The gods Are Real
The Bible never said they were imaginary - it said they were defeated. And the campaign is still being fought.
Today’s post is a departure…
After two decades of blogging, it’s the first time I’ve written publicly on a theological topic. Not to worry; my next post returns to the sort of subject matter you subscribed for in the first place — Part II of something I started back in 2015, Vaccine Wars are on the Horizon.
Two things led me to break ‘new’ ground...
The first was a Saturday evening Bible study I led a couple weeks ago on the Kingdom of God, where the questions kept running past the answers I had written down. I touched on some of this, hopefully whetting appetites and not just confusing people.
The second was hearing Pastor Josh Howerton walk across this exact ground early in his recent conversation with Shawn Ryan (click below and listen to the first intermission)…
The post itself is a deep dive. Don’t try and read it in one sitting. It is broken down into a prologue and three chapters. A great study for the next week or so…
Still Trying to Make Sense of the Bible Without a Deuteronomy 32 Worldview?
There are a significant number of familiar events in both the Old and New Testaments that I would argue make little sense without a “Deuteronomy 32” worldview (paying particular attention to verses 7-9). We will take a bigger bite shortly, but follow me for a moment while you chew on this tiny morsel.
One such event I have always struggled to understand concerns the third of Christ's temptations. When Satan took Jesus up on a high mountain to show Him “all the kingdoms of the world,” promising that they could all be His if He would bow down and worship, my pea-brain used to have a meltdown. I thought Christ, as creator of the universe, already owned all those kingdoms?
And it gets even more interesting when you read Luke’s version and notice the detail Matthew left out…
“And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it.” (Luke 4:5-6)
For that is delivered unto me… Delivered? By whom?
Think about it — although Jesus refused Satan’s offer, He did not dispute the claim. He never said the offer was a lie or a bluff. Instead, He quoted Deuteronomy 6:13 at the enemy and moved on. This means that if the kingdoms were not actually Satan’s to hand over, the temptation would have been no temptation at all. In other words, you can’t be tempted by an empty box.
So there are only two possibilities…
Either the devil was lying, and Christ heard the lie but failed to address it. Or the kingdoms really were Satan’s to hand over to “whomsoever he will”. Meaning someone had put the world in his hands long before Christ stood with him on that mountain.
But that’s just the beginning — one of a host of similar. In fact, there are almost too many other passages to count that we all too often simply gloss over, in many cases because we are on autopilot due to familiarity. Passages that, if we were to actually stop and ponder, make little sense without viewing them in light of those three verses of Deuteronomy 32 (7-9).
For instance, when looking at the Exodus, why would God tell Moses that the plagues were aimed at specific small ‘g’ gods (plural)?
“For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD.” (Exodus 12:12)
Against all the gods of Egypt…
Until recently, I was under the assumption that the ten plagues were merely demonstrations of God’s raw power to a stubborn Pharaoh — greater displays of power than Egypt’s occult sorcerers could muster. The text indicates, however, that they were judicial proceedings against convicted defendants.
Imaginary entities do not warrant judgment…
“A subtle but dangerous mistake: When most people think about idols, they picture statues—carved wood, molded metal, or some ancient object of superstition. But Scripture presents a much deeper—and more dangerous—reality. The Bible doesn’t confuse an idol with the god it represents. It repeatedly distinguishes between the two. An idol is not the god itself, but an access point—a spiritual portal of presence and power.” -Pastor Jon Moffit from an article on the Reformed Fringe blog titled The Key to Idolatry: Why Access to Other gods Still Matters
In other words, the danger isn’t in the wood, stone, or gold itself. It’s in what the wood, stone, or gold connects you to.
If you follow The Reformed Fringe podcast, which you should, you will see over and over that small ‘g’ gods are not only real, but they have considerable power. This is why the very first commandment God handed to Moses (Thou shalt have no other gods before Me) was written. Not because Joe Sports Nut might make football an idol (episode, episode, episode), but because real gods exist beyond the idols they represent and are worshiped through.
Let’s roll through some related Q & A…
Why did a Syrian general haul dirt home in saddlebags?
“And Naaman said, Shall there not then, I pray thee, be given to thy servant two mules’ burden of earth? for thy servant will henceforth offer neither burnt offering nor sacrifice unto other gods, but unto the LORD.” (2 Kings 5:17)
Naaman had just been healed of one of the most dreaded diseases of the ancient world, leprosy. And his instinct — obviously, immediately, without anyone correcting him — was that worshipping Israel’s God back in Damascus required a patch of Israel’s ground to stand on. Elisha’s response? “Go in peace.”
Why did David think exile meant forced idolatry?
“…they have driven me out this day from abiding in the inheritance of the LORD, saying, Go, serve other gods.” (1 Samuel 26:19)
Nobody said that to David. No one handed him an idol. He is describing what it meant to be pushed outside the boundaries of the LORD’s inheritance. Cross the line, and you are in somebody else’s jurisdiction.
Why did Jephthah argue territory by deity?
“Wilt not thou possess that which Chemosh thy god giveth thee to possess? So whomsoever the LORD our God shall drive out from before us, them will we possess.” (Judges 11:24)
Pay attention because Jephthah, judge of Israel, in the middle of a diplomatic exchange, treated land allotment as a matter in which the deed is held by a god.
Why did the Syrians think elevation mattered?
“And the servants of the king of Syria said unto him, Their gods are gods of the hills; therefore they were stronger than we; but let us fight against them in the plain, and surely we shall be stronger than they.” (1 Kings 20:23)
The Syrians lost. But notice the assumption everyone in the ancient Near East shared… Nobody argued about spiritual authority having physical addresses.
Why did a legion of demons beg to stay put?
“And he besought him much that he would not send them away out of the country.” (Mark 5:10)
Not “don’t destroy us.” Not “don’t send us to the abyss” — though Luke records that plea too. Don’t send us out of the region. Whatever a legion of unclean spirits is, it apparently had an address. And when the trade came, they took it. Remember this because you will soon see how much it matters.
Why did one of God’s angels get held up for three weeks? Who fought him to an almost month-long standstill?
“But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me.” (Daniel 10:13)
A prince of Persia strong enough to delay a heavenly messenger, and another prince — the archangel Michael — assigned to Israel, having to come to his aid. Nations with spiritual princes (aka principalities). Princes who battle each other. A war going on behind the scenes, in the spiritual realm.
And why, when Paul stood up on Mars Hill, did he describe the entire pagan history of the world as a period God deliberately let slide?
“And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent.” (Acts 17:30)
Winked at. Overlooked. Passed by. Why would God overlook the nations for centuries and then, suddenly, at a specific point in history, command all men everywhere to repent?
What changed in the unseen realm with Christ’s death, burial, resurrection, and subsequent ascension to the right hand of the Father?
Any one of these can be explained away on its own. A metaphor here, a cultural accommodation there, or a bit of ancient superstition that modern (enlightened) Christians can safely discard because it doesn’t fit our theology.
But that’s the problem in a nutshell — they don’t appear on their own. They are literally everywhere…
They appear consistently; across two testaments, and in narrative, law, poetry, prophecy, and letters — from Moses to Paul to John the Revelator. And they all assume the same thing. They assume the nations of the earth are under authority. Not God’s direct authority, but somebody else’s. However, they all teach that this is a situation God Himself established, with the intention of reversing.
This reversal is the very point of the Bible / Gospel — the way God’s Kingdom is both established and expanded...
This reversal — prophesied first in Genesis 3:15 — has a name and an address. It was stated by Moses in the Song he was commanded to teach Israel as a witness against them, and it is arguably the single most consequential concept in the Bible that most Christians have never had explained to them, or in many cases, never heard of…
The Divine Council of Deuteronomy 32:8.
We are going to start at the beginning — with a rebellion in a garden, a descent on a mountain, and a tower on a plain — and follow it forward until we are standing on a hillside outside Jerusalem, watching the Son of Man ascend into a cloud, listening to His disciples ask a question about borders and hearing Him answer with the whole world.
By the end you should be able to say what the Kingdom of God is, when it started, why it did not look the way anyone expected, what exactly was bound in Revelation 20, and why the church has been advancing ever since, against gates that were never designed to hold it back.
PART I — THE REBELLIONS AND THE ALLOTMENT
The Question Nobody Expected
Forty days after His resurrection, standing on a hillside outside Jerusalem with the risen Christ standing in front of them, the disciples asked a question that has confounded commentators for two thousand years…
“Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6)
They had watched Him die. They had seen the empty tomb. They had eaten with Him. He had spent the better part of six weeks explaining, in His own words, “the things pertaining to the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3). And at the end of all that instruction, their question was still about borders. Still about Rome. Still about getting the land back.
The standard read on this is that the disciples were just plain stupid. That they had missed the point so completely that Jesus had to redirect them one last time before departing.
That read is too quick.
Jesus did not tell them the question is wrong. He told them the timing was not theirs to know…
“And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.” (Acts 1:7)
He then gave them something better than an answer. He gage them a map…
“But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)
Jerusalem. Judaea. Samaria. The uttermost part of the earth. The disciples asked about one nation. Jesus answered about all of them…
The full weight of that answer only makes sense if you know what happened to the nations in the first place. And to know that, you have to go back much further than Acts. Further than the Gospels. Further even than Sinai and Abraham.
You have to go back to a courtroom in heaven, a mountain in the north, and a tower on a plain in the fertile crescent named Shinar.
The Bible Assumes We Know What We Don’t
Here is the difficulty with our modern American pea-brains trying to grasp the context of the writings of the ancients…
The bible’s writers held a set of assumptions about the unseen world that they never bothered to explain. Why not? Because their readers already shared them. It was common knowledge. Nobody explains what everybody already knows.
An “enlightened” world does not share those assumptions...
Two thousand years of theological development, a Reformation fluent in the unseen realm but with heirs who aren’t, an Enlightenment, and a century of both liberal demythologizing and dispensational chart-making have left the modern Christian reader — including the modern conservative Christian reader — with a mental furniture arrangement the biblical authors would not recognize.
So when we hit passages that presuppose that framework, we do one of three things. We skip them. We spiritualize them away. Or we force them into a system built centuries later and retrofitted into one’s systematic theology.
Consider a handful of texts that most Christians have read, but almost none have been taught…
“God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods.” (Psalm 82:1)
“For who in the heaven can be compared unto the LORD? who among the sons of the mighty can be likened unto the LORD? God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the saints, and to be had in reverence of all them that are about him.” (Psalm 89:6-7)
“And the LORD said, Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead? And one said on this manner, and another said on that manner. And there came forth a spirit, and stood before the LORD, and said, I will persuade him.” (1 Kings 22:20-21)
“Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them.” (Job 1:6)
There is a pattern here, and it is not subtle. Scripture repeatedly describes God presiding over an assembly of created spiritual beings. He consults them. They report to Him. They are given assignments. They can dissent. They can be evaluated. They can be condemned. But do not be confused…
Yahweh alone is, as our church regularly sings, “Lord among gods”.
Michael Heiser called this the divine council, and his 2015 book The Unseen Realm did more than any recent work to put it back in front of ordinary readers. But Heiser did not invent this. He recovered it. The framework is older than the Reformation, older than Augustine, older than the New Testament. It is simply what the text says, read the way its first audience would have read it.
Two clarifications before we go further...
First, the word “gods” is not a concession to polytheism. In Hebrew, elohim is a term of place, not of rank. It marks a being whose native realm is the spiritual world rather than the physical one. It is applied to Yahweh, to the members of the council, to the deceased spirit of Samuel in 1 Samuel 28:13, and to demons. Yahweh is elohim; so are others. But only Yahweh is uncreated, only Yahweh is omnipotent, only Yahweh is worshipped. The distance between Yahweh and every other elohim is the distance between the Creator and everything that is not. Deuteronomy 4:35 and Isaiah 43:10-11 are not undone by Psalm 82. They are the reason Psalm 82 ends the way it does.
Second, this is not new theology. The early church read Scripture this way as a matter of course. So did the Jews of the Second Temple period who wrote the New Testament. What was lost was not orthodoxy. What was lost was the background — and as many of you will see, losing the background has flattened large amounts of the foreground.
