This is the transcript of the podcast episode in full article form.
If you’ve been following my journey through Genesis 1–11, you know we’ve been looking at the blueprint of reality. In the last podcast episode, I interviewed Tudor Alexander, and together, we analysed the transition from the Old to the New Covenant.
I realised during this last week that I had not discussed how the New Testament writers viewed the world around them, and what grounded their theology: personal interaction with Jesus, their Second Temple-period education, and holy spirit downloads from Jesus after His ascension. As Jews, they were all clueless until their impartation of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2, the Day of Pentecost.
This is a key point.
It is the Holy Spirit that activates your senses to the spiritual world, not because of anything you do, but a sovereign act of Jesus, who knows your end from your beginning (Isaiah 46:9-10).
Today, we are bridging the covenants by asking a critical question: How did Jesus’s apostles—men like Paul, Peter, Jude, John, and James—actually view the world around them?
To understand their writing in the New Testament, we have to set aside our preconceptions learned in Sunday School and Church, where the goal is sanitisation, and step into the world of the first-century Jew.
The New Testament writers were immersed in a world saturated with spiritual reality. They read their Scriptures primarily in the Greek Septuagint, and they lived in a Second Temple Jewish context where the invisible cosmic battle was front and centre.
Today, we’re unpacking their spiritual worldview and how it shaped what they wrote and how they wrote it. We will cover the three great rebellions of darkness in Genesis that they were all well aware of, as well as the ultimate destination of every believer: the resurrection and the New Jerusalem.
Let’s start at the very beginning.
Long before human beings were formed from the dust, God created the heavenly realm.
When modern readers see Genesis 1:26—“Let US make man in OUR image”—we often incorrectly default to a Trinitarian interpretation by saying “Us” means Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is typical of the sanitisation of the Word of God, which makes us numb to the reality of the spiritual battle in which we all participate.
I lay the blame for this squarely at the feet of the Jesuits, the secret society of the Papacy, established in 1540 by Pope Paul 111, to enact counter-reformation strategy and tactics, resulting in the prophesied lukewarm church of the Letter to Laodicea in Revelation 3.
But to a First-Century Jew, this evoked scenes of a supreme being, a singular God (Elohim with a capital “E” in Hebrew), surrounded by His created plural spiritual beings (elohim with a small “e” in Hebrew), called the Divine Council in Psalm 82 in the ESV.
Psalms 82:1-8 ESV A Psalm of Asaph. God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment: (2) “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Selah (3) Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. (4) Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.” (5) They have neither knowledge nor understanding; they walk about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken. (6) I said, “You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; (7) nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.” (8) Arise, O God, judge the earth; for you shall inherit all the nations!
Contained within this psalm is knowledge the psalmist assumes you have: namely, the allocation of divine beings (the sons of God) to each nation formed after the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, where God scattered the languages among all the nations of the known world. We find this in Deuteronomy 32:8-9:
Deuteronomy 32:8-9 ESV 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.
This passage tells us that Yahweh divided mankind into nations with borders, and that the inhabitants of each nation had created divine beings assigned to watch over that nation, but that Yahweh’s portion would be Israel.
We find in Genesis 6:1-4 that divine beings rebelled against Yahweh and left their assigned tasks in the spiritual realm to take women in the physical realm and procreate, with the Nephilim as the resultant offspring.
Genesis 6:1-4 LSB Now it happened, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, (2) that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were good in appearance; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. (3) Then Yahweh said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever because he indeed is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be 120 years.” (4) The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.
Part of the Second Temple literature was the Book of Enoch, which elaborates on the biblical text above (Book of the Watchers, Enoch Chapters 1-32), and of which Peter and Jude were well aware. Jude provides a direct quote from Enoch to validate the contained prophecy:
Jude 1:14-15 LSB But Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, also prophesied about these men, saying, “Behold, the Lord came with many thousands of His holy ones, (15) to execute judgment upon all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their ungodly deeds which they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.”
Jude discusses the Watchers in Jude 6:
Jude 1:6 LSB And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day,
And Peter also quotes the Watchers event:
2 Peter 2:4 LSB For if God did not spare angels who sinned, but cast them into the pit and delivered them to chains of darkness, being kept for judgment;
It is important to note that the canonical Genesis 6:1-4 account does NOT contain details of the rebellious spiritual beings imprisoned in Tartarus; these are found only in the book of Enoch.
