The Septuagint translation of Isaiah 11:10 references the root of Jesse, the one who “rises up to rule the nations; nations will put their hope in him, and his repose will be honor.” The Septuagint has anistamenos for “rise,” and this is reflected in Romans 15:8 – 12 where Paul quotes Isaiah and refers to the Messiah who “arises” (anistamenos) and is both the ruler and the hope of the gentiles. This same concept is also present in Psalm 82:8, where Yahweh “rises” (anasta in the Septuagint) to judge the earth and inherit the nations. As we will see below, this language closely resembles the ascension language of Paul in Ephesians.
Joel Muddamalle, The Unseen Battle, p. 113
So, in this context, the word “rise” or “rise up” implies a warrior/king rousing himself to battle and conquering (in this case, conquering the gods of the nations). Like the word “inheritance,” it’s a clue that the Scripture is talking about which god has legal rights to a geographical area or a group of people: the unseen battle.
I believe it is also linked to the name Anastasia, which means resurrection.
Not sure why, but it feels very appropriate to me that the word for resurrection should have four or five syllables.
It’s true. My dad was a Protestant pastor, and also sort of hippie about some things. No drug use or sleeping around, but he liked to live “simply” (for example, keeping his old coffee percolator), and around the time I was a baby, he had become a convinced pacifist. That is, he had become convinced based upon the Sermon on the Mount (mostly) that for Christians nowadays, it is never permissible to resist violence with violence. And this went for nations too. For him, principled pacisfism was part of following Jesus.
So here it was, the mid 1980s, late in the Cold War (though we did not know it was late at the time). A no-nukes protest had been planned in a downtown plaza in our large Midwestern city. I believe it was organized by the city’s churches, because among other people, my dad had been asked to sit in a panel onstage.
I was probably 9 or 10 years old. I was excited to go along. It seemed like a good thing. It was pretty clear to me that us, or anybody else, getting killed by nukes was a bad thing, something that we would not want to have happen. I had heard gruesome stories about people’s eyeballs being turned into jelly when the bomb was dropped (by us!) on Hiroshima. This was in a book that we had at home called Peace Be With You.
As the family artist, I made the sign for our protest. I tried to draw the symbol from the cover of Peace Be With You, a dove holding a branch in its beak. I had never drawn a dove before, and I got the beak wrong, so it came out looking more like a parrot.
I don’t remember all the content of the rally, but two things stand out. There was a play about a couple who survive a nuclear holocaust and live in a tent city, only to get radiation sickness. And, I remember the final song.
With the panel of pastors still seated on the stage, a lady came up to give a moving musical number. The first verse was about the Statue of Liberty and how she represents to many people that they have arrived in a place that is free from oppression. The second verse was about the cross of Christ, and how, to the Christian, it means liberty from sin, death, and hell. The refrain was “the Cross is my Statue of Liberty.”
Horribly blasphemous, of course. It was trying to compliment the greater by comparing it to the lesser, which actually reverses the roles of greater and lesser, unintentionally offering a huge insult to Christ.
As soon as he realized where the song was going, my dad abruptly got up from his seat on the stage behind the singer, stalked off the stage in a huff, and marched me and my brother out of there before the rally ended. I’m still proud of him for this. As someone said (I can’t find the reference, but I think it was Spurgeon), “Even a dog barks when its master is attacked.” Referring to himself defending the honor of Christ, however inarticulately.
I think what the organizers were trying to convey with that song was, “We are Christians, and don’t worry, even though we are against nukes we still definitely love our country.” But it was ill chosen.
Although I now think the whole event was incredibly naive, I commend my dad for attending it and for bringing his kids. Kids need to have experiences where they go fight for the right alongside their parents, even if the cause later turns out to have been somewhat misguided. This sends the message, “We have certain values as a family, these are important enough to do something about, my parents are good people” and, above all, “I and my parents are on the same side.” Please, give your kids many experiences like this before they become teenagers!
So, why naive? Well, I can’t blame myself for not noticing this as a kid, but why in the world did we think we were the only people who objected to the idea of a nuclear holocaust? Surely that is something that everyone recognizes is bad? (Except, perhaps, the mullahs, I digress.)