File that framework away in your mind, and watch what happens when you start viewing the scriptures through the lens of the divine council...
Rebellion One: The Garden
Every account of cosmic conflict has to start somewhere, and most start with a dramatic pre-creation fall of Satan — a war in heaven before Genesis 1, a rebellion of a third of the angels, Lucifer cast down in the space between the first and second verses of the Bible.
I want to be careful here, because this is where a great many otherwise sound teachers overplay their hand.
Scripture never narrates that event.
It is not that the fall of the adversary is unbiblical. It is that the Bible does not give us a scene. There is no chapter that says: before the world was made, an archangel rebelled, and this is how it went. What we have instead are two oracles addressed to human kings that reach past their subjects toward something older, and a handful of New Testament statements about angels who did not keep their place.
The two oracles are Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28.
“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.” (Isaiah 14:12-14)
“Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.” (Ezekiel 28:14-15)
Read the headers. Isaiah 14:4 addresses “the king of Babylon.” Ezekiel 28:12 addresses “the king of Tyrus.” These are taunt-songs against human rulers.
And yet the language will not stay in its lane. No Phoenician monarch was in Eden. No Babylonian king was ever on the holy mountain among the stones of fire. The prophets are doing something the ancient world understood instinctively. They are describing an earthly ruler by draping him in the mythology of a cosmic one. It’s an insult that only works if the older story is both real and known.
So the historic church reads these passages as double-layered — a human king in the foreground, a fallen spiritual being behind him. Origen argued exactly this in De Principiis (Book I, Chapter 5), and Tertullian assumes it as well. That reading is defensible. What is not defensible is treating these two passages as a straightforward chronological narrative of a pre-Genesis war. They are poetry doing prophetic work, and building a timeline out of them is building on sand.
Here is what Scripture does tell us plainly. Something in Eden was already opposed to God before the man and the woman ate of the forbidden apple...
“Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.” (Genesis 3:1)
The Hebrew word is nachash, and it carries a triple resonance that English cannot hold at once: serpent, one who deceives or practices divination, and — as an adjective — shining or bronze. Paul seems to know all three when he writes that “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). This was not a talking animal. This was a member of the council, present in God’s garden-sanctuary, who chose to work against the purposes of the One who put him there.
What did he want? The text says it plainly...
“For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:5)
Ye shall be as elohim. The temptation was not fundamentally about fruit. It was an offer of a rank. And it worked, in the worst possible way — God Himself confirmed the outcome…
“And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.” (Genesis 3:22)
Humanity was made to rule the earth as God’s image and imagers, His administrators in the physical realm, exactly as the council served Him in the spiritual one…
“And 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 fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:26)
Note the “us.”
If you grew up in church, you were taught that “us” is the Trinity — Father, Son, and Spirit in conversation before the foundation of the world. That’s how I heard it too, for most of my life, and there’s nothing heretical about it. But it’s worth noticing that the reading came along a few centuries after the text, and that the text itself gives us something different.
Look at what happened one verse later. Verse 26 is plural: let us make man in our image. Verse 27 is singular, three times over: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him. If the “us” were partners in the work, verse 27 makes no sense. God didn’t have help.
He had an audience.
And that audience turned up again in Isaiah’s throne room vision, where the prophet heard the voice ask, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? — spoken in a room that Isaiah has just described as full of other beings. Nobody reads that “us” as an internal conversation within the Godhead. It’s the same idiom. The same room.
Once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it…
The sons of God present themselves before the Lord in Job. Micaiah watches the Lord sit enthroned with the host of heaven standing on his right hand and on his left, and hears an actual deliberation take place. Daniel sees thrones — plural — set in place before the court sits. The Psalmist says God stands in the assembly and passes judgment among them. This is not a fringe reading assembled from three obscure verses. It’s an institution the Old Testament simply assumes its readers know about, the way it assumes you know what a threshing floor is.
A Divine Council worldview does not come at the expense of the Trinity…
While seen the the Old Testament, the doctrine of the Trinity is built on the New Testament — on the baptismal formula, on John’s prologue, on Paul’s benediction — not on a Hebrew pronoun in Genesis 1. And it’s stronger when it isn’t leaning on a grammatical ambiguity that a sharp skeptic can pick apart in thirty seconds. What you gain by letting Genesis 1:26 mean what it meant to the people who first heard it is the rest of the story. Because the moment you accept that there was a courtroom, and that there were others in it, the third chapter stops being a fable about a talking animal and becomes something much bigger and far more serious.
The council is standing right there in the first chapter of the Bible. And one of them is listening…
“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” (Genesis 3:15)
Everything that follows in the bible is the working-out of that sentence.
One more note that will be important later. When Jesus says…
“I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.” (Luke 10:18)
Luke is not reminiscing about a pre-creation event here. Look at the context. He says it in the moment the Seventy return from their mission, reporting that even the demons submitted to them. They had been sent out in pairs, ahead of Jesus, into every town and place He intended to enter — seventy of them, and the number is not incidental (seventy missionaries / seventy nations).
The described fall is a consequence of their mission. Remember this because it becomes load-bearing in Part II.
Rebellion Two: The Mountain
Genesis 6 contains four of the strangest verses in the Bible, and the modern church has spent enormous time and energy explaining them away…
“And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.” (Genesis 6:1-2)
“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” (Genesis 6:4)
The dominant evangelical reading for the last several centuries has been the Sethite view: the “sons of God” are the godly line of Seth, the “daughters of men” are the ungodly line of Cain, and the sin is intermarriage between believers and unbelievers.
That reading has a serious problem — it is not what the phrase means anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible…
Bene ha-elohim — sons of God — refers to divine beings in Job 1:6, Job 2:1, and Job 38:7, with the parallel construction in Psalm 89:6. There is no instance where it denotes a human genealogical line. And the Sethite view has no explanation whatsoever for the offspring. Godly men and ungodly women do not produce Nephilim. Ordinary marriage does not yield giants.
More decisively, I would argue that the New Testament writers did not hold the Sethite view…
“For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment; and spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly.” (2 Peter 2:4-5)
Peter put the sin of the angels immediately adjacent to the flood, in that order. That is Genesis 6 read the plain way.
Jude is more explicit still…
“And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.” (Jude 6-7)
Angels who left their proper dwelling are compared to sexual sin. Described as going after “strange flesh” — flesh of a different kind. Jude is not describing pious Sethites marrying badly.
This was the consensus of the early church, and it was not a fringe consensus. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Athenagoras, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Lactantius, and Ambrose all read Genesis 6 supernaturally. Athenagoras stated it directly in his Plea for the Christians (Chapter 24). Justin Martyr did the same in his Second Apology (Chapter 5).
The shift toward the Sethite reading came later, largely with Augustine and John Chrysostom, and was driven substantially by a desire to distance Christian interpretation from the book of Enoch that heretics were fond of quoting — not by fresh exegesis of the Hebrew (Christian historian, Phillip Schaff on this subject).
A Word About the Book of Enoch
We cannot go further without dealing with Enoch, because Jude quotes it.
“And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” (Jude 14-15)
That is a direct quotation of 1 Enoch 1:9.
And Jude’s whole surrounding argument — the angels who left their habitation, held in chains of darkness — tracked Enoch’s account of the Watchers closely enough that it cannot be coincidence.
So what do we do with it?
Just remember that Enoch was a witness, never an authority.
It tells us what the conceptual world of the New Testament writers looked like. It tells us that Jude’s readers would have recognized this allusion. It does not, however, tell us what is true. Where it aligns with canonical Scripture, it illuminates. Where it goes beyond canonical Scripture, it is interesting. Where it contradicts canonical Scripture, it is wrong. No exceptions.
Three practical cautions…
“The Book of Enoch” is not one book. It is a composite of at least five distinct works written over several centuries. The Book of the Watchers (chapters 1-36) is the section that matters here and is well attested in the Dead Sea scrolls. The Similitudes or Parables (chapters 37-71), which contain the striking “Son of Man” material, are not attested at Qumran and are disputed in date, with some scholars placing them late enough to raise the question of Christian influence rather than the reverse. Anyone who cites “Enoch” as a single unified prophetic book has not read it.
Quotation is not endorsement. Paul quoted the Cretan poet Epimenides in Titus 1:12 and the Athenian poet Aratus in Acts 17:28. Neither became Scripture. Jude affirmmed that this particular saying is true. Doing so did not canonize the corpus.
Augustine rejected it, and his reason deserves engagement rather than dismissal. In City of God 15.23 and 18.38 he acknowledges that Enoch wrote something divine — Jude says so — but argued that the writings circulating under Enoch’s name could not be trusted for antiquity, and were rightly excluded from the canon by those responsible for guarding it (something I will get plenty of pushback about in the comment section). He is right about the canon question. Where I part company with Augustine is Genesis 6 itself. His move away from the supernatural reading was made partly to avoid the Enochic baggage, and in avoiding the baggage he abandoned the plain sense of the passage.
The Mountain Itself
1 Enoch supplies one detail that Scripture does not state directly but that the rest of the Bible appears to assume. A location. The Watchers descend on Mount Hermon.
That name should stop you. Hermon sits at the northern edge of Israelite territory, on the border of Bashan. Why should that interest us? Bashan is where the Old Testament puts its giants…
“For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man.” (Deuteronomy 3:11)
“All the kingdom of Og in Bashan, which reigned in Ashtaroth and in Edrei, who remained of the remnant of the giants.” (Joshua 13:12)
Bashan carried an unmistakable reputation in the Hebrew imagination. It was associated with the Rephaim — a term used both for the giant clans and for the shades of the dead. Ugaritic texts recovered at Ras Shamra connect the region to the cult of dead kings. Psalm 68, which we will return to in Part II, sets Bashan in direct opposition to God’s own mountain…
“The hill of God is as the hill of Bashan; an high hill as the hill of Bashan. Why leap ye, ye high hills? this is the hill which God desireth to dwell in; yea, the LORD will dwell in it for ever.” (Psalm 68:15-16)
The picture is territorial. There is God’s mountain, and there is the enemy’s mountain, and they are set against each other.
File that away because in Part II, Jesus walked His disciples eighty miles north, out of Galilee entirely, to the very foot of Mount Hermon — to ask them who He is.
What the Nephilim Left Behind
One more thread from Genesis 6, because it determines what “deceive the nations no more” will mean when we reach Revelation 20.
Where do demons come from?
There are essentially two answers...
The common assumption is that demons are simply fallen angels — the same beings as the Watchers, operating freely. The other, which is the reading of Enoch, is that demons are the disembodied spirits of the dead Nephilim. Hybrid beings whose bodies perished in the flood but whose spirits, having no proper place in either realm, remained on the earth (1 Enoch 15:8-10).
If the second view is right, it accounts for something the Gospels make conspicuous. Demons are frantic about embodiment. They beg not to be sent out of the region, plead to enter swine, seek dry places but find no rest.
“When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none.” (Matthew 12:43)
“And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them.” (Mark 5:12)
That is not the behavior of a powerful angelic prince. That is the behavior of something displaced and desperate for a body.
This distinction matters for Part III. The angelic Watchers of Genesis 6 are already imprisoned according to Jude and 2 Peter — bound, in chains, reserved for judgment. That is a different set of beings from the territorial rulers of Deuteronomy 32 and Daniel 10, who are demonstrably still operating.
Which means that when Revelation 20 speaks of a binding, we already have a canonical category for what “bound” looks like, and we already know it does not mean “removed from the earth.”
My own opinion after a decade of deep-diving this topic? I hold the Nephilim-spirits view as the better reading, primarily because it explains the Gospel narrative better. But nothing in this post collapses if you disagree. Both views agree on the essential point — that the beings ruling over and harassing the nations in the spiritual realm are created, defeated, and doomed.
Rebellion Three: The Tower
Now to the hinge. This is the passage that reorganizes everything, and it is the one most Christians know cold, but have never had properly explained to them.
Start with the story as we all learned it…
“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.” (Genesis 11:1-2)
“And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:4)
“And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off building the city.” (Genesis 11:5-8)
Two things to notice before moving forward.
First, “let us go down.” The council again.
