Who Invented Territorial Spirits? From Ancient Gods to NAR

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org, where history proves that truth, or at least their version of it, is truly stranger than fiction. I've been having multiple conversations as everybody is aware with people who were in the New Apostolic Reformation or were impacted by it because there are certain aspects of this that really really fascinate me. I grew up in a world of Branhamism, which was one of the precursors to the New Apostolic Reformation and the Charismatic Movement, and some of the

themes that are in the New Apostolic Reformation just seem so odd, whatever I try to think about them, and that's me in a group that was part of the historical lineage of New Apostolic Reformation, and I can only imagine what it's like for people who are outside of this thing looking in. What in the world is going on?

In the minds of the people, that's one of the thoughts, and one of the key areas of focus, whenever people are thinking about all of this, is the concept of territorial spirits. This is something that just fascinates me. It really does.

Everybody knows who has listened to the podcast. Whenever I left the Branham Movement, I began studying the ancient world, ancient cultures, ancient mythologies, and there's just so many themes that you can see carried forward from the pagan worlds into the New Apostolic Reformation world. One of them is territorial spirits, and I wanted to talk through that today. When you look at the ancient world, Moab had Kimash, Babylon had Marduk, and Assyria had a sure. And when you open the book of Daniel, something strangely familiar appears. Persia has a prince, and Greece has a prince, and Israel has Michael.

So how did we get from an ancient world where nations had gods and heavenly forces to Daniel's Prince of Persia, and eventually modern Christianity who are identifying and confronting territorial spirits? And I'll warn people from the outset of this episode. This is a historical episode. It's not an attempt to tell people what they must believe theologically. It's going to sound like I'm talking theology because I'm talking about the Bible, but I'm actually going to do this from a historical perspective. And that's really important to understand. This is a historical episode, and I had the conversation recently with somebody. When my wife writes

a letter to me, we have a language that we share, and we have things that we have experienced or have in common, that we can say to each other, and it has this broader meaning that anybody else reading could understand. And the Bible is much like this. The Bible, the books were written to a specific people in a specific time who read and understood it in a specific way. But over the years in millennia, people have introduced theology about the underlying meanings behind those statements. And the culture has changed, the culture has shifted. Many of the things understood in the ancient world aren't understood in

the same way today, we actually have a different worldview than the people of the Bible had. So this is a historical episode. There's a value in understanding how the reader of the original book in the ancient world would have understood it through their lands of the ancient world and its perspective. So I like to go there, and I strongly feel that if you are a Christian, I strongly feel that you need to go there as well. I understand that there is a purpose for the theological approach, but if you exclude the historical approach, you totally miss

many, many things. And in the example of the New Apostolic Reformation, you go off into this error that really can't be corrected without understanding the history. So this is a historical episode. And the goal is to trace the development of this idea. How did it go from point A to point B from the ancient world and its nations of gods to the, you know, the modern New Apostolic Reformation where you're climbing mountains to speak it, the territorial spirits, which is so odd to me.

So we're going to talk through what the ancient culture believed, going to talk through what the biblical text actually says, not what the theological interpretation of that text says, but what it actually says. And then walk through some of the ways in which the ancient readers in the Jewish or Christian world would have interpreted it because they came from a world that's much different than ours. And what modern people do with this is totally different. If you look at the New Apostolic Reformation, it gets really odd because in the pagan world and their worlds of gods and

demons that they lived in, that was separate from the God of Israel. And yet when you go into the New Apostolic Reformation, the way that it's been framed and the way that they have taken the gods of the false gods of each territory and tried to re-enact territorial gods, they've actually taken it out of the national context and they're trying to invent a new mythology. I think the That's the point that I really want to drive out in this episode.

Territorial spirits as projected by a New Apostolic Reformation leaders is not a biblical thing and oddly, it's not really a pagan thing so much as it is a reinvention of pagan mythologies. And that's the point I want to get at.

So a non-nar Christian can look completely differently at how angels and demons and principalities and owners of powers are in existence while rejecting the modern principles of the New Apostolic Reformation with regards to these territorial spirits.

