming. He is eternal, omnipresent, etc, etc. The Trinity works together in concert; no one part of God (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) is above the others, and each part of the Trinity is God, but the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Father, and so on.  

If God is the President, then He must have a Cabinet, or a group of advisors, right? You might be saying to yourself, "But God is perfect. He doesn't need a group of advisors to tell him what he ought to do; he's God." And I'd completely agree with you. But God chooses to instead share His rule with his creation, specifically humans on earth. And just like He shares his rule with humans in the physical realm, He also shares his rule with others in the spiritual realm with beney elohim who make up the divine council. The divine council is first referenced in Genesis 1:26, where it says, "Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”". The word "us" refers to the divine council, and my analogy for what is happening right here is that God saying "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" is like Jeff messaging the GroupMe asking if we want pizza. We all agree that pizza is a great idea, and so Jeff goes and gets the pizza. He is both the inspiration and the initiative, similar to how God has an idea (Let us make man in our image, after our likeness), and the initiative (So God created man in his own image). The divine council makes an appearance in 1st Kings 22:19, where it reads, "I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left". Here, we see God summoning his divine council to create a plan to get Ahab to go fight a battle and die. If you know anything about Ahab, you know he wasn't the best king Israel had. And one spirit comes forth and gives a plan, then another gives a plan, and God's like, "ok, these are good, but not quite what I'm looking for. Anyone got anything else?", and another spirit comes forward and says, "I got an idea. Why don't I put a lying spirit in all the false prophets that Ahab's got sitting around, so they'll encourage him to attack a heavily fortified city that's heavily armed, and then he gets to find out that you're the one true God a lot faster than expected?". And God's like, "Great idea. Go ahead and do it.". And that's what happens. 

Below beney elohim, but still in the divine council, we have cheribum. I'm not going to go into too much detail because I already talked about their role a bit, but they make sure that those who enter God's presence are allowed in, regardless of sin. They also help fight in the war that I talked about earlier and will dive into in a second. 

And as for angels, as I said, it's a job title, not a creature. It is a role assigned to elohim to deliver what is, in essence, mail from God. If it were a physical letter, the return address would be "1 Throne of God, Eden, Heaven". It is the lowest in the divine council, but not in importance. All roles in the divine council are important, and the rankings change depending on the situation. 

Now that we know who's who in Heaven and what the org chart looks like, let's look at spiritual warfare and divine territory. 

Spiritual Warfare and Divine Territory, OT Edition 

The stage is set. We know who's who; now we get to go dropkick the Gates of Hell. But we only know one enemy: Satan. Should there be more? Yes, and there is.  

First, let's make sure we know who Satan is. He doesn't have a tail, horns, and a pitchfork. He is an elohim who rebelled against God, wanted to be God, but was instead cast down from heaven, as seen in Isaiah 14:12-15. He is not for anything; he is instead anti-everything. He wants to drag the world into its pre-creation state. Because if creation is good, and sin is bad, sin is the act of de-creation.  

Introducing Satan's fellow ne'er-do-wells, Shedim. The Shedim translates as "demon", and they are spiritual beings who are in rebellion with God. There are two great places to see where Shedim are found outside of exorcism, as seen in the Gospels. Genesis 3:1, with the serpent, and Genesis 6:1, 4. In Genesis 3, we see the human rebellion tied to the spiritual rebellion, as the serpent, which is translated from nacash, gets Adam and Eve to sin, and from there it goes downhill. From this point on, the human rebellion against God will forever be intertwined with the spiritual one. Genesis 6:1-4 reveals that elohim are not meant to intermingle with humans, and thus, that makes the sons of God who do so in rebellion against God. These rebel beney elohim don't just disappear; they become very important very fast. After the Tower of Babel, God disinherits the nations, and by doing so, he hands them over to the rebel beney elohim, and this makes Genesis 10 and the Table of Nations very important. Each nation listed is given over to a certain beney elohim, and each nation lived in a certain area of the world. This means that Egypt belongs to this beney elohim, and Babylon belongs to this beney elohim. This is where all the idols and false gods of the Old Testament come from. 