And given that we were not uniquely intelligent or good such that we were the only ones who didn’t like the idea of people being annihilated by a nuclear bomb, it would make sense to connect the next pair of dots (#s 2 and 3) and ask ourselves, since 99% of people don’t like nukes, how is it that they still exist? Could it be that, once you have a nuclear standoff, getting rid of nukes is more complicated than just “getting rid of them”? Perhaps there are people who also don’t want an apocalypse, but whose options are limited?
By the same token, perhaps there are more obstacles standing between humanity and the cessation of wars in general than just a dearth of people saying, “We don’t like war.” After all, most people don’t like wars, including most people who fight them.
But we, the anti-war protestors of the Cold War era, honestly, naively, conceitedly thought we were the only people in our country who saw a moral problem with human suffering. And we thought it would somehow stop if only we were to stand up and heroically say, “We are against this.”
It didn’t work. And not because not enough people were against it. It turns out, just saying that doesn’t do anything.
I’m sure my dad’s generation would say that these antiwar protests were ineffective because “our leaders didn’t listen.” “Listening,” in this context, would mean disarming our nukes and other WMDs, and perhaps completely disbanding our military. After all, if every country did this, peace would flow into the empty space where the weapons used to be. And someone has to go first! So it might as well be us! Someone has to give peace a chance.
This made sense to me at 10, especially when it was coming from respected authority figures. Once we grow up, however, we have a responsibility to ask ourselves what could possibly go wrong with this scenario. And the answer is: a lot. Everything.
War is, unfortunately, the default state of human beings. When we are not at war, it is because a lot of people are working very hard to maintain a precarious balance where things don’t tip into war. Fortunate are we who live in a country or empire large enough, or strong enough, that all that work has paid off and we get to go about our daily lives, assuming that peace is the natural state of things. But it isn’t. It is not the case that wars don’t happen unless some “war monger” goes out and “starts one.” That would be nice, but it’s not what we have here.
There are multiple reasons for this. Until recently, I thought it was sufficiently explained by human beings being sinful, and full of fears, lusts, and cravings. All of that is certainly a huge factor. We usually see wars explained as being caused by “fighting over scarce resources,” but I think that materialistic explanation is far from sufficient. Wars have not become less common as the worldwide standard of living has increased. I have also seen wars attributed to “religion.” There are a number of logical problems with this as well. To test this theory, you’d need a control group of humans who had either no religion, or no war. Since both war and religion are things that humans universally do, such a control group does not exist. To say that because both are universal, means one causes the other, is the post hoc fallacy.
So in general, I think the stubborn persistence of war is adequately explained by the Seven Deadly Sins: Envy, Greed, Lust, Sloth, Gluttony, Anger, and Pride. Especially Pride and Envy.
Say somebody hates you and wants to go to war with you because they are prideful and think their way of life is better, but also, at the same time, they envy some things about, tacitly acknowledging that in those respects, you are better than they are. Is such a person going to put down their weapons because you fold your hands and say, “Look. None of us like war. Let’s all mind our own business and disarm”? No, unfortunately, your enemy may not like war, but they hate you a lot more than they hate war. If they even recognize that you are taking the moral high ground, that is only going to exacerbate the wounded-pride-and-envy problem.
This is why fifty years of “anti-war” protests have done nothing but make the protestors look silly.
But it recently came to my attention that there may be an additional cause besides human sin that keeps stirring up wars in the world.
We need to expand our understanding of spiritual warfare to include the larger social and political structures of our world. Why does war bring ruin to the world? Why do we feel constantly on the verge of a new world war? … Why is peace, specifically the peace the permeates through the spread of the gospel, such a threat to world powers? The answer to these questions falls under the larger context of the unseen battle, a battle that has in mind the final unification of the nations of the world under the banner of Christ.
–Joel Muddamalle, The Unseen Battle, p. 120
Muddamalle is suggesting that the gods of the nations, who would prefer to go on ruling them, feel threatened by the spread of the Gospel and use geopolitical instability as one of their tools to slow this spread. (For more about these entities, see my review of Michael Heiser’s book.)
The idea is that human beings, while plenty fight-y on our own, would sometimes like to rest. But these spiritual entities will not let their people rest. They are hard at work, with demonic delight, stirring up, prolonging, and accelerating generations-long conflicts, to keep the Gospel of Christ out and also perhaps, as a side benefit, because they enjoy human suffering.