The average Christian reading doesn't read into the text. They read what the text says. And I'm gonna be doing that from a historical perspective. And again, it's not a theological perspective. So the question I'm gonna be driving at is this are territorial spirits even real?

And where did the idea come from? What did it originally mean? And why did Christians start believing that they, not God, but they, should directly confront these spiritual beings? The question came up recently in a podcast.

I was talking about the modern invention of spiritual warfare. And a very valid question was posted in the comments, which I did address because the poster asked does not the Bible talk about the Prince of Persia or the Prince of Greece.

And they were trying to say that there was this heavenly battle being fought waged by the people on earth. And the question that I had was simply this, that is in the text, yes, but the modern New Apostolic Reformation way of presenting this is not that the heavenly forces are fighting, it's that they're wanting you to take part in the battle.

And that is something that is totally different than what is projected in the Bible. Interestingly, it is projected in some of the ancient mythologies, which we'll get into that just a bit, but I want to separate two realms here that Daniel is talking about.

And again, I'm not theologian, but any of you can simply open up Daniel and you can read and find exactly what I'm saying here. And Daniel is talking about the heavenly realm and it's talking about Daniel who is praying.

His spiritual warfare is simply this, I'm praying. That this thing will be taken care of by these heavenly forces that I have no power to control. And I'm trusting that God will take care of this.

That is the beginning and the end of what happens with Daniel's involvement in this other than having the vision of, of course, what's happening. But in the heavenly realm, you have the Prince of Persia who withstood me for 21 days, you can read this in Daniel.

I think it's Daniel 10. You have Michael, the great prince who has charged over your people. You can read that also in Daniel, and I think it's chapter 12. And you have the Prince of Greece from also Daniel.

10. The Prince of Greece will come. So that's in the heavenly realm. Well, in the earthly realm, you have Persia, which is now. You have Israel, your people, and you have Greece, which will come.

And Daniel is praying for 21 days as all of this unfolds. So let's break this down. Summarize just a bit. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Daniel 10, and again, I recommend you read it. I recommend not that you go ask somebody even what it means. Just simply open up the text and read it. Daniel has been mourning. He's fasting for three weeks. This messenger comes and says, if you're not, I have come because of your words. In other words, I've prayed, and I am coming because you have prayed. The Prince of the Kingdom of Persia

has withstood this messenger for 21 days, but Michael, the chief of the princes has come to help Daniel. And it says, keep reading in the text. It says, I will return and fight against the Prince of Persia. It doesn't say Daniel will return and fight. The Prince of Greece will come. So lay this out. You've got Persia, which has the Prince of Persia. He have Greece, which has the Prince of Greece. And then Daniel's people, Israel, has Michael. So you have to ask the question, well, who are these princes? They can't easily be associated with ordinary earthly rulers.

And that's one of the common misconceptions for people who, like me, are fascinated with history and you understand how the ancient world worked. The messenger has been fighting the Prince of Persia for 21 days. Michael calls himself a chief prince, and he intervenes. But Michael is specifically associated with Daniel's people, Israel. And the Prince of Greece is still to come. And so this is this is talking about things that are past, present, and future. This is a battle that's happening in the supernatural political geography, not one that's happening on the earthly realm. So when you

think territorial spirits and you're trying to think, okay, this nation is mapped to this God or this territory is mapped to this God, you can't really do that historically because of this important fact. There was no corresponding Persian versus Greek military battle on Earth during those 21 days. We have the timeline. And Daniel dates the vision to the third year of Cyrus.

That's the milestone in history that you have to look at. That was approximately 535, 536 BC. And at this point, Persia had conquered Babylon, 539 BC, I think it was. Cyrus controlled the Persian Empire. The famous Persian wars against the Greek world were still decades away. That's a battle that's not yet even happened. And Daniel says that the Prince of Greece will come. He doesn't say that it's here now. So you can't simply say that armies on Earth were fighting territorial spirits through their human...

Ponents and their relationship to the spirit world that weren't climbing mountains and Speaking at demons and casting out spirits and doing and doing the NARS stuff Daniel was simply praying and he was praying Assuming that God was taking care of everything that would be to happen this vision came to Daniel and he gets this glimpse into What is the the battle that's going on in the heavenly realm not the earthly realm?

