SPIRITUAL WARFARE AND POLITICS
Michael P. Andrus
Introduction: Nothing is clearer in Scripture than the fact that there are supernatural beings who interface with our world and impact our lives. Angels are mentioned at least 275 times in at least 34 books of the Bible. Demons are mentioned in all but four NT books and many times in the OT. We are all familiar with these words from Ephesians 6:12: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” But do we really believe that? Carl Sagan famously pronounced, “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be,” by which he meant the material universe. Many Christians live as though Sagan was right. They don’t expect or even consider the possibility of angelic or demonic interference in their world.
Daniel is enlightened concerning the existence of cosmic forces impacting political events in his world. The tenth chapter of Daniel portrays an unseen realm of angels and demons who impact international affairs, domestic politics, and even the believer’s prayer life. During the third year of Cyrus King of Persia, Daniel is given a final vision concerning a great war.[i] The vision is so frightening that the prophet mourns and fasts for three full weeks, at the end of which he is confronted by an angel, described in such breathtaking terms that he must be an angel of very high rank.
The angel tells Daniel that he was sent by God immediately to answer Daniel’s prayer for greater understanding, but his arrival was blocked for three weeks by the prince of the Persian kingdom. This prince is clearly not the son of Cyrus, the King of Persia; rather he is one of the cosmic powers mentioned in Ephesians 6. He is a demon of very high rank, an archdemon, one might say, and it wasn’t until Michael the archangel arrived to help that the unnamed angel was able to deliver the answer to Daniel’s prayer.
This incident seems to reveal that supernatural beings, both good and evil, are assigned to human governments.[ii] Michael is clearly God’s special angel assigned to Israel, for the angel calls him “your prince,” (Daniel 10:21), and in 12:1 he is called “the great prince who has charge of your people.” Satan, on the other hand, has apparently assigned one of his high demons to Persia (10:13, 20) and another to Greece (10:20). In Daniel’s day, of course, those two nations constituted the current world empire and the one that was destined to succeed it.
Cosmic forces are seen impacting politics elsewhere in Scripture. This passage is not the only place we see such phenomena in Scripture. In Ahab’s day the prophet Micaiah reveals a scene from heaven in which the Lord asks a host of angels gathered around him, “Who will entice Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?” (1 Kings 22:20) We see it again in 2 Kings 6, where the King of Aram tries to capture the prophet Elisha for allegedly revealing state secrets, and God sends an army of angels to protect Elisha. But should we think this is unique to world empires in ancient history? I see no reason to doubt that Satan assigns to every nation of the world a high-ranking demon, who supervises a vast number of lesser evil spirits. Nor do I doubt that God has assigned corresponding angels of high rank to those same nations to do battle with Satan’s emissaries.[iii]
Are cosmic forces also involved in political events in today’s world? Let’s use some sanctified imagination to apply this to modern times. The year I was born (1944) the Holocaust was going full throttle in Germany. Was that diabolical event solely of Hitler’s and Himmler’s and Eichmann’s planning and effort, or was it the brainchild of Satan himself, carried out under the direction of the prince of fascist Germany, a high demon commissioned by the Evil One himself? Perhaps Michael, the prince of Israel, had more to do with bringing Nazi Germany to its knees than did Eisenhower.
Thirty-five years ago, the Berlin wall collapsed, and with it, the Soviet Union, taking the most astute political minds in the world by total surprise. Is it not possible that the prince of the Soviet Union, the prince of East Germany, and other cosmic forces found themselves engaged in a titanic struggle with the angels of God over the freedom of one-third of the earth’s population to hear the Gospel? Perhaps angelic forces had more to do with the result than Reagan and Gorbachev.
Consider the racial unrest that has consumed our country since George Floyd’s death in 2020. Is it merely conflict between white supremacists and radical progressives, or does it involve spiritual warfare? Satan probably doesn’t care whether a person is on the far left or the far right, just so he is on one extreme or the other, because both have deep roots in demonic influence. Hitler and Nazism were heavily involved in the occult, and white supremacy movements share in that heritage.[iv] But the same is true of BLM. Patrisse Cullors, founder of the Black Lives Matter movement has openly admitted that BLM leadership talked to the dead and called on spirits for empowering their movement and for protection.[v]
Two concluding observations:
1. Human governments, international relations, and even domestic politics have a supernatural spiritual dimension we must not ignore. We tend to see conflicts in terms of Democrat versus Republican, left versus right, socialism versus capitalism, government programs versus free enterprise, social justice versus white supremacy. But many of these conflicts undoubtedly involve Satanic efforts to hinder the spread of the Gospel, to undermine God’s church, and to silence the followers of Christ. But at the same time, thankfully, God’s angels are working overtime to open unreached people groups to the Gospel, to strengthen the church, and to help believers return to their God-given priorities of faith, family, and the future. We need a balanced approach that acknowledges the existence of supernatural forces but doesn’t try to explain everything in terms of their influence.[vi]
2. God is sovereign and those supernatural beings loyal to him will ultimately be victorious over those loyal to Satan. God’s sovereignty is the overall theme of the book of Daniel. It would be a serious mistake to conclude that the forces of evil and the forces of good are engaged in a titanic struggle to the death with the outcome still in doubt. The outcome is not in doubt. Jesus defeated the cosmic powers at the Cross, and he sentenced them to eternal damnation, but in the meantime, they are, so to speak, out on parole. So long as Jesus tarries there will be spiritual battles in the heavenlies, and while we’re sojourning on the territory that temporarily belongs to the “prince of the power of the air,” we will be fighting skirmishes and occasional full-fledged battles with the Evil One. He is a formidable foe as he goes around seeking whom he may devour. But, as Martin Luther reminded us, his doom is sure.
[i] Since Cyrus defeated Babylon in October 539 B.C. on the night Belshazzar saw the handwriting on the wall, this is probably sometime during 536 B.C.
[ii] For a thorough treatment of the activity of angels and demons in God’s world, see Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm, 2015.
[iii] David Helm writes (Daniel for You, 185), “What underpins this verse (Daniel 10:13) is the idea that God has fixed the geopolitical borders of nations according to assignments given to angels. And this has further, and older, biblical warrant. Deuteronomy 32:8-9 says: ‘When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.’” Unfortunately the NIV translates “sons of God” as “sons of Israel,” but Helm is almost certainly correct when he identifies the “sons of God” as angels.
[iv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_and_the_Occult
[v] https://www.pinterest.com/pin/571253533989510730/
[vi] C. S. Lewis (Miracles, A Preliminary Study,126) gives wise advice, but perhaps slightly more skeptical than I would be:
“To be sure, the morbid inquisitiveness about demons which led our ancestors (the Salem witch hunters) to a pseudo-science of demonology, is to be sternly discouraged: our attitude should be that of the sensible citizen in wartime who believes that there are enemy spies in our midst but disbelieves nearly every particular spy story. We must limit ourselves to the general statement that beings in a different, and higher, “Nature” which is partially interlocked with ours have, like men, fallen and have tampered with things inside our frontier.”