Intertestamental Developments

The Jewish worldview underwent a significant transformation during the period between the Old and the New Testaments. Since the time of the exodus, the Jews had closely associated the truthfulness of their belief in Yahweh’s supremacy with their political successes. Yahweh’s lordship over Israel and over the world was, for them, most clearly evidenced by the fact that they had won, and preserved, an independent status as a nation. When they were taken into captivity and oppressed by heathen kings, therefore, this caused a crisis of faith for them. It seemed to imply that Yahweh was not, in fact, the sovereign Lord over the earth.

Still, so long as there was hope that Israel would someday regain its independence, Israel’s national misfortunes could be explained as being the result of their own temporary infidelity to Yahweh. Their misfortunes were not, therefore, an indictment of their belief in Yahweh’s supremacy so much as they were an indictment of themselves. The people believed that as soon as they as a nation repented of their sin and turned back to the Lord, the Lord would prove faithful and give them back the Promised Land.2

After several hundred years of painful oppression under pagan authorities, however, this chastisement theology began to wear thin. When this oppression turned to overt bloody persecution under Antiochus IV, many Jews abandoned this theology. An increasing number of Jews in the third and second centuries B.C. began to believe that what was happening to them could not be all their fault, and thus it could not all be Yahweh’s disciplining will.

But if it was not God’s will that was bringing about the disasters they were experiencing, whose will was it? To answer this question, some Jews of this period turned with fresh urgency to the warfare motifs found throughout their Scriptures.

If ever there was a time when it seemed that the raging seas, Leviathan, Satan and demons were having their way with Israel, and with the entire world, this was the time. Not surprisingly, then, we find in this oppressive, painful environment an intensification of the warfare themes of the Hebrew Bible. The conviction that the cosmos is populated with good and evil spiritual beings and that the earth is caught in the crossfire of their conflict became centrally important for many Jews during this intertestamental period. So too, the apocalyptic hope that Yahweh would soon vanquish Leviathan (or some parallel cosmic figure) and all its cohorts grew in intensity during this period.

This intensification of Old Testament themes, this incredible expansion of and centralization of the Old Testament ideas about the lesser gods and Yahweh’s conflicts with them, constitutes what has come to be called the apocalyptic worldview. It is against the backdrop of this world-view that we must read the New Testament if we are to understand it properly.

Apocalyptic thought and Zoroastrianism. Admittedly, the above claim that it was principally to the Old Testament that the Jews of this period turned to answer the crisis created by their oppression, and thus that it is primarily the Old Testament that lies behind apocalyptic thought, is by no means undisputed. To the contrary, the issues surrounding the origin and development of apocalypticism are many, and many of them are hotly contested. Before proceeding further, then, we do well to pause briefly to address several of the more important of these issues.3

The problems associated with the study of Jewish apocalyptic thought begin with the controversy surrounding the very definition of “apocalyptic.”4 While attempts to arrive at a generally accepted definition have proved notoriously futile, it is at least widely agreed that it is important to distinguish among three distinct but frequently confused categories: “apocalypse” as a literary category, “apocalyptic eschatology” as a theological category, and “apocalypticism” as a comprehensive worldview.5 The apocalyptic worldview includes the literary and theological apocalyptic elements, but the converse is not always true. It is principally the worldview that presently concerns us.

While articulating precisely what constitutes this worldview has proved difficult, scholars agree widely on several general characteristics. Among these are the use of pseudepigraphy; the dividing up of history into distinct periods (ages), often in a loosely deterministic fashion; an intensified interest in angels and demons; a concentration on heavenly journeys or visions; a belief in an ultimate resurrection and final judgment, often construed as impending; and perhaps most fundamentally, and for our purposes most importantly, an intense conviction that the world is engulfed in a cosmic struggle between good and evil. Apocalyptic thought considers evil more a structural characteristic of a war-torn cosmos than a feature of human decision-making.

Gabriele Boccaccini expresses the centrality of this last feature well when he writes concerning the Jewish apocalyptic tradition:

As we shall see shortly, this “generative idea” lies at the foundation of the New Testament’s own conception of the world.