This certainly matches the picture of “the gods” that we get in, say, Greek mythology. People are bad enough on their own, but even when you have a majority of people who want to do the right thing, you will see that Fate, or the gods, or whatever, intervene so that exactly the wrong thing happens at exactly the wrong moment. The result: ten years of war.
Peace, it turns out, is not a passive, waterlike thing that flows in wherever a space is opened for it. It has to be established, like a fortress. It is the result of someone coming in, taking names, and routing the false gods. That someone is the Lord Jesus.
The Unseen Realm is a scholarly book about the concept of the divine council in Ancient Near Eastern cosmology, especially in Ugarit, which was a near neighbor of Israel both geographically, culturally, and linguistically. Heiser finds this concept of the divine council assumed in the Hebrew Scriptures, similar to how the heliocentric model of the solar system is assumed in anything you see written since Copernicus. That is, it’s never stated or described directly, but it is referenced in many stories, phrases, and figures of speech, and is openly the setting for certain passages, such as Psalm 82.
The idea behind “the divine council” is that there is a Most High God (the Creator) who rules the earth with the help of a sort of committee of divine beings (elohim). This committee is traditionally conceived of as meeting on a high mountain, in a garden setting, often a place that is the source of rivers. Or as Ps. 82 calls it, “the great assembly.”
Heiser spends most of his book establishing that this view is present in Scripture.
After reading Heiser, I heard a podcast interview with Joel Muddamalle. Muddamalle is the academic protege of Heiser (who has now gone to his reward). He is carrying on with researching this idea of the elohim as an active presence in redemption history, and also with popularizing it in the Christian world. And I heard that he had written a book, The Unseen Battle, which might be viewed as a sequel to Heiser’s book. So naturally, I had to get it.
I expected TUB to be all the same material as TUR, just with Muddamalle’s own personal style. It was not. The first few chapters do recap Heiser’s cosmology, but they don’t spend a lot of time establishing it, as Heiser did. Muddamalle then moves on to the nature of the battle, which Heiser touched on but did not major on.
The nature of the battle is that God wants to get the nations back from the gods.
The way this is done, in the church age, is through evangelism, missions, and building healthy churches and families. In short, obedience. It’s not primarily through a lot of fancy, spooky ghost-hunting or exorcism stuff.
This exegesis, naturally, warmed my little Reformed heart.
Now, it does mean that, if you are attempting to be faithful to your spouse and/or raise your kids; work hard and honestly at a lawful calling; worship the Lord on Sunday and support His people; or do any other forms of healthy, faithful culture-building, you have stepped into the battle. The dethroned powers do not like this sort of behavior. This may, perhaps, explain why just trying to mind your own business and live a quiet, peaceable life can occasion so much resistance: everything from health problems, to Murphy’s Law and attacks of depression and discouragement; to actual hate and legal resistance from human beings who do not like what you are doing. (Per Muddamalle, Scripture makes it clear that the “hosts” on both sides of this battle are mixed, consisting of human beings and of spiritual beings.)
Particularly if you are contributing in any way (including by prayer) to the disciplining of not-yet-Christianized nations, you present a threat to the old gods, who do not want to be cast out as they have been cast out of so many other nations in the last 2000 years. This is why foreign missionaries and native pastors in unreached or partially unreached countries undergo so many hardships: poverty, evil bureaucracy, and all kinds of health and mental problems.
The church itself, existing as an entity comprised of people from many nations, is a rebuke to the powers.
The multiethnic and diverse nature of the family of God, the church, can be seen through Paul’s use of polupoikilos. This term is a combination of two adjectives meaning “much” (polus) and “various kinds, diversified, manifold” (poikilos). The word polupoikilos can also mean “of many colors” or “polychrome.” Classical Greek writers used this word to reference cloth or flowers to convey a sense of intricate beauty. The word poikilos is used in the Septuagint to refer to Joseph’s coat of many colors (Gen. 17:3, 23). As Timothy Gombis observes, “The powers have ordered the present evil age in such a way as to exacerbate the divisions within humanity. God confounds them by creating in Christ one unified, multiracial body consisting of formerly divided groups of people.”
ibid, pp. 169 – 170
How about that. The Rainbow of Diversity, which we have been taught to hate, is actually God’s goal as well. The reason that we have been taught to hate it, is because of the way they have pursued it … trying to force it down by means of human power and moralism, by defining righteous and unrighteous groups and viciously suppressing those deemed to be foes of the rainbow. They have made “inclusion” mean “we exclude you.” This is what happens any time people try to make the world look like the restored heavens and earth, without Christ. They end up bringing about the opposite. True harmony among the ethnic groups is not an easy thing. It can only be obtained by means of the New Birth.
