Are Angels and Demons Reality or Myth?

Tom: You are listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him.

For this week and in the weeks ahead, the Lord willing, we are addressing the biblical perspective on “Evil, Satan, and Demons,” which is the title of chapter eight of Dave’s book In Defense of the Faith, and which we’ll be using as a source as of questions on the subject.

Now, Dave, I want to start with a quote from Robert Green Ingersoll, and this is right at the front; you have this at the front of chapter eight.

Dave: You need to explain who he was. He was a famous atheist lawyer of the last century, and he acknowledged that no one was fool enough to die for a lie (which is very interesting, because all the apostles died testifying to the truth). But anyway, I’m sorry, Tom. Go ahead.

Tom: So, Dave, I don’t know that much about him. Did he then convert? Did he become a Christian?

Dave: No, he didn’t.

Tom: So that makes this…

Dave: He was one of the chief enemies of God, the Bible, and Christianity in the last—I keep saying the last century, I forget—in the 19^th century.

Tom: Yes. So this makes this quote insightful, but also for us to take it seriously. This is what the enemy of the cross would be concerned about.

“A man of thought and sense does not believe in the existence of the Devil. He feels certain that imps, goblins, demons, and evil spirits exist only in the imagination of the ignorant and frightened…. Back of this belief there is no evidence, and there never has been.

“Now take the Devil out of the New Testament, and you also take the veracity of Christ; with that veracity you take the divinity; with that divinity you take the atonement, and when you take the atonement, the great fabric known as Christianity becomes a shapeless ruin.”

So this is a challenge.

Dave: Yeah. The Bible, of course, introduces us to Satan right in the very beginning. It doesn’t call him Satan. In chapter three we have the Satan as the serpent which, again, is rather interesting, because the Bible is the only religious writing that identifies Satan as the serpent. In all the other religions you have people worshiping serpents. He’s also called “the dragon.” And, as you know, traveling in the East, you’ve got dragons on all the temples in China, in Japan, many of them. And serpents play a prominent role all over the world. We’ve talked about that in the past.

Tom: All right, so if this wasn’t some kind of reality, why would all these people have decided this was going to be their object of worship?

Dave: Yeah, and they have believed the lie, that’s what’s so interesting. They worship the serpent.

But “Satan,” I guess it means adversary. He’s the adversary of God and man. And you read of—not the origin of Satan—the fall of Lucifer, who became Satan. We read of that in Isaiah 14. And it came about through his ambition, his pride. “I will be like the Most High.” And that is very instructive, because Satan is not some dark figure created off to the side somewhere, but he was (we get the impression from Scripture) apparently the choir leader, “the cherubim which covereth,” it says. He was apparently the closest angel to God, the most powerful, most beautiful, and he was lifted up with pride over his beauty. And he wanted to, well, not exactly take God’s place, because that would be totally ludicrous, but his ambition that he stated was also ludicrous. He said, “I will be like the Most High.” So how many “most highs” can you have?

So Satan, of course, is the author of polytheism. Instead of one “Most High,” there can be many gods, and he convinced Eve she could become one of the gods. In Genesis 3, it doesn’t say, “You can become God,” it says, “You can be like the gods.” In other words, “You’ve got to be like the rest of us who have rebelled against the true God and are all pretender gods trying to have the same power that God has.” And of course, that’s basically the ambition of mankind.

Tom: Hey, Satan, Lucifer, he had a perfect environment. Eve had a perfect environment. There were no dysfunctional family problems; there were no environmental problems or whatever.

Dave: Exactly, so you could hardly blame evil on that sort of thing. Because—you said a perfect environment. Satan, we don’t read of his creation or the creation of the angels. And we are told not to inquire into the angels, you know, angelic beings, and try to get to know them and much less to worship them. But they are greater in power than we are in many ways.

However, I don’t read that God loved the angels, and there is no redemption for angels. The angels that sinned, they are “kept in chains of darkness,” the scripture says, “reserved to the judgment of that day.” And I would take the chains of darkness to mean that they are in total ignorance. They are deluded. I think Satan is a self-deluded egomaniac who probably to this day thinks he’s going to win. After all, what does he offer? He offers people all that their selfish ambitions would want: self as god. And instead of taking that, who is going to follow this lowly man of Nazareth who all He promises you is “Take up your cross and follow me”? “You’ll be hated by the world and so forth,” and Satan promises you the world. So rationally, you would think he ought to have the biggest following, and in fact he does.

I often say to young people especially, “If Satan has more to offer than God, if what Satan is offering you is better and your conscience can go with it and in the long run it’s going to prove to be better than what God offers, by all means, follow Satan.” God is not trying to trick anyone, but He is up front with what He’s offering. And Satan is a deceiver and a liar…

Tom: Mm-hmm, the father of lies.

