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Find the answers to all those questions you were too embarrassed to ask in Sunday School. Welcome to Weird Stuff in the Bible, where we explore scripture passages that are bizarre, perplexing or just plain weird. Hosted by Luke Taylor.
Demonology: Territorial Spirits (and the Deuteronomy 32 worldview)
Mark 5:10
Introduction
I’ve been doing this podcast for about a year now and I can’t believe I haven’t done an episode about this yet.
Today, we’re going to be talking about territorial spirits. And that phrase refers to the fact that spirits are assigned to certain sectors of the earth.
Many Bible-readers aren’t aware of this little tidbit about how the spiritual realm works, and you may question whether this is in the Bible.
In fact, it’s ALL THROUGH the Bible. We just encountered one place last week when we were studying the demoniac of Mark 5. This was the guy who had a “Legion” of demons within him, and Jesus ends up casting the demons into the pigs.
What’s really strange, though, is a request from the demons not to be sent out of that territory. This was a spiritually dark place known as the Gadarenes- or some translations may say the Gerasenes.
Mark 5:10 said
And he [and this is the demon-possessed man] begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country.
In other words, the demoniac begged Jesus earnestly not to send the demons out of the country.
Why were the demons so intent on staying within this location?
I find this to be weird, and I’d like to explore why it’s in the Bible.
Turn to Genesis 11, and let’s get weird.
[theme music]
The Deuteronomy 32 Worldview
Welcome to Weird Stuff in the Bible, where we explore scripture passages that are bizarre, perplexing or just plain weird. This is Luke Taylor, and today we’re going to be talking about territorial spirits, which will start with Dr. Michael Heiser’s Deuteronomy 32 worldview.
If you haven’t learned about the Deuteronomy 32 worldview before, you may be wondering why I told you to turn to Genesis 11 a moment ago. That’s because this idea starts with how the peoples of the earth were dispersed following the Tower of Babel incident.
I’m going to assume you’re familiar with that account. God wanted the people to spread out right after the flood and cover the earth, but some of them rebelled against this admonition and decided they would gather together and build a tower to heaven.
Genesis 11:9 says
Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.
So the word “dispersed” is key there. Other translations may say “divided,” because the peoples were divided based on the languages that they spoke, and this is the story of basically where all our various languages came from.
Prior to that everybody spoke the same language. But because of the Tower of Babel story, people were forced to separate on the basis of settling somewhere among people who could understand you. And so that’s why your high schooler has to take French class. Because of these clowns in Genesis 11. If it weren't for them, you wouldn’t have so much trouble having to call AT&T customer service.
Now turn to Deuteronomy 32, because this is going to pick up on that idea. In Deuteronomy 32, we have something called the Song of Moses. These are some of the last words of Moses that he spoke right before he died. He refers to the Tower of Babel incident in
Deuteronomy 32:8-9
[well, let’s start at verse 7 so you hear the entire sentence]
7 Remember the days of old;
consider the years of many generations;
ask your father, and he will show you,
your elders, and they will tell you.
8 When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he divided mankind,
he fixed the borders of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God.
9 But the Lord's portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage.
So let’s break those last two verses down a bit. It says that God divided mankind and fixed the borders of the peoples- in other words, God separated off the nations and said, “This portion of land on the earth will go to Moabites, this portion to Persians, this portion to the Egyptians, and so forth. And, of course, as you turn the page and read Genesis 12, you see how God gave a particular piece of land to a man named Abraham.
But for all these other nations, how did God decide who got what? Well, let’s look at verse 8 again, because if you’ve been listening to this podcast a while, hopefully your ears perked up when I used the phrase “sons of God”: When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.
So who are the Sons of God? These are the bene Elohim; they are spiritual beings that some describe as angels, but I would rather use the term fallen angels. Actually, I would just prefer to call the the Sons of God, since that’s the term the Bible uses. These are spiritual beings who were assigned certain territories of planet earth. Sectors of the world.
It said in Deuteronomy 32:8 that God fixed the borders of the peoples according to the Sons of God. That means God set the boundaries down here on earth based on where God set their authority up in heaven.
So here’s another way to think of it. There is a spiritual being who has been given charge over Germany. The biblical term for this spiritual being is a principality. He is one of the Sons of God. Another biblical way to put this would be the Prince of Germany.
So Germany’s border are not random. There may have been a historical reason that Germany’s boundaries start here and stop at this river and go on down to this landmark, and so on. There are historical reasons behind all that, sure. But in God’s sovereignty, God only caused those boundaries to be set based on what He had already decreed in heaven. God had already decided that based on the Sons of God and which territory He wanted to allot to each one of them.
It’s kind of strange that these beings are called the sons of God, since many or most or maybe even all of them are in rebellion to God. I’ll note that there are some Christian traditions who claim that the Sons of God are just human rulers, human kings. This is hermeneutically ridiculous, it de-spiritualizes the Bible, and it’s indefensible to read the Bible that way consistently. I could prove that today, but if you need that proven, I encourage you to go back and listen to an episode I did last November or December called Who Are the Sons of God?