A second set of issues surrounds the question of the extent to which the Jewish apocalyptic worldview of the intertestamental period is an outgrowth of Persian Zoroastrianism (and perhaps other pagan influences), or the extent to which it is an outgrowth of the Old Testament’s own warfare worldview.7 Since the time of Julius Wellhausen (mid-nineteenth century) up to the recent past, critical scholars have tended strongly toward the former. Indeed, until relatively recent times, it was common to find Jewish apocalyptic thought characterized in a decidedly negative fashion as a sort of hybrid compromise between the supposed “pure” (viz., exclusivistic) monotheism of the prophetic period on the one hand and Zoroastrian dualism on the other.8

In the last several decades, however, scholars have been increasingly emphasizing the Old Testament as the primary background for Jewish apocalypticism. Gerhard von Rad and others have attempted to argue that the Jewish wisdom tradition supplied the original soil on which apocalyptic thought was eventually to flourish.9 Even more influentially, however, scholars such as F. M. Cross, H. H. Rowley and especially P. D. Hanson have made strong cases for seeing apocalyptic thought as firmly rooted in the Old Testament’s prophetic tradition.10 The key to understanding the development of apocalyptic thought, in this view, is found in the proto-apocalyptic passages of the Old Testament prophets, such as Isaiah 24—27, Ezekiel 38—39, and Zechariah 5—6 and 9—14.11

While conceding that the question of Persian (Zoroastrian) influence upon Jewish apocalyptic thought remains open, a majority of scholars today concur that it is, at best, merely one of a number of possible influences, all of which must be viewed as secondary to the Old Testament traditions themselves. Even those who continue to defend the primacy of a Zoroastrian influence agree widely that the claims of earlier proponents of wholesale borrowing were excessive and untenable.12

At least three factors have led to the demise of the strong Zoroastrian influence position. First, as was the case generally with the history-of-religions school, the supposed parallels between Zoroastrianism and Judeo-Christian thought were inconclusive upon further analysis. Indeed, as Edwin Yamauchi and others have demonstrated, each of the “parallels” can be more easily accounted for by reference to the Old Testament itself.13

Even worse for this once-dominant thesis, however, is that those Zoroastrian texts most frequently appealed to as providing strong parallels with Judaism and Christianity were demonstrably written or redacted after the period of Persian rule over Israel.14 Further, a fairly strong case can be made for the contention that at least some of those texts (such as Job) that are supposedly most indebted to Persian influence were written before the period of Persian rule over Israel.15

Finally, and perhaps most decisively, despite shared features, the perspectives on God and Satan found in Zoroastrianism and the Judeo-Christian tradition are, on closer examination, actually significantly different from one another. Most fundamentally, while it is debated whether Zoroastrianism was thoroughly dualistic at the time of Israel’s captivity, it was certainly tending in this direction.16 But Judaism, even in its most extreme apocalyptic versions, remained within the parameters of “creational monotheism.” While Satan (or, outside the canon, sometimes a parallel figure) was certainly acknowledged to have a great deal of control over this present fallen world, the power he wielded was always unambiguously understood to be a power that was given him by God, his Creator. In this sense, as Yamauchi argues, Satan differs significantly from “the primordial Ahriman, who was equal in power to Ohrmazd.”17

In other words, the dualism of the Bible is a free will dualism, not a metaphysical dualism. It is there only because of how various free beings have exercised their free will. More precisely, it is there because (1) God chose to create a quasi-democratic cosmos in which dualism could result; and (2) some of these free beings whom God created (both human and angelic) have chosen to misuse their divine gift and are thus now freely existing in a state of rebellion.

In any event, the great difference of perspectives here makes it reasonable to conclude that if Zoroastrianism influenced Judaism at all, it was only in a very general, “atmospheric” way. Theologically speaking, perhaps in the progress of revelation the Lord providentially used Israel’s captivity, and thus used Persian Zoroastrianism, to heighten their awareness of the scope of Satan’s power and activity in the world. But any claim to a more significant influence than this is simply unwarranted.

The fall of the Watcher angels. Hence it was primarily from the Old Testament that the Jews of the intertestamental period developed their particular intensified convictions concerning cosmic spiritual warfare. This is not to minimize the radical newness of apocalyptic thought, however, for this intensification was by no means insignificant. To the contrary, the radical ideas about cosmic conflict that grew out of the intense, prolonged experience of evil these Jews were suffering went far beyond anything depicted in the Old Testament.18

In apocalyptic thought, the relatively opaque ideas about free gods (angels) we find in the Old Testament erupt in an explosion of speculations about the vast numbers, particular names, individual natures, personal histories and the particular battles of all these various intermediary beings.19 Undoubtedly, the most important example of this sort of speculative development is the use Jews made of the story of the fallen “sons of God” in Genesis 6 during this time.