There are a few good examples of the idea of foreign territory in the Old Testament. The first is in Leviticus 16, where God tells Moses about the Day of Atonement ritual, where two goats were presented to God, and one was sacrificed to Yahweh, and the other was cast out into the desert "to Azazel". To quote Michael Hieser, whose book The Unseen Realm is a primary source for this message, "Azazel's realm was somewhere out in the desert, outside the confines of holy ground". Another key point to add is that "The point of the goat for Azazel was not that something was owed to the demonic realm, as though a ransom was being paid. The goat for Azazel banished the sins of the Israelites to the realm outside Israel. Why? Because the ground on which Yahweh had his dwelling was holy. Sin had to be "transported" to where evil belonged-the territory outside Israel, under the control of gods set over the pagan nations. The high priest was sacrificing to Azazel. Rather, Azazel was getting what belonged to him: sin". The second example is in 1st Samuel 26:19, where David calls out to Saul, who is hunting him, "'Now therefore let my lord the king hear the words of his servant. If it is the LORD who has stirred you up against me, may he accept an offering, but if it is men, may they be cursed before the LORD, for they have driven me out this day that I should have no share in the heritage of the LORD, saying, ‘Go, serve other gods.’'". David understands that if he is not in the territory of Israel, he is not in Yahweh's domain, and by all the laws and understandings of cosmic geography, he could not worship Yahweh. This is why, when Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah (for those who aren't super big Bible nerds, those last three are Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego) all choose to worship the Lord instead of the false gods the Babylonians worshipped, it was a massive deal. It was basically a giant middle finger to the demonic realm that said, "We know that technically we can't worship Yahweh here, but we know that He is greater and stronger than all of you, so we'll do it anyway". 

So we've looked at spiritual beings, cosmic geography, and basic Old Testament spiritual warfare. But we don't live in the Old Testament era. We live in a time where Christ has already died on Calvary. So how does this apply to us in 2026? That's where I'm going next. So buckle up and get ready. 

Spiritual Warfare and Foreign Territory NT Edition 

This is what applies to us here and now. These next few minutes. This is where the rubber meets the road. Let's roll. 

When Jesus died on the cross, he didn't just pay for our sins. He also started the process of taking back foreign territory. Paul writes in several of his letters, "I need to get to Spain". Why? Because this was the last area from the nations disinherited at Babel that had not yet received the Gospel. Paul and the Apostles understood that the death and resurrection of Christ meant that God was taking back what was rightfully his. That is one of the reasons why we can worship God outside of Israel: sin was given to the demonic realm for good, and that means that wherever the Gospel goes, that land becomes God's. Every baptism, every public declaration of faith, every sinner saved, every time the Gospel is spread is God's way of saying, "this is mine, it was always mine, and I'm taking it back". 

I want to loop back to Ephesians 6:12, where Paul writes, "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places". Paul is saying that even though Christ defeated death and the demonic realm when he died on the cross and rose three days later, they aren't dead yet. They're defeated, and they know it; they just won't go down easy. If anyone here has read the series or watched the TV show The Wheel of Time, the demonic realm is like a Myrddraal, who, when they are killed, often will thrash and still try to fight, even though they are, in all purposes, dead. That's the demonic realm. So they're going to fight harder to try to take as many with them as possible.  

So, how do we fight against them? Paul doesn't leave us hanging. Immediately after Ephesians 6:12, Paul tells us to, "Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day". Paul then gives us exactly what each part of the armor is, what it does, and the order needed to put it on. The order matters. The Belt of Truth grounds you and binds everything together. The Breastplate imbues God's righteousness into you, and the Shoes give you grip to stand firm and have true, God-given peace. The Shield defends you from the attacks of the enemy. The Helmet blocks the lies of the enemy and tells you that you are saved, and the Sword allows you to fight the unseen enemy. 

Conclusion 

While the war is won, the battle is not yet finished. We need to stand firm, keep the watch, and be ready to dropkick in the Gates of Hell. James writes in James 2:19, "demons believe—and shudder!". If that's the case, what do we have to fear? Paul writes, "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain".  

So my final exhortation is go out and put on the full armor of God. Now, something to know is that you are going to face blowback from the enemy. They don't like it when we stand firm and fight back. So, this is why you need to be wearing the Armor of God, so you can fight back. One of my favorite songs is "Last One Alive" by Demon Hunter, a Christian metal band, and it has the line, "Better I'm the last one alive/Than a soul denied". That should be our goal: better that I'm the last one alive to face the demonic horde than one single person be denied eternity with God. Therefore, go out, destroy strongholds, and take back what is rightfully God's in your everyday life. 

Resources:

Michael Heiser's The Unseen Realm and Supernatural

Bible Project's Spiritual Beings Series