One last thing we see there is the spiritual being responsible for Israel. There are two ways we could answer this: one is that God is ultimately in charge of the land of Israel. This is one of the reasons, I believe, that the rest of the world is always trying to take Israel’s land. They’re trying to take it from God. Two, an archangel named Michael is also in charge of Israel’s land, according to
Daniel 10:21
there is none who contends by my side against these except Michael, your prince.
This was spoken to Daniel- an Israelite- by an angel. Michael is referred to as the Prince of Israel because he’s the principality assigned over Israel, and Michael is one of the Sons of God who is still loyal to the true God.
One linguistic note about Deuteronomy 32. I was reading from the ESV. If you’re using another translation, there’s a good chance that it says “sons of Israel” instead of Sons of God. That would completely change the meaning of the sentence, but let me explain why I believe the ESV is most accurate. Other translations- such as the King Jimmy or the New King Jimmy Version or the Nearly Inspired Version- are dependent upon the Masoretic Text for their translation. But later on after the King Jimmy came out, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, and these were even older than the Masoretic texts. The Dead Sea Scrolls are almost exactly like the Masoretic text, except there are some changes in a few places, and one of those differences is right here in Deuteronomy 32. So I prefer the ESV’s translation because it relies on older manuscripts than the other translations, and the older translations are probably more accurate to what was first written by Moses himself. Also, it makes more logical sense that the borders of the nations are fixed according to the Sons of God, since those are the spiritual beings who have been set in charge of those nations.
Making Sense of the Rest of Scripture
So every nation has a chief spirit who is set in charge of it, the Prince of that Nation. And he has his own underlings who do his bidding, and this includes all the demons who are also assigned to that territory. When those underlings- those demons- don’t do according to their prince’s will, they have ways of being punished.
One of those ways, I believe, is being thrown into a spiritual dungeon called The Abyss, which is referenced in Revelation 9. There are also the demons being cast out by Jesus in
Luke 8:31
And they begged him not to command them to depart into the abyss.
These principalities have their own chief ruler- Satan, the prince of demons. Satan has other names in the Bible, including Lucifer, Baal, and Beelzebub. But Satan is the being who has charge of all of the principalities throughout the rest of the world. This is why he was able to tempt Jesus with handing over control of those nations in
Matthew 4:8-9
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.”
I don’t think that was an empty promise, or it couldn’t have been considered a temptation. Satan is the principality in charge of all the other principalities.
Ephesians 6:12
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
We often use the phrase “angels and demons” to refer to beings of the spirit world. But the spiritual realm is a lot more complex than we realize, and there are different types of beings and different hierarchies of beings, and that’s what Ephesians 6 is talking about there.
Some versions use the word “principalities” there, although the ESV doesn’t. But these are the authorities and the cosmic powers it speaks of. Spiritual beings who have been given command of certain sectors of the world.
We’ll close down by looking at a few more places in scripture where this shows up, right after this break.
[musical interlude]
Housekeeping/Mailbag
Next time on this podcast: did you know the Bible has a ghost story? There is actually a ghost story in the Bible. And this is a time of year that lots of people like to tell ghost stories. I don’t usually go for that kind of thing, but if there’s one in the Bible- and it’s weird- then that makes it a good conversation-starter for this podcast. Make sure you’re subscribed so you can get it!
I received an email this week from a listener who may have been Sadie, I’m not quite sure. Sadie had recently listened to my episode on why God was upset with Cain, and she writes, “Have you ever thought that God had cursed the ground as to why God was not happy with Cain?” This is probably because Cain was said to be a worker of the ground, but in Genesis 3, God had cursed the ground. So I thought that was an interesting observation, and I noticed that the word ground comes up 5 times in Genesis 4. So if anyone has any thoughts on that, feel free to comment or email them to me. weirdstuffinthebible@gmail.com And thank you to Sadie for her encouragement and that email and for being a listener.
And Sadie said she’s a new listener, but Sadie, be careful, you listen to too many more and you will become an official Weirdo.
Closing Thoughts
In closing, today’s lesson was really important. On some of my podcast episodes, I will say things like, “Go back and listen to episode 23” for background on whatever I’m talking about now. And this is going to be one of those episodes that I’ll probably send people back to a lot as I’m explaining future concepts and weird stuff in the Bible. Territorial spirits and the Deuteronomy 32 worldview comes up a lot in Scripture, from the days of Moses all the way up to the letters of Paul.
So the reason that Michael Heiser calls this the Deuteronomy 32 worldview is because once you understand this doctrine of territorial spirits, it changes the way you read and understand all of Scripture, and even big geopolitical shakeups like foreign nations at war with each other.