We have clear references in Peter and Jude to an event of rebellion in Genesis 6, which validates the rebellion’s historical veracity.
The spiritual realm is REAL, and all the first-century New Testament writers knew it.
Let’s look at other occurrences of the divine council in Scripture:
Job 1 and 2: The “sons of God” (bene elohim) assemble before the Lord.
1 Kings 22: The prophet Micaiah sees Yahweh seated on His throne with the host of heaven standing around Him, taking counsel on how to execute judgment.
Psalm 82: God takes His stand in the divine assembly, pronouncing judgment over the spiritual forces who failed in their proxy stewardship of the nations.
Revelation 4 and 5 show God in the presence of all His divine beings.
The apostles knew this reality intimately. God created an entire hierarchy of spiritual beings before Adam ever drew breath. Man was created lower than these heavenly beings for a little while, meant to rule creation under God’s authority. But then... the rebellions.
Most modern Christians focus almost entirely on one fall: Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. But in the Second Temple Jewish worldview shared by Paul, Peter, and Jude, history was shaped by three major cosmic disasters in Genesis 1–11.
The Fall of Man (Genesis 3): Eden. Temptation, deception, human autonomy, and the entry of death into the human family.
The Corruption of the Watchers (Genesis 6:1–4): Heavenly beings—the sons of God—abandoned their proper domain, transgressing the boundary between heaven and earth to intermingle with human women, breeding violence and corruption, as discussed above.
The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11): Humanity’s corporate rebellion, leading God to disinherit the nations and hand them over to lesser divine beings (Deuteronomy 32:8-9), while choosing Abraham to build a nation of His own.
We now have an important question?
When did God disinherit these watchers over the nations?
This is where Psalm 82, quoted above, provides the details, but the question of when remains a mystery. We know that these watchers allowed partiality to the wicked, and Yahweh is berating them for their failure to protect the pure-hearted. The psalm ends with a plea to Yahweh to end the nonsense by judging all the nations and installing Himself as the Watcher, a prophecy fulfilled by Jesus.
When Paul writes in Ephesians 6 that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world,” he is describing a literal, territorial, spiritual war that began in Genesis and raged into his present day.
So where does that leave us right now?
Revelation 12 informs us that Satan and his followers were thrown out of heaven and down to Earth after a battle with Archangel Michael. As Revelation was written AFTER Paul’s writings, the details Jesus provided to him were incomplete.
We see in Job 1 and 2 that Satan was a member of the Divine Council and had residence in heaven with God, with his assigned task to go “to and fro” on the Earth.
It is a myth to believe that Satan was expelled from the spiritual realm before the fall of man in Genesis 3. His job was to roam the creation, and we find him present in the Garden in Genesis 3. This incident does not mean Satan physically appeared as a serpent, but as a spirit being; his job was to deceive and tempt, which he executed to perfection.
So what has changed?
His domain has changed.
This is key to your understanding of the spiritual battle we face today.
No longer is Satan part of the Divine Council, but he is now permanently stationed on Earth, along with his followers, creating deceptions and harassing anyone who proclaims Christ as their King:
Revelation 12:7-9 LSB And there was war in heaven, Michael and his angels waging war with the dragon. The dragon and his angels waged war, (8) and they were not strong enough, and there was no longer a place found for them in heaven. (9) And the great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.
Revelation 12:17 LSB So the dragon was enraged with the woman and went off to make war with the rest of her seed, who keep the commandments of God and have the witness of Jesus.
Satan is the founder of ALL modern deceptions that prevent people who profess they are followers of Jesus from attaining sanctification. If you place anything or anyone between yourself and Jesus, your heart will become hardened to Jesus and the life of His indwelling Holy Spirit.
If, on the other hand, you are saved by the sovereign work of Jesus through the indwelling Holy Spirit, you are given a new heart of flesh, replacing your hardened heart of stone (see Ezekiel 36:25-26, also quoted by Jesus in John 3).
If you think your church has saved you, think again.
Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5 that while we live in this present age, we dwell in an “earthly tent.” This physical body, subject to decay, disease, temptation, and spiritual oppression, is temporary.
We are pilgrims in a cosmic warzone.