Second, Genesis tells us the languages were confused and the people scattered. It does not tell us what became of them afterward. The narrative gives us Babel, followed by the Table of Nations, picking up Abram in verse 26 the very next chapter. Genesis 11 ends with a scattering and Genesis 12 begins with a calling, and the connection between the two is left unstated.
Moses, however, stated it in crystal clear fashion in Deuteronomy 32…
“When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel. For the LORD’s portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance.” (Deuteronomy 32:8-9, KJV)
Read that carefully, because the King James rendering, which is typically my go-to version, hides the problem. And once you see the problem, you will grasp why this passage is key to making sense of numerous passages througout the entirety of Scripture, a few of which we touched on earlier.
A key passage for having your spiritual eyes opened to begin to see and actually understand the governing heirarchy and what essentially amounts to a military ranking of the unseen realm, as seen in the various versions of Ephesians 6:12.
It’s a list that blew my mind, and might blow yours as well…
principalities and powers, rulers, evil rulers, evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, evil beginnings, preeminents, governments, powers, authorities, potentates, empires, despotisms, forces and authorities, powers of this dark world, mighty powers in this dark world, cosmic powers over this present darkness, cosmic powers of this dark age, cosmic powers in the darkness around us, world forces of this darkness, world powers of this darkness, world rulers of the darkness of this age, world-rulers of this darkness, princes of darkness, rulers of darkness, rulers of the darkness of this world, rulers of this world of darkness, universal lords of this darkness, directors of this world of darkness, chiefs of the world of darkness of this life, powers who govern this world of darkness, forces that control and govern this dark world, spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms, spiritual forces of evil in the heavens, spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places, spiritual forces of pain-ridden evil in the heavenlies, spiritual forces that control evil in the heavenly world, spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places, spiritual hosts of evil arrayed against us in the heavenly warfare, spiritual wickedness in high places, spiritual things of the evil in the heavenly places, spirits of wickedness in high places, evil spirits in the heavenly places, evil spirits under the heavens, wicked spirits in the heavenly regions, wicked aereal spirits, powers in the spiritual world.
The Manuscript Question, Handled Head-On
The KJV, following the Masoretic Hebrew text, reads “according to the number of the children of Israel.”
That makes no sense in context, and it has bothered careful readers for a very long time. The event described is Babel — the division of the nations. Israel does not exist yet. Jacob has not been born. Abram has not been called. Why would God set the boundaries of the nations by the number of a people who would not appear for centuries?
Two other ancient renderings read differently…
The Septuagint — the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made by Jewish scholars in the third and second centuries BC, and the version quoted throughout the New Testament — reads “according to the number of the angels of God.”
But that’s not even the biggie…
In 1952, in Cave 4 at Qumran on the Dead Sea, a Hebrew manuscript fragment designated 4QDeut-j was recovered, predating the Masoretic tradition by roughly a thousand years. It read bene elohim — sons of God.
So we have the older Hebrew and the ancient Greek agreeing against the later Hebrew. And the reading they agree on makes immediate sense of a passage that otherwise doesn’t.
This raises an important question. Was there a nefarious reason for the 1611 (KJV) being translated in this manner? No…
Jude 7 says Sodom sinned “in like manner” — but the Greek adds a small word the King James leaves out (toutois), pointing backward at the angels of verse 6, not sideways at the neighboring cities. In other words, Sodom's sin is being compared to theirs. And the King James is the version that preserves what that sin was, rendering it “strange flesh” — literally, flesh of another kind — where most modern translations flatten it into “perversion” or “unnatural desire” and lose the point entirely.
The dominant reading of Genesis 6 in Reformation and post-Reformation England was the Sethite view — the godly line of Seth marrying the ungodly line of Cain. Calvin held it. The Geneva Bible notes pushed it. If the translators shared that assumption, and they probably did, then the angelic reading of Jude 7 simply wasn't on their radar to suppress. You can't scrub a reading you never considered. Ambient assumption isn't conspiracy.
Many translations have followed this evidence.
When God divided the human race after Babel, He apportioned the nations among the members of His heavenly council — one administrator each. The number seventy isn’t printed in the verse; it comes from counting the nations in Genesis 10 and reading the two passages together, as the ancient reader would have done.
But it is Deut 32:9 that turns the hinge…
For the LORD’s portion is His people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance.
God parceled out the nations, keeping exactly one for Himself.
And the name of that nation is hiding in plain sight, because it is the second name God later gave Jacob — a name given in the same way He had renamed Jacob’s grandfather from Abram to Abraham in his latter years.
And it came twice. First at Peniel, after a night spent wrestling a man who turned out to be an angel. Then again at Bethel, when God appeared to him a second time and made the change formal…
And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed. (Genesis 32:28)
And God said unto him, Thy name is Jacob: thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name: and he called his name Israel. (Genesis 35:10)
Portion, inheritance, lot — that’s estate language, the same vocabulary used when Canaan was divided among the twelve tribes (Numbers 26:52–56; Numbers 33:54; Numbers 34; Joshua 13–19; Joshua 14:1–2; Joshua 17:5; Joshua 18:10; Joshua 19:9; Joshua 13:33). And notice what the text doesn’t say. These beings weren’t nessecarily evil when initially installed. They were appointed, lawfully, as regional administrators under God’s authority.
What they became is the subject of Psalm 82, where God indicted them for judging unjustly and favoring the wicked. Appointed, corrupted, sentenced. Part II turns on that sequence, so stay tuned.
Now, back to the modern versions that follow this line of evidence…
RSV — 1952. The earliest of these, and the most important date on the list: the translation committee adopted the reading on the strength of the Septuagint alone, decades before the Qumran Deuteronomy fragment supporting it was published, and sixty-three years before The Unseen Realm. (“according to the number of the sons of God”)
Good News Bible / GNT — 1976. The American Bible Society put the divine-council sense into a mass-market pew Bible aimed at ordinary readers, not scholars. (“He assigned to each nation a heavenly being”). Read this one again. Not because I recommend you run out and buy this translation, but because it is the most simplified of the bunch.
NRSV — 1989. Goes furthest of any major version, showing that translators who followed the manuscript evidence were willing to state the implication plainly. (“according to the number of the gods”)
NLT — 1996. Published by Tyndale House for an evangelical readership, which breaks the assumption that this reading lives only in mainline Bibles. (“according to the number in his heavenly court”). Hold the idea of the heavenly court because we see it in Daniel 7, just prior to Christ Coming on the Clouds to heaven to receive the keys to the Kingdom and be crowned King of Kings by the Father Himself.
ESV — 2001. The decisive version for conservative Reformed readers. J. I. Packer’s committee put the reading in the text rather than burying it in a footnote, and this is arguably the version used in most Confessional churches in America. (“according to the number of the sons of God”)
NET — 2005. Produced at Dallas Theological Seminary (a conservative, dispensational institution) under Daniel Wallace and Robert Chisholm. Interestingly, it carries the most detailed translator’s note on the variant of any English Bible in print. (“according to the number of the heavenly assembly”)
CEB — 2011. Confirms the reading held across a full sixty years of committee work rather than appearing and fading. (“based on the number of the gods”)
I fed these bullet points into Claude and asked it to summerize Deuteronomy 32:8-9 for me…
Deuteronomy 32:8–9 describes a single event with two halves.
When God divided the human race into nations, He did not leave them unattended. He assigned each nation to a member of His heavenly council — the “sons of God,” rendered variously across English translations as the gods, the heavenly assembly, or His heavenly court.
The second half is the exception.
One nation was not assigned to anyone. Verse 9 says the LORD’s portion is His people, and Jacob is the lot of His inheritance. He kept Israel for Himself, ruling it directly.
The vocabulary throughout is the language of dividing an estate — portion, inheritance, lot, allotment. The nations were parceled out. One was retained.
The number of those nations is not given in the verse. It comes from the table of nations in Genesis 10, which lists seventy.
God did not merely scatter the nations at Babel, He disinherited them. He assigned them to members of His divine council and handed them over.
And then, in the very next act of the story, He called one man out of Ur and started over, building for Himself a people of His own — a nation of humble beginnings that would grow until it encompassed the entire world (start marching around your house singing Father Abraham, not ignoring it’s deeper Christian truth — article, article, article, article, article, article).
Genesis 10, the seventy nations catalogued. Genesis 11, the nations disinherited, scattered, and turned over at Babel. Genesis 12, Abram called out of Ur to be the father of many nations — one of which would be Israel. Hold that phrase, many nations. It matters more than you think, and we will come back to it, because as I stated earlier, it’s a critical premise of the Gospel message.
The Fallback That Needs No Variant
Someone is going to tell you that this whole framework rests on a textual variant — that you have to abandon the Masoretic text to get there, and therefore the argument is built on a scholarly preference.
That objection fails, and here is why. The same claim is made in a passage where there is no variant…
“And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the LORD thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven. But the LORD hath taken you, and brought you out of the iron furnace, even out of Egypt, to be unto him a people of inheritance, as ye are this day.” (Deuteronomy 4:19-20)
That is the Masoretic text. That is the King James. There is no manuscript dispute.
And it says exactly the same thing as Deuteronomy 32:8-9. The host of heaven was divided unto all nations — the Hebrew verb is one of apportionment, of allotting a share. Israel was taken as God’s own inheritance. Two allotments, two portions: the nations to the host of heaven, Israel to Yahweh.
The framework does not depend on the Dead Sea Scrolls, but the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm it. To show you just how important this concept is in the overarching theme of scripture, Moses repeated it a third time…
“Take heed to yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant of the LORD your God, which he made with you, and make you a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, which the LORD thy God hath forbidden thee.” (Deuteronomy 4:23)
“And the LORD shall scatter you among the nations... And there ye shall serve gods, the work of men’s hands, wood and stone, which neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell.” (Deuteronomy 4:27-28)
To be exiled from the land is to be handed over to the gods of the nations…
Territory and spiritual allegiance are bound together throughout the Old Testament. This is why Naaman hauled Israelite dirt back to Syria in 2 Kings 5:17. Why David complained that being driven out of the inheritance of the LORD amounted to being told, “Go, serve other gods” (1 Samuel 26:19).
Why Seventy Nations?
Genesis 10 — the chapter immediately preceding Babel — is the Table of Nations. It lists the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth who became the peoples of the earth. Count them. That number is not incidental, and it does not go away. It recurs at every significant juncture in the story…
Seventy of Jacob’s household go down into Egypt (Genesis 46:27; Exodus 1:5).
Seventy elders of Israel ascend Sinai and eat and drink before God (Exodus 24:1, 9-11).
Seventy elders receive the Spirit that was on Moses (Numbers 11:16, 24-25).
Seventy palm trees stand at Elim (Exodus 15:27).
Seventy years of exile are decreed (Jeremiah 25:11).
Seventy missionaries sent out in Luke 10.
The seventy motif is real, biblical, and repeated. It is a genuine literary and theological thread. But there are a couple of caveats to think about…
Footnote #1: The Hebrew text of Genesis 10 yields seventy nations; the Greek Septuagint yields seventy-two. The same split shows up in the manuscripts of Luke 10, where some read seventy and others seventy-two. That is not a problem for the argument — it is a fingerprint of it. Whichever tradition a scribe was working in, the number of those Jesus sent out matched the number of nations in his Bible.
Footnote #2: The seventy weeks of Daniel 9 are a separate matter. They operate on a different axis — a chronological prophecy measured in sevens (“weeks”) of years (490 to be exact), not a count of nations. While there is resonance between the two, there is no demonstrable textual equation. I will show you the resonance in Part II where the timing converges.
The Council Becomes Corrupt
The nations were placed under the administration of the sons of God. And the sons of God did with that authority exactly what fallen creatures do with authority.
Psalm 82 is the courtroom scene…
“God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods. How long will ye judge unjustly, and accept the persons of the wicked? Selah. Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy. Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked. They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course.” (Psalm 82:1-5)
The gods were given a job. Administer justice among the peoples entrusted to you. Protect the poor, the fatherless, the afflicted.
They did the opposite. They accepted the persons of the wicked. They took worship for themselves. They ran the nations into the ground until “all the foundations of the earth are out of course.”
