Redstone said:

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In light of recent "UFO revelations," this post is an attempt for a framework. Maybe there is a consilience, a general Christian understanding, with useful explanatory power of such phenomenon.

Elohim, God, Logos Incarnate - and then His various, primarily spiritual, creations. Some are embodied spirits, heavily grounded in the material, such as humans. Some are messengers - choir(s) of angels. Some, after rejecting God, are "satans" - accusers. These fallen entities, led by Lucifer / Beelzebub / Satan (the same, according to exorcist Fr. Chad Ripperger), who retains his ability, intelligence, and high rank (just in inverse), can interact with humans .... as do their unfallen spiritual creations, such as our guardian messenger.

Is angel / demon, however, perhaps best thought of as a job description?

Who are the "princes" of Daniel 10?
What is the "court" of Psalm 82?
God presides in the great assembly; he gives judgment among the "gods" ... "I said, `You are "gods"; you are all sons of the Most High.' But you will die like mere men; you will fall like every other ruler." (NIV)

Are these simply angels?

"Aliens" "Bigfoot" "Fairies," ect. - may be best understood as "inter-dimensional" spiritual creations ... grounded in the material, and / or capable of embodiment and human interaction, and / or "trickster entities" that fell after rejecting God, perhaps like the "machine elves" described by many DMT-induced testimonies.

The point is that God exists, a holy Spirit, and he has created various spirits, including humans. Is God / Angel / Demon, the types of spirits we hear most about, only the beginning of a longer list of spirit types?

This consilience I have in mind is the close textual analysis of Protestant scholarship - Michael Heiser, a pastor and ancient languages specialist - and the Apostolic (Catholic / Orthodox) mystical tradition.

Heiser (start with The Unseen Realm, Angels book and Demons book are shorter supplements)
- Summary
a. https://www.docdroid.net/mZZGrH3/elohim-pdf
b. https://www.logos.com/grow/who-are-elohim
His definition of the term "elohim" is above. It is Biblical and very useful.
- Books
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00JX3934O/allbooks?ingress=0&visitId=84583044-c6b9-437b-b568-3acd92f64f62&store_ref=ap_rdr&ref_=ap_rdr

A summary of the Apostolic, touching on these subjects
- https://texags.com/forums/15/topics/3166505

The visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich (will at some point be an officially declared saint):
I am a believer in her sanctity and honesty, although the Catholic Church cannot take a position on her writings, because as a bedridden mystic, with the wounds of Christ, she used a scribe. The visions matter here to better understand Genesis (Adam and Eve, spiritual creations, hurled to earth after sin - then the "first man" of the Sacraments, priest, and founder of Jerusalem, and certainly not the first human or, hundreds of thousands of years back, one of the various hominids).
- https://angelicopress.org/emmerich

Orthodox priest and American convert Fr. Seraphim Rose, who warned against spiritual deceptions, including "alien contact" -
https://www.amazon.com/Books-Seraphim-Rose/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3ASeraphim+Rose

This is not to suggest that aliens don't exist .... I'm a believer, in this context.

There is much to explore in future posts, such as "abductions" that have been stopped through an appeal to Christ.

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Great post! Very thought-provoking!

Redstone said:

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Is angel / demon, however, perhaps best thought of as a job description?

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I believe so. May we extend that to Satan too? God created Satan and Satan is doing exactly what God created him to do. The same is true of "fallen" angels and demons. They ALL serve God's purpose of "enlightening" mankind on the subject of evil.

Yes, "satan" means accuser and Heiser details how it can be plural.

Lucifer, therefore, an angelic name, is the primary accuser, or Satan.

As for the UFO phenomenon, I have no personal or direct evidence that we are being visited or monitored by extraterrestrials. However, I suspect that it is true - in a way.

What I believe may be happening is that dark forces (Ephesians 6:12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places) are appearing in the sky as "aliens" in order to deceive us and that the anti-Christ will come to us in the form of an alien.

Luke 21:11
There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.

Luke 21:25
And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth distress of nations in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves

Joel 2:30
And I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke.

Redstone said:

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Yes, "satan" means accuser and Heiser details how it can be plural.

Lucifer, therefore, an angelic name, is the primary accuser, or Satan.

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There is an argument that Lucifer and Satan aren't the same. That argument is based on John 6:44

You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

Lucifer was NOT a "murderer" from the beginning.

However, I believe it's possible that Lucifer was transformed into Satan and in that instant, he became a murderer and so I am inclined to believe that Lucier and Satan are the same.

Fr. Ripperger (recommend his YouTube) has detailed how God punishes demons by using their evils to prompt people to turn from sin.

"Demon" is, its reasonable to speculate, an umbrella term - especially if there were multiple "falls," which Heiser's close textual analysis states regarding 2nd Temple era religious thought.

Powers of the air, one quite real spiritual realm that is not heaven or hell.

IMO, "Astral Projection" and "Remote Viewing" have been empirically verified as legitimate. Weak, but beyond random. This is carefully detailed across episodes of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World podcast, with many primary sources.

