S5 E4: The Unseen Realm--Part 2

Spirit-Led Hope made Feedspot's top 20 list of Spirit-Led podcasts! Thank you Feedspot!

20 Best Holy Spirit Podcasts You Must Follow in 2025

Season 5 will cover the supernatural and paranormal from a Spirit-led perspective. In this episode, Glenn continues looking at the book "The Unseen Realm" by the late Dr. Michael Heiser. This book is used by many Christians to explain paranormal and supernatural events. The book has attracted both criticism and praise, and Glenn will focus on portions of the book he believes are relevant to a Spirit-led life. This episode looks at the rebellion of Satan and other spiritual beings. The strange happenings in Genesis 6 are briefly discussed.

The Bible will be the source of truth for this season, even though extra-biblical books and podcasts will be discussed. As discussed in Episode 1, Glenn will be kind to the authors and podcast hosts discussed throughout the season.

This episode has a transcript. If your podcast player does not support transcripts, please go to the Transcripts section of https://spiritledhope.com/ . These transcripts have been edited for accuracy and are typically of higher quality than those produced automatically by many podcast apps.

Transcript

S5 E4 TRANSCRIPT 

THE UNSEEN REALM PART 2

INTRODUCTION

Hello everyone and welcome to Spirit-Led Hope. My name is Glenn Erichsen, and in this episode, we are discussing a book called:

     THE UNSEEN REALM

And this is Part 2. It is very important that you listen to Part 1 if you have not already done so. Otherwise, you will not understand the approach I am taking, and you may draw some incorrect conclusions.

This book, written by the late Dr. Michael Heiser, has continued to garner both praise and criticism. To some, “The Unseen Realm” is the book that makes Scripture more accessible and understandable. On the other extreme some view it as heretical.

In the last episode, I made the statement that Heiser often presents things on the fringe of Christian theology. Recently, I heard some more criticism about the book that I do not think is warranted. What I can see, is that some Christians have taken the teachings of Heiser and stretched them further than Heiser ever intended. Unfortunately, Michael Heiser is no longer alive and able to be a corrective force. I believe he would be unhappy with some of the ways his work is being used.

Heiser might have been unhappy with what I am doing, because I am extracting parts of the book that I think are helpful to a Spirit-led life. This may be seen as watering down the book, and I admit that is probably true. That is why I recommend that you read the book before passing judgement on it. Probably in the next episode, I will give you my opinion on what I think about the whole book. 

THE FIRST SIGNIFICANT EVENT REVIEW

Let us continue where we left off in the last episode. As you may recall, we are looking at four significant events which form a framework for how Michael Heiser viewed the contents of the Bible. The first event, which we covered in Episode 3, had two parts. The first part was that God created a vast array of spiritual beings before humans were created. The second part presented the Divine Council. The Divine Council is composed of a select number of these powerful created spiritual beings who have a say in running the universe. We explained that these beings are not to be worshipped and that God does not require their assistance. God created them for his pleasure and his own purposes which we do not know.

Most theologians have no problem accepting the Divine Council because it is presented in Scripture. However, I did skip some things about the Divine Council that spark debate. For example, Heiser infers the presence of the Divine Council in the first chapter of Genesis. When God says, “Let us make man in our image,” Heiser believes the “us” refers to God and the Divine Council. Most people, myself included, teach the “us” as a reference to the Trinity.

In the following events, I will continue to leave out some of the items which are more controversial. Or I may mention them. My goal here is to lay out the remaining significant events without going down too many rabbit trails.

THE SECOND SIGNIFICANT EVENT

Just like the first significant event, the second significant event has two parts. And the first of these two parts involves one of the more powerful spiritual beings. What happened in this event, is that one of these beings decided to rebel against God. Most people believe that this rebel was a member of the Divine Council, although Heiser does not believe that is a necessity. 

In “The Unseen Realm,” Heiser is very careful about naming, or not naming, this rebel. I am going to take a less restrained approach and call this being Satan, or the Devil. Heiser likes to point out that the Hebrew word “satan” is a function, not a proper name. The “satan” is an “adversary,” or “prosecutor.” But I am going to follow the traditional thinking and call this rebel Satan, based on the word “satan.”

The second part of this event takes place when Satan, now in full rebellion of God, tempts Eve in the garden of Eden. “The Unseen Realm” talks a lot about the garden of Eden, but I am not viewing that as the part we are most interested in.