This story, usually referred to as “the Watcher tradition,” occurs in a number of different forms, but in outline it runs as follows.20 The Lord had originally entrusted various angels with the responsibility of watching over humans, who in turn were assigned the task of watching over the earth. These angels, the original “sons of God,” were to be guardians and educators of humankind, instructing them in the ways of God and giving them useful advice in making tools, working the land, building structures and so on.21

Unfortunately, however, many of these exalted spiritual beings succumbed to lust for beautiful earthly women (or, in some accounts, to pride or envy) and then abused the divine authority they had originally been given. For example, instead of providing moral instruction, these (now rebel) angels instructed humankind in demonic magic; instead of teaching useful crafts, they taught humans how to fashion weapons of war to be used against each another.

Moreover, according to the Watcher tradition (as in the Genesis account), these rebel angelic beings attained the pinnacle of evil (or, in some accounts, the original act of evil) when they took human form and copulated with human women (“the daughters of men,” Gen 6:4; see chapter four above). As in Genesis, the offspring of these hybrid unions were believed to be mutant giants (Nephilim) whose own offspring, according to some Watcher accounts, were mutant spiritual beings (demons).22 While the Watcher angels and Nephilim were generally believed to have been defeated by Yahweh’s angels, according to many sources, their demon offspring still populate the earth. They possess people, incite others to violence and deceit, and generally afflict the world with famines and disease.

The central thrust of the whole Watcher story line is clearly that when heavenly beings pervert their God-given authority, everything under them (including the rest of creation) begins to grow perverse as well.23 This is one of the driving themes of the apocalyptic literature written just prior to the time of Christ, and if we give it any credence (such as Jesus and the disciples seem to give it), it has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of evil.

The precarious role of guardian angels. In more specific terms, apocalyptic writers greatly expanded the relatively minor Old Testament portrayal of gods who are given assignments over nations and who are associated with certain natural phenomena. Indeed, the general thrust of this literature is to paint a picture of Yahweh’s authority as being, in almost every respect, mediated by morally responsible angels.

For example, the book of Jubilees catalogs the “spirits which serve before [God]” by referring to angels who are variously given authority over fire, winds, clouds, darkness, snow, hail, frost, thunder and lightning, cold and heat. Others are put in charge of autumn, summer, winter and spring, while still others are charged with guarding over “all of the spirits of [God’s] creatures which are in the heavens and on the earth.”24 The Testament of Adam adds to this list angels who are variously given authority over creeping animals, birds, fish, the atmosphere, rain, and even over the sun, moon and stars.25

The list could easily be expanded,26 but the point is already clear: Everything under God’s authority is also under some other “god’s” authority. As Wink notes, in this worldview “every species and thing has its angel.”27 For apocalyptic writers, this meant that the divine governance of the universe was more precarious than had been previously thought. For if and when these guardian angels decide to turn evil, the authority and responsibility given to them is not (cannot be?) immediately retracted. As is the case with human parents and their children, when these angels fall, everything they are guardians of suffers accordingly. For these writers, the explanation for how God’s good creation could be perverted on a cosmic scale is found in this “angelic variable.” The blame for the evil within the cosmos is understood to land squarely on these intermediary beings and on the humans who align themselves with them.

This is not to suggest that apocalyptic writers held to anything like a uniform and consistently worked out view of angelic and human freedom as a means of accounting for this creaturely moral responsibility. To the contrary, while some of these writings are certainly explicit and emphatic in their understanding of creaturely freedom, others are decidedly deterministic.28 The deterministic strand in apocalyptic thought has tended to receive the greater emphasis in the scholarly literature, but there are some indications that this is changing. For example, according to A. E. Sekki strict determinism is relatively rare even in the Qumran literature, which scholars frequently regard as displaying the most intense determinism of any writings of the period. The assumption that the Qumran community was deterministic in its outlook, Sekki has convincingly argued, is based on a mistaken identification of the “two spirits” with the “two angels” tradition found in the Manual of Discipline (1QS 3.13—4.26).29

If Sekki is correct, it is likely that the strand of intertestamental literature that emphasized free will has not been given its due. As E. H. Merrill and a number of other scholars have argued, it is clear that there was a wide variety of opinions on the matter of free will and determinism in this period, and thus a wide variety of expressions to this effect in the literature.30 In my opinion, the ferment generated by the intensified warfare paradigm produced a variety of tensive perspectives that were just beginning to be worked out in this transitional period. This point must caution us in trying to draw too much out of this literature as background for the New Testament.

However these various authors landed on the free will-determinism issue, they all share the general perception that something has gone seriously wrong with the cosmos. Indeed, to put it in this fashion significantly understates their general view. Here we come to perhaps the most important modification these authors made to Old Testament themes.