The danger is these take humans to the domain of "powers of the air," and this is not spiritually permitted.

Also, IMO "Machine Elves" are fallen elohims, and they can be empirically verified (multiple people, same "trip," descriptions very similar) …. group setting, subjective experiences described in ways that point to an objective reality.

Redstone said:

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Fr. Ripperger (recommend his YouTube) has detailed how God punishes demons by using their evils to prompt people to turn from sin.

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I think that's a lot of what this life is about. We are separated from God, at least partially, in order that we can all experience evil so that we can learn that following God is the only way to live.

I also believe that many will not learn this fact in life and so will NOT follow Christ in this life and so their soul will require significant refinement in the "Lake of Fire", a symbolic image that describes an after-death process for the wicked, or so I understand.

As for Satan, "fallen" angels, and demons, I believe they are doing exactly what God intended them to do and that they too will be refined and saved by Jesus. Why? Because it is God's will and because God is love, mercy, and Jesus is CAPABLE of saving everyone! What greater testament to the greatness of God can there be than Satan bowing before and worshipping God the Father with total love and devotion?

Exorcists tell us that demons are forced to remember their sin and acknowledge Christ in various ways.

All "entities" should be tested. Some are good and some less so. The Bible states to do it.

Over 3 posts, I'd like to present some selections and points from Heiser's 3 books
Angels, Demons, The Unseen Realm

Elohims - "spirit beings" .....


Angels book -

"Most Christians will refer to them as angels, but, as we'll learn, that's just one of many terms the Bible uses for supernatural beings who serve him."

"In our discussion of Old Testament angelology, I'll draw your attention to the plural language of Genesis 1:26 ("let us make humankind in our image," LEB). That language isn't a cryptic reference to the Trinity. God is speaking to his heavenly host."

There are terms that describe
nature (what the members of the heavenly host are or are like)
status (hierarchical rank with respect to God and each other)
function (what members of the heavenly host do)

"The Dead Sea Scrolls contain a number of references to the divine council of the Hebrew Bible. These references utilize the same terminology for the council we surveyed in chapter 1 - a council of elohim or elim.....The word elohim occurs over five hundred times in the scrolls, seventy of which are semantically plural. These instances are not references to idols. It's evident that the Qumran authors, in concert with the Hebrew Bible, considered them spirit beings based on phrases like 'spirits of the gods' (ruhot elohim) and "spirits of the living gods (ruhot elohim hayyim)" ... To summarize our findings, the vocabulary of Second Temple Jewish literature is quite consistent with that of the Hebrew Bible, even in translation. Despite this consistency, Second Temple Jewish angelology beyond the Old Testament in imaginative ways."

"It should be apparent that Second Temple angelology bears a strong resemblance to the Old Testament theology of the heavenly host."

"As we saw earlier, 'angel' is a generic term in the New Testament for heavenly beings loyal to God."

Demons book -

"An Old Testament theology of the powers of darkness connects sinister spiritual beings with death, the relm of the dead, and an ongoing assault on the harmony, order, and well-being the good God of all the earth desired in the world he had created for humankind."

As with angels, the New Testament provided more context of understanding spirit beings, but an umbrella term of common usage, when the texts are quite a bit more complex, remains present.....

A note from Christian scholar John Walton:
"No general term for 'demons' exists in any of the major cultures of the ancient Near East or in the Hebrew Bible. They are generally considered one of the categories of 'spirit beings' (along with gods and ghosts). The term demons has had a checkered history; in today's theological usage the term denotes beings, often fallen angels, who are intrinsically evil and who do the bidding of their master, Stan. This definition, however, only became commonplace after the Hebrew Bible was complete."

ELOHIM
"I've written extensively on this term and how the biblical writers affirmed the existence of multiple elohim - that is, a populated spiritual world. Since the biblical writers identify a range of entities as elohim that they explicitly differentiate from Yahweh and emphasize as lesser beings than Yahweh, it is clear that the term elohim is not a label for only Supreme Being."

Ontology -
"Ontology refers to what a thing is, a thing's nature. By definition, an evil spirit is a spirit.....for evil spirits are members of God's heavenly host who have chosen to rebel against his will. Passages such as 1 Kings 22:19-23 make it clear that "the members of God's heavenly host are spirits (Hebrew: ruhot; singular: ruah) - entities that, by nature, are not embodied, at least in the sense of our human experience of being physical in form."

Heiser quotes himself -
"A biblical writer would use elohim to label any entity that is not embodied by nature and is a member of the spiritual realm. This 'otherworldliness' is an attribute all residents of the spiritual world possess. Every member of the spiritual world can be thought of as elohim since the term tells us where an entity belongs in terms of its nature."

In reading Heiser's close textual analysis - was there more than one "fall," and the essential Mesopotamian context of some of the most puzzling passages in Scripture - it's not as simple as "angels," or messengers, or the umbrella term, demons....