So understand that there is a disconnection between the heavenly realm and the earthly realm in Daniel's interpretation and in Daniel's vision And that's something again anybody can read this all you have to do is open up the Bible But you do have to understand the history and the context of history around that passage to understand that these battles Aren't happening at the same time. So let's talk through the context of history What's happening in the world whenever Daniel's vision is taking place more specifically?

What's happening in Daniel's world because again and the example that I use with my wife and her writing a letter We need to understand what the readers of Daniel's visions as he wrote it down what the readers would have understood in their day And it's quite different than what we would understand today the timeline of history were Centuries passed the Exodus from Egypt and more recently Jerusalem has been destroyed by Babylon Judah's elite had already begun being deported by Babylon around 597 BC I think it was and Daniel's story is placing him in an earlier deportation, which is around

605 BC something like this So you've got the Babylonian exile that's happening Daniel has this vision and Daniel is in a world where the gods and the nations Were connected very very directly that's something that it's very difficult in the modern world to understand especially in America Because we have a separation of church and state and unless you're in New Apostolic Reformation There's this there's this weird thing that happens but for the most part there is a separation between church and state and When you think through the ancient world, it's much different a people could have a god a city could have a god a

Kingdom could have a god a king or a Pharaoh could be a Representation of that god or the king in the Pharaoh's rule could be a representation of that god and The examples which I mentioned earlier which really apply here Babylon had Marduk a Syria had a sure and Moab had Kamash so you had this direct relationship between the kingdoms and the gods and understanding that Hierarchy as it was understood in the ancient world makes a lot of sense when you read what Daniel has written in this In this vision that came today So the concept to understand, it's not necessarily like the modern way in talking, where a demon occupies a geographical zone, it's more to the point it is, God has a relationship to his people, the people have a relationship to the king, the king has a relationship to the land, the land has a relationship to the nation.

So you could say patron deity, basically, in the modern world, in the football world, you think mascot, but you could think this city, this land, this kingdom, this people has a patron deity, and the actual history surrounding this, again, is fascinating.

If you study the ancient kingdoms, their mythologies, and why those mythologies existed, ancient gods weren't just simply object of devotion, as you like to think of it in today's world, they could represent the political identity of an entire people.

If your nation won a war, then your God had demonstrated power over the other nations and over their gods, so it was a God against God type of relationship. If your nation lost catastrophically, people could say, was your God defeated? Why did your God abandon you? And people who were on the defeated side would think, oh my gosh, our God must be weaker.

So you began to have this battle of the gods that is happening, again, in the spiritual realm, not so much in the earthly realm, except whenever there was a direct battle, they thought that it was the God's fighting, not the people.

That's key to understand when you think of how the New Apostolic Reformation leaders are trying to spin this territorial warfare, mumbo jumbo. But again, the kingdoms and their gods and their relationships is really important to understand, because if you read through what's happening in Daniel, you start to understand that this is outside of our control, we have no way to control.

We can only pray to God that these things are taking place and he gives his protection over us. So to the people who are reading after Daniel had written his vision down, the people who are reading are thinking their kingdom has a God, and the other forces have another God that is about to conquer us.

We're sitting here, what do we do? Thankfully, we have somebody who is our intercessor in this spiritual battle that's happening outside of our earthly realm. It was a God over a kingdom and people and land and not so much a territorial spirit, where the territorial spirit makes sense is only in the context of God's generals, which is a nar concept.

We have a general, we're going to throw this map out on the board, we're going to mark out. territories where we're going to go invade, and this is a battle that literally is happening in the minds of New Apostolic Reformation leaders.

The problem is, as they visualize it in their minds, they try to map it back to passages of Scripture, and they do, but they don't take the entire context of Scripture nor the context of history, and what they have done in essence is they've created a new mythology that doesn't really exist in both the modern world or the ancient world.

The fact of the matter is that Israel did not develop in a bubble. Israel was part of a culture, part of an ancient system, an ancient ideology, an ancient belief system, where the gods and the nations and the kings and the kingdoms and the people and the lands were all very closely interwoven.

