The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Salvation preached to evil spirits?

Theology Soteriology
#19

Well, I appreciate everyone’s effort in confronting this question, particularly Paidion and Jason.

What I like about this site is a persistence at getting to the truth. I’m glad people didn’t just placate me with a hardy “Amen” in mutual agreement about this passage. And while it may have busted my bubble of enthusiasm in thinking I “discovered” something, it is refreshing to see opposing views which allows more learned minds than me to present a fair, balanced approached to the question.

At any rate, I’m still hopeful, but cautious, that God’s Reconciliation is complete, including all rebel beings. Perhaps further research will eventually reveal as such.

Thanks again, everyone.

Paidion, I may just have to get my hands on that book. I’d love to have a reference of that sort.

#20

Did you happen to read our little study on Colossians 1.13-23? Some good encouragement there for the hope of UR.

#21

No, I didn’t come cross that study. Would you mind providing me a link?

#22
#23

Here is the passage which may indicate the church preaching to evil spirits:

Of this gospel I became a distributer in keeping with the gift of God’s grace, given to me according to the working of His power. To me, though I am the leaster*(1)** of all saints, was given this grace, to proclaim to the Gentiles the inimitable riches of Christ, and to bring to light what is the plan of the secret hidden for ages in God, the One having created all things, in order that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might be made known now to the rulers and authorities in the heavenlies**(2)**, in keeping with the purpose of the ages that he brought about in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Eph 3:7-11)*

In the following passage “rulers and authorities in the heavenlies” are clearly demons (spiritual forces of evil)

Because it is to us not a conflict against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the world rulers of this [present] darkness, against the spiritual [forces] of evil in the heavenlies. (Eph 6:12)

Are we aware that we, the Church of Christ, are making known the manifold wisdom of God to the spriritual forces of evil in the heavenlies?

Notes:
(1) The word I translated as “leaster” is a word coined by the apostle Paul. Nowhere is it found in Greek literature other than at this place.
(2) “The heavenlies” is often rendered as “the heavenly places” by many translators.

#24

[quote=“DaveB”]
Transferred from Darkness to Light]

Thanks, Dave.

#25

Amazing. Although I don’t know how we humans could impress “spiritual forces of evil” when we fail in so many ways. Unless it is to procliam the “secret hidden for ages in God” the Gospel which confounds the wise. I bet the devils didn’t anticipate the victory of Christ’s resurrection.

Still, though, I’m unclear as to how salvation could come to demons if they are not in the flesh, like humans, since Christ died in the flesh. What benefit could the Death, Burial, and Resurrection have to spirits if they themselves don’t die in the flesh. Unless, of course, death extends beyond physical death.

I am suddenly reminded of another passage in I Peter:

I’ve always had trouble with this passage, and there are various scenerios that attempt to explain it, which often fall short of a satisfactory answer. Of course, most answers emerge from a non-universalist perspective, disowning any possibility of post-mortem salvation, much less the salvation of demons. Most popular is the idea that Jesus preached to the pre-Flood lost, through the instrument of Noah as a type or prophet of Christ.

But the context of this passage leaves that explanation wanting. For one, we are not “spirits” per se, though we are spiritual beings. Most of the time, “spirits” refer top angels or demons.

Could it be that Jesus preached the Gospel to the Sons of God (Nephilim) prior to the Flood (although why pre-Flood specifically?)? And that salvation is a “quickening of the Spirit” to those who are dead to God in rebellion, even in the spiritual realm?

I know it’s kinda sketchy, however the idea is strenghthened a couple of verses later:

There again is the “angels and authorities and powers” for which the Gospel is proclaimed. I don’t know the specifics of Greek grammer, but it seems to me that this couldn’t be speaking of “righteous angels”, for they would already be made subject to Him. Is this in the present tense? Is it an ongoing process?

BTW, Paidion, that book you recommended doesn’t have the English translation parallel to the Greek manuscript examples, does it? Otherwise, it woun’t do me much good unless i knew Greek, which I don’t. Someone on the Amazon comments recommended Bruce M Metzger’s work, “A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament”. Would that be a better book for us laymen as an early manuscript reference?

#26

On the other hand, something could be said about Legion being “tormented” by Jesus. Quite frankly, I see nothing in the text that Jesus actually *did *anything to torment the demons. Was it merely His Presence as the Son of God, God in the flesh, filled with the Spirit of God enough for the demons to sense the holy fire of God’s righteousness by merely being at present? In the parallel passage in Matthew 8, the demons ask, “art thou come hither to torment us before the time?” Before what time? The time of judgment? Or maybe the time of correction? Or both?