Crucially, the gospel promise in the New Covenant is NOT that our ultimate destiny is to exist forever as disembodied ghosts floating on clouds.
Paul, Peter, John, and James were unified in their physical, resurrection hope.
In Romans 8, Paul lays out the grand cosmic restoration:
God foreknew His people. He predestined them to be conformed to the image of His Son.
And what is the climax of that process?
It is the redemption of our bodies.
Creation itself groans, waiting for the revealing of the sons of God. (Romans 8:19)
When Jesus returned from the dead, He had a physical, glorified resurrection body.
He ate fish, He walked, He was touched—yet He was no longer subject to mortality or decay. He was the “firstfruits” of the dead, a brand-new humanity.
This brings us to the glorious conclusion of the apostolic worldview.
Through the cross and the resurrection, Jesus disarmed the cosmic powers and principalities (Colossians 2:15). He began reclaiming the nations disinherited at Babel.
Those who belong to Messiah—the foreknown, the called, those being sanctified day by day—are being prepared for a final home. (Romans 8:28-30)
In Revelation 21 and 22, the Apostle John sees the climax of the story: The New Jerusalem descending out of heaven to earth.
Notice the direction!
Earth isn’t destroyed and abandoned; earth is redeemed and renewed.
God’s tabernacle comes down to dwell with humanity. Eden is restored as a glorious, eternal City.
There, alongside all the faithful Saints from every age, clothed in immortal resurrection bodies, believers will step into the reality we were made for:
No more curses (reversing Genesis 3).
No more spiritual corruption or dark rulers (reversing Genesis 6).
All nations gathered in unity under the true King (reversing Genesis 11).
Friends, you live in a spiritual world.
Your daily battles are not merely psychological, political, or physical. You are part of an ancient story, and you dwell currently in a temporary tent.
Living today near the end of the cosmic battle, we have the great gift of hindsight, allowing us to view history through the lens of biblical prophecy and make educated guesses about what the future may hold.
As I see it, the primary prophecy yet unfulfilled is in Revelation 13:
Revelation 13:11-18 LSB Then I saw another beast coming up out of the earth, and he had two horns like a lamb and he was speaking as a dragon. (12) And he exercises all the authority of the first beast in his presence. And he makes the earth and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast, whose fatal wound was healed. (13) And he does great signs, so that he even makes fire come down out of heaven to the earth in the presence of men. (14) And he deceives those who dwell on the earth because of the signs which were given to him to do in the presence of the beast, telling those who dwell on the earth to make an image to the beast who *had the wound of the sword and has come to life. (15) And it was given to him to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast would even speak and cause as many as do not worship the image of the beast to be killed. (16) And he causes all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, that they be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, (17) and that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name. (18) Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of man; and his number is 666.
This second beast of Revelation 13 is in the formation stages as we speak. It is the United States of America. Right from the inception of this new great nation, the Jesuits have infiltrated it at all levels of industry and government, with the goal of claiming it for the Papacy.
We now have a first-ever American Pope professing world peace in a religiously unified, ecumenical world. He will step in when global war breaks out after an economic disaster, as the unifying “peace”. This event was prophesied by Jesus in Matthew 24:
Matthew 24:36-39 LSB “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. (37) “For just as the days of Noah were, so the coming of the Son of Man will be. (38) “For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, (39) and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be.
Jesus points out that in the end days, just as in the days of Noah, people will be going about their business in peace right up to the day of the flood, unaware of the impending doom.
This will not affect those who are set apart for Jesus, because you will see the events through your spiritual eyes.
So take heart.
The fallen powers who corrupted creation have already been defeated at the cross. We wait with eager anticipation for the day of Jesus’s return, when the trumpet will sound, mortality will be swallowed up by life, and we will enter New Jerusalem with all the saints to reign with Him forever.
All the New Testament writers held that we are spiritual beings in a physical world dominated by principalities and powers of darkness from the underworld. If it was good enough for them, it is incumbent upon us to reflect the same understanding when we are born-again by the indwelling Spirit of Jesus.
Thank you for tuning in today. If this episode helped you see the New Covenant through a clearer, ancient lens, share it with a friend, leave a review, and subscribe.
Until next time—keep your eyes fixed on the eternal.
Blessings
Geoff