The How and Why Of A Demonless World
When I listen to the chatter in spiritual forums and circles it sounds like some of you have had difficult experiences with what many would call demonic activity. Those who tell of these experiences often request I prove to them there is no Satan or demons. I would love to prove that to these poor tormented souls, and I wish that could happen in a brief email response but it can’t. That is one of the reasons I have written a four volume book series that fully treats the topic of Satan, devils, demons and Hell. I assure you, the topic is vast and ancient so it requires a lot of explaining to place the ideas of demons and Satan back into their cultural context and understanding. That said, here is a short synopsis of why Satan and demons are not real.
Prior to the captivity of the Hebrew people in Babylon in about 586 BCE, it was the plan that they have a strict monotheism. This means they were not to believe any other Gods existed but Yahweh. After all, this almighty God supposedly declared he is God, there is none else in all the earth, and there is none like Him. That pre-captivity period involved contact with many pagan cultures. Those cultures believed in multiple good and evil Gods. So the God of the Scriptures addressed this by informing His people that He was the only God. The take on it from the ancient Hebrew perspective was that there is one God and it is that God who does good and evil. In fact, looking at the Hebrew Scriptures we find the word sawtawn, which has become the English word Satan, was never a name for a supernatural entity. Rather, it is simply a noun that in most cases means adversary. Always referring to a human adversary. Therefore, it is humans who are the satan in biblical cases. Humans are typically the adversary to other humans. It is a little known fact that the Lord is also the sawtawn in one sense when Balaam attempts to curse Israel in Number 23. And of demons and devils in the Old Testament, well they never were supernatural spirits, rather when we look at the Hebrew words in the places devil and demon are used we find they are just man-made goat idols. Goat idols were a common worship icon of the ancient pagans. Upon inspection, we find there are no spirit demons at all in the Old Testament. As for evil spirits and lying spirits, they are said to come from Yahweh, which is to say, these things do not come as evil entities from Satan. One place we see this is in 1 Kings when an evil spirit from the Lord comes upon Saul.
Let’s back up a bit and talk about that captivity in Babylon. In time the Persians went to war with Babylon and the Persians took over the entire culture. Now the Hebrews became captives of Persia. The Persians were very tolerant of other religions and the “Jews” in Persia were assimilating nicely to the Persian lifestyle and beliefs. One of the predominant beliefs that came out of the Persian contact was that of a Persian prophet named Zoroaster. This belief developed when Zoroaster had a vision. As a man who despised polytheism, he envisioned the existence of two great gods at battle. There was one good God and there was an evil god who was attempting to thwart the Good God. His vision seemed to take steps toward reducing the number of false gods but effectively he introduced a dualism that can be found in today’s version of Christianity. The bad god of Zoroaster’s vision was the sawtawn (the adversary) of the good God and as assimilation and mystical thinking became more pervasive, this bad god evolved in the thinking of assimilated Jewish leaders. Now the adversary was the sawtawn and began moving out of Persia. The Pharisees carried this idea with them because of their connection to Persian religious men and their authority to teach the masses. As they were beginning to leave Persia, the repatriated Jews did not want to believe their good God could have brought evil on them so they found it convenient to blame the Persian bad God. Evil and adversarial situations were no longer personified, the sawtaw became Satan; and Christianity’s demonology was born.
We even find Isaiah trying to help the Jews to see they are wrong to blame evil on something else with supernatural abilities. He tells the Jews in Isaiah 45:5-7 that Yahweh is the only God and there is none else… that is to say there is no supernatural entity who foists evil upon people.
Isa 45:5 I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me:
Isa 45:6 That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else.
Isa 45:7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.
As the Jews were leaving Persia, the idea of a second god-like entity that opposes not only Yahweh but the people of God was deeply entrenched in their belief system. AS briefly mentions it was because one of the main religious leadership groups actually adopted a serious philosophical view of the Persians. If we consider the Pharisees, we find they come from the area of Farsi in Persia where the Persian Magi hailed from. It was these groups who vibrantly developed the idea of a mystical, supernatural evil entity in opposition to God and then brought it out of Persia.
As the Pharisees headed back with the Jews to Jerusalem, they took this powerfully deceptive teaching along with them. They then proceeded to sew their “new” understanding into the religious fabric of the rebuilt Jerusalem. Perhaps the teaching could have fizzled out in that pivotal doctrine-defining era because only a few generations were messed up in Persia. However, we now find these confused folk are soon impacted by the next religion-altering powerhouse. It is at this time the Greek period of influence enters.
Hellenization was the next problem facing the Jews and the mystically minded Pharisees had already imparted their view to the commoners. The ball was rolling and it was gathering speed and size as it rolled down the Greek mountain of Zeus. As you may know, the Greeks had already developed a very complicated and deep structure of Gods and demi-gods. This did a lot for furthering the belief in a secondary god-like being of evil. The unwitting Jewish culture, at least many of the influential ones like the Pharisees and those who were taught by them, now fully embraced the idea that a supernatural opposition to God existed. It once was that only God existed in the Hebrew believer’s thinking and evil happened because of man’s choices or in some cases when Yahweh decided to allow an unseemly situation to develop upon the people. But the clear history shows no evil was attributed to a creature who fell from heaven. And in fact, the famous story about a fallen angel is simply about a king who fell from context. This fact is indisputable in light of a critical examination of the context and the history that unfolds in that story found in Isaiah 14.