What we care about here is that Satan was successful in tempting Eve to violate the only prohibition given to Adam and Eve. It is through this temptation that Adam sinned, and sin entered the world to affect us today.

As a side note, I appreciate Heiser’s explanations about the serpent in the garden. I do not know about you, but I grew up seeing pictures of an ordinary snake tempting Eve. That raises a lot of questions. Heiser points out that the serpent would have been known to Eve as one who gave council to God. And his form, while serpent-like or dragon-like, would have been beautiful. This explains a lot, like why the serpent could talk. Who would not be tempted by an incredible creature like that? 

So how does this second significant event relate to a Spirit-led life? Let us look at the judgment that was passed on the serpent because of his actions. This is what we read in Genesis 3:14-15…

So the Lord God said to the serpent: Because you have done this, you are cursed more than any livestock and more than any wild animal. You will move on your belly and eat dust all the days of your life. I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.

Genesis 3:14-15 CSB

The first thing I want us to see is that there will be hostility between humans and the “offspring” of Satan. Heiser and other biblical scholars point out that this does not mean humans will be fighting a bunch of serpents or snake-people. Nothing like that. In this verse, the “offspring” of the serpent is understood to be those humans and spiritual beings who follow the serpent, or Satan.

So, think about that. And think about the first significant event which involved the creation of multitudes of spiritual beings and a select group of these spiritual beings on the Divine Council. If any of those spiritual beings choose to follow Satan, Genesis 3 says that they will be hostile towards us. That does not sound good!

A Christian worldview anticipates that humanity will be in an ongoing fight with spiritual beings. And these spiritual beings are of different types with different abilities. In upcoming episodes about the paranormal and supernatural, we will need to consider if these spiritual beings might be ghosts, or Bigfoot, or aliens. To the modern materialistic, science-based mind, this sounds crazy. But this is what the Bible presents. Well, the Bible does not talk about Bigfoot, but it opens the door to all sorts of possibilities.

This idea of combatting powerful spiritual beings could be terrifying. What chance would lowly humans have against unchecked spiritual forces with powers and abilities way beyond ours? We would have no chance. 

But the judgment against Satan has an interesting prophetic statement. In Genesis 15 God says to the serpent, “He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.” This fascinating verse has a name. It is called “Protoevangelium” because it is the first presentation of the gospel pointing to Jesus. Jesus is the “He” in the verse. Jesus will ultimately destroy Satan. This picture of our heel and Satan’s head from Genesis is why Paul says:

The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.

Romans 16:20 CSB

As followers of Jesus, we understand that, because of Jesus, Satan is defeated. And this has large ramifications as we live a Spirit-led life. A Spirit-led person does not need to fear any encounters with these combative spiritual beings and, in fact, is equipped by the Holy Spirit to deal with them. Now, we should be careful when dealing with these beings and use caution, but we do not need to experience any crippling fear.

Before we move to the third significant event in “The Unseen Realm,” I want to make sure we keep the first and second events in context. It is important, as believers, that we are aware of the ongoing battle against evil spiritual beings. At the same time, we must not let that consume us or cloud our thinking. Every bad thing that happens to us is not caused by an evil spirit. An evil spirit did not burn my toast. Our focus is not on evil spirits. Our first concern should always be on our relationship with God.

By the way, I have been fighting a cold, and I can feel my voice giving out. My apologies if I keep sounding raspier.

THE THIRD SIGNIFICANT EVENT

Let us move on now to the third significant event. As a warning to parents, this third event does involve some mature themes. I am going to use guarded language, but if you have a pre-teen listening with you, you may want to turn this off and listen later to decide if it is suitable for your family.

This next significant event involves four verses from Genesis that raise all sorts of questions. We saw in Genesis 3 that Satan would have offspring. In other words, there would be humans and spiritual beings who would follow him down the path of rebellion from God. In Genesis 6, we see that rebellion in full force. Let us read Genesis 6:1-4…

When mankind began to multiply on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of mankind were beautiful, and they took any they chose as wives for themselves. And the Lord said, “My Spirit will not remain with mankind forever, because they are corrupt. Their days will be 120 years.” The Nephilim were on the earth both in those days and afterward, when the sons of God came to the daughters of mankind, who bore children to them. They were the powerful men of old, the famous men.

Genesis 6:1-4 CSB

These verses reveal that Satan’s rebellion was joined by more spiritual beings. These spiritual beings, the sons of God, were able to intimately unite with human women and have children. Now, within the Church, there have been efforts to change the meaning of these verses because of the implications. 