Though this is a scholarly-for-the-layperson work, Muddamalle’s lighter personality shines in it. He has many call-out boxes sprinkled throughout the book, devoting a page or two to questions such as, “Are There Aliens in This World?” and “What About Demonic Exorcisms?”.
That’s it. Just I promised: a short review.
Oh! What are the “three rebellions”?
Adam and Eve’s rebellion at the Tree
The rebellion of the “sons of God,” when they chose to come down and take human wives (Genesis 6)
Humankind’s post-Flood rebellion at Babel (Genesis 11). It was at this point that God divided up humankind among the elohim, giving each people group extant at the time its patron god.
Anyway … back to the battle! God be w ye this weekend!
The Church is built on the fact and not on a theory. The theories that we meet in the New Testament and in later doctrines are attempts to explain the fact. The fact is not an invention to suit the theories.
-T.W. Manson, quoted by Ronald H. Nash in Christianity & the Hellenistic World, p. 270
Manson suggests we do two things: first, assume that whatever else may be the case, the New Testament at the very least gives us evidence about what the early church believed and did; second, read the New Testament “with ordinary common sense” and not through the spectacles of naturalistic unbelief or fanciful speculation.
–Ronald H. Nash, Christianity & the Hellenistic World, p. 269
Of course, there are many people whose definition of common sense includes a strict naturalism, or rather anti-supernaturalism. However, Nash and Manson are both talking to Bible scholars, who we would not expect to hold this view.
If there is an element of Gnosis (not Gnosticism) present in John’s Gospel, it may well reflect the writer’s purpose to counteract Gnostic tendencies (not yet Gnosticism) in his day. In other words, when Paul and John appear to approach the subject of Gnosis, they are clearly anti-Gnosis.
–Ronald H. Nash, Christianity & the Hellenistic World, p. 268
Christianity & the Hellenistic World, by Ronald H. Nash, pub. 1984 by Zondervan and Probe Ministries International. This review was published on GoodReads on May 8, 2026.
C&THW is a capable review of the scholarship around the question: Did Christianity actually arise from Platonism/Stoicism, Gnosticism, or the Hellenistic mystery religions?
The view that it did, became popular in the late 1800s/early 1900s, especially in a German school of thought called Comparative Religions, or the “History of Religions School” (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule — one of the many great ideas that German philosophers have given us). (p. 117) These claims were fairly quickly debunked by theologians and early-church historians, and they stopped being taken seriously in theological circles.
However, as often happens, the bad idea had escaped the barn and was wandering freely throughout the neighborhood. The idea that Christianity’s inception lay in Hellenistic thought-systems and not in the Jewish Law & the Prophets followed by the events of 30 A.D. was still being taught as fact by various philosophers and historians years later. (p. 11)
Nash’s book was written to survey the Comparative Religionists’ claims and present the debunking evidence for the lay person. It’s what I would call a popular-level scholarly book. The topic is scholarly and there are a ton of references, but it never gets too far into the weeds on any one topic. For example, I would have liked a lot more detail about the mystery religions, but that is not this book’s purpose, and you don’t need to know a lot about the mystery religions before you see that they are nothing like the Christian communion ceremony, for example.
The writing itself is matter-of-fact, capable, and not flashy. Probably many people would find this book boring. I certainly wouldn’t have picked it up ordinarily. But my interest in this topic had been piqued because I recently read Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, a lot of which is about ancient Greek “solar kings.” I was struck by how they parallel Jesus, and yet are very different from Him at the same time. I wondered whether anyone has tried to claim that Christianity was just the solar king myth repackaged for the Jews. Turns out, they have. So this book came to me at just the right moment to be pretty interesting. It’s going in my home library for sure.
