[0:00]Whenever I get asked the question about spiritual warfare, tell us about spiritual warfare. I ask this question, what would a principality and a power fear? I'll tell you what they'll what they fear, they fear their own destruction. So, the thing that can instill the most fear in them is if the church, being defined as every individual Christian, would just do their job. Because it's as the one kingdom grows, the other kingdom diminishes. And we inch further and further and further down the line to the fullness of the Gentiles. They know it's coming. So they don't think they can kill God and and win that way, but if they can if they can get the church distracted, if they can make it hopelessly worldly so that its message is invalidated, so that the great commission sort of screeches to a halt or slows down. They're gonna be here a long time. They're gonna do anything they can to get people to realize God wants them back. They're gonna deflect attention, they're gonna substitute themselves for for the truth of what God has. Anything they can do to blind their populations and destroy them. That's what they're gonna do. This leads to what scholars also call cosmic geography. You know, and again I say it the the Babel thing really explains the rest of the Old Testament because it explains why Israel, it's Israel against the nations, it's Yahweh against the gods. That that whole situation derives from what happens at Babel, this last rebellion. Supernatural beings attached to geopolitical entities. What does that sound like? It sounds like Daniel 10. This is where Daniel gets his theology. He gets it from Deuteronomy. He gets it from the Torah. I mean where else would a good Jew get his theology but from the Torah, okay? It's right there, but again we can't see it unless again, we're we're reading with, you know, the the best primary source material. But there are other passages that this, you know, explains as well. I'll just give you a few of them because there's there's cosmic geographical things in and lots of stories both Old and New Testament. First Samuel 5 is the when when the Philistines have the Ark of the Covenant. Which, you know, it's it's a funny story and I don't know why it's doing that, but let's just go to the to this. We'll just type it in. First Samuel 5. Of course I'm assuming I can type. The Philistines and the Ark. Let's just shut the visual filter off again. Get rid of that. So they've captured the Ark and again we this is a story we tell in Sunday school because it's comical. When the Philistines captured the Ark of God, they brought it from Ebenezer to Ashdod. Then the Philistines took the Ark of God and brought it into the house of Dagon and set it up beside Dagon. And when the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, behold, Dagon had fallen face downward on the ground before the Ark of the Lord. Everybody laughs and it's funny, okay? So they took Dagon and put him back in his place. Dagon needed some help. I mean again, the Philistines know that that the idol isn't the actual deity because if you smashed the deity, you just built a new or you smashed the deity, you just built a new one. The logic of idolatry was was people made objects and then they would perform ritual ritual ceremonies. The most common one is called the opening of the mouth. Egypt had it, Mesopotamia had it. It's you go through a bunch of ritual actions to animate the deity, to to let the breath, let the spirit being come in and inhabit, to animate, to enliven the idol.
[4:05]This is the logic of idolatry. You know, it localizes the deity in that sense for for different, you know, purposes. So, I mean there there are actually Mesopotamian texts where idols get destroyed during wars and the people don't sit down there and cry like, oh our God is dead now, what are we gonna do? No, they okay, we gotta go build another one. Then we gotta go through the whole ceremony again and then the the DD will come and live in in our in our little thing that we made and everything will be great. So idols and and deities, there is a relationship intrinsically between them, but they are not the same thing. They are two related but distinct things, okay? So we have here, you know, Dagon falls face flat. They put him back up again. And now, you know, the next morning, Dagon had fallen face downward on the ground before the Ark of the of the Lord. The head of Dagon and both his hands were lying cut off on the threshold.
[5:03]Now again, they they don't conclude, well, I guess Dagon's dead now, we don't we don't have Dagon worship anymore, you know. Only the trunk of Dagon is left. This is why, here's the line. This is why the priests of Dagon and all who enter the house of Dagon do not tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod to this day. So when after this time, I mean they they're gonna get rid of the ark. They can't get rid of that thing fast enough after this. But they keep worshipping Dagon in the same house, the same temple. But this time when they go through whatever they're doing, they take great care to not walk on the place where they found the idol of Dagon smashed up. Why? Because they know this little patch of dirt is under dominion of Yahweh. This is where Yahweh had victory over Dagon. He owns this land. Right here and we aren't taking any chances. So we're gonna do what we do for Dagon, but we ain't walking over that. Again, it's this notion that deities are attached to places, not just objects but places.
