We like to think we read the Bible exactly as it was written. We open the text, read the words, and assume our modern brains are perfectly capturing the original intent of the authors. But the truth is, most modern Christians read the Bible like functional atheists.

We have inherited a post-modern, materialistic worldview. Because of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, we assume the physical, observable world is all that really matters. We obsess over the search for “the Historical Jesus.” We treat the Bible as if its only value lies in what can be historically known as fact. We dig for archaeological proof of every king and battle, assuming that if we can just prove the physical events happened, we have successfully defended the faith.

We treat the Bible like a textbook we can simply extract a religion from. But the ancient reality is the exact opposite. Religion is not derived from a text. The text derives from a real, lived, supernatural experience of God that was handed down through ritual, art, and community.

But reducing the biblical texts to mere historical data strips the Scriptures of their power. The biblical authors didn’t write secular history books. They wrote theological history. They weren’t just recording what happened on the ground; they were revealing the cosmic realities happening in the unseen realm. The events that take place in the spiritual and physical realms often have consequences in both, and that is something Scripture itself reveals. Yet we don’t even realize it.

By filtering the Bible through the limits of modern historical criticism, we reduce a cosmic, supernatural revelation into a dry list of political events and moral fables. When we encounter the supernatural elements of the Bible, we often treat them as embarrassing ancient superstitions. To make the Scriptures more palatable and accessible to a scientific age, we actively strip them of their supernatural meaning.

We reduce miracles to simple metaphors. We reduce demons to primitive diagnoses of mental illness. We reduce cosmic warfare to localized human politics. For instance, when the Apostle Paul writes about the “rulers of this age” who are “being brought to nothing” (1 Cor 2:6), modern readers almost universally assume he’s talking about corrupt human politicians like Caesar or Pilate. But Paul isn’t talking about people; he’s talking about the fallen spiritual entities governing the pagan world. When we import these materialistic presuppositions into the text, we blind ourselves to the actual story the biblical authors were telling.

If we want to understand the cosmic scope of God’s story of salvation, we have to dismantle our own modern views and adopt the worldview of the Gospel writers. We have to read the Bible like an ancient.

The worldview of the Apostles was heavily shaped by Second Temple Jewish literature, particularly books like 1 Enoch and Jubilees. These texts provided the early Church with their primary theological framework for understanding the origin and proliferation of evil.

In the modern West, we usually blame all the evil in the world on a single event: Adam and Eve eating the fruit in Eden. But the ancient Jewish and early Christian worldview recognized three distinct falls. The most devastating of these, which resulted in the overwhelming demonic reality of the ancient world, is detailed in 1 Enoch.

The main importance of 1 Enoch lies in its expansion on the strange narrative found in Genesis 6. It details how a group of high-ranking angels, known as the Watchers, rebelled against God. They descended to earth, took human wives, and produced a race of giant, hybrid offspring known as the Nephilim. Worse, these Watchers taught humanity illicit knowledge, including warfare, sorcery, and occult practices. The resulting bloodshed and corruption forced God to send the flood to cleanse the earth. When the physical bodies of the Nephilim died in the flood, their disembodied spirits were condemned to roam the earth. These spirits are what the ancient world, and the New Testament, call demons.

The book of Jubilees picks up where 1 Enoch leaves off and explains why these demons are still a problem. After the flood, the chief of these evil spirits (named Mastema) petitions God, asking that some of the demons be allowed to remain free to tempt and test humanity. God allows one tenth of them to remain active on the earth, but only until a specific, appointed day of final judgment.

While these specific texts aren’t part of the canonical Scriptures for most Christians today, they were the theological air the early Church breathed. Early Church Fathers like St. Athenagoras of Athens, St. Justin Martyr, and St. Irenaeus actively utilized the theological frameworks of these books to explain the origin of evil, the demonic world, and the nature of the cosmos.

If we ignore the frameworks these early Christians took for granted, we will fundamentally misunderstand Jesus. To see how much our materialistic blindfold distorts the text, let’s look at two specific examples where modern interpretation completely misses the mark.

Case Study 1: The Conquest of Canaan

When modern readers look at the book of Joshua and God’s command to wipe out the populations of Canaan, they see a localized, ethnic land grab. Through our materialistic lens, it looks like divinely sanctioned genocide. This causes many Christians to stumble, question the goodness of God, or try to explain the text away as ancient political propaganda.

But the ancients didn’t view this as ethnic cleansing. They viewed it as cosmic warfare.

When you read the Greek Old Testament used by the early Church, the target of the Israelite conquest becomes very clear. The Israelites were specifically targeting tribal groups like the Anakim and the Rephaim. The Greek text explicitly translates these groups as the gigantes (giants).

The conquest of Canaan was a targeted extermination campaign against the Nephilim bloodlines, which were the surviving seed of the supernatural rebellion described in Genesis 6. God was purging a supernaturally corrupted threat from the land to protect the lineage of the coming Messiah. He wasn’t acting as a petty tribal warlord settling land disputes. When we strip the supernatural giants out of the story, we turn a divine rescue mission into a human atrocity.

Case Study 2: Jesus and the Demons

We do the exact same thing with the Gospels. When Jesus encounters demons, modern readers often dismiss it as primitive psychology. Even when we accept the demonic presence as real, we tend to treat the demons as generic, spooky ghosts who are just arbitrarily causing trouble in the neighborhood.

But the ancient, correct interpretation is much more specific. The demons in the Gospels know exactly who Jesus is, and they are terrified of a very specific timeline.

When Jesus crosses into Gentile territory in Matthew 8, two possessed men confront Him. Notice exactly what the demonic spirits say: “And behold, they cried out saying, ‘What is there between us and you, Son of God? Did you come here before the time to torment us?’” (Matt 8:29, NRSVue).

The Greek word translated as “time” is kairos. It doesn’t mean time in a general sense. It means a specific, appointed deadline or season. Why are the demons surprised Jesus is there? Why are they complaining about the schedule?

To answer that, we only need to recall the framework of the Watchers we looked at earlier. Remember that according to the tradition preserved in Jubilees, these demons (the disembodied spirits of the dead giants) were granted a temporary lease to remain on the earth and test humanity until the appointed day of final judgment.

The demons knew the schedule. They knew they had a lease on the earth. They’re panicking in Matthew 8 because the Son of God has invaded their territory “before the time” to begin the reclamation of the cosmos. Jesus isn’t just performing random acts of healing. He is a divine warrior triggering the apocalypse for the powers of darkness.

Welcome to the War

We can’t understand the story of salvation if we insist on stripping the supernatural out of it. We must lay down our modern arrogance, stop trying to make the text “accessible,” and submit to the ancient, Spirit-filled mindset of the early Church. Only then does the Bible open up into the brilliant, cosmic rescue mission it truly is.

Welcome to Beyond the Veil: The Cosmic Scope of Salvation. In this series, we will trace the grand narrative of God’s redemptive work from eternity past, through the proliferation of evil in the world, and all the way to the final restoration of the cosmos.

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