Many of the theories about Paul’s alleged dependence [on the Stoics, Gnostics, or mystery religions] stumble over their inability to come to grips with the radical change produced by Paul’s conversion. Many of them are inconsistent with what we know to be the early church’s repudiation of pagan inclusivism.
–Ronald H. Nash, Christianity & the Hellenistic World, p. 267
Alien Intrusion: UFOs and the Evolution Connection by Gary Bates, A Book Review
I’ve found myself recommending this book to multiple people in multiple comments sections in recent days, so perhaps it’s time to re-post a shortened version of my review of it from 2024. This is a great resource if you’re wondering about UFOs and the beings that are presumably inside them.
Alien Intrusion is 400+ pages, with endnotes to each chapter, appendices, and an index, yet it is accessibly written. It is a capable survey of the whole phenomenon, starting with the social history of UFO sightings and how aliens are portrayed in fiction; moving on to the science of whether light-speed travel is really possible (it’s not); whether indications of physical life beyond Earth look promising (they don’t); the theory of Directed Panspermia and how it was supposed to save evolution; sightings of lights in the sky and cover-ups associated with them; conspiracy theorists, true believers, and hucksters who have capitalized on the UFO craze; and finally, testimonies of people who have had abduction experiences.
“Abducted — Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind” is a really interesting chapter. Bates has just spent more than half the book showing that the extraterrestrial hypothesis, at least as it is usually understood, cannot be true for multiple reasons. But now, he turns his attention to the many people who have had alien abduction experiences. And instead of dismissing them as hoaxers (dealt with in the last chapter) or gaslighting them, he believes them. And he has a great deal of compassion for them. This is why I think so highly of Bates.
A “Typical” Alien Abduction Story
According to Bates, drawing on the work of other researchers, here are the elements of “Classic Abduction Syndrome [CAS]”: the abductee is captured, often at night, and often while being seemingly paralyzed. Once on the ship, they are typically undressed and subjected to some kind of invasive and humiliating “medical” examination. Often, this escalates to sexual abuse of various kinds. Then, the aliens “teach” the abductee. This involves being told that they have been chosen for a special mission. Predictions are made about the future of earth or of humanity. The aliens are trying, and they want the abductee’s help, to raise humanity’s consciousness or to save humanity. Often, they say they are engaged in a breeding program, creating human/alien hybrids. Sometimes this is explained as a way for humanity to survive when the earth is destroyed. Abductees may be given a tour of the ship or of other locations, and they may meet a divine being or an entity claiming to be Jesus, the pope (!), or a dead relative. After the abductee is returned to his or her surroundings, they often don’t immediately remember their abduction experience. They may experience “lost time,” and recall the experience only later (sometimes under hypnosis, which raises other issues).
Abductees experience lasting physical and mental aftereffects of their experience, whatever its nature may have been. They have PTSD-like symptoms. They have may bruises, scars, or puncture marks on their body, though these are never of an obvious enough nature to prove their story. They may experience new chronic health problems, commonly with their reproductive system, even including uterine or breast cancer.
On the spiritual side, many abductees come out of the experience with a new openness to the occult and to New Age beliefs. Others, though they initially feel understandable anger and fear towards the aliens, after multiple abductions come to a passive state of appearing to love and be fascinated with their tormentors, almost like Stokholm Syndrome.
Assuming that all these people are not just making up these bizarre and traumatic experiences, it is clear that they have come into contact with entities that do not wish them well.
On their own testimony, the “aliens” can be shown to be unreliable. For example, they tell abductee they are torturing them “for your own good.” They say they are wise and want to help human beings evolve to the next level, yet they subject their human subjects to frightening and degrading sexual practices. Either these beings don’t understand humans very well, or they are traumatizing them on purpose to “break” them.
The aliens also seem eager to explain exactly where they are from. In past decades, they would claim to be from Mars or Venus. Now that we know more about those planets, they tend to name a star or star system that is outside of our galaxy. Aliens tend to appear to humans in whatever form is culturally expected at the time.
Over the decades, we have allegedly been visited by long-haired Space Brothers, stacked Space-Babes, black-eyed and large-headed dwarfs, bipedal reptiles, praying mantis-type creatures, and … well … the list goes on and on. But, they all seem perfectly comfortable with Earth’s gravity, temperature, oxygen levels, etc. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit odd?