These authors intensified the relatively minor Old Testament concept of Yahweh engaging in battle against opposing forces to preserve order in the world to the point that now Yahweh must do battle against these forces in order to rescue the world. In other words, if Old Testament authors saw Leviathan as threatening the earth, these authors sometimes saw this cosmic beast as having already devoured it. In their view, therefore, what was now needed was not so much protection from Leviathan but deliverance out of the belly of Leviathan itself.

These Jews, writing out of their own intense experience of evil, came to the remarkable conclusion that in a significant sense the battle between Yahweh and opposing hostile forces for the world had been, at least temporarily, lost by Yahweh. They were certain that Yahweh would ultimately (and soon) reclaim his cosmos, vanquish his foes and reinstate himself on his rightful throne. In this ultimate eschatological sense, Yahweh could yet be considered Lord over the creation. But in this “present age,” their conviction was that “Satan had stolen the world,” as James Kallas describes it, and thus that the creation had gone “berserk.”31

In this “modified dualism,” as William F. Albright appropriately labels it,32 the highest mediating agent of Yahweh had gone bad, abused his incredible God-given authority, taken the entire world hostage, and therefore set himself up as the illegitimate god of the present age. This spelled disaster for the cosmos.33

Fundamentally, it meant that the mediating angelic authority structure that Yahweh had set up at creation had gone bad at the very top. Hence everything underneath this highest authority, everything both in the heavens and on earth, had been adversely affected. Vast multitudes of powerful angels, having been given authority over various aspects of creation (or lesser angels), could now use this authority to wage war against God and against his people. Not all the angels fell, but in the minds of these writers, a great many of them did. Demons, sometimes portrayed as mutant offspring of the Nephilim but other times portrayed as fallen angels themselves, could now freely infest this satanically governed world and work all manner of evil in it. What was to have been a godly council of heaven and a godly army for the Lord had turned itself into a fierce rebel battalion that fought against God, and did so in large part by terrorizing the earth and holding its inhabitants captive.

For these apocalypticists, then, it was no wonder that Yahweh’s lordship was not manifested in Israel’s political fortune. Nor was it any great mystery why God’s people were now undergoing such vicious persecution. Indeed, to these writers it was no wonder that the entire creation looked like a diabolical war zone. In their view, that was precisely what it was.

Jesus’ View of the Satanic Army

On the reckoning of the majority of contemporary New Testament scholars, it is primarily against this apocalyptic background that we are to understand the ministry of Jesus and the early church.34 Jesus’ teaching, his exorcisms, his healings and other miracles, as well as his work on the cross, all remain somewhat incoherent and unrelated to one another until we interpret them within this apocalyptic context: in other words, until we interpret them as acts of war. When this hermeneutical step is made, however, Jesus’ ministry forms a coherent whole. The remainder of this chapter, as well as the following two chapters, seeks to demonstrate this coherence.

Satan’s rule. As in apocalyptic thought, the assumption that undergirds Jesus’ entire ministry is the view that Satan has illegitimately seized the world and thus now exercises a controlling influence over it. Three times the Jesus of John’s Gospel refers to Satan as “the prince of this world” (Jn 12:31; 14:30; 16:11). He here uses the word archon, which was customarily used to denote “the highest official in a city or a region in the Greco-Roman world.”35 Hence Jesus is saying that, concerning ruling powers over the cosmos, this evil ruler is highest.

Thus when Satan claimed that he could give all the “authority” and “glory” of “all the kingdoms of the world” to whomever he wanted—for they all belonged to him—Jesus did not dispute him (Lk 4:5-6). That much Jesus assumed to be true.36 With the apocalyptic worldview of his day, and in agreement with John, Paul and the rest of the New Testament, Jesus assumes that the entire world is “under the power of the evil one” (1 Jn 5:19) and that Satan is “the god of this world” (2 Cor 4:4) and “the ruler of the power of the air” (Eph 2:2). Jesus therefore concedes Satan’s rulership of the earth. What Jesus would not do, however, was to give in to Satan’s temptation and worship this illegitimate tyrant as a way of getting (back) this worldwide kingdom (Lk 4:7-8).37

Also in keeping with the apocalyptic thought of his day, Jesus sees this evil tyrant as mediating and expanding his authority over the world through multitudes of demons that form a vast army under him. Indeed, Jesus intensifies this conviction somewhat in comparison to the apocalyptic views of his day. When Jesus is accused of casting demons out of people by the power of Beelzebul (another name for Satan), he responds by telling his hostile audience, “If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand” (Mk 3:24).38 His response builds upon their shared assumption that the demonic kingdom is unified under one “prince” (archon), who is Satan (Mk 3:22; Mt 9:34; 12:24; Lk 11:15). His point is that this kingdom of evil, like any kingdom, cannot be working at cross-purposes with itself.