[6:21]Let's go back here. First Samuel 26. I'll just summarize this one. When David gets kicked out of Judah, you know, he's He he he David holds up with the Philistines actually for a while running from Saul. So he's outside of Judah and David is upset. And he and he's complaining that, you know, how am I supposed to pray and how am I supposed to worship the Lord when I'm not in Judah? So is David denying omnipresence? Is he a really bad theologian? No. He knows that the properly worship God, he has to be in God's land. And he's troubled by the fact that he's not where he belongs. This is Yahweh's domain. It it's a very simple idea, again from the perspective of the, you know, the biblical worldview. Let's go to Second Kings. Second Kings 5, I think I had 17 there. This is the Naman story. Again, This is another one we tell in Sunday school because it's a great story. But do we understand what it's communicating in terms of the worldview? Cosmic geographical worldview. So Naman, important guy, captain of, you know, Syrian army, he's a commander, and he has leprosy. So he's complaining to, I mean, we'd all complain if we had leprosy. Let's be honest. And a little girl in his household overhears him. She's a little slave girl that was taken from Israel as a captive in war. And she says to her master, my my paraphrase here, quit griping. I'm sure she didn't say it quite that way. But like, what's the problem? Why don't you go to Israel and talk to the prophet and he'll take care of your leprosy? And he's like, what? You know, so eventually he he becomes convinced, okay, we're gonna take a band of men, we're gonna go down there. And at first, you know, he goes to Elisha and and he won't Elisha won't even come out to meet him, which is a real insult. He won't even come out of the hut. Yeah, yeah, I know who it is. Just just tell Naman to go down to the Jordan and wash seven times and problem solved. And Naman gets ticked. It's like, we got better rivers back in Syria than this little, you know, mud hole. I mean what? So he's he's angry. But again, somehow his men convince him to do it. Like, like what's the harm? You know, just go ahead, just try it. And so he does and again we know the story. He comes out after the seventh time and he's clean. And now he's freaked out. So, I mean, you look at you look at what he says here. Oh, let's see. He he returned to the man of God, he and all his company and he came and stood before him and he said, behold, I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel. That that's a huge statement for a pagan. This he's Syrian. He's not a Jew. Like he's just denying that his own gods are legit. He I know there's no God in all the earth but in Israel. So accept now a present from your servant. So he wants to give the prophet something in return. Elisha says, no, we're not gonna do that. Then Naman said, well, if you won't take it, please let there be given to your servant two mule loads of earth, dirt. For from now on, your servant will not offer burnt offering or sacrifice to any God but the Lord. Why does he ask for dirt?
[10:17]Because it's Yahweh's dirt, okay? Yahweh is connected to the land.
[10:27]I'm gonna take some dirt, all that my two mules can carry and I want to take it back home. And you know, we're not told exactly what he's gonna do with it, but maybe he little made a little altar at home where he can sacrifice to the Lord on the Lord's ground even though he's not there, it it's here with him. The dirt is with him. Maybe he put some in a little pouch, you know, because he he actually says, you know, hey, I got to go into the Temple of Ramone from time to time. You know, may the Lord pardon your servant when my master, you know, the king, goes into the house of Ramone to worship there, he's leaning on my arm, he's kind of old, you know, and frail. You know, when I bow, I kind of like have to go with him. You know, when I bow myself in the house of Ramone, the Lord pardon your servant in this matter. Is that okay? And Elisha says, yeah, that's cool. Go ahead, take your dirt. You're okay. Again, this is this is why again to Jesus. This is one of the examples, the great examples of faith in the Old Testament that Jesus appeals to, you know, against the Pharisees. But it's cosmic geography. Uh Daniel 10, we've already, you know, we've already looked at a little bit, you know, Prince of Persia, Prince of Greece. I have a little reference to the Septuagint. Septuagint is the Greek translation, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. One of the terms used in some of the uh Greek manuscripts for Daniel 10 is the word Archon. Archon. And it's one of Paul's words for the principalities. I mean, there's other there's other vocabulary connections between what Paul says and and the Old Testament, but this is a clear one. So how does this relate to the New Testament? I mean, we'll get back to Paul in a moment, obviously. The just a few things uh in relationship to Jesus. Now, we're not gonna talk about the gates of Hell because that actually refers to the second rebellion, the whole Giant Clan issue. With Bashan and all that. So you can read about that in in the books. But there are a couple of things, again, and I'm gonna pick two for the sake of time here. That are really interesting. Let's see if this will click out right to the passage. Yep, it clicks out the demons for us. Oh, that's because I had the passage in here. I can just read it. So, this is the exorcism of Legion, which again is a story we're familiar with in the gospels and