#27

Dondi, that is exactly what I believe Peter to have meant, except that the Nephilim were not the “Sons of God”, but their offspring. Why pre-flood? Because the Nephilim didn’t exist after the flood. They were all drowned.

You inquired about the book of transcripts of all extant NT Greek manuscripts. They contain only the transcripts and the scriptural references. No English translation.

#28

Yep, I agree, Eph 3 is one of my scriptural evidences for evangelizing rebel angels! I haven’t posted an ExeComp article on that yet, nor on Eph 1:9-10 and Eph 1:18-23, but they’re on the list, too. I have already posted an entry on Ephesians 4:8-10 however, if that may be helpful. Like 1 Peter, that section of verses also talks about Christ’s descent into hades.

My notes on 1 Peter 3:18-4:6 can be found here, as well as an interesting followup later at 4:17-18 which is sometimes cited as evidence against universal salvation. I don’t come down super-solidly in favor of salvation of rebel angels from 1 Peter; I do argue it’s probably referring to rebel spirits who incarnated themselves and were slain as rebels by God, not only dead rebel humans, but mainly I argue it’s talking about dead rebel humans.

Most of my notes on scriptures testifying toward the salvation of rebel angels haven’t been posted yet, but that’s only by accident (as a side effect of not having posted most of my scriptural notes toward universal salvation yet), not by design. There are a number of very interesting ones, although they’re obviously not well known (so to speak) or there would be more prevalent dispute about them at least.

In regard to your question about Metzger’s book, it’s a good reference but overlooks a few things and is meant to be used in concert with the 4th edition of the UBS Greek NT. The 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland (the Greek text of which is identical to the UBS) features some textual variations not mentioned in the apparatus of the UBS Greek and vice versa, and sometimes Metzger talks about some other variations in his notes to the 4th UBS (though obviously there’s a lot of overlap, too).

Usually variations which don’t appear in one of these three sources have cropped up in the much later Majority (or Byzantine) Greek Orthodox standardized texts (though they do include the Maj text set in their deliberations) and can be safely ignored for purposes of figuring out the original text; but they aren’t perfect at noting even all the possibly-important variations in early texts which is one reason why new editions are occasionally released (and why Paidion was able to find a textual variation in a papyrus which the editors themselves used but didn’t notice.)

Metzger’s notes are almost all in English, though he assumes you’re able to parse out some of the Greek terms and phrases (but he also helps provide contextual clues to the differences between them sometimes, or says straight out what they are). The UBS is entirely in Greek though the introduction is in English. The 27th NA also has an extensive introduction in English, and runs the English Revised Standard translation on facing pages with the Greek text. It isn’t like an interlinear, though, matching up Greek to English terms. (But I don’t know any interlinears which have a good apparatus of textual variations. Green was supposed to include one with his modern Textus Receptus attempt, but printers didn’t include it with my copy for whatever reason, so I have no clue what his rationale is supposed to be for preferring various readings. His work is very handy as an interlinear, though.)

#29

Ah, my mistake about the Nephilim as “Sons of God” but rather their offspring. Thank you. But if they did all drown, how to you account for the post-Flood mentioning of the Anakim in Numbers 13:32-33? (Nephilim is interpreted as “giant” in both passages in many translations).

I do not want to belabor the point about the Nephilim. I was actually having the “Sons of God” (male angelic parents?) in mind concerning Jesus preaching to the “spirits”, rather than the offspring themselves, since Nephilim would not be a spirit, per se, but have a body and spirit. Of course this gets into the dicey area of how angels could procreate in the first place, too. If they did, then that means that God *gave *them the ability to.

There would be some that would argue that angels couldn’t procreate based on Jesus’ statement in Mark 12:25. There is a heirarchy of angels, of course, and different kinds of angelic beings, so who knows what abilities they might have. And there are those that suggest Jesus may only be referring to heavenly angels as celebate, and not those who left their adobe. And I would also suggest that not all of them are necessarily evil (some good angels ate with Abraham, and those same angels looked good to the Sodomites who would have them). This, of course, gets into a lot of conjecture about fallen beings and earth-bound angels, etc. But it would be rather important question if dealing with the salvation of these beings, whatever form they might appear. If they have some physical form as “Sons of God”, then perhaps the “resurrection” of these being might not be so farfetched.

All this to me is mind-boggling when thinking about it. So many directions to explore (Jude, the Book of Enoch, etc). But the data seems scant.

That is unfortunate. Do you recommend any thing similar for us amatuers?