And so the consequence…
“I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.” (Psalm 82:6-7)
Ye are elohim…
God Himself says it, and He is not conceding polytheism — He is stating what these beings are before announcing what they will become. Created spiritual beings, given a portion of His authority, who will now be stripped of their immortality and die like the humans they were supposed to protect.
Then comes the prophetic bombshell — the psalm’s final line, which is the theme of everything that follows. The very theme of the Gospel itself…
“Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations.” (Psalm 82:8)
Every nation. Not Israel only. All of them.
The psalmist is asking God to take back what He gave away. And when Jesus is accused of blasphemy in John 10, this is the psalm He reaches for…
“Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?” (John 10:34-36)
Jesus Christ quotes Psalm 82:6 and says “the scripture cannot be broken.” He is not embarrassed by the divine council. Instead, He builds one of scripture’s most powerful theological arguments on it.
Daniel Names Names
If Deuteronomy 32 and Psalm 82 tell us the theology of the divine council exists, Daniel 10 is a picture of it operating in real time.
Daniel fasts and mourns for three weeks. Then an angelic messenger arrives with an explanation for the delay that ought to leave you wondering why you’ve never heard this preached in your church before...
“Then said he unto me, Fear not, Daniel: for from the first day that thou didst set thine heart to understand, and to chasten thyself before thy God, thy words were heard, and I am come for thy words. But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia.” (Daniel 10:12-13)
“Then said he, Knowest thou wherefore I come unto thee? and now will I return to fight with the prince of Persia: and when I am gone forth, lo, the prince of Grecia shall come. But I will shew thee that which is noted in the scripture of truth: and there is none that holdeth with me in these things, but Michael your prince.” (Daniel 10:20-21)
A prince of Persia. A prince of Greece. And a prince of Israel named Michael.
These are not human kings — a human monarch does not delay an angelic messenger for three weeks, and no human is Israel’s “prince” in a context where Michael is named. These were the territorial spiritual rulers of Deuteronomy 32, identified by nation, engaged in conflict, and — note this — aligned with the geopolitical order of the empires they govern. Persia was on its way out. Greece was on its way in. The unseen conflict tracked with the visible conflict.
Origen saw this clearly and argued it at length against the pagan critic Celsus, who had mocked Christians for their view of the nations. Origen replied that the division of the peoples among angelic overseers is exactly what Deuteronomy teaches, and that Christ’s coming was the reclamation of what those overseers had corrupted.
Daniel 12 completes the picture, and it points forward…
“And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book.” (Daniel 12:1)
Paul Read It This Way Too
It would be fair, at this point, to ask whether all of this is an Old Testament arrangement that the New Testament quietly ignored.
It is not. Paul was working directly from Deuteronomy 32…
“But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils.” (1 Corinthians 10:20)
That is a quotation of Deuteronomy 32:17 — “They sacrificed unto devils, not to God; to gods whom they knew not, to new gods that came newly up, whom your fathers feared not.” Paul was telling Corinthian Christians that pagan sacrifice is not merely misguided ritual directed at nothing. It’s a real “communion” with real beings.
He said it more carefully a couple chapters earlier…
“For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,) But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.” (1 Corinthians 8:5-6)
Paul did not say the gods of the nations are imaginary. He said they exist as created things, and that for the Christian there is but one God and one Lord that rules supremely over all of them. This is precisely the Deuteronomy 32 framework carried forward into the New Testament intact.
And then the passage everyone knows, and almost nobody reads in this light…
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” (Ephesians 6:12)
Although touched on earlier, a couple paragraphs are in order here…
Principalities. Powers. Rulers. Administrative terms — terms of jurisdiction and rank. Not a mood or a mist. The word ‘principalities’ is traced back to the Latin princeps, a chief, a first-ranked ruler, and it names a territory with someone placed over it.
The Greek behind Paul's word in Ephesians 6:12 is archas, the vocabulary of magistracies and provincial governors — the same terms a Roman would have used for the men administering his empire.
Paul is not describing free-floating malevolence here...
He is describing a chain of command, staffed, ranked, and holding assigned ground in a governmental / military heirarchy — the same hierarchy Daniel's messenger had to fight his way through, delayed twenty-one days by the prince of Persia, warning on his way out that the prince of Greece was next.
Where Part I Leaves Us
Let’s set the pieces on the table and see what the board looks like…
The nations of the earth were disinherited at Babel and placed under the administration of created spiritual beings (Deuteronomy 32:8-9; Deuteronomy 4:19-20).
Those beings corrupted their charge, took worship for themselves, and were sentenced to die like men (Psalm 82).
They are territorial, they are named by nation, and they contest the purposes of God in real time (Daniel 10).
God kept one nation for Himself and built it out of one childless couple (Genesis 12; Deuteronomy 4:20).
And the whole arrangement was always temporary, because the last line of the courtroom psalm is a petition God intended to answer…
“Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations.” (Psalm 82:8)
The Old Testament ends with that petition unanswered. Israel is in the land, then out of it, then back in a diminished form under foreign rule. The nations remain in the hands of their princes. The seventy are still seventy.
But the answer had already been written into a coronation psalm that Israel had been singing for a thousand years, that no one understood what it would cost to fulfill…
“I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” (Psalm 2:7-8)
Ask of me, and I shall give thee the nations for thine inheritance…
Deuteronomy 32:9 gave Yahweh Jacob only. Psalm 2:8 promised the Son everything else. Part II is the story of how He asked, and what it cost Him, and the day the Father said yes.
PART II — THE RECLAMATION
Four Hundred Years of Nothing
The Old Testament closed with Malachi, and then the record went quiet for four centuries.
During that silence, the nations kept doing what disinherited nations do…
Persia gave way to Greece exactly as Daniel’s messenger said it would. Greece fractured into successor kingdoms. Antiochus IV Epiphanes desecrated the temple and was thrown out by the Maccabees. Rome then absorbed everything. By the time the silence broke, Israel was a client province with a puppet Edomite on the throne, an occupying garrison in the fortress overlooking the temple courts, and a religious establishment that had learned to manage the arrangement.
However, the petition of Psalm 82 was still on the table, unanswered…
“Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations.” (Psalm 82:8)
The prophets had promised that it would be answered.
Isaiah said the nations would come. Micah said they would stream to the mountain of the LORD. Zechariah said that ten men out of all languages would take hold of the skirt of a Jew. Malachi, in the final book, said something so startling that later readers spiritualized it just to make it manageable…
“For from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name shall be great among the Gentiles; and in every place incense shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering: for my name shall be great among the heathen, saith the LORD of hosts.” (Malachi 1:11)
Great among the Gentiles. In every place.
But nobody knew how. The mechanism was missing. Israel had no army, no empire, no missionary apparatus. And by the first century, no political existence to speak of. Whatever was going to happen to the seventy nations was not going to happen the way anyone was expecting.
Thus is the nature of God’s upside down Kingdom — the Kingdom of God…
The Son Asks
Psalm 2 is a coronation psalm. It was almost certainly used at the enthronement of Davidic kings, and on the surface it reads as royal ceremony — the nations rage, the king is installed, the rebels are warned.
But it prophesies bigger things than any son of David could accomplish…
“Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.” (Psalm 2:1-3)
“Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion. I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.” (Psalm 2:6-7)
“Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” (Psalm 2:8)
Ask of me…
Look at that next to Deuteronomy 32:9 — “the LORD’s portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance” — and the shape of the plan becomes visible. At Babel the Father took one nation as His inheritance and allotted the rest. In Psalm 2 the Son is invited to ask for the rest back. Not as conquest imposed from outside the arrangement, but as inheritance — the legal language of a son receiving what belongs to him.
The New Testament writers understood Psalm 2 as being about Jesus and nobody else. It is quoted at His baptism and transfiguration in substance, cited outright in Acts 4:25-26 by the praying church, applied to Him in Acts 13:33, and used twice in the opening argument of Hebrews…
“For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee? And again, I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son?” (Hebrews 1:5)
That question is not rhetorical filler.
Hebrews opens by systematically distinguishing the Son from angels — and the reason that argument matters should be clear from our discussion thus far. The nations had been handed to angelic administrators. The writer of Hebrews was establishing, before doing anything else, that the one now receiving them is of an entirely different order.
He stated the consequence outright a chapter later…
“For unto the angels hath he not put in subjection the world to come, whereof we speak.” (Hebrews 2:5)
Not to angels. The old arrangement is named and terminated in one short sentence.
Born Into Occupied Territory
The Gospels do not open with a general statement about the human condition. They open with a census, a tax, a foreign emperor, a ruled king, and a massacre…
“And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.” (Luke 2:1)
“Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under.” (Matthew 2:16)
Matthew then did something with the geography that is easy to skim past. The family fled to Egypt, and Matthew explained the move with an OT quote…
“And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.” (Matthew 2:15)
That is Hosea 11:1, and in Hosea it is about the exodus — about Israel being called out of Egypt. Pay attention to this next paragraph because I don’t care who you are, this is powerful stuff!
Matthew applied it to the Christ child, telling us, in his second chapter, that Jesus is going to recapitulate the story of the nation of Israel: down into Egypt, out of Egypt, through the water, into the wilderness, tested for forty… What Israel failed to do, Jesus Christ suceeded at every step.
And Israel’s failure, per Deuteronomy 32, was precisely a failure regarding the gods…
“They provoked him to jealousy with strange gods, with abominations provoked they him to anger. They sacrificed unto devils, not to God; to gods whom they knew not, to new gods that came newly up, whom your fathers feared not.” (Deuteronomy 32:16-17)
The Mountain, Revisited
Now go back to my original hangup — Christ’s third temptation. With the framework in place, it should read differently now...
“And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.” (Luke 4:5-7)
Three observations…
The claim was not challenged. Jesus answered with Deuteronomy 6:13 — worship God only — and left the assertion of ownership alone. John would later call the adversary “the prince of this world” three separate times (John 12:31, 14:30, 16:11). Paul will call him “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4). John will write that “the whole world lieth in wickedness” (1 John 5:19), where the Greek is closer to lying in the lap of the wicked one. The New Testament is consistent. The authority was real, it was derivative, and it was temporary.
The offer was a shortcut around the cross. This is what made it a genuine temptation rather than a cartoon. Psalm 2:8 had already promised the nations to the Son. The devil offered the same inheritance without Calvary — the destination without the road. That is the shape of every serious temptation: the right thing, obtained the wrong way. And lest you think the Cross was a nothingburger simply because Jesus is God, please go back and listen to Shawn Ryan’s Easter interview with Jeremiah Johnston on the Shroud of Turin or rewatch Mel Gibson’s 2004 offering, The Passion of Christ.
All three temptations were answered from Deuteronomy. Not Deuteronomy at random, either. Jesus quoted 8:3, 6:13, and 6:16 — all from the section where Moses was warning Israel about the very failures Israel would commit in the wilderness. He stood in the wilderness, being tested, answering with the text Israel was given for that test but flunked. Where the nation of Israel fell, the One True Israel held.
That is the reclamation’s beginnings. Not with an army. But with a starving man refusing to take a shortcut.
He Started in the Wrong Place on Purpose
Jesus did not begin His public ministry in Jerusalem. He began in Galilee, and Matthew flagged it as deliberate fulfillment…
“And leaving Nazareth, he came and dwelt in Capernaum, which is upon the sea coast, in the borders of Zabulon and Nephthalim: That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, The land of Zabulon, and the land of Nephthalim, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles; The people which sat in darkness saw great light; and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is sprung up.” (Matthew 4:13-16)
Galilee of the Gentiles. Isaiah 9:1-2, and it was not a compliment in its original setting — this was the territory overrun first by Assyria, the northern tribes deported, the region repopulated and mixed, the frontier zone that respectable Judeans looked down on for centuries afterward.
He started there. The light showed up first in the place with the deepest Gentile shadow.
Then look at where He went over the next three years, plotted on a map rather than read as a devotional sequence. He crossed to the Decapolis, which is Gentile territory. He went to the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, which is Phoenician territory — Jezebel’s homeland, the seat of Baal worship. He deliberately passed through Samaria, which pious travelers detoured around. He operated on the frontiers, over and over, in the border zones where the jurisdictions touch.
This is not an incidental itinerary. Christ’s ministry was being conducted along the perimeter of occupied ground.