For most Christians, whenever they look at this ancient world, they think of it like this. There is the Christian God, and there's no other God. Everybody else is just worshipping and vain because no other God is in existence.

To the Pentecostal Charismatic world, especially in some of the more extremist versions of it, they think this is not true. Simply, you must climb the mountains and pray against the ancient spirits of evil that are plaguing our lands for millennia.

But Israel did not always believe it like this. Israel was a product of the cultures that they lived in, but there's also a progression of understanding of worldview that is actually mapped out in the Bible.

I will be covering this with a few different podcasts hosts, but the question is, are there false gods? It is a big question if you're in the Pentecostal Charismatic movement. Isaiah says it very clearly.

Isaiah 45, besides, there is none besides me. I am the Lord, and there is no other. And Paul makes it very clear in Corinthians. He says, we know that an idol has no real existence, and there is no God but one.

And I'm paraphrasing, you can go read those in your, in your Bibles, and you can understand what they're trying to say. They're saying essentially, these people are worshipping and vain. There is no God.

There is only the one true God. That's what most Christians believe. Israel did not always believe it like this. And in fact, as it relates to what we're talking about with the Prince of Persia, it gets a little bit interesting because if you read through the Old Testament, you can read in Judges 11, 24, will you not possess what Kimosh, your God, gives you to possess?

And they understood the worldviews. They understood the nations and the kingdoms and the people that Kimosh, their God, was to possess. And there was this notion that there was a structural division of kings and kingdoms and gods, much like the...

world, the rest of the ancient world believed. There was Yahweh, and He was over our people in our land, but they looked at Kimosh as your people and your land in that passage of scripture.

You can read through kings, it says the servants of the kings of Syria say their gods are gods of the hills, so they were stronger than us, but let us fight against them in the plain. And that's I think it's kings 20, 23. You can read that for yourself, it's a very plain, they're talking about here's a nation, here's their god, here's a kingdom, I should say, and it's people in their god.

That is how the ancient world view was. You can read all through the Old Testament and you can find examples of this, but the important development that the Hebrew Bible contains is that while there are multiple ways of speaking about kingdoms and people and gods, they're not in contradiction as you would find Christian apologists will help you with this, but you'll find people who are fighting against the Christian Bible, and they say those two things contradict, they can't be, and they're not understanding what the Bible is. The Bible is not a book, as it is portrayed by a lot

of the Pentecostal Charismatic world, it's a library of books, and it has different genres of books, some of which are just history books, and when you read through the history books, it shows the clear development of the mindset of the people, and the reasons why they developed that mindset, it's quite interesting if you understand what it is and begin to read it, but if you continue reading, and again I'll get into this another podcast, they start ridiculing the idols, they say they're would, they're stone, they can't speak, they can't hear, they can't save you, but our God can.

That's really the thing to understand here. Now as it relates to Daniel and his dream, I'll say this, this is coming as a vision, so it puts it in a different category a little bit, but also we find clear examples where God is speaking in ways that the culture he's speaking to can understand. Again, if one of my wife writes me a letter, she writes it in a way that I can understand it, not my neighbor, or her brothers, or her father, she writes it in a way that I can understand it. Well, the visions are God's mouthpiece to the people, God has to speak in the way that

the people understand, and that is critical for everybody to understand as you realize what the New Apostolic Reformation has done with all of these ancient worlds in their concepts. One of the most important texts to understand behind Daniel 10 and indirect conflict with the New Apostolic Reformation is Deuteronomy 32. In the New Apostolic Reformation, there's an idea that there are spiritual territories and we must conquer those territories, we must conquer the demons behind them, and the go to passages in the Old Testament that are talking about battles and warfare, but they're not really telling the people how that was presented in the ancient world.

Like I said, in previous sections in this podcast, Yahweh and His people had His land, and they viewed the other lands as land for the other gods. And in Deuteronomy, it makes this very, very clear, but there's an interesting text variant.