Indeed, Jesus adds that one cannot make significant headway in taking back the “property” of this “kingdom” unless one first “ties up the strong man” who oversees the whole operation (Mk 3:27). This, Luke adds, can only be done when “one stronger than he attacks him and overpowers him” and thus “takes away his armor in which he trusted” and then “divides his plunder” (Lk 11:22). This is what Jesus came to do. His whole ministry was about overpowering the “fully armed” strong man who guarded “his property” (Lk 11:21), namely, God’s people and ultimately the entire earth.

Far from illustrating how (per impossible) Satan’s kingdom works against itself, Jesus’ success in casting out demons reveals that his whole ministry was about “tying up the strong man.”39 The whole episode clearly illustrates Jesus’ assumption that Satan and demons form a unified kingdom. They are, as John Newport puts it, a “tight-knit lethal organization” that has a singular focus under a single general, Satan.40

Because of this assumption Jesus can refer to the “devil and his angels,” implying that fallen angels belong to Satan (Mt 25:41). For the same reason Jesus sees demonic activity as being, by extension, the activity of Satan himself (e.g., Lk 13:11-16; cf. Acts 10:38; 2 Cor 12:7), and he therefore judges that everything done against demons is also done against Satan himself.41

For example, when his seventy disciples returned to him after a successful ministry of driving out demons, Jesus proclaims that he saw “Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning” (Lk 10:17-18).42 The “strong man” and his household clearly stand or fall together. They together form a single, relatively organized army, unified in its singular purpose of hindering God’s work and bringing evil and misery to his people. The head of this army, and thus the ultimate principle of all evil, is Satan.43

The pervasive influence of Satan’s army. As the Gospels portray it, this demonic alien army is vast in number and global in influence.44 The sheer number of possessions recorded in the Gospels, the large number of multiple possessions recorded, and the many allusions to vast numbers of people who were possessed reveal the belief that “the number of evil spirits [was] . . . indefinitely large.”45 The world was understood to be saturated with demons, whose destructive influence was all-pervasive. Everything about Jesus’ ministry informs us that he judged every feature of the world that was not in keeping with the Creator’s all-good design as being directly or indirectly the result of this invading presence.

Jesus never once appealed to a mysterious divine will to explain why a person was sick, maimed or deceased, as many Christians today are inclined to do.46 Rather, in every instance, he came against such things as being the byproducts of a creation gone berserk through the evil influence of this Satanic army. Indeed, many times he attributed sicknesses to direct demonic involvement.47

For example, Jesus diagnosed a woman “with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years” as one whom “Satan bound” (Lk 13:11, 16). Far from trying to discern some secret, sovereign, divine blueprint behind her grotesque deformity, Jesus treated her as a casualty of war. The one ultimately responsible for her affliction, Jesus claimed, was the captain of the opposing battalion himself. James Kallas poignantly expresses Jesus’ approach to such matters, in sharp contrast to our typical modern Western approach:

As difficult as Kallas’s assessment may be to accept, from a strictly scriptural perspective he is surely correct. In the minds of the disciples, such things as back deformities and diseases were, as Raymond Brown argues, “directly inflicted by Satan.” So for them, to be “saved” was not simply about “spiritual regeneration” but also about being delivered “from the evil grasp of sickness, from the dominion of Satan.”49

Further, as Brown and others also make clear, Jesus and the Gospel authors sometimes referred to the diseases people had as “scourgings” or “whippings” (mastix; Mk 3:10; 5:29, 34; Lk 7:21).50 The only other times ancient authors used this term to describe physical maladies were to refer to afflictions sent by God upon people.51 In these particular instances, God was punishing people with a scourging. But this clearly cannot be its meaning here, since Jesus sets people free from this scourging.

For example, after the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years touched his cloak, Jesus says to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your scourging [mastix]” (Mk 5:34).52 Jesus was certainly not freeing this woman from a God-intended twelve-year whipping. But whose whipping is Jesus freeing her from? In the total context of Jesus’ ministry, the only other possibility is that he understood himself to be setting this woman (and all like her) free from the whippings of “the strong man,” Satan.