I'm this is the Mark 5 record. So they came to the other side of the sea to the country of the Garcines. And when Jesus had stepped out of the boat, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit. By the way, I'm not gonna, you know, look at the footnotes here. I promise. But in the demons' book, When I talk there's a section of the book where I talk about the phrase unclean spirits. There's a whole scholarly book on that. It was it's somebody's dissertation that got published on where does the term for unclean and impure spirits come from? Short answer is, what is the concept of uncleanness and impurity in Torah? It is fundamentally about one thing. Forbidden mixtures. You you know, the weird thing with the clothing, what what it's made of and you don't mix this with that and you know, this meat and this other forbidden mixtures. Why would demons be connected with forbidden mixturing? Because of Genesis 6. That's a forbidden mixture. It's a transgression of a boundary. Again, this is why Second Temple Judaism has its own theology that we're completely ignorant of of demonology. And a lot of it is hooked back into Genesis 6, which we are taught, I was taught, that there's nothing supernatural going on there. The sons of God, they're just the sons of Seth. Like just like they're humans in Psalm 82. There's nothing to see here, citizen, move along. Okay, nothing to see here. This is one of the rare subjects in Second Temple Judaism where Basically all of the source work, the source texts agree. A demon that you, like that you encounter in the Gospels is not a fallen angel in in Jewish thought. And it's based on a few things, a few passages in the Old Testament, we're not gonna get to today. But a demon is the disembodied spirit of one of the dead Nephilim, one of the dead Giant Clans. They go by different terms. Nephilim, Anakim, Rephaim, Amim, Zamzumim, there's a whole bunch of Amis, okay? When you killed one because it was spawned through a supernatural process, supernatural act, whatever that was. When you killed one, the body died and the spirit lived on seeking reembodiment. That's what a demon is. It is an unclean spirit. Because it was it was brought into the world through forbidden mixture. They have a whole theology this and you get little vestiges of this like in Isaiah 14. In Ezekiel 32, when you get these visions of the underworld, the realm of the dead, you see Rephaim in there. Okay, they're they're that's where they live. They live in hell, so to speak, okay? So again there there's a lot of there's a lot of strands that that bleed into the idea. But this is what what what Jesus is encountering here. Except we get Legion. So the man with the unclean spirit, he lived among the tombs. Again, we know the story of what he's like and so, He says to Jesus, when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and fell down before him and crying out with a loud voice, he said, what have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me. For he was saying to him, come out of the man, you unclean spirit. So the spirits Legion is begging for mercy here. And Jesus asked him, what is your name? He replied, my name is Legion for we are many and he begged him earnestly not to send him out of the country. Okay, so they're in Gentile territory. They're hurting pigs here, okay? They're hurting swine there. So the the place where it happens is significant because, well, I'll get to it in a in a moment, but just again, this is this is not like your normal Jewish turf here. Don't send me out. You know, I this is where we belong. They're out in the desert, it's Gentile territory. You know, a herd of great pigs on the hillside and Jesus permits the unclean spirits to go out and and enter the pigs and so on and so forth. Now I wrote here, it's noteworthy that Jesus again had limited his ministry to his Jewish audience before this chapter. This is Mark 5. This would not be unexpected as Israel's Messiah, his entrance into the country of the Garcines, Gentile territory, Mark 5 indicates a departure from his pattern. Now if you compare, and these are just two passages. When he's in Galilee and he runs into, you know, the situation, what have you to do with us, the demons asked, Jesus of Nazareth? But when he's outside holy ground, okay, because this is this is under Gentile dominion at this point in history. Now it's all of a sudden Jesus, Son of the Most High. Does the Most High sound familiar? That's Deuteronomy 32 language. When the Most High divided up the nations, he divided them up according to the number of the sons of God. So, even the demons know this.
[18:10]Okay, there it is. Sending of the 70, 72. This is only in Luke. It's Luke chapter 10. I'll just summarize it. When Jesus sends out disciples for the first time to and this is part of inaugurating, launching the kingdom of God. He doesn't send out 12. He sends out 70. Some of you some of your New Testament, you know, translations will have 72. It doesn't matter because the same Old Testament reference is in view and that is the Table of Nations in Genesis 10. If you use the traditional Masoretic text, if you count the nations, it's the number 70. If you use the Septuagint, the number 72 because they divide a couple in the Septuagint. So he sends out disciples in a number that is a symbolic number and a symbolic act to reclaiming the nations. What's the theological messaging? Jesus is saying, and by the way, this is in Luke. Luke is probably a Gentile, okay? I I would say he's a physician. He's very likely a Gentile.