"....the notion of hostile divine princes (i.e., evil territorial spirits) in Daniel 10 derives from the allotment of the nations in Deuteronomy 32:8-9 to lesser elohim...."
"As we proceed, we will will learn how the mass of terms we discussed were muddled and merged by Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible in the Septuagint, the source for most of the passages from the New Testament quoted by its authors."

A brief summary of long discussions of Watchers -
"The implication is that the preflood apkallu that were completely divine correspond to the sons of God of Genesis 6:1-4 who cohabit with human women. As has been noted in several places in our own study, the Second Temple Jewish equivalent of the rebellious sons of God were the Watchers. It is significant that Akkadian texts associated with the apkallu provide an unmistakable, unambiguous correlation between the apkallu and the Watchers."

So - demons are fallen angels?

"This notion is ubiquitous in popular Christian books and preaching. It is both on target and misguided. The statement fails to account for a number of items in the biblical text and the development of biblical thought about the powers of darkness.......in the Old Testament 'angel' is a functional, not an ontological, term. It is, in effect, a job description. This circumstance changes in the Second Temple period and the New Testament, where 'angel' is a term used predominately to distinguish loyal supernatural beings from evil, rebellious ones. the devil (Satan) can have 'angels' on his side (Matt. 25:41; Rev 12:9) ..."

A summary - "Rebellion in the divine council by a group of deities ... "

The Unseen Realm - 380 pages of dense, scholarly textual analysis.

Five sentences that summarize Heiser's approach:
- Let the Bible be what it is, and be open to the notion that what it says about the unseen realm might just be real.
- The context of the Bible needs to make sense in its own context, whether or not it makes sense in ours.
- How the biblical writers tie passages together for interpretation should guide our own interpretation of the Bible.
- How the New Testament writers repurpose the Old Testament is critical for biblical interpretation.
- Metaphorical meaning isn't "less real" than literal meaning (however that's defined).

"The divine transgressions of Genesis 3 and 6 are part of a theological prelude that frames the rest of the Bible....core components of the supernatural worldview of ancient Israelites and the Jewish community in which Christianity was born."

This worldview includes the collisions of the human world and the unseen realms.

For example, in future posts, speculation about historical events such as the Bronze Age Collapse, amid such passages as Duet 3:1-11, the demise of the giant Og, last of the Rephaim...

"In the view of the biblical writers, Israel is at war with enemies spawned by rival divine beings."

And much else - deep connections of Old and New Testament ... for example, why did Paul want to go to Spain so badly?
"In Paul's day, Spain was where Tarshish was......so that the disinheritance at Babel would be reversed."

M1Buckeye said:

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Redstone said:

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Is angel / demon, however, perhaps best thought of as a job description?

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I believe so. May we extend that to Satan too? God created Satan and Satan is doing exactly what God created him to do. The same is true of "fallen" angels and demons. They ALL serve God's purpose of "enlightening" mankind on the subject of evil.

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If they're all just working for the man then Satan and Demons are getting a bad rap. With proper representation I could possibly even get out of the bad contract I made, although good luck finding an impartial judge I guess.

After reviewing the above-detailed explanations of elohims, especially from Heiser's writings linked in the OP -

A metaphysical reality - something like "powers of the air" - that can also materialize has IMO decent explanatory power ( excellent recurring guest Paul Sinclair has his latest update here - https://theunexplained.tv/episodes/edition-731-tim-burchettpaul-sinclair alongside a U.S. Rep )

Meaning, inter-dimensional.

This was also the conclusion - though not necessarily in the context of Christianity - of a former firm materialist, Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, who ventured into the spiritual seeking answers.

From his biography, The Believer, by NY Times reporter and big breaker of news, Ralph Blumenthal:

Quote:

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Quote:
Now Mack told the conferees at MIT why he thought the abduction phenomenon was not a psychiatric phenomenon, although that was most people's snap assumption, including, at first, his own. But any explanation, he said, had to account for five elements: (1) consistency of the reports, (2) physical signs like scars and witness-backed reports of actual absence for a time, (3) accounts from children too young for delusional psychiatric syndromes, (4) an association with witnessed UFOs, and (5) the lack of any consistent psychopathology among abductees.

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They didn't act like a collective disorder. The experiences were too personal.....

I would add, how many "abductions" have been stopped by calling upon Christ? We certainly do have testimonies of that.....

Have posted before...here it is again:

94chem said:

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Have posted before...here it is again:

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Both Bible believing Christians
Chuck Missler is awesome because he ties very deep scientific matters and fields with the Bible.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUwtE9Hi3BnpxFCcaJGDXQ9h4Ke5fQCR8

Guy Malone is a Christian as well and talks about the nefarious nature of experiencers encounters with "aliens"

I again recommend Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World podcast. The archives have excellent discussions of the UAP phenomenon, from the "faith and reason" perspective, with detailed research and high-quality analysis. He is a Catholic apologist that interviews a wide variety of people.

(An interesting aside - UAP now means "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena" and not "aerial," given the many accounts we have concerning water)

https://sqpn.com/2023/06/ufo-whistleblower-revelations/

Related - a good paper concerning UAPs and faith:
https://philpapers.org/archive/MCIHDW.pdf