Along the same lines, though Jesus never endorsed the apocalyptic tendency to speculate about the names, ranks and functions of various fallen angels, he does go so far as to rebuke a deaf and mute spirit (Mk 9:25), and Luke describes another exorcism as the driving out of “a demon that was mute” (Lk 11:14).53 There are apparently various kinds of demons within Satan’s army who have differing particular functions in afflicting people.

Elsewhere Jesus does not specify that a demon is causing an infirmity, but his exorcisms have the effect of freeing the person from a physical ailment, clearly showing that it was demonically induced (Mt 9:32-33). Other times the Gospels state that a person is demonized, but then note that Jesus heals the person, without mentioning exorcism (Mt 12:22; cf. 4:24; Lk 7:21). Clearly, the line between healing and exorcism in the Gospels is a fine one.54

Still other times a demon is not specifically mentioned, but Jesus treats the illness as though it were a demon. For example, Jesus rebukes Peter’s mother-in-law’s fever as though it were a demon, or at least demonically induced (Lk 4:39). Indeed, Jesus rebukes a threatening storm in a similar fashion (Lk 8:42; Mk 4:39). Finally, Jesus’ general response to people when they came to him with their ailments was a response of compassion, revealing his conviction that what was afflicting them ought not to be there (Mk 1:41; Mt 9:36; 14:14; 20:34). There was no thought here of pious resignation or of seeking to discover what perfect plan God might have behind the illness. To the contrary, so far as we can discern from the Gospels, Jesus simply viewed these unfortunate people as casualties of war.

Thus the Peter of Luke’s history of the early church can be understood to be reflecting Jesus’ own attitude when he later summarizes Jesus’ ministry by saying that Jesus “went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him” (Acts 10:38). When Jesus healed people, he saw himself as setting them free from the power, and the whippings, of the devil.55

Jesus and the Kingdom of God

It is crucial for us to recognize that Jesus’ view about the rule of Satan and the pervasive influence of his army was not simply a marginal piece of first-century apocalyptic thought that he happened to embrace. It is, rather, the driving force behind everything Jesus says and does. Indeed, Jesus’ concept of “the kingdom of God” is centered on these views. For Jesus, the kingdom of God means abolishing the kingdom of Satan. As Kallas argues:

So too Gustaf Wingren writes:

The “kingdom of God,” as Jesus uses the term, refers to nothing other than his ministry, and the ministry he gave to his disciples, of setting up God’s rule where previously there had been Satan’s rule. If “the kingdom of God” was the central concept of Jesus’ ministry and teaching, as all scholars recognize, then the “kingdom of Satan” was, as a correlary concept, central as well. An increasing number of scholars are also coming to recognize this.58

The kingdom as a warfare concept. While no orthodox first-century Jew or Christian ever doubted that there existed only one Creator, or that this Creator would reign supreme in the eschaton, it seems equally clear that the New Testament authors also never doubted that in this present world the Creator’s will was not the only will that was being carried out. Wills, human and angelic, oppose God, and he must fight against them. The kingdom of God, therefore, was something the New Testament authors prayed for, not something they considered already accomplished (Mt 6:10; Lk 11:2).59 The only way it would be brought about, they understood, was by overthrowing the illegitimate kingdom that was now in place. In this sense, one might say along with John Newport that the New Testament authors, like the apocalyptic authors of their day, held to a “limited dualism.”60

In any event, in New Testament terms the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan are correlative concepts. The former can be understood to be expanding only as the latter is diminishing. This is precisely why healings and exorcisms played such a central role in Jesus’ ministry. “If it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons,” Jesus says, “then the kingdom of God has come to you” (Lk 11:20). To accomplish the one was to accomplish the other.

Susan Garrett correctly summarizes this point: “Every healing, exorcism, or raising of the dead is a loss for Satan and a gain for God.”61 Or, as James Kallas again puts it, “The arrival of the kingdom is simultaneous with, dependent upon, and manifested in the routing of demons.”62 For Jesus, healings and exorcisms clearly did not merely symbolize the kingdom of God—they were the kingdom of God.63 They were not byproducts of the message he proclaimed—they were the message. Warring against Satan and building the kingdom of God are, for Jesus, one and the same activity.64

Among the many ways Jesus’ warfare conception of the kingdom of God is illustrated is the Gospels’ association of Jesus’ pronouncements about the kingdom and his demonstrations of the kingdom. This is a recurring phenomenon throughout the Gospels, but two examples pertaining to the thematic beginnings of Jesus’ ministry in Mark and Luke make the point clear.

In the opening of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus begins his ministry by announcing: “The kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mk 1:15). This is the total content of what Mark tells us Jesus preached. But everything that follows informs us what this kingdom preaching means, and it does so by illustration.