This is why certain people groups have been at war with each other for thousands upon thousands of years. I think it was Toby Keith who once famous sang that he doesn’t know the difference in Iraq and Iran. Well, at least he was honest, but that reveals he probably didn’t read his Bible too much. Iraq and Iran have similar names, and both are Muslim nations today, but they certainly do not get along, and that goes back thousands of years to when Persia and Babylon used to not get along.
Now, there’s a potential question you may be wondering about: do these boundary lines that God draws in heaven- these divine allotments of territories- do they ever shift, or have they been set in place ever since the Tower of Babel? The Bible doesn’t specifically answer this question one way or the other, but it is my belief that these boundaries or borders can be redrawn at times. That God can reassign or reallocate territory as He sees fit. God can reassign these spiritual beings to new assignments. And I believe this is the cause of some of the wars that occasionally break out. The boundary lines in heaven have been redrawn, and this means that a war breaks out on earth as a way of moving that border where it needs to be.
The Human Resources department in heaven is a busy place! And what happens in the spiritual has an effect in the physical.
So, some other places in Scripture where territorial spirits show up.
Deuteronomy 4:19-20 will make more sense as you read it now:
19 And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven. 20 But the Lord has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be a people of his own inheritance, as you are this day.
They are called “all the host of heaven” in verse 19. “All the host of heaven” sounds like a good thing, but these are mainly or perhaps entirely going to be evil spirits. But they are the spirits in authority in heavenly places, as Ephesians 6 said it. They are the spirits in authority, and they desire to be worshiped as gods, but in Deuteronomy 4, God told Israel not to worship them.
Note that it said in verse 20 that the Israelites are a people of God’s own inheritance. Remember the significance of that word in Deuteronomy 32- the inheritance is the land of Israel. The physical land of Israel. It’s God’s land for God’s people who want to worship the true God.
When David was on the run from Saul, he encountered Saul at one point in a cave, and he said this to King Saul in
I Samuel 26:19 (NKJV)
Now therefore, please, let my lord the king hear the words of his servant: If the Lord has stirred you up against me, let Him accept an offering. But if it is the children of men, may they be cursed before the Lord, for they have driven me out this day from sharing in the inheritance of the Lord, saying, ‘Go, serve other gods.’
Understand what David is saying here. He is saying he’s been driven out of the Lord’s “inheritance.” That means the land of the Lord. And since he’s been driven out of the Lord’s land, he feels like he’s been handed over to these other gods.
It’s a really bizarre verse to most of us with a 21st Century western mindset. We’d say, “Well David, don’t you know that God is omnipresent? Didn’t you learn that in JBQ, David? You can worship God from anywhere, David!” But David knew something we don’t; he had a mindset about physical land that we don’t have: different territories belong to different spiritual beings, and most of them are on Santa’s naughty list.
Is that superstitious? It’s right there in the Bible! I think David knew more about spiritual reality than I do. David wrote more chapters of the Bible than I did. I’ll take him over your modern theories any day.
So let’s wrap this up. Just as David didn’t want to be outside of the boundaries of Israel because he knew he would be out of God’s land, that’s the same reason these demons in Mark 5 didn’t want cast out of their territory. They wanted to be where they were assigned.
Mark 5:10 said
And he begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country.
But let’s back up to something pretty interesting at the beginning of this story of the demoniac. Let’s look at how they address Jesus.
Mark 5:6-7
6 And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and fell down before him. 7 And crying out with a loud voice, he said, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?
Jesus, Son of the Most High God. Of all the ways he could have addressed Jesus, why this particular way? Should it mean anything to us? It’s the same title that Moses used for God in
Deuteronomy 32:8
When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he divided mankind,
he fixed the borders of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God.
Satan might be a prince of princes, and that title sounds like he’s pretty high on the totem pole; but God is the Most High.
In his book Reversing Hermon, Michael Heiser writes, “Legion recognizes that Jesus is the rightful Lord of the country of the Gerasenes- old Bashan now under Gentile occupation.”
And then in Heiser’s book Demons, he continues this thought: “While the territory in which this encounter occurs is subsumed in the land promised to Abraham and his descendants, the fact that Jesus ventured into an area under gentile governance in his day let everyone know that he was not merely the Messiah for Yahweh’s portion. He was lord of the gentile lands as well.”
Jesus’ mission- and our mission as the church- is to spread God’s Kingdom throughout the world. We don’t have to be afraid of crossing borders to do it. Yes, the boundaries were allotted to spiritual beings, and most of them aren’t our friends. But you are a temple of the Holy Spirit, you are the citizen of another Kingdom, the Kingdom of God, and wherever you set your foot is holy ground. And wherever we spread the Gospel weakens the influence of those spirits in that area.
So your spiritual warfare lesson today is to continue the mission of Jesus, preach the Gospel to every creature, and take back this territory from those spirits. Take back your home, take back your neighborhood, take back your city, take back your state, take back your nation. Get your demons reassigned somewhere else.
And if you think that sounds weird, I hope you’re a little more weird today, too. Thanks for listening, God bless you for sticking around until the end, and we’ll see you next time on Weird Stuff in the Bible.