Dave: …and in the end it’s not going to be so good.

But anyway, there is, I believe, a genuine battle for the souls, the minds, the hearts, the spirits of mankind between God and Satan.

Tom: Yeah. Dave, as long as we’re on this track, the Bible doesn’t tell us there is redemption for angels, just as you referred to earlier.

Dave: No, there isn’t. There can’t be.

Tom: And sometimes you wonder about that. You can blow me right off the table on this one, but one of the reasons I think is, what else could Satan have? There he is, in the environment of God. He’s right there next to the throne of heaven, let’s say. What else is there? What could you offer somebody and say, “Oh, well…”? Whereas with humanity, we’re not quite there. We were created in the image of God, created in a perfect way, which we’ll get into, but certainly an environment not of perfection, not…

Dave: Well, of course, Adam and Eve were in that environment.

Tom: Yeah.

Dave: But the angels, Satan among them, certainly knew the truth.

Tom: Sure.

Dave: They have rebelled with their eyes open. But I don’t know, and we’re not to inquire about this. But definitely there is no redemption for them, [for] the same reason there is no redemption for extraterrestrials, if such existed. Because in order to redeem man, Christ had to become a man. He had to take our place, pay the penalty as a man for mankind.

Now, if there are extraterrestrials off on other planets and they would be redeemed, then Christ would have to become one of them. But wait a minute—he can’t be Jesus Christ on this earth and something else over there. The scripture says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

By the same token, having become a man, Jesus could not become an angel. Even God can’t be more than one thing at a time. In other words, that’s one of the reasons that God is God. So that’s why Jesus did not cease to be God when he became man. But having become the God-man, he can’t become the God-angel or the God-extraterrestrial off on some other planet. So God has opted for man, and man was created in his image.

We do not read that angels were created in the image of God; another reason why God couldn’t become an angel. God couldn’t become a stone. This is one of the problems with paganism. They are worshipping stones and waterfalls and trees and the sky. No, God could become a man without ceasing to be God because man was made in the image of God.

Tom: Dave, how does that relate to the times in Scripture where we find Jesus being referred to as the Angel of the Lord?

Dave: Well, I think in those cases, Tom, it does say, “Three men appeared to Abraham,” or, “A man came.” Now, angels appear as men, and among these messengers, these men who’ve come from heaven, who are obviously not of this earth and are recognized as such, there’s one who is called the Angel of the Lord. Could He manifest Himself in the form of an angel? I suppose He could, but angels are manifesting themselves in the forms of men. But Jesus or God could not become an angel. There’s a difference between manifesting yourself in the form of and literally becoming, and God literally became a man in the virgin birth.

Tom: Dave, the reason I bring it up is there are a number of cults—well, two that I can think of in particular—that refer to Jesus as “Michael the archangel,” which is pretty erroneous.

Dave: Not true. He’s the uncreated eternal Son of God, one with the Father.

Tom: In the weeks ahead, and it’s going to take us more than a couple of weeks to cover this topic. But on the one hand, it’s foolish to deny the reality of evil and evil spirits. But on the other hand, as you mentioned earlier, we’re not to become preoccupied with this. But we want to know what God’s Word says about it, and that’s what I hope we can accomplish over the next few weeks.

Dave: Okay.

Tom: Let’s start with our first question. Isaiah:45:7I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.
See All... seems to state that God creates evil. How can this be possible if God is totally good? And if He does create evil, why does He do so, and what form does it take? Let me read Isaiah:45:7I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.
See All... for our audience: “I form the light and create darkness [this is God speaking]; I make peace and create evil. I the Lord do all these things.”

Dave, the overall context of Isaiah 45, for example, it’s the Lord talking about [how] He’s going to raise up, interestingly, an anointed, which is Cyrus. And Cyrus is going to deliver his people, basically. Cyrus is a type of Christ. So throughout chapter 45, you have God really talking about His sovereignty. “I am the one who does this, I am going to do this, I do this,” and so on and so forth. So the intention here, from my understanding, is not “evils” as we think of moral evil; it has to do with calamity. God is going to allow these things to happen, and because of who He is, these things are going to take place.

Dave: Yeah, I think that’s what the context says. On the other hand, the word for evil is “rah”; it does mean “wickedness,” does it not?

Tom: That’s evil and wickedness many times throughout the Scriptures. The Old Testament has that application.

Dave: So I think we have to face that as well, and I think there is certainly a way of understanding it. God says, “I form the light and create darkness.” Well, what is darkness? It’s not something that God created. It is the absence of light. And darkness is understood when you see the light. If you grew up in darkness, you wouldn’t know there was such a thing as darkness and there isn’t.