Nick Redfern, UFO researcher, quoted in ibid, p. 321
So, we have powerful, apparently deceptive entities, which kidnap and traumatize people, and then unfailingly give them a New Age message to take back to earth, often going out of their way to say that the Bible has “gotten it wrong.”
Furthermore, apart from claiming to be from space, these “alien” abduction experiences have a lot in common with abduction stories from past ages where the perpetrators were fairies, demons, or other paranormal entities. It is starting to look as if we are hearing the same song, but a different verse. And in fact, Bates suggests that these “aliens” are probably demonic, or fallen angelic, entities. They are, in short, the “elohim” described by Heiserand identified as “the gods” by Cahn.
Jesus Really Is the Answer
Two UFO researchers, Joe Jordan and Wes Clark, noticed that out of all the abduction cases they had heard of, very few were Christians. They put out a call for anyone who was a Christian and had an abduction experience to contact them. Confusingly, they were contacted by people who said things like “I’m a Christian and I was abducted and saw Jesus on the spaceship.” With further research, they found that people who identified as Christian but did not “walk the walk,” as the researchers put it, were just as likely to experience abduction and subsequent New Age brainwashing by the “aliens.” However, “walk the walk” Christians had a different experience:
Clark said that many of the respondents claimed to be Christians who told of their own abduction experiences. He felt that they were happy to have someone to talk to; they usually felt uncomfortable talking about their experiences because most UFO investigators had New Age inclinations and ideas that opposed their own beliefs. In addition, the Christian church is not equipped to deal with such reports because the UFO phenomenon has been largely misunderstood and dismissed by organized religions. Clark comments:
“As the number of cases mounted, the data showed that in every instance where the victim knew to invoke the name of Jesus Christ, the event stopped. Period. The evidence was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.”
ibid, p. 267
So, My Prediction
Therefore, here’s what I expect from the government files about UFOs which are being released a chunk at a time.
These files cover years of reports, so they will comprise a bunch of different types of experiences. “Aliens” seem to adjust their approach based not only on the cultural expectations of the time, but regionally as well, and perhaps tailored to the individual. So this will be a very heterogenous mass of stuff.
Most of it will not be conclusive. There will be grainy videos and plenty of eyewitness testimonies. Some of the testimony is going to come from people considered sane and reliable (like Air Force pilots), but most people simply can’t bring themselves to accept testimony of something they believe is impossible, no matter how upstanding the witness. As we have seen with abduction experiences, “aliens” might leave some kind of physical evidence (small puzzling scars), but they tend not to leave anything conclusive. Observe that they have been dropping strange hints, and lots of them, for more than a century, but they have never made an open appearance that would settle all questions.
If there really are, say, powerful and ethically challenged interdimensional beings who wish to sell humankind a narrative by appearing as aliens, why have they not settled on a unified approach and made a big, dramatic appearance with an internally consistent story to back it up? I can think of three reasons.
The first reason is that they want control of the narrative, which means they only want to present themselves openly to people they can successfully brainwash. Presumably, they can’t give Stockholm Syndrome to 300 million people at the same time, so they save the extreme treatment for individuals. For people they can’t directly access for whatever reason, they give ambiguous physical phenomena, such as lights that move as nothing should be able to.
Second reason: They aren’t unified, and/or they don’t have really great self-control. There is no reason to think that fallen angelic beings would all work together. Perhaps they are all going rogue. Clearly, they can’t resist torturing their victims, even when that would seem to work against their goal of presenting as wise and gaining humankind’s trust.
Third reason: They are limited by a greater power. You cannot come into a strong man’s house and take his possessions unless you can first tie up the strong man. Say you want to manifest yourself as a god or with a big obvious spaceship in a randomly chosen country. If that country was, at one time, loyal to the Creator of the Universe, and large sections of it still are, He quite likely will not put up with this.
So, from these government files I expect a bunch of different stuff, maybe even an alien “corpse,” which will be weird and ambiguous and perhaps look like it was made for a movie (because, in a sense, it was) … but nothing that would be seen as conclusive by a skeptic.
This Christian affirmation that the death and resurrection of Christ happened to a historical person at a particular time has absolutely no parallel in any of the pagan mystery religions.
— Ronald H. Nash, Christianity & the Hellenistic World, p. 198
Out of Babel Books 