Every Exorcism was a Repossession
Modern readers tend to treat Christ’s numerous exorcisms as compassion narratives — a suffering man is relieved of a torment. While true on the surface, it does not scratch the surface of reading through the lens of a Deuteronomy 32 worldview. Read the demonic dialogue and notice what the demons are actually worried about…
“Saying, Let us alone; what have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? art thou come to destroy us? I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God.” (Mark 1:24)
“And, behold, they cried out, saying, What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time?” (Matthew 8:29)
Before the time. They know there is a schedule. They know it ends with their doom. Their objection is not that judgment is unjust — it is that it appears to be arriving early.
Jesus stated the meaning of the exorcisms Himself when the Pharisees accused Him of casting out demons by Beelzebub…
“But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you. Or else how can one enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man? and then he will spoil his house.” (Matthew 12:28 & 29)
Stop and read that another time or two…
Because it’s the theme of the entire ministry in one sentence — a sentence we will watch Revelation 20 pick up and run with shortly. The exorcisms are not merely acts of mercy. They are evidence of a binding already in progress. The house (the nations) is being looted of its most precious treasures (people) because the owner has been tied up.
Note carefully that in Jesus’ own illustration, binding and plundering are simultaneous and ongoing — not sequential stages separated by an age. He is binding, and He is spoiling, now.
Ponder that because it’s the single most important factor concerning what Revelation 20 can or can’t mean.
The Man in the Tombs
The Gerasene account, touched on earlier as described in another gospel, deserves its own treatment, because it is the Deuteronomy 32 framework played out in an afternoon.
Jesus crossed the Sea of Galilee at night, through a storm, to the eastern shore — the Decapolis. Gentile country. Pig country. He arrived, encountered one man, and left almost immediately.
In other words, an entire trip for one person…
“And when he was come out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, Who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains.” (Mark 5:2-3)
“And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.” (Mark 5:9)
“And he besought him much that he would not send them away out of the country.” (Mark 5:10)
Legion…
A Roman military designation of 4,000-5,000 soldiers for a name. A collective inhabiting of thousands of demons in one man. And a plea grounded entirely in geography — do not send us out of the region.
The pigs go over the cliff. The townspeople ask Jesus to leave. And then this…
“Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee. And he departed, and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him: and all men did marvel.” (Mark 5:19-20)
Everywhere else in Mark, Jesus told people to keep quiet. Here He commissioned a man to broadcast. The difference was the address. This is Gentile territory, and the first missionary to the Decapolis was a formerly demon-possessed Gentile who had been living in a graveyard an hour earlier — a man likely known and recognized in the region.
The reclamation of the nations did not begin with a conference. It began with one exorcised man in occupied land being told to go home and tell people what Christ had done for him.
Order of Operations
The Syrophoenician woman is the passage people find hardest, and a Deuteronomy 32 worldview helped make sense of it…
“But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matthew 15:24)
“But he answered and said, It is not right to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.” (Matthew 15:26)
Read outside the lines for a moment. This is Jesus being harsh to a desperate mother. Now read inside. Jesus is stating the sequence. Israel first, then the nations. Not Israel only — He is standing in Gentile territory when He said it, which is not the behavior of someone maintaining an exclusion — but Israel first.
She accepted the sequence and argued within it…
“And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” (Matthew 15:27)
She was not disputing the order, but instead pointing out that the order did not require her to starve while she waited. And He commended her faith and healed her daughter.
Paul later stated the same sequence as settled policy: “to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” — typically preaching first at the local synogogue in his missionary journeys before moving on to preach to the Gentiles. The nations were always coming. The question was when, and through what.
Caesarea Philippi
This was the passage where the geography from Part I came due, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.
Jesus took His disciples on a journey of roughly twenty-five miles north from Bethsaida, out of Galilee entirely, to the northernmost point of His recorded ministry. The destination is Caesarea Philippi — known in earlier centuries as Paneas, after the Greek god Pan, whose shrine stood there. A site sitting at the foot of Mount Hermon.
Mount Hermon. The mountain of the Watchers’ descent in the book of Enoch. The northern edge of Bashan, land of the Rephaim and the giants. The place ancient Israelites associated with the underworld and the dishonored dead.
At Paneas, there is a cave in the cliff face from which one of the sources of the Jordan emerges. The Greeks called such a cave a gate to the underworld, and the Romans had built a temple to Augustus there. By every measure available to a first-century Jew, it was the most spiritually hostile real estate in the region.
He walked His disciples to that spot and asked them a question…
“When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?” (Matthew 16:13)
“And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” (Matthew 16:16)
“And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18)
The gates of hell. The Greek is pylai hadou — the gates of Hades, the realm of the dead. He said it standing in front of a cliff face that the local religion regarded as exactly that.
And note the direction of the metaphor, because without the proper direction this passage loses its potency. Gates are not offensive weapons. Gates are defensive. A gate does not charge. A gate holds a position, and it holds it against something coming.
Note that Jesus was not promising that the Church will survive a siege. He was announcing that the Church is the siege engine — and the fortifications of death could not hold.
Six days later, three of them went up “a high mountain apart” and saw Him transfigured (Matthew 17:1). Matthew gave no name for the mountain and neither will I, but the tradition placing it at Tabor is late and Tabor is neither high nor apart. But they were at Hermon’s base. Just saying.
Then, coming down, He told them plainly for the first time that He would be going to Jerusalem to be killed. The confession, the gates, and the cross are one continuous conversation begun at the foot of the enemy’s mountain.
The Seventy Go Out
Luke 10 opened with a commissioning that the framework turned from a curious detail into the hinge of the Gospel…
“After these things the Lord appointed other seventy also, and sent them two and two before his face into every city and place, whither he himself would come.” (Luke 10:1)
Seventy nations…
Christ had already appointed twelve, matching the tribes of Israel. He then appointed seventy missionaries, matching the nations of the world. The two numbers are not competing. They are sequential — the two halves of Deuteronomy 32:8-9. The portion He kept, and the portion He gave away.
The Seventy went out. And they came back elated…
“And the seventy returned again with joy, saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name.” (Luke 10:17)
And He answers with a line that has been mined for pre-Genesis cosmology by people who were not reading the paragraph it sits in.
“And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.” (Luke 10:18)
The tense, the context, and the sequence all point the same direction. They report a mission. But Christ depicted Satan’s fall. The fall is what the mission accomplished. This was not a memory from before creation — it was Jesus telling seventy exhausted men they have no idea what they just did.
A number of missionaries that was the same number of the nations went out. The adversary came down.
Then Christ immediately steadied them, because prideful humans tend to become drunk with power. What sort of spiritual power are we talking about here? The kaboooooom kind…
“Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you. Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.” (Luke 10:19-20)
Authority over the enemy is real. But power for power’s sake was not the point. The point was that they belonged to the Kingdom, early in the process reclaiming the nations.
The Hour
The crux came in John 12, and the trigger is worth noticing.
Some Greeks — Gentiles, God-fearers, up for the feast — approached Philip to ask to see Jesus. Philip tells Andrew. The two of them tell Jesus. And this was His response…
“And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified.” (John 12:23)
The nations show up asking for Him, and He instead announced that the hour had arrived. Then He stated what the hour was for using not only the language of a Deuteronomy worldview, but the verbiage of Moses that would be should have been as clear as day to devout Second Temple Jews…
“Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” (John 12:31-32)
Three things in two verses. Judgment on the world — now. The prince of this world cast out — now. And a drawing of all men, which in context means all kinds of men, the nations (Gentiles) included, accomplished by His blood sacrifice at Calvary.
He said it twice more before the arrest…
“Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me.” (John 14:30)
“Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.” (John 16:11)
The cross was not portrayed in these passages as a tragedy that God managed to salvage as a ‘Plan B’. It was portrayed as the judicial proceeding in which the prince of this world was legally stripped of his standing.
They Did Not Know What They Were Doing
Paul said something about the crucifixion that only makes sense inside this framework…
“But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” (1 Corinthians 2:7-8)
The archontes — rulers…
Pilate and Caiaphas were in view, but Paul’s vocabulary for spiritual authorities was the same vocabulary he used in Ephesians 6:12 and Colossians 2:15, and the argument required beings capable of being deceived by a hidden divine wisdom, which was a strange thing to say about a provincial governor.
Read it as the rulers behind the rulers, and the passage snaps into focus. The powers took the bait. They engineered the execution of the one human being — the God man / Son of man over whom death had no claim, and in doing so they forfeited everything…
“Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.” (Hebrews 2:14-15)
He legally destroyed the one holding the power of death by dying. That is the wisdom none of the princes knew — the “Deeper Magic from before the dawn of time” CS Lewis used in describing Aslan’s rerrection in his timeless Chronicles of Narnia.
And then Paul’s summary, which is the center of gravity for everything in this treatise…
“And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.” (Colossians 2:15)
The imagery is a Roman triumph…
A victorious general parades through the city with his conquered enemies stripped and displayed behind him. Paul said that the cross was that parade — that the instrument of Roman shame was in fact the enemy’s public humiliation, and nobody in the crowd realized it while it was happening.
A note on framing, since this is where Reformed readers sometimes get nervous…
Presenting the cross as ‘cosmic’ victory over the powers laid out in Ephesians 6:12 does not compete with penal substitution. It depends on it. The powers are disarmed because the legal claim they held was satisfied and cancelled — which was precisely what Paul said in the verse immediately before Colossians 2:15…
“Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross.” (Colossians 2:14)
The Descent and the Proclamation
I believe in God,
the Father almighty,
Creator of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died and was buried;
he descended into hell;
on the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and life everlasting.
Amen.
-The Apostle’s Creed, the earliest version of which (The Old Roman Creed) dates to the 2nd century
Peter recorded something astonishing between the cross and the resurrection that the church has argued about for two thousand years, and the Genesis 6 background makes better sense of it than the alternatives…
“For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.” (1 Peter 3:18-20)
Spirits in prison. Disobedient in the days of Noah. That is not a description of the holding place for the righteous human dead (although those people were there as well, in Abraham’s Bosom, separated by the chasm/gulf seen in the story of Lazarus the beggar). The Apostle Peter mentioned them at one specific point in history and identified them by one specific rebellion. These are the imprisoned angels of 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6.
The Watchers…
The word Peter uses to describe what Christ is doing there is not euangelizo, the word for preaching good news. It is kerysso, the word for a herald making a proclamation. Christ did not go to that prison to offer terms or, as some have inexplicably said, pay for Christian’s sins in hell. He went to announce His victory. To set the captives free and condemn those spirits that had been awaiting their judgment for millennia.
Peter finished the sentence by tying all of it to the ascension…
“Who is gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God; angels and authorities and powers being made subject unto him.” (1 Peter 3:22)
Proclamation to the imprisoned, then enthronement, then the subjection of the powers. Peter is narrating the reclamation in order.
Paul described the same movement with a psalm.
“Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men. (Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.)” (Ephesians 4:8-10)
He was quoting Psalm 68 — and Psalm 68 is the psalm pitting God’s mountain against Bashan — the place of the giants.
“The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands of angels: the Lord is among them, as in Sinai, in the holy place. Thou hast ascended on high, thou hast led captivity captive: thou hast received gifts for men; yea, for the rebellious also, that the LORD God might dwell among them.” (Psalm 68:17-18)
“The Lord said, I will bring again from Bashan, I will bring my people again from the depths of the sea.” (Psalm 68:22)
Paul took the ascent of God to His mountain in triumph over Bashan, and applied it to the ascension of Christ. The mountain of the Watchers, named in the victory psalm, and quoted by the apostle to describe what happened on the fortieth day.
Can anyone say “The Ascension”?
A Kingly Coronation, Not an Earthly Departure
We have been taught to read the ascension as an exit…
Jesus finished His earthly work, said His goodbyes, and went home to heaven — the closing scene of the Gospel story. The point at which the disciples are left on their own to get on with things until the Holy Spirit entered the scene.
However…
That’s not even remotely what Daniel prophetically described 600 years earlier while under Israel’s Babylonian captivity…
“I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.” (Daniel 7:13-14)
Pay attention to the direction of travel…
The Son of Man does not come from heaven to earth in this vision. He comes with the clouds to the Ancient of Days, is brought near before Him, and receives a kingdom. This is an approach to a throne, not a descent back to earth (Second Coming) as Darby’s followers have been taught for the past 150 years.