And I think in the same way we can understand “I make peace and create evil.” God is good. He is perfection, and therefore evil is in contrast to Him. It’s the opposite of what God is. So His very nature, His very being, you could say, creates evil. Not evil as something, but evil as the absence of good. And I think the Bible supports that—Romans:3:23For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;
See All...: “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” So sin is defined as coming short of God’s glory.

Adam and Eve were created in the image of God. That image has been marred. We’ve talked about it many times, but it probably doesn’t hurt to remind people. When you think of an image you think of a mirror. A mirror has only one purpose—to reflect a reality other than its own. So what would you think of a mirror that tries to develop a good self-image? It doesn’t fit. If there’s something wrong with the image in the mirror, the mirror needs to get back in a right relationship with the one whose image it was designed to reflect. And that’s the situation with man. Man was made in the image of God. Man has moved away. He’s no longer reflecting that image. He has rebelled against God. He has stepped away from God, and now what he manifests is what you have to say is the absence of God’s truth, love, purity, holiness, justice and so forth. And this is what evil is. It’s man in rebellion against God. And by the very fact that God is pure and holy and perfect, He doesn’t create evil, because in contrast to Him this is what it is seen to be.

Tom: Sure, someone would have to be perfect in every way to uphold and maintain his standards. “Be as God.”

Dave: Yes, we are created beings far less than God. We will make far less than godly decisions, and it’s just inevitable that we will reveal ourselves for what we are. But if God had not put on our conscience His laws, His standard, we would not know. We would be amoral creatures. We wouldn’t have any concept of right and wrong. We wouldn’t know that we were doing evil, doing wickedness. We only know that because God is perfect, and He has reflected that in our conscience.

So when we read 1 Corinthians 13, for example, we are confronted by a love we’ve never seen on this earth. It is so pure and so selfless. We know it is true because God made us in His image, and when man rebelled, God left His laws in man’s conscience. It’s not that the laws were something that God decided, “Well, what shall I come up with? I want to kind of govern their behavior and keep them in line.” No, these laws flow from the very character of God. This is who He is, and when you disobey, you do it in rebellion against Him.

So I think we cannot dispute the existence of evil. We know that in our conscience, and anyone who would look at a Hitler, or look at Arafat, look at that man and know what he’s done—the murders he’s committed, the lies, the evil that he stands for—I think you would have to acknowledge there is such a thing as evil.

Now, whether there are evil spirits, whether there is a Satan and demons, we’ll have to take up in the time to come. But I remember Richard Wurmbrand, one of my dear friends many years ago (and for those who don’t recognize the name, his first book was called Tortured for Christ). He was a Jewish believer in Jesus in Romania in Communist days who stood up to the Communists. I remember him and his wife Sabina telling me and Ruth, my wife, how they would get out there in the snow at 3:00 in the morning when everybody was asleep. They had to keep running back inside to keep melting the glue again, and they were pasting up posters all over Bucharest about Jesus. And, of course, he ended up in prison where he was tortured. And he even has had scars (he’s gone home to be with the Lord now), he had literal holes in his body and deep impressions in his body where red hot pokers had been driven into him.

I remember one of the things he used to say was, “When they were torturing me, one part of the body of Christ, why wasn’t the rest of the body of Christ in America crying out in agony for me in prayer, and crying out to the government of Romania and to our own government?” He would say the same thing today about what’s happening in Sudan. The torture, the murder of about 2-3 million—well, several million Christians. Not all Christians, but non-Muslims, and why aren’t we speaking up about it?

But anyway, getting back to the point…

Tom: Well, that’s evil and you’ve just described evil in overwhelming terms.

Dave:  Yeah. And I remember Richard Wurmbrand saying to me, some of the men who tortured him, they didn’t seem like human beings to him. They seemed like they were demons in human form. Exactly what that means I don’t know.

But you know, Tom, when you talk about demons—let’s look at it like this: Let’s say we put on a horror film. What makes a horror film so horrible? If we’re just talking about a lion, there’s a lion in the next room, you know, going to come in and get us, well, we might climb up on something, or get a gun and defend ourselves. But if there is a demon in the next room coming in to get you—wow, that creates in the human mind a different level of terror that you cannot explain as a conditioned response.

There is something within man that recognizes that there are non-physical beings that exist. And in fact, do I dare quote Robert Jastrow, who said some of these extraterrestrials could have evolved past the need of bodies, and they would be what religious people would call “spirits” and we are trying to contact them? What a set up for demons! But at least even the materialist today recognizes there are non-physical entities. And how do you know they are good? Obviously from what they do, some of them are very evil.

Tom: Dave, in the weeks ahead we are going to search the Scriptures to see what it says about these entities, but more than that, about Him who has come and has given us victory so that we have no reason to fear these things.

Dave: Amen, amen.