The text says something to this effect. When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, He fixed the borders of the people according to the number of the sons of Israel. In other words, these are our borders, this is our land, this is Yahweh's, and we have the other lands, and as I mentioned in the previous passage that we read from the Bible, they have Kimosh, they have Marduk, all these other gods.

But the Most High Israel has given us this land as our inheritance, and He fixed those borders. But the Dead Sea Scrolls preserves this sons of God text variant. Instead of sons of Israel, it says sons of God.

And I'll get into that into a conversation with General Ross and Bob Scott, a few others. That plays into how you distinguish between what the New Apostolic Reformation has presented as the false gods, and the difference between what the Bible actually says.

It's a key critical difference. But the picture becomes this, you have the Most High God Yahweh, you have a division of the nations, you have the sons of God, you have heavenly beings and nations, but Yahweh's portion, listen to that word portion, is for his people Jacob has been allotted his inheritance. So potentially other nations have other gods with other heavenly beings, and it's their portion, we as Israel have our portion. So Daniel later, as we mentioned, Daniel is talking to Persia, who has its prince, Greece, which has its prince, and Israel, which has Michael. So this isn't really to say that Daniel is proving that these are identical

to the sons of God. It's more to the point it's saying that there is a biblical framework in which nations and heavenly beings are already being associated by Israel, much like the whole rest of the ancient world. Israel is no different. When you look at the gods of ancient Egypt and you look at the pharaohs, any mythology that you study, basically, you're going to find that there is a relationship between the God and the people in the kingdom, and Israel accepts this. Israel says, we have our borders, we have our boundaries, they have a God, we have a God. Our God is different

than their God. Israel is warned not to worship those. Don't worship the sun, the moon, the stars, the host of heaven. So there is a clear difference. Understanding that difference is really the key point that I'm trying to make here. If you understand that difference, you understand why reading as these Prince of Persia and this viewing it as a territorial spirit, why it's actually in direct conflict with what the ancient Israelites believed historically.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started, or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transition through the latter reign charismatic and other fringe movements into the New Apostolic Reformation? You can learn this and more on William Branham Historical Research's website, William-Branham.org.

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One of the things that deeply saddens me about the Pentecostal charismatic movement is that whenever there is a difference in opinion on theology, that difference in opinion becomes personal. And there's a reason for this. I've studied this deeply because this is the world that I grew up in.

Whenever you adopt the belief system in the Pentecostal charismatic way, you must adopt it in such a way that it becomes part of your personality. You are living the word. You are acting out the word. You are becoming one with the word, so to speak.

And whenever somebody else has a different variation of how they understand that word to be, well, that's a challenge against your person because you have adopted your belief set as part of your identity.

And I warned you at the beginning, this was going to be a historical discussion, not a theological discussion. So I'm about to step on some toes, and I wanted to warn you before I did step on toes because I know from a theological standpoint, you're going to say, I disagree with John, you're the lowest center you're going to hell.

And there are theologians who know what I'm about to say, and they won't touch it with a 10-foot pole for the reason I'm about to get into. People who know me, they know that I don't have any 10-foot poles, so I just naturally go there.

Because I want to know, there are things about the Bible that if you don't think outside of your own box, it's very difficult to not be trapping yourself into a corner. And that corner that I'm about to discuss, and there are a few different corners you can get into, the one I'm about to discuss is the Divine Council.

This is a subject matter that, again, not many theologians will adopt this viewpoint, but it is critical because of one aspect of the pre... via historical conversation. Psalms 82, if you read the text and you go through the inner linear version of the Bible and you understand the meaning and usage of the word Elohim.

Elohim is complicated because it can mean one God depending on the other words that are used in the sentence, but it can also mean a plurality of gods. And depending on how you interpret this verse from Psalms 82, it gets to be a little bit tricky because it sounds very much like it's talking about a divine council.

It says, and I'll read this in the King James version for those of you who are KJV-only people. God's standeth in the congregation of the mighty. He judges among the gods. How long will you judge unjustly and accept the persons of the wicked?

And again, this passage is under debate. There are those who understand it to mean a divine council. There are those who do not. But this is critical when you think of New Apostolic Reformation because if you read further, this is where it says, I have said year gods, you're all children of the most high.