Now move forward to Acts…
“And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight.” (Acts 1:9)
A cloud received Him.
Luke has just told us that Jesus spent forty days teaching about the Kingdom, and he then described an ascent into a cloud using the vocabulary of the one Old Testament vision that described a Son of Man coming in heavenly clouds to receive a kingdom. This is not a coincidence of imagery. Luke is reporting the fulfillment of Daniel 7:13-14, and he expects his readers familiar with Daniel (i.e. every single Second Temple Jew) to catch it.
The ascension is the enthronement. It is the moment the Son, having asked, sees the fulfillment of Psalm 2:8, and receives His Kingdom.
A kingdom of all people, nations, and languages. Daniel says it in the seventh chapter, six centuries earlier. Every nation on the Table of Nations list. The seventy, turned into principalities at Babel, and delivered to the Son at His coronation.
And the angels’ word to the men standing there staring is not meant to console them. It’s a call to action from the launch site…
“Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.” (Acts 1:11)
You have work to do. Get to it!
All Authority
Matthew’s version of the commission says the same thing in a single sentence in what is clearly the language of Daniel 7…
“And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” (Matthew 28:18-20)
All authority in heaven and in earth. Heaven — the realm of the divine council. Earth — the realm of the nations. Both. The entire two-tier arrangement of Deuteronomy 32, in the King’s hand.
And then the imperative that follows from it: therefore — because I now hold what was allotted away — disciple the nations. The ethne. The exact word the Septuagint uses in Deuteronomy 32:8 for the peoples divided among the sons of God.
The Great Commission is not a general instruction to be religious in public. It is a repossession order, issued by King Jesus, enthroned at the right hand of power, and holding legal title over all lands, peoples, and spiritual beings, including powers, principalities, rulers, and demonic forces.
Notice too that “teach them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” is not merely evangelistic. It is jurisdictional. Nations under new administration receive new law. This is the sentence that separates an inaugurated, expanding Kingdom from a holding pattern.
Babel Run Backward
Ten days later, the mechanism arrived…
“And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” (Acts 2:1-4)
Notice what Luke did next, reading it slowly, because it’s the clearest post-coronation example of the reversal of Babel. And not enough Christians notice it…
“And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.” (Acts 2:5)
“Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.” (Acts 2:9-11)
Luke stops his narrative and inserts a list.
Why? He was a careful writer. He did not waste words. But nobody needs a fifteen-item travel manifest to understand that this crowd was multilingual.
He included it because it is a Table of Nations…
It is Genesis 10 in first-century dress — an inventory of the known world, organized geographically, running east to west. Precisely the kind of list a Jewish reader would recognize on sight, but that our American pea-brains tend to gloss over as merely “interesting”.
And what happened to that list of nations?
The language barrier God imposed at Babel was reversed. Not undone — the languages remain. But they were overcome. At Babel, one language became many so the nations could not unite in rebellion. At Pentecost, many languages heard a single message so the Gentile nations could be united into a single Kingdom under a single all-powerful and almighty King.
The fire is worth noting as well…
God descended in fire on Sinai to give the law to His one nation. God descended in fire at Pentecost — not on a mountain, but on people — and the result is immediately, in the same paragraph, addressed to every nation under heaven.
Peter stood up and quoted a passage instantly recognized by all who were present…
“This is that which was uttered through the prophet Joel: And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh.” (Acts 2:16-17)
All flesh. Not just God’s original portion; the nation of Israel. But all of it, the nations (Gentiles) included.
It’s the mechanism the four hundred years of silence were missing. The nations were not going to be reclaimed by physical armies or by Israel becoming an empire. They were going to be reclaimed by the Spirit of God being poured out on ordinary people from every nation on the list, who went back to their lands after the Passover and told everyone they me about the risen and ascended King.
A spiritual army, taking its marching orders from King Jesus, pledged to turn the spiritual reality into a physical one over the course of time and history — not simply by converting the nations, but by discipling them, exactly as the Great Commission commanded.
Acts 1:8 Maps Out the Entire Book
Every battle requires a battle plan and order of assault for major offensives, and this offensive was not any different…
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.
Once you see it, you’ll see the structure of Acts is not a loose collection of missionary anecdotes. It is Jesus’ outline in Acts 1:8, executed in a specific order of battle.
Jerusalem — chapters 1 through 7.
Judaea and Samaria — chapter 8, where Philip goes to the Samaritans, the people every Judean regarded as ethnically and religiously compromised.
Then, in the same chapter, an Ethiopian court official reading Isaiah in a chariot…
“And he arose and went: and, behold, a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, who had the charge of all her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem for to worship.” (Acts 8:27)
Ethiopia is Cush, and Cush is on the Table of Nations in Genesis 10:6. The reclamation is now proceeding nation by nation from the original list.
Cornelius — chapter 10. A Roman centurion — a Gentile — caused Peter to be given a vision three times before he would go. Old habits die hard, and the wall of seperation between the portion (Israel) and the disinherited (The Nations) was two thousand years old. And Peter could feel every stone of it…
“Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.” (Acts 10:34-35)
In every nation. Peter was watching Deuteronomy 32 come apart at the seams in front of his very eyes.
Paul at Athens — chapter 17, and this is where the whole framework surfaces explicitly. Standing in the most religiously saturated city in the Greek world, Paul says this…
“And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” (Acts 17:26)
That is Deuteronomy 32:8 quoted to a pagan audience. The bounds of their habitation — the boundaries fixed at the division of the nations. Paul is telling the Athenians that the arrangement they have been living under was set by God, and then he tells them it has expired…
“And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent.” (Acts 17:30)
There is the answer to the question the prelude left hanging. What changed? The Son asked, and the Father gave, and the period of overlooking is over. Now — after the cross, after the ascension, after Pentecost — the command goes to all men everywhere, because the one issuing it now holds all authority in heaven and earth.
Ephesus — chapter 19, where the gospel collides with the cult of Artemis, with economic damage severe enough to start a riot. The silversmiths were not confused about what was happening to their business.
Rome — chapter 28, the last verse, Paul preaching in the capital of the empire, unhindered.
The book does not end. It stops, mid-advance, with the Kingdom still expanding outward…
Where Part II Leaves Us
Now, set these on the table next to the pieces from Part I…
The Son asked for the nations, and the request was written into Israel’s hymnal a thousand years before He made it (Psalm 2:8).
He was born into occupied ground, refused the shortcut that would have handed Him the kingdoms without a cross (Luke 4:5-8), and conducted His ministry along the frontiers of that occupation.
Every exorcism was a repossession, and He said so — the strong man is bound, and the house is being spoiled, simultaneously and now (Matthew 12:28-29).
He walked His disciples to the foot of the enemy’s mountain and announced that the gates of the dead would not hold against what He was building (Matthew 16:18).
He sent out the number of the nations, and the adversary fell (Luke 10:1, 17-18).
The powers engineered His execution and destroyed themselves doing it (1 Corinthians 2:8; Colossians 2:14-15; Hebrews 2:14).
He proclaimed the outcome to the imprisoned spirits of the Genesis 6 rebellion (1 Peter 3:19-20) and ascended in triumph (Ephesians 4:8-10; Psalm 68).
He came with the clouds to the Ancient of Days and received a kingdom of all peoples, nations, and languages (Daniel 7:13-14; Acts 1:9).
He declared that all authority in heaven and earth was His, and ordered the nations discipled (Matthew 28:18-20).
And the Spirit fell on a room in Jerusalem, and a list of nations heard the wonderful works of God in their own languages (Acts 2:9-11).
The petition of Psalm 82:8 has been answered. The Kingdom is not coming. It came — on a specific day, at a specific coronation, with a specific transfer of authority — and despite periods of history that appear contrary to the assertion, has been expanding ever since.
Which raises the obvious problem, and it is the one every honest reader is already asking...
If the strong man is bound, why does the world look like this?
PART III — ALREADY, BUT NOT YET
The Obvious Problem
How can the strong man possibly be bound, with so much evil in the world?
Anyone who reads Revelation 20 and concludes that Satan is currently restrained (“bound”) has to reckon with a planet that features trafficking, genocide, industrialized governmental deception, and a church that in many places is losing rather than winning. The premillennial reading has an easy answer to this, and it’s easy to follow…
The binding of Satan has not happened yet, which is why things look like they do.
The problem with the easy answer is that it requires you to unhook Revelation 20 from everything Jesus said about His own ministry, as well as the greater biblical narrative.
So, let’s do this carefully, and start by not asking the wrong question. The right question is not “is Satan bound?” The right question is the one the text itself answers immediately after, in a purpose clause most readers slide right past.
Read the Purpose Clause
“And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.” (Revelation 20:1-3)
Read that passage again and find the specification.
That he should deceive the nations no more.
John does not say the dragon is annihilated. He does not say he is removed from the earth, or rendered inert, or stripped of all capacity to act, tempt, or deceive individuals. He says the binding has a stated purpose, and the stated purpose is precise. The binding is so he can no longer deceive the nations.
It’s not a general statement about evil. Instead, it’s a targeted, jurisdictional restriction — the exact jurisdiction Deuteronomy 32:8 established and Psalm 82 condemned.
The nations were Satan’s. And the nations are the very thing being taken over by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. -Read this over and over again, until it makes sense
The whole of Parts I and II built toward the sentence above, and once the framework is in place, Revelation 20:2 stops being a puzzle and becomes a summary (go back and watch the first 10 minutes of Josh Howerton’s discussion of Revelation with Shawn Ryan at the very beginning of the post).
What was bound at the cross and enthronement was not the enemy’s existence, his malice, or his ability to tempt an individual believer on a Tuesday afternoon. What was bound was his legal claim to seventy distinct jurisdictions around the globe.
Scripture Already Defined “Bound” Twice
We are not guessing at what the word ‘binding’ means. The Bible uses the concept in two distinct ways, and both are in play in Revelation 20.
The first is imprisonment, and it describes the Watchers…
“And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.” (Jude 6)
“For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment.” (2 Peter 2:4)
Those beings are out of circulation entirely. Chains, darkness, held until judgment. That is total.
The second is functional restraint, and it’s the one Jesus applied to His own ministry…
“Or else how can one enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man? and then he will spoil his house.” (Matthew 12:29)
Notice what the strong man in that illustration is still capable of…
Although present and watching it happen, Satan cannot stop the looting. The binding does not empty him of hatred and hostility. It empties him of the ability to defend his possessions — human souls.
And Jesus states this in the same breath as the arrival of the Kingdom…
“But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you.” (Matthew 12:28)
Come. Past tense. Already.
So when Revelation 20 describes a binding whose specified effect is that the nations can no longer be deceived, we already have the category. It is the strong man in Matthew 12 — restrained in a defined function while his house is emptied of its contents.
This also handles the objection everyone subsequently seems to raise…
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” (1 Peter 5:8)
Peter wrote that after Pentecost…
It is entirely compatible with Revelation 20, because the apostle is describing predation on individual believers, and John is describing the deception of nations. Those are different operations at different scales. A chained dog can still bite anyone who walks within the radius of the chain. What it cannot do is leave the yard.
Every believer who has read Romans 7 knows the devil has not lost his ability to tempt. That was never the claim. Satan has, however, lost his ability to deceive the nations — essentially neutered regarding complete and total territorial control.
The Evidence Nobody Looks At
Here is where the argument stops being theoretical, and it is the part of the case that I find most difficult to answer from the other side.
Before Christ, every nation on earth was religiously captive to its own small ‘g’ gods. That is not an interpretive claim. It is the plain historical record…
Egypt had its pantheon, Babylon had Marduk, Canaan had Baal and Molech, Greece had Olympus, Rome had its state cult, and every one of these systems was intact, funded, publicly sponsored, and universal within its territory. The gods of the nations were not a minority religious option. They were the nations. Temples were civic institutions. Sacrifice (in many cases, human sacrifice) was a tax. Refusal was treason.
Israel alone stood outside. But Israel was one small nation that spent far too much of its history failing to, well, stand outside.