JRP's Exegetical Compilation: Ephesians 4:8-10
#30

Aren’t angels “spirits”? Can they take flesh and blood - like a docetic Jesus? Whose body would they inhabit? How could they procreate?

#31

I would like to defer a question about Eph. 4:8-10 over on your referenced link. It doesn’t really have much to do with the topic here, so I’ll ask it over there.

#32

Why would angels need to be docetic? Or why would they necessarily need someone elses’ body to manifest itself physically? As I pointed out, Abraham’s visitors ate a meal and were in solid enough form to be sexually attracted to certain men who tried to impose themselves in Sodom. Evidently, angels of this type can obtain physical form, like the angel who wrestled Jacob, (a match which Jacob won, incidently).

#33

Aren’t they ‘spirits’? What does that mean? Flesh and blood? Sexual organs? I’m going to have to question this concept of angels, I think.
I’m not quarreling with you, I’d just like to understand this.

Maybe I’ll start up a little Colossians angel sect here… :smiley:

#34

I was pretty sure you would bring that up, Dondi. It’s a good question. But in my opinion the word “nephilim” means “giants” in the usual sense. But I personally reserve the phrase “The Nephilim” with reference to those prediluvian offspring of fallen angels and women. Many try to interpret “the sons of God” as “the Godly line of Seth”, or some such, but the historic Hebrew understanding has been that they were angels.

I agree that the Nephilim were a hybrid of body and spirit, body from their mother and spirit from their father (the angels are spirits). Because they are part “spirit”, their spirits went somewhere at death, to a “prison” in which Christ, in His spirit, went and preached to these spirits who were formerly disobedient in the days of Noah. It doesn’t say WHEN Christ in the spirit preached to them. Perhaps in His resurrected state. But since He wasn’t spirit in that state but flesh, I suspect He preached to them in His pre-incarnate state, perhaps shortly after they went to the prison.

As some of you know, I don’t believe people possess an immaterial spirit that goes somewhere immediately after death. So people who die as rebels must first be raised to life before they can be dealt with.

#35

How do spirits have sexual intercourse? Or were these virgin births?

#36

All I know is what is written in Genesis:

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. (Gen 6:4 ESV)

We know that “to come in to” a woman was a Hebraic euphemism for having sexual intercourse. I can see only one way to argue against the interpretation I have given, and that is to assign a human rather than angelic denotation to the phrase “sons of God”. However the phrase “sons of God” denoted angels several other times in the Old Testament:

*Deut 32:8 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.

Job 1:6 Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them.

Job 38:7 … when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.*

#37

When most people think of “spirits”, there is an overwhelming tendancy to think of massless, etherals ghost-like forms floating around, as immaterial. (In the movie Casper, there is a humorous scene in which several ghosts are seen eating food in the kitchen only to have the food pass right through their etheral bodies and onto the floor,…undigested, of course). And that may be true, insofar as our ability to discern their role in the natural world. But while they do not have flesh and bones, as Jesus tells us in Luke 24, that doesn’t mean they don’t have some kind of substance. All through scripture angels or spirit beings interact with the physical world. Therefore, there must be some basis of ‘reality’, we are not able to detect, which makes it possible for the laws of nature to be affected by the actions of angels.

There is much we don’t know about nature. Our understanding of Newtronian physics has been upended, of sorts, by quantum mechanics (though Newtronian physics is true for most of what we encounter in the macro world. Things get real fuzzy in the microworld). There are things that happen in the that microworld which we are still trying to get a grasp of. Scientist now believe that the cosmological makeup of the universe as seen by our telescopes and accounted in mathematical equations and gravitaional forces and such, that there is something missing. Something that they call dark matter because the matter they can account for couldn’t possibly be enough to explain makeup of the universe as it stands. It is called dark matter because none of our instruments have been able to measure it. Yet physics demands that it has to be there. On top of that, there is the phenomenom of *dark energy *, which likewise cannot be detected by our current instruments, but is surmised to be there because of the current expansion rate of the universe demands it be there. Both dark matter and dark energy is said to be a combined 95.1% of the *total mass-energy *of our universe, leaving only 4.9% of what is visible and detectable to us.

That is enormous when you think about it. and it is even more provocative considering that scientists believe that up to 10 dimensions exist, including the four dimensions we are familiar with. We’ve only cracked the door on what we know is reality.

So is it possible that these “spirit” beings, with whom we believe don’t have substance in the 4-dimensional world in which we are familiar, might just have substance in another dimensional construct that intersects with ours consisting in part of the 95.1% of the mass-energy we don’t see?

