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Do we really believe we are in a spiritual war?

Christians in the West, of course, affirm – or should affirm – the reality of the spiritual realm, including dark spiritual powers such as Satan and demons. However, when push comes to shove, do we really believe these things? Yes, we mentally agree with biblical teaching on these matters, but one wonders if we really live as if we do, in fact, believe them.

In many other parts of the globe, Christians live as if these things certainly exist and must be reckoned with. Thu,s things like demons and exorcisms are taken much more seriously. They know full well they are dealing with powerful spiritual realities, and they need the full armour of God to deal with them.

Thus, even reading a passage like Ephesians 6:11-12 may mean quite different things to Western Christians and non-Western Christians:

“Put on the whole armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

Getting Western Christians to take all this much more seriously and not just pay lip service to it is the need of the hour. Two individuals can be mentioned here. Michael Heiser (1963-2023) was an Old Testament scholar who produced a number of important books on this and related subjects. They include:

• The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Lexham Press, 2015)
• Supernatural: What the Bible Teaches About the Unseen World – and Why It Matters (Lexham Press, 2015)
• Angels: What the Bible Really Says About God’s Heavenly Host (Lexham Press, 2018)
• Demons: What the Bible Really Says About the Powers of Darkness (Lexham Press, 2020)

The second individual (someone I want to spend more time on) is Jonathan Cahn. A recent book of his, The Return of the Gods (Frontline, 2022), has gotten a lot of attention, and not necessarily from those you would expect. I will briefly describe the book and then look at what two such individuals have said about it.

Return of the Old Gods

Cahn, a Messianic Jew, argues that early paganism —and the spiritual forces behind it — were in good measure ‘booted out’ (my term) of lands and nations as the Christian faith spread and the truth of Jesus Christ was proclaimed and affirmed. The Christianised West largely ‘unarmed’ these gods.

But as the West increasingly rejected its Christian past and turned on the Gospel, these earlier spiritual powers made a comeback. He uses Matthew 12:43-45 to help make his case:

When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So also will it be with this evil generation.

He says this is not just about individual possession, but collective or mass possession. This can be about cultures or civilisations:

According to the parable, the repossessed house will end up far worse than at the beginning. Taken into the realm of world history, it means this: A post-Christian civilization will end up in a far darker state than a pre-Christian civilization. If Western civilization turns away from God, what will come of it will be much darker and far more dangerous than what it was in its days of paganism.

It is no accident that the modern world and not the ancient has been responsible for unleashing the greatest evils upon the world. And it is no accident that when nations and civilizations that had once known God turned away, when they turned against the Christian faith they had once received, what then came upon them would often be described in terms of the demonic.

A pre-Christian civilization may produce a Caligula or a Nero. But a post-Christian civilization will produce a Stalin or a Hitler.

A pre-Christian society may give birth to barbarity. But a post-Christian society will give birth to even darker offspring, Fascism, Communism, and Nazism.

A pre-Christian nation may erect an altar of human sacrifice. But a post-Christian nation will build Auschwitz.

For a nation or civilization that had once known God, that was once delivered of the gods and spirits, to then turn away from God is a most dangerous thing. The gods will return to it. (p. 26)

He focuses on the ‘dark trinity’ of Baal, Ishtar, and Molech and all that they represent. He looks at the English word ‘demon’ and its Hebrew and Greek forms: shedim and daimonion, and discusses three key biblical texts on this:

They sacrificed to demons that were no gods,
to gods they had never known,
to new gods that had come recently,
whom your fathers had never dreaded. (Deuteronomy 32:17)

They served their idols,
which became a snare to them.
They sacrificed their sons
and their daughters to the demons (Psalm 106:36-37)

No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons. (1 Corinthians 10:20)

Skipping over several hundred pages, towards the end of his book, he writes:

The only answer to the gods – is God. The powers of the gods can only be overcome by the power of God. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the word for God is Elohim. Elohim is plural. It speaks of the one true God in His transcendence and limitlessness. But the same word, translated as “God,” is, in other contexts, translated as “the gods.” The strange property of the word reveals a profound truth. In the end, it will come down to one Elohim or the other — the Elohim of God or the elohim of the gods. (p. 232)

These gods and demons are certainly real. How exactly we understand them, and whether Cahn has it right here is a moot point. Indeed, one need not agree with all that Cahn has to say. But he offers us something to seriously consider, at least. That is the view of at least two other authors. Indeed, it was their remarks about the book that led me to go out and get it.

Broken Covenant

The one I first read speaking quite approvingly of the book is Naomi Wolf. In her 2023 volume Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age (Chelsea Green), she warned of where the West is heading in terms of increasing statism, shrinking freedom, and expanding tyranny – much of it especially unleashed during the Covid Wars.

I was so taken with the book that I penned four articles on it. In my third piece, I looked at how this nominal Jewess is becoming much more open to her own roots, and to that of Christianity.

In Chapter 16 of her book, she looks at the Cahn thesis. Here is an extended quote:

Though I don’t agree with everything in his book, Pastor Cahn’s central argument — that we have turned away from the Judeo-Christian God and thus we opened a door into our civilization for the negative spirits of “the Gods” to re-possess us — feels right.