That's important for all of you manifested sons of God escapees who are listening. This is one of the passages that they go to. What they don't tell you when they go there is that there is a debate as to whether this is talking about a divine council of gods.

Think of the pantheons of gods in Greece. Think of pantheons of God in Rome. And now picture Israel, this verbage sounds very much like it's also talking about a pantheon of gods. And it says that passage that is misused to think that to make people think that they can become like gods.

And I won't get into that debate. I think Chino and I probably had that debate in one of our podcasts. But the point I'm trying to make is there is some debate here. And here's where it gets interesting.

Those who won't touch this with that 10 foot pole I was talking about also won't go to the fact that, like I just read in another passage, there are passages in the Bible that actually talk about the other deities for the other cities and nations and peoples.

So it doesn't make sense to take this out of that context of a world filled with gods that are reigning over nations and kingdoms. Yes, the Bible does later say that there are no other gods.

There's only one god. However, again, this is a progression of time, a progression of understanding. And the people are coming to a world view that is changing over millennia of time. So after decades and decades and centuries of time, there is a change and you can see that recorded.

I'm talking about the early days of this understanding of the gods. It looks very much like they're talking about it. That's the only thing that I will say there. But now let's take a look at Psalms 89.

And let's... Find out who these sons of God are, who are they referring to, and let's look at it through the lens of the historical view. How would the people who read this have interpreted it in the ancient world? And remember the ancient world, as we've described before, they believed that there was a God who was reigning above their king, kingdom, people, cities, empires, and that God was usually associated with the sun, moon, and stars. So Psalms 89 says, for who in the sky is above can compare with the Lord? Who is like the Lord among these heavenly beings? Again, they're looking

at the stars, they're seeing the stars. These are the heavenly beings which govern these other nations. In the council of the holy ones, God is greatly feared. He is more awesome than any who surround them.

This would have sounded to them whether it does an archaeology today or not. It would have sounded like a divine council. And in fact, that verbage is used in the council of the holy ones. And I'm laughing not because this is funny, but because of the big difference, the vast difference in understanding between what the ancients would have understood and what theology today is telling us to believe. And I'm not going to say which one is right or wrong. I can just tell you that this looks a little bit different than I was taught being raised. I'll say it like that. And the part that really

makes me giggle when I read this because it did the first time I thought about it, they took it a different direction than either side. They took it to this manifested sons of God. These holy ones that they're talking about in this passage is actually the manifest sons of God in some of the other passages. And when you think about that and realize that they're actually talking about what we would consider today, the demonic forces, the false gods. Israel is talking about God is in the council of all of these other false gods who are among the other nations. But in some of

the contexts in the early versions of the context, as they were beginning to understand who they were in the world, they said, God, our God, Yahweh, has put boundaries between us and the other nations and the other gods who have these heavenly hosts. So when you think about that and you begin to understand the ancient worldview, again, it looks much different than this. But if you continue reading, who is like you, Lord? Almighty, you, Lord, are mighty in your faithfulness surround you. You rule over the surging sea, you rule over Rahab, the slain, etc. If you keep

reading this, it's talking about a God who goes beyond those boundaries. And I think that's why the theology evolved in the way that it did. But to the Israelites, they did have the boundaries. It's very clear from Deuteronomy. And with those boundaries, this is the God we worship.

but our God is greater than the other gods. That's essentially what it is saying here. So why is this important? From the ancient historical version of context, not the new theological version of context, this gives us a few different things.

You have Yahweh, the Almighty, all-powerful God of Israel, the Heavenly Council, all of the other nations in the heavens. You have the sons of God, which is totally different than the NAR sons of God, and you have the holy ones.

And this is not at all to say that Israel believed that all of these gods were equal. In fact, I just read the Psalm. It says, quite the opposite. Who among you is like Yahweh?

Who is as great as Yahweh? But the point I want to make is when you read it through the lens of how the ancients would have had interpreted this, you suddenly began to understand why the text variants come to be.

And it's not that one is really right or wrong. It's that it is translated according to how the ancients would have understood it. What the point I'm trying to make is they believed that Yahweh was God.

