ORIGINS OF THE MYTHS
A little bit of research about angels, demons, Satan and devils reveals that these mythical entities have been evident in religion for thousands of years. They were important parts of pagan religions before, during and after the emergence of Judaism and Christianity. And they are still part of these and other religions today.
AUTHORS’ NOTE: See ORIGINS OF JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY for discussion about the influence of these ancient religions on the Abrahamic religions.
What most people do not know is that God used the creatures in these myths to symbolically represent spiritual truths just like he used other objects in the natural world (e.g. food, stars, animals, etc) to represent other spiritual truths. Although they do not exist, as we will demonstrate in this series of pages, they were considered to be real by people who lived in those days. Thus God was consistent in his use of natural objects to represent spiritual truths.
AUTHORS’ NOTE: See FIRST THE NATURAL, THEN THE SPIRITUAL, PRINCIPLE for discussion on how God uses natural objects to represent spiritual truths.
Unfortunately, the tendency of people in all generations to interpret the Bible literally and not symbolically resulted in beliefs and theologies that focused on the physical and natural to the exclusion of the spiritual. And they have done this to their great peril.
AUTHORS NOTE: See Literal or Symbolic Interpretation Part 1, Literal or Symbolic Interpretation Part 2 and Literal or Symbolic Interpretation Part 3, and Symbols, Signs, Types, Copies, Shadows and Patterns for detailed discussion about literal interpretation vs. symbolic interpretation.
The majority of this website is devoted to debunking literal Biblical interpretation while explaining the spiritual meaning of what God said using symbolism of all kinds that contribute to the Mystery of the Bible.
Getting to the truth about angels, demons and the devil is not easy. If it was easy we would not have so much wrong thinking about them. Even Biblical scholars down through the ages have failed to discover the truth because they have always emphasized the literal reading of the Bible to near exclusion of the symbolic meaning. Hard as it is to get to the truth, it is not impossible. In this series of pages we will demonstrate how to do it — not just to expose the truth but to provide a practical example of how to study the Bible and interpret it symbolically.
Before we go through that process however, we will give the conclusions from our study. Because they are so contrary to popular beliefs, we hope that they will provoke readers to investigate the process. The way we see it, God used these well-known creatures to represent man’s two, basic inner natures.
It is a life and death matter to know how to identify angels, and their kind, and distinguish between them and false prophets, demons, devils, and their kind. God makes the point of knowing the difference in scriptures about clean and unclean foods.