This is the first post in The Strange Parts, an eight-part series on the passages of Scripture that only make sense with a supernatural worldview.
Every serious Bible reader has done it. You are working through Genesis, making good progress, and you hit chapter six. Sons of God taking human wives. Giants on the earth in those days. And you do what generations of readers before you have done. You squint, you slow down, and then you quietly move on to the ark, because at least the ark makes sense.
Or you are in 1 Kings 22, and Jehovah is asking His heavenly host how Ahab should be persuaded to his death, and a spirit steps forward and volunteers to be a lying spirit in the mouths of the prophets. Or you are in Daniel 10, where an angel apologizes for being three weeks late because the prince of the kingdom of Persia fought him the whole way. Or you are in Jude, and the shortest book in your New Testament is quoting the book of Enoch like everybody in the room has read it.
We skip these passages. Not because we are lazy and not because we do not love the Bible. We skip them because nobody ever handed us a framework where they make sense. And here is the claim I want to spend eight posts defending. The strange parts are not embarrassments to be explained away or footnotes to be endured. They are load-bearing walls. Pull them out and the whole story sags.
The Filter You Inherited
Here is what actually happened to us. Somewhere between the biblical authors and your Sunday school classroom, the Western church passed through the Enlightenment, and we came out the other side with a filter installed. The filter keeps God, because we need Him. It keeps angels, mostly for Christmas. And it quietly deletes nearly everything else the biblical authors believed about the unseen world.
The men who wrote your Bible believed in a populated spiritual world. They believed Jehovah rules that world the way a great king rules a court, surrounded by a host of created spiritual beings who serve Him, report to Him, and in some cases rebelled against Him. They believed the nations of the earth had spiritual realities standing behind them. They believed the prophets were men who had stood in the courtroom of heaven and come back with a message. None of this was strange to them. It was the furniture of their world.
But we read their words through our filter, and whole sections of Scripture turn to static. Psalm 82 becomes a puzzle. Genesis 6 becomes a marriage sermon that does not fit the text. Daniel 10 becomes something we just do not preach on. The text did not change. The lens did.
If our framework cannot hold what the text plainly says, the problem is not the text. The problem is the framework.
One Rule for the Whole Series
So here is the rule that will govern everything we do in this series. We let the text mean what it meant to the people who wrote it, and only then do we ask what it means for us. Never the reverse.
That sounds obvious. It is anything but. Most of the bad readings of these passages come from running the rule backwards. We start with what we already believe the unseen world must look like, usually some tidy two-story house with God upstairs and us downstairs, and then we sand down every verse that will not fit through the door. The sons of God become the line of Seth. The gods of Psalm 82 become human judges. The prince of Persia becomes a metaphor for political resistance. Each of those moves was invented to protect the text from saying what it says.
And the text does not need our protection. It needs our attention.
A Word Worth Learning Before We Start
Let me hand you one Hebrew word that will open the door for the entire series. The word is sod, and it means a council, a close circle, the kind of intimate assembly where real decisions get made. Jeremiah uses it when he tells you how to spot a true prophet from a false one.
“For who has stood in the counsel of the LORD, And has perceived and heard His word? Who has marked His word and heard it?”
Jeremiah 23:18 NKJV
Stood in the counsel. The false prophets ran with a message nobody gave them. The true prophet had been somewhere, in the sod of Jehovah, the working session of the throne room. The psalmist uses the same picture.
“God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the saints, And to be held in reverence by all those around Him.”
Psalm 89:7 NKJV
All those around Him. There is a crowd in that throne room, and the Old Testament is not shy about it. Hold on to this word. We will meet it again and again.
| Word | Original | Strong’s | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| sod | סוֹד | H5475 | Council, intimate assembly, confidential circle where decisions are made |
Where This Series Is Going
Over the next seven posts we are going to walk through the passages you were taught to skip, and we are going to take them at full strength. We will sit in the courtroom of Psalm 82 and ask who is being sentenced. We will stand at Babel and watch Jehovah disinherit the nations, then turn the page and watch Him call Abram to win them back. We will deal honestly with Genesis 6, the Nephilim, and the angels Jude says are kept in chains. We will watch a lying spirit get commissioned from the throne, learn to read Ezekiel’s wheels without a decoder ring, and find out why a prince of Persia could keep a heavenly messenger waiting for three weeks. And then we will end at Caesarea Philippi and Pentecost, where the whole long war turns.
I want to be clear about the spirit of this series. This is not conspiracy material, and it is not sensationalism. You will find no charts of demon hierarchies here and no invitations to fear. The supernatural worldview of the biblical authors always lands in the same places, worship, courage, prayer, and hope. If a reading of these passages makes you afraid of the dark, it is a bad reading. The authors who wrote them were not afraid. They knew who sat on the throne.
Here is my invitation. Bring your whole Bible. Not the abridged edition your filter has been reading for you, the whole strange, glorious thing. You do not need less Bible than you have. You need all of it. The strange parts included.
Discussion Questions
- Which strange passage of Scripture have you most often skipped past, and what did you tell yourself about it?
- Where did your working picture of the unseen world come from? How much of it can you actually trace to the text?
- Read Jeremiah 23:16-22. What is the difference between the prophets Jehovah condemns and the prophet who has stood in His counsel?
- What would change about your Bible reading if you assumed the authors meant exactly what they wrote?
Going Deeper
If you want to read ahead, Michael Heiser’s The Unseen Realm is the full scholarly treatment of the worldview this series draws on, and his shorter book Supernatural covers the same ground for a general reader. For the throne room texts, sit with 1 Kings 22:19-23, Job 1:6-12, Isaiah 6:1-8, and Psalm 89:5-7 this week. Read them in one sitting and ask one question the whole way through. Who else is in the room?
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