I remember reading these verses as a young man and I had no problem accepting that the sons of God, or angels, were able to procreate with humans. And the reason is almost demanded by the verses themselves…which I will explain in a moment.

I think there a couple of reasons why Christians want to interpret these verses differently. The first is just the ick-factor. I mean, the idea of angelic beings getting intimate with human females has an element of repulsion to it. Ick. The second is that there is a common thought that spiritual beings have no physicality. If there is no physicality to an angel, then there is no way that this union can produce children.

So, because of these ideas, people have tried to work around these verses by reinterpreting the expression “sons of God.” Probably the most common one is to say that the sons of God were not spiritual beings but were human descendants of the godly Seth (a son of Adam and Eve). And the human women were ungodly women descended from Cain, who murdered his brother.

There is just no good way to defend this view based on Scripture. And remember how I said the verses themselves almost demand that there be an angelic and human interaction? If the sons of God really were humans, then how would the mating of human men and human women consistently result in producing the Nephilim?

Genesis 6 makes it clear that something unique was created through the bonding of spiritual beings and humans. The Nephilim, as we learn from other verses, were giants with power. And we see them in Scripture before and after the flood. 

There are also verses written by Peter and Jude which talk about angels who sinned, and this sin is related to the events in Genesis 6. Plus, we have extra-biblical material in the first book of Enoch which talks about this event. We need to be careful how we use Enoch, but it does give us a glimpse at how the Jewish writers of the day viewed the Genesis 6 account.

I know that we can all think of a lot of questions around this third significant event, but my intent here is not to answer all the questions about Genesis 6. I may go deeper in a future episode if we cover the book of Enoch…which I am fairly certain we will do.

But what can we learn from this Biblical account that will help us with a Spirit-led life as we look at the supernatural and paranormal? There are two related points I want to make.

The first point is that when we look at supernatural and paranormal events, we may be dealing with things that are beyond our normal life experience. And these happenings may make us uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that we may be tempted to find explanations that avoid the discomfort by overlooking the obvious. 

This is where our Christian worldview of charismatic or non-charismatic may come into play. In fact, now that I think about it, every teaching I have heard that avoided the idea of angelic and human relations came from a non-charismatic. I would not make that into some rule because Heiser himself was non-charismatic, but I do find my experience with that interesting. I would be curious to know if you have had the same experience.

If we are dealing with things that are beyond our normal experience, that leads to the second point. And the second point is that we must be careful about which sources we use to inform us about these things.

Our obvious primary source of choice is the Bible. But even there we need to be careful. For example, I have heard famous Bible teachers avoid the idea of angelic-human relations by saying that spiritual beings have no physical form. But what do you do then with Genesis 18 and 19 where two angels are physically present and interact with Abraham and Lot? We are not allowed to cherry pick the verses we want. There are things written in the Bible that can really mess with us and our understanding of how we think things should be.

And what do we do when something is not directly covered in the Bible? This is where we must trust the Holy Spirit to supply wisdom and anything else we need. It is the Holy Spirit’s choice on how he helps us, and it is up to us to be careful and wise and keep within the boundaries supplied in Scripture. It is here, where we can help each other as the Body of Christ to do the right thing. God has given each of us natural intelligence, wisdom, and abilities and we are called to use them cooperatively with God and each other. This is an extremely important part of a Spirit-led life.

The bottom line is that we must be humble and recognize that we do not know everything. This third significant event highlights that spiritual things can be challenging to understand and embrace. I am grateful that God shows us enough for what we need. Even when the answers seem slow in coming, he is faithful in his timing.

CLOSING

Now that we have covered three of the four significant events discussed in “The Unseen Realm,” I hope you are getting a better idea of why this book is used by many Christians to help them view the supernatural and paranormal. You can already see how this framework has explanatory power if paranormal events are motivated by spiritual beings. 

In the next episode we will look at the fourth significant event and wrap up our discussion of “The Unseen Realm” by Michael Heiser. 

As always, you can send me comments, suggestions, or questions, by email at glenn@spiritledhope.com, or simply use the Contact Form at spiritledhope.com. You can also send me a one-way text message by going to the episode show notes and clicking on the link with your smart phone. If you find these episodes useful, please spread the word and share them with your friends.

As you think about the spiritual world…

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope, by the power of the Holy Spirit.  

Until the next episode, take care.

Copyright 2025 Spirit-Led Hope