[19:18]He's writing to Theophilus, who again is very likely a Gentile. And he's the only one that includes this story because it's about Gentile, it's about Gentile reclamation. It's about reclaiming the nations that were divorced at Babel and assigned to other members of the heavenly host, who again, pervert their charges and enslave their populations and turn their hearts to idolatry. Jesus is saying, yeah, I'm the Messiah of Israel. All right. I'm the Son of David and the son of Abraham and all that stuff. But I just want you all to know, everybody who's watching me send out the 70. I want you all to know that what I'm doing here and starting the kingdom of God includes every nation. I am not here to reclaim just Israel. I am here to reclaim all of it. Every last inch. Go get him. I mean, because he he is in power over demons and stuff like this. But but just the the number and the act in the gospel in which it appears, telegraphs certain ideas. That again, this is this is this is part of spiritual warfare. And it, you know, since it's connected to the great commission, you know, that that's gonna become important because ultimately that's what spiritual warfare is. If you go to the book of Acts, Acts and Deuteronomy 32 Worldview. I spend a lot of time in in Unseen Realm talking about this. And if you don't have the book, you can get the details there. But how many times have we heard this passage preached or read it? Day of Pentecost, divided tongues as a fire. Again, this is a screenshot. Divided is the Greek Lema De Maridzo. Say who cares, big deal. You know, we learned another Greek vocabulary word. Okay. Well, if you search for Demoridzo in the Septuagint, one of the occurrences just happens to be in Deuteronomy 32 8. What a coincidence. The nations are divided, divided tongues, okay? You say so what? You keep reading and the people who listen to all this real weird tongue stuff going on at Pentecost. They were bewildered soon, Keo. If you search for that Lemma. Oh, what a coincidence. One of those is in Genesis 11, the Tower of Babel story. If you keep reading through the book of Acts, or let's just let's just stay in Acts 2 for for this point. You get all these all these names of of, you know, place names in Acts 2 from all the people who are there for Pentecost. The list, if you if you read through the list, it moves from this side, which would be okay, your right hand side to the left. Right to left. So it proceeds from east to west. And of course, when it hits the the ocean, nobody lives in the ocean, okay, except for Crete here. But it branches up and down. All of the regions that are listed in the book of Acts correspond regionally, and in some cases by name, to the regions represented in Genesis 10. The table of nations.
[22:40]That's not a coincidence. What what has happened is because of the exile. You want a good illustration of God using evil? Why do we have the exile? Idolatry? That's why Israel lost the land. They're they're set they're wiped out. Northern Kingdom in 722, the Assyrians, of course, deport everybody. Then they import other people, you know, to mix the populations so they don't they're not fighting for their homeland anymore. And of course, the two tribes in the south, you're taken to Babylon and all that. So you and a lot of them remain in Babylon. And the rest, the other 10 tribes are scattered throughout the known world. You know, who knows where they end up? Well, what that means is that there are Jews everywhere else in the Mediterranean that cover regionally all of the turf covered in Genesis 10. The Babel event, the third rebellion. And so at Pentecost, by this time in history, people from all of these places will go to Jerusalem for Pentecost. That's what they do. It's one of the, you know, the big annual events here. And what and and this Pentecost when they get there, oh, they hear something different this time. This is a this this this visit's gonna be memorable for all sorts of other reasons. They're they're present at Pentecost and and, you know, Peter sitting in the book of Acts in 2, chapter 2 says 3,000 of them become followers of Jesus. They see what what's happening with the spirit's descent. Peter, you know, has this sermon. This is the inauguration of the New Covenant. The spirit has come. It's it's he's come because Jesus of Nazareth. You you put the death, but he rose again and he ascended to the father. The spirit comes. And and this is and this is the new covenant spoken of by the prophets to redeem us from permanent exile and and all this stuff. And 3,000 of them believe. So what do you think they do when when Pentecost is over? They go back home. So now we have the gospel seated in every place among the nations that were disinherited at Babel. Little cell groups. This is why when Paul in his missionary journeys goes into a town, he already finds believers there. Like, how does that happen? It happens because of Pentecost.