Now look at what happened after…
Within three centuries of Christ being seated on the heavenly throne of His kingdom, the temples of the Mediterranean world were emptying. Human sacrifice was collapsing. The oracles that had guided Greek civic and military decisions for a thousand years fell silent — and this was noticed and lamented by pagans, not merely claimed by Christians.
Plutarch, a priest at Delphi and no friend of Christianity, wrote an entire treatise on the problem, De Defectu Oraculorum — On the Obsolescence of Oracles, trying to account for why the gods had stopped speaking.
Consider the sheer magnitude of what this really means…
Within a few hundred years of a Galilean carpenter’s execution, the entire religious infrastructure of the ancient world — which had run continuously for millennia and had never faced a serious challenge — came apart at the seams. Not by conquest. Not by legislation (at least not initially). It came apart because ordinary people in every one of those nations heard a message about the One True God who ruled the universe justly, and had conquered the small ‘g’ gods, putting them to open shame.
That is what a binding looks like. Not the absence of evil. But the increasing failure of a deception that had held without interruption since Babel.
A binding that has not been reversed…
There is no serious sense in which the gods of the nations have returned to their former standing. Where the old systems persist, they persist as heritage, curiosity, or deliberate revival — not as the unquestioned civic authority they once were. Meanwhile, the gospel has reached, at minimum, a substantial portion of every people group on the Genesis 10 inventory — something no one in the first century had any mechanism to imagine.
The world is not sinless. But the world is not deceived the way it used to be deceived.
The Thousand Years
Nothing in the preceding paragraph requires the thousand years to be a literal ten centuries, and the book itself argues against reading it that way.
Revelation is drenched in numbers, and none of them are inventory counts. Seven churches, seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls. Twenty-four elders. Four horsemen. A hundred forty-four thousand, which is twelve squared times a thousand. Three and a half, forty-two months, twelve hundred and sixty days — the same period stated three ways. Anyone who reads the 144,000 as a literal census and the thousand years as a literal millennium is applying two different hermeneutics in the same book and usually within the same chapter.
A thousand to the ancient Hebrew signified fullness, completeness, an uncountable quantity. Once you see it, you’ll see it again and again and again…
“For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills.” (Psalm 50:10)
God does not own the livestock on exactly one thousand hills and rent the rest. The number means all of them. Likewise…
“He hath remembered his covenant forever, the word which he commanded to a thousand generations.” (Psalm 105:8)
The thousand years is the full duration of the binding — the complete period between the enthronement and the loosing, however long that turns out to be. It is a theological quantity, not a stopwatch reading.
Revelation 20 Does Not Follow Revelation 19 Chronologically
The single strongest structural argument for reading the binding as present is that Revelation is not written in chronological sequence.
The book recapitulates. It circles the same ground repeatedly from different angles — seals, then trumpets, then bowls, each running to the same end, each ending in final judgment imagery, each starting over. This is a well-established feature of the book’s architecture — a feature recognized long before anyone had a millennial system to defend. Victorinus of Pettau noted the recapitulation in the third century, and it runs through the Western commentary tradition from Tyconius forward.
If the book recapitulates, then Revelation 20:1 is not the next event after chapter 19. It is the same age described a second time, from a different angle — this time from the angle of what happened to the enemy. John has already described this age once, in chapter 12, using the woman and the dragon. And that chapter tells us plainly when the dragon was thrown out…
“And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.” (Revelation 12:7-9)
“And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.” (Revelation 12:10)
That expulsion is tied in context to the birth and ascension of the male child who is to rule all nations with a rod of iron — Psalm 2 again — who is “caught up unto God, and to his throne” (Revelation 12:5). The casting down of the accuser is placed at the ascension. It is the same event Jesus described in John 12:31 and Luke 10:18.
Revelation 12 and Revelation 20 are describing the same reality twice as part of a giant chiasmus.
Why the Timing Is Not Vague
The book of Revelation is time-stamped, telling you when it expects its contents to occur, in its first paragraph and its last…
“The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass.” (Revelation 1:1)
“Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand.” (Revelation 1:3)
“And he saith unto me, Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand.” (Revelation 22:10)
Set that last verse against its Old Testament prophetic counterpart…
“But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” (Daniel 12:4 — compare the seconp half to Paul’s missionary journeys as described in Romans 10:18 & Colossians 1:23)
Daniel is told to seal it, because the time is distant. John is told not to seal it, because the time is near.
That contrast is intentional, and it is decisive for how the book expects to be read. Whatever else Revelation is doing, it is not describing events exclusively reserved for a period two thousand or more years beyond its first readers, who were told to keep what was written in it.
AD 70 and the End of the Old Order
The generation John and Peter and Paul lived in saw the visible end of the covenant order that had held since Sinai, and the New Testament writers wrote down that Christ had told them in advance that they would…
“Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.” (Matthew 24:34)
“Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” (Matthew 16:28 — a clear reference to the fulfillment of Daniel 7:13-14)
“In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away.” (Hebrews 8:13)
Hebrews was written while the temple still stood, and its author described the entire sacrificial system as an aged relic on the verge of disappearing. Within a few years it disappeared — permanently. The temple was destroyed in AD 70, the priesthood ended, and the genealogies burned. And the sacrificial worship that Leviticus commanded has not been offered since.
Consider what that meant for the men carrying the message…
They were traveling the empire announcing that sacrifice was finished — that the blood of bulls and goats could never take away sins, that one offering had ended the need for all the others forever. Meanwhile, back in Jerusalem, every single morning and evening, priests were sacrificing animals exactly as Leviticus prescribed.
Put yourself in the position of the man hearing Hebrews read aloud…
You are being told that Christ was the prophetically foretold, crucified, and risen Messiah. But you can walk to Jerusalem, go to the Temple, and watch it operating at full capacity. It hadn’t shrunk. In fact, Herod had spent decades enlarging it into one of the most impressive structures of the ancient world, and the work was still going on. The apostle’s message pointed one way, but the visible message pointed the other.
That ended in AD 70…
The end of the the Old Covenenant sacrificial age — the visible, historical demonstration that the old administration had been superseded by the one inaugurated at the ascension. The language of cosmic collapse in Matthew 24 is the standard prophetic idiom for the fall of a political and religious order; Isaiah used the same imagery of Babylon’s fall (Isaiah 13) and Ezekiel of Egypt’s (Ezekiel 32). Nobody reads those as astronomical.
What’s left prophetically speaking? The three biggies are the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, and the bodily return of Christ — all on the Last Day, whenever that is. What’s past is the judgment on the Old Covenant order and the legal public transfer of the many kingdoms into a single consolidated Kingdom.
The Seventy Weeks, Handled Honestly
In Part I, I promised to draw the resonance between the seventy nations and Daniel’s seventy weeks without claiming a mechanical equation. Here is where the timing converges…
“Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy.” (Daniel 9:24)
“And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined.” (Daniel 9:26)
Six accomplishments, all of them fulfilled at the cross and its aftermath…
“To finish the transgression…” (Genesis 15:16; Matthew 21:43-44; Matthew 23:32-36; Matthew 24:34; 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16; 1 Peter 4:17)
“To make an end of sins…” (Romans 8:3; Galatians 3:13; Hebrews 9:26; Hebrews 10:12; Hebrews 10:17–18; 1 John 3:5)
“To make reconciliation for iniquity…” (Romans 5:10–11; 2 Corinthians 5:18–19; Ephesians 2:16; Colossians 1:20–22; Colossians 2:14; 1 Peter 2:24)
“To bring in everlasting righteousness…” (Romans 3:21–22; Romans 5:19; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Philippians 3:9)
“To seal up the vision and prophecy…” (Luke 24:44; Acts 3:18; 2 Corinthians 1:20; Hebrews 1:1–2)
“To anoint the most Holy…” (Matthew 3:16–17; Luke 4:18–21; Acts 4:27; Acts 10:38)
But keep going because the prophecy is not finished…
Messiah cut off in the midst of the week, not for himself (Isaiah 53:8; Daniel 9:26; Mark 15:37; John 19:30).
The city, sanctuary, and Old Covenant “elements of worship” destroyed with burning heat (Daniel 9:26; Matthew 23:38; Matthew 24:1–2; Luke 19:43–44; Luke 21:20–24; 2 Peter 3:10–12; Hebrews 12:26–29; Malachi 4:1; Isaiah 34:4; Hebrews 8:13; Hebrews 9:8–10; Colossians 2:14–17; Galatians 4:9–11; Galatians 4:24–31; Galatians 5:1–4). Although this occurred legally / spiritually at Calvary (the nation of Israel filling up or finishing its transgression), it would be a generation (Matthew 23:34–36; Matthew 24:34; Mark 13:30; Luke 21:29–33) before it occurred physically, with the destruction of the epicenters of Old Covenant worship, Jerusalem and the Temple.
Who were “the people of the prince who would come” with all this destruction? Generals Vespasian and his son, General Titus. Vespasian was proclaimed emperor and left the campaign, handing the command to his son Titus, who conducted the siege and finished the destruction. His men literally tore the Temple to the ground (not one stone left on another) to get at the melted gold that had run between the stonework. The desolations determined a generation before, had finally come due…
But Jeus answered them, “You see all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.” As he sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will these things be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”
The sign of your coming…
This is not a passage about the sign of Christ’s Second Coming. It’s a passage about the sign that Christ had “come on the clouds”.
This passage is not about the Second Coming. It is about Christ coming on the clouds, which is the language Daniel’s 7th chapter, verses 13 & 14 used to describe the Son of Man approaching the Ancient of Days to receive a kingdom. The disciples asked when the age would end and what the sign would be. As He often did, Jesus answered past the question they asked.
He gave them a sign that no one would be able to miss — not the disciples, not the religious leadership, not the crowds who had called for His death. The Temple would be pulled down stone by stone, and it would happen while the men standing in front of Him were still alive to see it. That is the genea of Matthew 24:34. One biblical generation. Roughly forty years. When the smoke rose over Jerusalem in AD 70, every living person who had heard the claim had the proof in front of them.
Daniel received this vision while praying about the seventy years of exile decreed by Jeremiah (Daniel 9:2). Seventy is the number of the nations at Babel (Genesis 10), the number of Jacob’s household in Egypt (Genesis 46:27), the number of elders at Sinai (Exodus 24:1), the number of years in exile (Jeremiah 25:11), and the number Christ sent out (Luke 10:1). The motif is real, and it’s everywhere. Daniel’s seventy sevens sit inside that pattern.
Let’s see what the final week of Daniel’s seventy prophetic weeks looks like.
A first-century fulfillment, in chronological order, no 2,000-year (and counting) gap needed (article, article, article). And for those, like me, who like to see it laid out in a timeline, this is from ChatGPT in response to a very detailed prompt (HINT: numbers 4 & 5 on the timeline are the same event. Daniel’s final week of the things of God being chiefly for “thy people” — Jews — ends with the Gospel going forth to the Gentiles (the nations), the first of those being Cornelius, the Centurion…
What I am not going to do is claim the seventy weeks are the seventy nations, or that the weeks map onto the princes, or that one decodes the other. They operate on different axes — one is a chronology of years, the other a count of peoples. The pattern is theological, and is strong enough on its own. Pressing it into an equation is how a sound argument acquires a soft spot.
However…
The relationship is not hard to see once the disinheritance is on the table. The seventy nations were handed over. Israel was saved back as a people unto Himself (Exodus 19:5; Deuteronomy 7:6; Deuteronomy 14:2; Deuteronomy 26:18; Deuteronomy 29:13; 2 Samuel 7:23), the one and only portion God retained in his Table of Nations decree — and then Israel was handed over too, for seventy years, to Babylon.
Daniel was praying about the seventy years of Babylonian exile when Gabriel arrived with a much larger number. The seventy sevens (490 years) described the terms under which Israel's exile would finally and fully end.
But look at what Gabriel says lies at the end of the chronology. Not the restoration of a national estate — not land, not borders, not a throne in Jerusalem. Sins ended. Reconciliation made. Everlasting righteousness brought in. These are covenant and atonement categories, none of which are territorial.
The return from Babylon restored a people to a place. What Gabriel described restored a greatly enlarged people group to God, which is the larger of the two by a wide margin, and which makes the return from Babylon look like a foreshadowing of the real thing.
