When Star Wars first came out, my aunt and uncle saw the movie and fell immediately in love with this great space saga. They even bought the merch to go with it, including sheets for their two sons’ twin beds. All was well in their household and everyone slept soundly dreaming of Luke and Leia and Hans and Chewy. Soon, thereafter, a friend invited my aunt to go to a revival meeting at their church. There she learned about demons and witchcraft and evil spirits and how they can prey on people’s souls today, if those people let them. And how do they let them? They open a doorway to the demonic world by dabbling in the occult and false religions. And these revival leaders said that nothing speaks more about dabbling in the dark side of the occult than Star Wars. My aunt was aghast at what she had done. She immediately went home, stripped the sheets off the boys’ bed, took them into the backyard and burned them with gas and wood. Apparently, she wanted to keep any and all demons in a galaxy far, far away. Okay, now we know where the sheets went, but where do demons come from? That actually is a very interesting question. But I am getting ahead of myself.
We are wrestling with some of the issues found in Matthias Henze’s book, Mind the Gap: How the Jewish Writings between the Old and New Testament Help Us Understand Jesus (Fortress Press, 2017). Now, it has been almost two months since we have thought about minding any gaps, especially the 400-year gap between the two testaments, so perhaps we ought to engage in a little review. Henze shares his personal story with these words that I quoted in our first post:
“For the longest time, I was under the impression that this is the reason why the Christian Bible has two parts, the Old Testament and the New Testament. I simply assumed that the Old Testament was the Jewish part of the Christian Bible and the New Testament was the Christian part. The purpose of the Old Testament was to explain Judaism to Christians. Whenever we read in the New Testament of Jesus’s Judaism, we could simply turn to the Old Testament; and there, somewhere, we would find an explanation for the Jewish world of Jesus. The only problem was that I never seemed to be able to find the relevant passages in the Old Testament. What I found didn’t really explain what I was looking for. Surely, I thought, the reason was my insufficient knowledge of the Bible: I was simply looking in the wrong places. Only later, did I realize that the mistake was not mine. I was looking for passages about synagogues and rabbis and Pharisees that simply don’t exist. The Old Testament cannot explain the Jewish world of Jesus [because] the religion of the Old Testament is not the Judaism of Jesus.”
Read that last line again because it is incredibly important. Here’s the upshot of everything we have said so far: We need to understand the Second Temple period because understanding the Second Temple period is crucial to understanding Jesus. Matthias Henze goes on to explain why. He writes:
“Jewish intellectuals who were active during the last centuries before the Common Era introduced a wealth of new features, ideas, and literary expressions into Judaism: the institution of the synagogue, the social and religious divisions of Judaism into distinct sects, such as the Pharisees, Sadducees, and the Essenes, the rabbi as a religious authority. . . . and an array of theological concepts and concerns, among them the belief in the messiah as a divine agent of the end of time, the hope for the resurrection of the dead, and the angelic afterlife. The list goes on. None of these aspects of Judaism are found in the Old Testament. They all took shape during the time of the Second Temple period and became fixed parts of Judaism during the centuries leading up to the time of Jesus.”
Included in Henze’s list here (that list that “goes on”), is a belief that our world contains an army of demons and unclean spirits. Now, that is a hard thing for many modern readers to grasp, but it is also a hard thing for Bible readers to grasp because when the Old Testament comes to a close, demons and evil spirits barely make a blip on anyone’s radar screen. But as soon as we open up the New Testament, demons seem to be everywhere. We need to look no further than to Mark’s Gospel for proof of this. In the very first chapter of Mark, it takes a mere 21 verses before Jesus encounters and drives out an impure spirit. Demons show up for the first time in that same chapter. They are cast out in verse 31 (repeated in verse 39). Other exorcisms occur in chapter 5 (1-20), chapter 7 (24-30), and chapter 9 (14-29). And none of these episodes are short. Mark chooses to emphasize these encounters and spends significant time describing the miracle and outlining the cosmic battle that the exorcism portrays. But again, that is a bit shocking because we would think that we would be able to find some background on these “evil spirits” in the pages of the Old Testament, but no. The Old Testament contains no information about who these spirits are, where they come from, how they possess people or how to exorcise them. But again, no. Now, that doesn’t mean there are no “evil spirits” or “demons” in the Old Testament. There are, but they are very, very different from these beings that we encounter in the gospels. Let me explain.
In 1 Samuel 16, we read that an “evil spirit” was afflicting King Saul (unfortunately, we are not told what that affliction looks like). To drive out this evil spirit, David does something unexpected. He plays music for Saul, and the evil spirit leaves. You can read the gospels until you are blue in the face, but you will never find that Jesus escorted any demons out of a victim through music or song. One of these things is not like the other. We find the same dissimilarity in 1 Kings 22. Evil King Ahab wants to go to war with the Arameans; but before he can launch an attack, he needs to consult the prophets. And so, he gathers 400 of them. And they all agree: God will go with Ahab and give him the victory. But then, he encounters another prophet (Micaiah); and he tells Ahab that if he proceeds with his plan, he will die. This news enrages Ahab, and he demands to know why he should listen the Micaiah when 400 other prophets disagree with him. And he tells Ahab that God (note that, God) sent a lying spirit to those other prophets so that they would convince Ahab to attack so that he could be killed in battle. In other words, God deliberately led these false prophets astray by sending them a “lying spirit” to deceive them. And that means that this “evil spirit” is not an agent of Satan, but an instrument of God. Hence, there is no need to exorcise it and send it into a herd of pigs (see Mark 5).
Demons are also mentioned in the Old Testament, but they also are very different from the “demons” we encounter in the gospels. In the gospels, they are evil and destructive. They drive people to injure themselves and even push them to suicide. In the Old Testament, they are synonymous with the false gods of the nations. We can even see this in how the NIV translates the word. In Deuteronomy 32, we read (16-17):
“[Israel] made him jealous with their foreign gods and angered him with their detestable idols.
They sacrificed to false gods (NIV—demons), which are not God—gods they had not known, gods that recently appeared, gods your ancestors did not fear.”
Demons here aren’t the malevolent beings that we would normally think of, but are the gods of the other nations. They are the strange gods that could possibly lead Israel astray. We see this same thing in Psalm 106 (34-38):
“They did not destroy the peoples as the Lord had commanded them, but they mingled with the nations and adopted their customs. They worshiped their idols, which became a snare to them. They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to false gods (to demons). They shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan, and the land was desecrated by their blood.”
Here’s the point: The “demons” and “evil spirits” of the Old Testament are very different from their namesakes in the New Testament. Even the emphasis on these “beings” is radically different. You have to search the Old Testament for even a few examples, and none of those examples will knock you over; but the gospels almost overflow with reports of Jesus defeating the demons. And that raises the big question: If the “evil spirits” and “demons” of the gospels aren’t rooted in the Old Testament, where do they come from? And an even bigger question: What does that mean for us today? Unfortunately, the answers to these questions will have to wait until next week. It is hardly fair, I know, but as they say, the devil is in the details and in the delays.