After calling his disciples (vv. 16-20), Jesus amazes the people with the authority of his teaching (vv. 21-22). Immediately, however, a man demonized by an unclean spirit cries out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?” The first-person plural here perhaps indicates that the demon is speaking on behalf of the entire army he is a part of. But he continues in the singular, “I know who you are, the Holy One of God” (vv. 23-24). In contrast to all earthly players in Mark’s narrative, those in the demonic kingdom know who Jesus is and have suspicions about what he has come to earth to do (see v. 34; 3:11).65 He has come to “destroy the works of the devil” (1 Jn 3:8), and the demons know this means their destruction.

Jesus rebukes the demon, telling him to “be silent” (Mk 1:25), literally, “be strangled” (phimoo). After Jesus strangles the demon with his divine authority, the demon throws the man to the ground and leaves him with a shriek (v. 26). This is what the kingdom of God means! Mark then notes that the people were again “amazed” at this “new teaching” and new “authority” (v. 27). The two, we see, go hand in hand.66

Mark then records Jesus’ healing of Peter’s mother-in-law’s fever (vv. 30-31), which Jesus assumed to be demonically induced in the Lukan parallel (Lk 4:38-39). That very evening “the whole city” brought “all who were sick or possessed with demons” to Jesus, and he “cured many” and “cast out many demons” (Mk 1:32-34). The kingdom of God was indeed near.

Next in Mark’s account, Jesus tells his disciples that he wants to go into other villages and “proclaim the message there also” (v. 38). This he proceeds to do, and Mark summarizes his activity by noting, “He went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons” (v. 39). Jesus then heals a man of leprosy (vv. 40-45), followed immediately by an account of Jesus healing a paralytic on the sabbath (2:1-12). After a brief interlude, we find Jesus again healing people, setting crowds of people free from the “scourges” of the enemy (3:10) and driving out evil spirits (3:11-12).67 Several verses later we have Mark’s account of the Beelzebul controversy, in which Jesus presents himself as the one who has come to tie up “the strong man” by the power of God (3:20-30). And we are not yet out of Mark’s third chapter!

This is what the kingdom of God means. The point is hard to miss. Whatever else the rule of God is about, it is about vanquishing the rule of Satan, and thus about setting people free from demons and from the ungodly infirmities they inflict on people.

Luke’s (and Matthew’s) account of Jesus’ ministry begins, quite appropriately, with Jesus confronting the devil in the desert. The cosmic war that has raged throughout the ages has now come to center on one person: Jesus.68 Jesus withstands each temptation, including Satan’s offer of all the kingdoms of the world he had authority over; and the devil, defeated, finally leaves him (Lk 4:1-13).

Unlike all other humans, Jesus did not come under Satan’s power by becoming “a slave to sin” (Jn 8:34). As Jesus states in John, “The ruler of this world . . . has no power over me; but I do as the Father has commanded me” (14:30-31; cf. 8:29). Rather, it is Jesus who has gotten hold of the devil. One stronger than “the strong man” has finally arrived. Having now defeated him in his own life, Jesus could set out to defeat him for the entire cosmos.

In Luke, Jesus launches his mission from his hometown. As in Mark, but in a slightly expanded manner, he begins by announcing that the kingdom of God has arrived in his own person. Standing up in the synagogue, Jesus reads from Isaiah:

After a moment of awkward silence, Jesus adds, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (v. 21). After some dispute, he is driven out of town (vv. 22-30); then, as Luke organizes his material, we begin to see what this proclamation of the kingdom means concretely. As in Mark, Jesus immediately confronts a demon-possessed man in a Capernaum synagogue who cries out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” (v. 34). As in Mark, Jesus strangles the demon and sets the “prisoner” of Satan free (v. 35). Jesus’ exorcism, clearly, demonstrates his application of the Isaiah passage to himself. This is the kind of freedom Jesus is talking about.

Jesus then proceeds to “rebuke” a demonic fever (v. 39), heal multitudes of sick people (v. 40) and cast out multitudes of shrieking demons (v. 41). Shortly thereafter he heals a man of leprosy (5:12-16), a paralytic (5:17-26) and a man with a withered hand (6:1-10). As Clinton Arnold argues, the point is that the prisoners who are to be set free are “trapped in the bondage and oppression of Satan’s kingdom.”69 What the kingdom of God means, therefore, is that the hostile alien kingdom of demonic captivity, oppression, poverty and blindness (physical and spiritual) is coming to an end through the ministry of Jesus. He is the bringer of the kingdom of God, for he is the vanquisher of the kingdom of Satan.