If energy can convert to matter, and vice versa, then it is possible that immanencial spiritual beings could interact with the natural world in ways we wouldn’t readily comprehend, including the formation of a body, of sorts, possibly capable of reproduction.

Of course, I qualify my statements with the disclaimer that I am not a quantum physicist. :nerd:

#38

Incidentally, there are two general explanations for Nephilim showing up later in scripture (I mean while still fitting the pre-Noah story).

#1.) The rebel angels did it again, just not as extensively for whatever reasons.

#2.) At least one of Noah’s sons actually married a Nephilim woman! Consequently (what we would call) the genetics would keep popping back up in descendants on occasion. (Artistically this is my favorite theory, and I’d be tickled if it showed up in the upcoming super-gonzo Noah movie with Russel Crowe. :mrgreen: Note that it relies on a detail of human gestation which the scriptures barely even hint at, the contribution of the woman to the baby – that’s an important detail of the humanity of Christ in the Incarnation for example, but most of the time the scriptures seem to assume the women only host the material from the men and contribute no material themselves.)

Also, though I don’t think this changes the weight in regard to any theories discussed so far I guess, a “docetic” anything wouldn’t have any real flesh or blood, borrowed from someone else or otherwise. That’s the point, the appearance is only an appearance. (Notice however that on typical ancient ideas of human gestation, there could be no virgin birth per se, only at most an appearance of such.)

The various theories about how the “sons of god” (if they weren’t what we would call advanced Adamic humans to begin with but rather rebel spirits of a basically different species) generated the Nephilim can get rather… interesting. One theory, which I don’t personally subscribe to (being rather positively agnostic about what exactly happened anyway), is that they took bodies made of clay, enticed/collected seed from human men as (what would later be called) succubi, made alterations to it internally, and then shifted the form of their bodies to impregnate human women as (what would later be called) incubi. In some versions of that theory, the point was to create actually organic bodies for their spirits to inhabit, since they couldn’t do that outright for whatever reason (or for whatever reason didn’t want to, details tend to be vague on this point), and so they birthed themselves into the natural world this way. However, they could now be naturally killed, BUT the bodies so created were so strong due to various design mutations (killing the women in childbirth is usually part of the story here), that they could only be naturally killed by a major natural catastrophe. (Why God would do that instead of killing them more directly tends to be rather vague again.)

On this class of theory, the incident explains why God and His prophets are so specially against religious modes which involve having sex with deities, even figuratively through human partners. Sometimes this includes an extended explanation that the whole affair (in multiple senses of that word :wink: ) dishonors the coming incarnation and virgin birth, which on some versions of the theory was a (or the) main reason why the rebel spirits did it in the first place. Another version of the theory for the rebel’s rationale(s,) is that it’s connected to Eve’s interpretation of God’s promise that eventually YHWH would be born of a woman (since she names one of her children something that translates to “YHWH is here”).

This theory is also one of a somewhat broader category of theories, including some completely naturalistic ones, claiming an overlap here with popular pagan demigod stories being criticized by Jewish religion. i.e. yeah we’ve heard about Herakles and Perseus etc., and we don’t deny that that kind of thing happens, BUT IT IS VERY MUCH NOT A GOOD THING! – and we shouldn’t worship them religiously, or even respect them at all.

Like I said, I don’t subscribe to a particular theory about what actually happened (and I’ve picked up other ones in various places over the years), but I do think the general scriptural gist across the OT and NT is that at least some rebel spirits who weren’t themselves technically human species, died in a giant water catastrophe, and their spirits are now imprisoned as a result though sometimes they manage to temporarily escape and make trouble before being returned to the prison, which is why the oceans represent and maybe even embody that situation. But then also other rebel spirits haven’t gone through that (perhaps yet) and are either imprisoned by a different method corresponding to what we’d call the atmosphere, or haven’t actually been imprisoned yet even though they still have a difficult time (and maybe increasing difficulties over time for various reasons involving God’s war against them) affecting the world directly.

Beyond that gist, the scriptural details seem sketchy to me. And I don’t claim to know for sure what it actually means or represents, although currently I agree there are rebel spirits trying to affect the natural world, including through corruption of human (and other species) gestation, but they’re having an increasingly difficult time doing so due to various things God has been doing mostly through (more-or-less) loyal agents of His.

I allow I could be wrong to some or any degree about that, and I try not to hang anything on it, and to keep an open mind about further details even along that line. But I have also found it’s important to notice at least that much of the story going on (in various modes of testimony) throughout the scriptures, because that general story (for whatever reason) seems connected to portions of scripture talking about universal salvation of sinners from sin (and to various explanations about human suffering).