Jonathan Cahn is a Messianic Jewish minister. He is the son of a Holocaust refugee. Formerly a secular-atheist, Cahn had a near-death experience as a young man that led him to accept Jesus — or, as he refers to this presence by the original Hebrew name, Yeshua — as his Lord and Savior. Pastor Cahn has a ministry based in Wayne, New Jersey, which brings together Jews and Gentiles.

In The Return of the Gods, his improbable, and yet somehow hauntingly plausible thesis is that ancient dark and metaphysically organized forces, “the Gods” of antiquity, have “returned” to our presumably advanced, secular post-Christian civilization.

Pastor Cahn’s theme is that, because we have turned away from our covenant with Yahweh — especially we in America, and we in the West, and especially since the 1960s — therefore, the ancient gods, or rather, ancient pagan energies, that had been vanquished by monotheism and exiled to the margins of civilization and human activity — have seen an “open door”, and thus a ready home to re-occupy, in us.

He argues that they have indeed done so.

Pastor Cahn makes the case that the ancient gods were initially, in essence, put on the defensive, as the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) recounts: first by Yahweh, and by the introduction of monotheism and the revelation of the Ten

Commandments; and then, that they were vanquished altogether and sent into outer darkness, by the arrival of the being whom he sees as the Messiah, Yeshua.

One might right away resist such a phrasing; what do you mean, “the gods”? But Cahn is both careful and accurate in his translations and his tracing of four millennia of religious history through a set of phrases.

Cahn points out that the Hebrew Bible refers to what in Hebrew is rendered shedim or “negative spirits” (in modern Hebrew, this word means “ghosts”). Cahn points out that these spirits, powers, or principalities were worshipped in the pagan world in many guises — from the fertility god Baal; to the sexuality goddess Astarte (also known as Ashtaroth or Asherah); to the destructive idol Moloch (or Malek). He rightly points out that the ancient world was everywhere consecrated to these dark or lower entities, and that worshippers went to the point of sacrificing their own children to propitiate these forces. He correctly reflects the central narrative of the tribes of Israel as alternately embracing Yahweh and his Ten Commandments and ethical covenant, and finding it all too taxing, and thus falling away to whore after these pagan gods. He notes that the gods of the Old Testament world descended in updated guise into Greco-Roman life, taking on new names: Zeus, Diana, and so on.

He notes that the Septuagint, the early Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, rendered shedim as daimones. This word is rendered also as “spirit personifications”; we receive this word in English today as “demons.”

Having traced the lineage of pagan worship and pagan forces, Cahn makes the case that they were never overcome by the West’s embrace of Christianity; but rather that they were pushed to the margins of Western civilization; weakened by our covenant with Yahweh, or with Jesus, depending on whom we are.

He argues that these negative but potentially powerful forces have been dormant for two millennia by virtue of the Western Judeo-Christian covenant. And that they have now taken this opportunity, of our turning away from God, and they have returned.

We, thus, are the house that has been cleaned — by the covenant with the Judeo-Christian commitment. But we subsequently abandoned the house, he maintains, and left it vulnerable; open, for negative energies to re-enter.

Though it is unfashionable now to talk about our Judeo-Christian founding and heritage in the West, it should not be. This legacy is simply an historical fact. I do not think one needs to be dismissive of or insulting to Buddhism or Islam (which is also part of the Judeo-Christian lineage, but that’s another story) or Jainism or Shintoism, to acknowledge the fact that the West’s civilization for the past two millennia has been a Judeo-Christian one, and that our Founders in this nation, though rightly establishing religious freedom, believed that they were consecrating a nation in alignment with the will of God as they understood Him.

Cahn cites Puritan minister Jonathan Winthrop in warning that America’s state of being blessed by God will last only as long as we hold up our end of the covenant.

While it is easy to dismiss Pastor Cahn’s theory as wacky and fanatical, I have reluctantly come to believe that his central premise may be right. (pp. 145-147)

Very interesting, to say the least! Secondly, there is what Rod Dreher said in his new book Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age (Hodder & Stoughton, 2024). In it, he has a chapter on the occult, and mentions one scholarly fellow, Jonah, who had been heavily involved in the world of the occult before converting to Orthodox Christianity. In another chapter, Dreher says this:

[I]t stunned me to read the persuasive case that best-selling Christian writer and pastor Jonathan Cahn makes that ancient Sumerian gods — Baal, Ishtar, and Moloch — have returned and are asserting their dark power over the post-Christian world. As a Messianic Jewish cleric and a megachurch pastor, Cahn’s world is very different from the Christian headspace inhabited by Orthodox Christians such as Jonah and me. But when I put Cahn’s argument to him, Jonah didn’t hesitate to affirm it as “absolutely correct.” We are sailing in deep waters here… (p. 135)

I simply note these two well-respected intellectuals who have found much in Cahn’s book that seems to ring true – not only in terms of the biblical message, but what we find happening throughout the West today. Indeed, often when folks ask me what is wrong with the world today, I say I can go through a whole list of political, cultural, moral and ideological issues. But behind all of this, there are spiritual issues.

There IS a spiritual war going on, and perhaps Chan is really on to something here. But read the book for yourself and see what you think.

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Republished with thanks to CultureWatch. Image courtesy of Adobe.