Jesus the healing exorcist. The centrality of warfare for the Gospels’ understanding of Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom of God is also clearly illustrated in the summary statements of Jesus’ ministry that are sprinkled throughout the Gospels. In almost every instance, teaching (or preaching) about the kingdom is mentioned in the same breath as healing or casting out demons, activities that demonstrate the kingdom.70 Consider the following verses:

Large crowds followed him, and he cured them there. (Mt 19:1-2) Such summary statements make clear that, in the mind of each Synoptic author, Jesus was first and foremost an exorcist and a healer. His preaching the good news had unprecedented “authority” (e.g., Mk 1:22, 27; Lk 4:32, 36) precisely because it was preached in deed as well as in word. Jesus not only talked about the kingdom but embodied it. Hence wherever he went, he was about freeing people from the scourges of the ruler of darkness (Acts 10:38).

What also illustrates the centrality of exorcism and healing in Jesus’ conception of the kingdom of God is that Jesus never commissions his disciples to proclaim the latter without also commissioning them to perform the former.71 Mark notes that he designated his twelve disciples as apostles “to be sent out to proclaim the message, and to have authority to cast out demons” (3:14-15). Word and deed go hand in hand.

Before Jesus sends out his twelve apostles on a particular mission, he tells them to “proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment” (Mt 10:7-8).

Tell people “the kingdom has come near,” Jesus is saying, with words and with action. Thus Jesus “gave them authority over the unclean spirits” (Mk 6:7; cf. Lk 9:1-2), and they “went out and proclaimed that all should repent,” while they also “cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them” (Mk 6:12-13; cf. Lk 9:6). To proclaim that the kingdom is near is virtually synonymous with pushing back the kingdom of Satan by freeing people from their sin as well as from demons and disease.

In similar fashion, when Jesus at another time prepares to send out 72 disciples, he simply instructs them: “Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you’” (Lk 10:8-9).

Nothing more is needed to carry out Christ’s ministry. Demonstrate the reality of the kingdom, and then interpret the demonstration for the people.72 When the 72 return they are overjoyed with their success: “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us” (Lk 10:17). In the light of Jesus’ commission to them to heal, their response is somewhat puzzling—unless we understand that, for Jesus and his followers, healing the sick was centrally about having authority over demons (Acts 10:38). As such, it was about defeating the kingdom of Satan.

Jesus himself immediately exclaims, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning” (Lk 10:18).73 As one chasing a scared enemy on the run, he reiterates to his disciples, “I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions [demons?], and over all the power of the enemy [viz., Satan and demons]” (v. 19). This is what his disciples are to preach.

Conclusion

In the light of all this, it must strike us as highly peculiar that many New Testament scholars over the last several hundred years have concluded that the historical Jesus was, in one way or another, simply a moral teacher. This can only testify to how thoroughly naturalistic presuppositions can filter one’s reading of the evidence.74 But it is hardly less puzzling that so many believing Christians today can read these same Gospels, while committing themselves to following this Lord, yet never seriously consider treating sickness and disease (to say nothing of demonized people) the way Jesus treated them. Far from considering such things as scourges of the devil, as Jesus did, we modern Christians are likely to attribute them to God’s “mysterious providence.” Rather than revolting against such things as scourges of the enemy, we are likely to ask God to help us accept such things “as from a father’s hand.”

This undoubtedly testifies to the strength of the post-Augustinian classical-philosophical theistic tradition as well as to the Western Enlightenment presuppositions that, until recently, have tended to dominate the thinking of everyone in the West, believer and nonbeliever alike. It also goes a long way toward explaining why our “problem of evil” is not the “problem of evil” Jesus and his disciples confronted.

If, in contrast to Jesus’ approach, one believes that a good and wise divine purpose ultimately lies behind sickness, disease and all the atrocities that make the world a nightmarish place, then one subtly shifts the problem of evil from something one has to war against to something one has to think through. Rather than being a problem of overcoming the evil deeds of the devil and his army, our problem of evil has become a problem of intellectually explaining how an all-good and all-powerful God could will what certainly are evil deeds of the devil.

Perhaps most tragically, in trading problems in this fashion, we have surrendered a spiritual conflict we are commissioned to fight and will (despite ourselves) ultimately win for an intellectual puzzle we can never resolve. It is an exceedingly poor trade, whether considered on philosophical, biblical or practical grounds. If we were to follow the example of our Savior instead, our basic stance toward evil in the world would be characterized by revolt, holy rage, social activism and aggressive warfare—not pious resignation.