And when it arrived, the reserved portion was no longer reserved. Paul said that the middle wall of partition is broken down and the two are made one in Christ. The estate divided at Babel was gathered back under a single head — in bigger fashion than too many modern evangelicals grasp (Romans 4:13). The seventy weeks are not a code for the seventy nations, and I am not arguing that they are. But they describe the terms on which the nations are released to come home.
For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of two, one new man, so making peace; And that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby. (Ephesians 2:14-16)
The Little Season
Now the part that too often gets skipped…
“and after that he must be loosed a little season.” (Revelation 20:3)
“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceiveth them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone.” (Revelation 20:7-10)
Several things about this passage deserve mention...
The loosing restores exactly the function that was bound. Satan is released to once again go out and deceive the nations. Same verb, same object. This confirms the reading of verse 3 — the restraint was on national deception, because that is what will return when the binding is lifted.
It is brief. A little season. Whatever the thousand years is, this is short by comparison, and John says so. How long is it and what signifies its starting point? People have been debating that since John wrote it down on the isle of Patmos.
There is no battle. Read it again. They gather. They surround. Fire falls. That is the entire military engagement. The Greek does not describe combat; it describes an assembly followed immediately by consumption. This is not Armageddon as a protracted struggle with an uncertain outcome. It is a rebellion that is over before it starts.
It does not undo what came before. This is the point that matters regarding eschatology. A brief final apostasy at the end of an age of advance does not reverse the advance any more than a prisoner’s last outburst reverses the judge’s verdict. The Kingdom does not lose ground and then get rescued. It expands, and at the end there is a short and futile convulsion, and then fire.
Although many claim such, nobody knows the timing or shape of the little season, and everyone who has claimed to know has been wrong. What the text gives us is duration (short), content (national deception returns), and outcome (immediate and total). That’s enough for a group who was initially told by two of God’s messengers (angels) at Christ’s ascension to stop standing around and staring and the sky, and get busy about the business of growing the Kingdom!
Already, But Not Yet
Paul states the structure of the present age more clearly than anyone…
“For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming. Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” (1 Corinthians 15:22-26)
Look at the verb tenses…
He must reign — present, continuous, now. The reign is not future. It began at the ascension when Daniel 7 was fulfilled.
Till he hath put all enemies under his feet — progressive. The subjugation is happening across the age, not instantaneously at its close.
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death — sequential, with death explicitly last. Which means the other enemies — the rule, authority, and power Paul names, the same vocabulary as Ephesians 6:12 and Colossians 2:15 — are being put down before death is. Now.
That is the already and the not yet in four verses. He reigns already. All enemies are not yet under His feet. The interval between those two facts is the age we are living in, and it is not a holding pattern. It is a subjugation in progress.
The author of Hebrews says the same thing by quoting from Psalm 8…
“Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. For in that he put all in subjection under him, he left nothing that is not put under him. But now we see not yet all things put under him.” (Hebrews 2:8)
All things are subjected. We do not yet see it. Both true, both stated in one verse, no contradiction. Which brings us to the passage the New Testament writers could not stop quoting.
Psalm 110 is seven verses long…
David Guzik’s commentary reveals that James Montgomery Boice counted twenty-seven quotations or allusions to it in the New Testament, with the first verse being the single most frequently referenced verse from the Old Testament anywhere in the New. Every time you read that Christ is seated at the right hand of God — Acts, Romans, Ephesians, Colossians, Hebrews, First Peter — you are reading its echo…
The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool. (Psalm 110:1)
Read that word until…
The sitting is not a rest after the work is done. The sitting comes first, and the subjugation happens while He sits. That is the identical structure Paul gives in 1 Corinthians 15 — he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet — because Paul is quoting this psalm when he writes it.
Then the next verse, which almost nobody reads…
The LORD shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the midst of thine enemies. (Psalm 110:2)
Not after His enemies. In the midst of them…
The reign is exercised inside contested territory, in the presence of an opposition that has not yet been removed. That is not a description of a kingdom waiting to begin. It is a description of a kingdom currently operating behind enemy lines.
And the mechanism is seen in verse three…
Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power. (Psalm 110:3)
Volunteers. The subjugation of the nations proceeds by the willing submission of people within them — which is exactly what the Seventy were doing, and exactly what the Great Commission commands.
If you want to bend your mind just a bit, notice who quotes it, and when…
Jesus used it against the Pharisees at the end of Matthew 22 to ask how David could call his own son Lord. He used it again before the Sanhedrin near the end of Matthew 26 to tell the men who were about to condemn Him that they would see the Son of man seated at the right hand of power. The claim to the throne of Psalm 110 that we fail to notice, but got Him charged with blasphemy by those who did (compare to the first few verses of the Olivet Discourse {Matthew 24; Mark 13; Luke 21}, noting what Calvin did back in 1555.
And then Peter, at Pentecost, with the crowd asking what on earth just happened…
For David is not ascended into the heavens: but he saith himself, The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thy foes thy footstool. (Acts 2:34-35)
That is the answer to the question…
Why were Parthians and Medes and Elamites and dwellers in Mesopotamia — a list that reads like the table of nations — suddenly hearing the works of God in their own tongues? Because the God-man (Son of Man) had been enthroned ten days earlier. Peter explained Babel running backward by citing a coronation psalm.
The reign began at the ascension. Enemies being defeated in time and history. A campaign being fought with volunteers. And what does everyone in the church say about volunteers? Ten percent of the people do 90% of the work. Hopefully that provides some motivation as you enter the home stretch of this already too-long piece…
What is the Church’s Mission?
Given everything discussed thus far, Ephesians 6 reads very differently than it’s usually preached…
“Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” (Ephesians 6:10-12)
“Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.” (Ephesians 6:13)
Count the offensive equipment. Belt, breastplate, shoes, shield, helmet — all defensive. And one offensive item — the sword of the Spirit, which Paul immediately identifies as the Word of God. And the stated objective, three times in four verses, is to stand.
You do not hold ground you have not already taken…
The posture Paul describes is that of an occupying force consolidating territory that has already changed hands — which is precisely what Colossians 2:15 said happened at the cross and what Matthew 28:18 said happened at the enthronement.
The weapons are correspondingly strange for a military metaphor, but note why that is…
“For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds; Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:4-5)
Strongholds, imaginations, arguments, thoughts. High things. The war is fought over what people believe. Their thought lives. Which is exactly what you would expect in an age whose defining feature is that the nations can no longer be deceived. Deception hinges on changing what a person believes about something.
And unfortunately, a deceived people will not recognize history for what it really is — His story…
The Stone That Became a Mountain
Two of Jesus’ shortest parables describe the Kingdom’s trajectory, and both describe the same thing. Something small that becomes large by internal growth rather than external imposition…
“Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.” (Matthew 13:31-32)
“Another parable spake he unto them; The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.” (Matthew 13:33)
Leaven does not ‘conquer’ dough. It permeates it. And the stated endpoint is not a partial result — it is till the whole was leavened.
Before that, Daniel prophetically described the Kingdom of God as a growing stone…
“Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces.” (Daniel 2:34)
“And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.” (Daniel 2:44)
“And the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.” (Daniel 2:35)
In the days of these kings…
During the fourth kingdom, which everyone except modern dispensationalists interpret as ancient Rome (they interpret it as a modern E.U. of exactly ten nations), the stone made without hands began growing into the mountain that will one day fill the whole earth. Growth, not sudden replacement. The striking is instantaneous, but the filling is a process.
That comes from the same prophet that gave us the Son of Man receiving all peoples, nations, and languages in chapter 7, and the spirit princes of Persia and Greece in chapter 10. Daniel is internally consistent about this from beginning to end.
Back to the Hillside
A return to where we started…
“Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6)
We can now see what was wrong with the question, and it was not what most people assume. The disciples were not wrong to expect a kingdom. They were not wrong to expect it soon. They were wrong about its size and about its nature.
They were asking about one nation — the portion, Jacob (aka Israel), the lot of His inheritance. They were asking about the restoration of Deuteronomy 32:9. Instead, they were given Deuteronomy 32:8. All of it. Every nation on the Table, every people handed over at Babel, every territory that had been sitting under the administration of a corrupt spiritual prince for thousands of years…
“But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)
The uttermost part of the earth…
Psalm 2:8 quoted back at them, by the ready-to-ascend-to-the-throne Christ as a job description — “the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession” — and they did not catch it, standing right there, ten days before the Spirit was gifted.
The fact that they did not fully understand did not slow down Christ’s plan. The Ascension, the cloud, and the beginning of the fulfillment of Daniel 7 — the coronation of Christ the King and His building His Kingdom through His chosen vehicle of change, His Church…
“And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.” (Daniel 7:14)
“Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?” (Acts 1:11)
What a Christian does with this information is everything. Think I’m hyperbolizing?
Fail to see it and your Christian mission is not what it should or could be simply because you’ve failed to understand your marching orders. Futurizing the Kingdom of God to a literal thousand-year “Millennium” robs the current generation of Christians of being part of the glorious advancement, while promoting pessimism and despair as far as the spread of the Gospel is concerned.
Oh, and don’t forget the date-setting...
“In his writings he was careful of his choice of words and used only those that delicately balanced with his meanings. The word ‘millennium’ is a perfectly good biblical word and yet you will not find it used by Dr Scofield. It suggests controversial aspects, so he always employed the word ‘Kingdom’”. -Dr W. Irving Carroll from a November 27, 1921 memorial service in Dallas celebrating the life of Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (The Incredible Scofield and His Book)
Do you polish the brass on a sinking ship? -The late J. Vernon McGee expositing on the nearness of Christ’s return as related to Christians leaving something lasting for future generations of Christians, from back in the early 1970’s
“What is a ‘generation’? Planet Earth’s greatest prophecy is found in Matthew 24... Jesus said that the generation that sees ‘all these things’ happen to Israel ‘shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.’... Assuming that 1948 was the date of the fig tree’s blossoming, then the expiration date of planet earth will be 1988. This is based on a Biblical generation being approximately 40 years.” -The late Hal Lindsey, from 1970’s Late Great Planet Earth, the single best-selling book of that decade — 35-40 million copies to date…
These are sentiments held by virtually all modern prophecy experts, and hallmarks of their theology. I grew up immersed in this system and understand its intricacies far better than most. And will argue that this way of thinking has not been helpful to the mission of the saints of God.
Sure, an increasingly impotent Church might be able to snatch some souls from the fire, but as far as advancing the Kingdom and the sort of lasting change that only comes from real discipleship… A pipe dream.
Because confusing the time of the end (the end of the Old Covenant sacrificial age) with the end of time (The Last Day — the Second Coming, bodily resurrection from the dead, and final judgement) produces little but pessimism for the Gospel and its Kingdom to overspread the earth as the waters cover the sea.
The Kingdom, however, is not a future arrangement awaiting a trigger.
It was inaugurated on a specific day by a specific transfer of authority, witnessed by eleven men who were told to stop looking at the sky and go take possession of what their King had just been given.
Imprtant: Notice what happened in Daniel 7 after Christ was given the keys to the Kingdom. He turned around and presented them to his vehicle for victory on earth, the Church.
An entity made up of individual — wait for it — ‘saints’…
7:18 — But the saints of the most High shall take the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever, even for ever and ever.
7:22 — Until the Ancient of days came, and judgment was given to the saints of the most High; and the time came that the saints possessed the kingdom.
7:27 — And the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints of the most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.
The strong man is bound in the one function that matters — he cannot keep the nations blinded to the things of God.
His real estate is being plundered by the saints, just as it has been continuously plundered for two thousand years, one nation and one Christian at a time, by a Church armed with nothing but God’s Word and God’s Spirit.
And the last enemy has a place in the queue…
“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” (1 Corinthians 15:26)
“And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever.” (Revelation 11:15)
Are become. Not will become.
The seventy nations, given away on a plain in Shinar and reclaimed on a hill outside Jerusalem, belong to the Son who asked for them.
Because I am working today I will not likely be able to respond to comments or questions until tomorrow, or even Sunday…
Thanks.
Well done!
You just summerized years of my study into one easily understandable short story. I love t!