The timing of this development places us in the apocalyptic period. Many of the gnostic writings and apocalyptic books were penned during this era. Some find reason to believe in demons and Satan due to what is found in these works. However, the fact is these works were not influenced by Scripture or a Hebraic understanding of God and evil; they were influenced by Greek thinking. None of the Apostles, apostolic fathers, nor Christ ever considered these writings to be Scripture or good for doctrine. As a method to fill in the blanks that were not understood about God and evil by the Hellenized thinker, many mystical and mythical suggestions were applied to Biblical statements. Yet they were statements that were never intended to be mythical, nor mystical.
One of the more potent influences on this topic after the Persian and Greek developments began to be cemented in culture, was the influence of Plato. Plato had a philosophy of demons that did not come from the Scriptures rather it came from the imaginations of the Greek thinker. In a world of major and minor Gods and deities, the Greek philosopher Plato thought many of them that possess god-like attributes and abilities. This, according to Plato, allowed the daimons/demons to enter the realms of the humans. The role of these lesser deities was to affect nature, health, wealth, sleep, love, war, agriculture and pretty much anything that was part of the human world. The minor deities, called daimons, were intermediaries between God and man. Veritable conduits to mediate between the two worlds; little gods themselves. They were in fact both good and evil in the Platonic thinking. A student of Plato has advanced the thinking. Xenocrates furthered the belief that good daimons and evil daimons (called eudaimons and kakodaimons) were present in and around almost every aspect of human life. In time, the Hellenised Jews adopted yet more of the Grecian thinking and began to do more than personify evil, illness, and harm filled circumstances. These Hellenised ones began to point at the sawtawn of their pre-release Persian experience as the source of all evil. God was real to them but the evil being and his demons also became real due to the intricate weaving of mystical thinking, with circumstances that were difficult to accept and situations that were hard to explain or understand. This view of demonology is readily identified by scholars as flowing out of Persian thinking.
The outworking of such a profoundly spiritualised instruction was one that caused demonology to grow even more potent. The creative mind of the first century un-critical peoples, adopted in its entirety the demon-think of ancient Greece and Persia. Then as the Christ operated in the first half of the first century, we see how deliverances were performed and often misunderstood. A removal of a sickness, false doctrine, harmful thought, or mental illness was in fact what was occurring when we hear of casting out demons. The Aramaic understanding of this Aramaic practice provides evidence that shows demons were not supernatural entities. At times when devils were verbally subjecting themselves to Christ or the Apostles, we find a “devil” in that instance to be the person with an insanity or the false teacher who taught demon (false teachings) .
However, because of the proliferation of the false idea of supernatural demons, people all over Christendom are compelled to miss-explain their experiences. As is found in an article about the anointed cherub, one error requires others to support it.
As for the belief that demons manifest in various ways and effect the peaceful existence of humans, there is a lot to understood in that area. The power of the mind to sense and feel what it believes has led to many demonic experiences. I would suggest the experience is real and what the person feels is real but the source of that experience and feeling is not what they suppose it to be. Either the seeming presence of demonic forces is explained by some natural or physical cause or it is little more than the human psyche, the indoctrinated mind at work. What is to blame for demonic encounters? It is solely a false doctrine that corrupts the thinking. If this doctrine gets corrected, demonic activity ceases to exist.
In realizing that all demonology begins with the foundational doctrine of Lucifer, then what is provable in that foundational doctrine? The answer is revealed, that clearly based on literary context, Lucifer is only a human king, a man and not a cosmic entity. Knowing the foundation of Satan and demons is not there but is a story about a man, we then can begin to rebuild the doctrine of Satan and demons in a correct manner. We then are led to a demonless world that reveals our experiential understanding of demons is baseless. We no longer force the Bible to fit our experiences rather we learn to see how our experiences fit the Bible. The English language and the present day meanings of satan, devils, and demons betrays the truth of the terms that underlies the English. Our only response should be to point to us as the problem for sin and evil and to recognize how our mind manifests our beliefs. No child should ever be led to believe an unbeatable, supernatural opponent waits under the bed or in hell for them and when that ideal comes to pass…we will find all who were once harassed by demons, will no longer be chased by these devilish minions. As one woman put it not long ago in response to my work, “When I stopped believing in demons they stopped chasing me.”
The true exorcism is not performed to remove a supernatural being in a room, closet, or person; it is the removal of the false beliefs that control the person. When true exorcism occurs, freedom can truly be had.
Please consider reviewing some of my work through www.imaginenosatan.com of via my internet radio show at www.blogtalkradio.com/jrbrayshaw
All the Best
JimJr
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