There was a heavenly court that Yahweh managed or governed. Below this was the sons of God, the angels, the princes, and the powers. And below this was the human nations. And you can pretty well get that just simply from reading even our translations today, but especially if you take the inner linear versions of the text and go through and read what these words mean.

You begin to see a much more complicated picture than the King James translators were able to even translate. And some of the modern translations do go there a little bit, but not to the extent that you get, if you read the text and its original context, and especially not if you read it from the understanding of the ancient world.

So for me, reading under that understanding is important along with the theology. It's not that you take one side or the other, but you really need both to understand how did the common person understand this?

We have this division where the priests and the scribes had control over the text. Well, what about the person who's out in the farmer in the field, who remembers coming out of Egypt or who had a family history of understanding what they believed in Egypt?

So now let's go back to the mystery that we were talking about earlier from Daniel, and not the mystery like you would hear in a sermon. I'm talking about the mystery of who are the sons of God, these angels and beings.

If you go to Daniel 10, he is praying in mourning for three weeks, and an angelic messenger appears and says your prayer was heard from the first day. But he goes on to say the kingdom of Persia has withstood me for 21 days, then Michael, the chief of princes came to help me.

And later it says I will go and I will fight against the prince of Persia and when I go out, behold, the prince of Greece will come. And again, we have the timelines of history.

We know that this isn't all happening at the same time. So we're talking about events past, present, and future. But the key point to understand is this, Daniel's not the one doing the battle.

When you're thinking spiritual warfare and take marking off spiritual territories and going and fighting spiritual demons in those territories or evil, ancient spirits of evil, however you wanna phrase this, that's not what Daniel is doing here.

It's completely different. And Daniel, if you keep reading things Daniel 12, it even makes the relationship clear. It says something to the effect, Michael, the great prince who has charged over your people. And this is a, this is an object of debate for me coming out of Brannemism, because Brannemism liked to go the Jehovah's Witness route.

And he would say that Michael was actually Jesus. And he would go off into this weird tangent where Jesus was an angel, and that angel was the same angel he had on stage. With him, and all of the Latin-Rain people rejoiced because the angel Michael who also was Jesus was on the stage with Brannem and the end is coming.

That's how all of this began. And remember, that was the precursor to the charismatic movement. That was the precursor to New Apostolic Reformation. They had that idea, and it comes from this passage. So this whole subject matter evolves around the whole reason I'm doing what I'm doing because I know what these passages meant in the context of Latin-Rain and cares Mania built on top of them.

But yet at the same time, they're budding heads with what the ancient world understood all of this to be. It's kind of funny when you think about it. But let's lay out what has happened in the vision written down by Daniel.

And I'll just spell it out very clearly. You have the heavenly realm, and you have Persia who has the Prince of Persia. You have Greece who has the Prince of Greece. You have Israel who has Michael.

So this is where the modern territorial spirit arguments get something actually important that is right. Daniel does depict these supernatural beings associated with earthly peoples and empires. But you can't deny that his interpretation of this is quite different from the perspective of the ancient world.

He's actually talking about these worlds which were pointing up to a star in the sky, or a moon, or a sun. It is a completely, completely different thing. So I know that some people probably missed, misunderstood where I was headed with that in some of the previous podcasts, but make no mistake, what they're saying in New Apostolic Reformation does not match the Bible, and it takes a step further, does not even come close to what the ancients would have understood this passage to mean in the first place.

So very, very important to understand that. Think of it like this. You have people, you have nation, you have empire, rather than a geographical coordinate system that is used in today's military. That's not at all what it is.

And Michael is not called the spirit who is occupying the land between these coordinates. He's instead your prince. And ignoring the theological side, go back to the ancient understanding of this. This ancient understanding was very, very common among all of the ancient world. And Daniel makes it very clear because these other nations have their prince, we have our prince. And it's in the heavenlies, it's among the sons of God, so on and so forth. So it changes completely what you perceive. When you hear the word manifested, son of God, it's totally different. And I know that

verbiage changes when you get to the New Testament. That's another complexity for another day. But reading the text for what it says as written and for how the ancients would have understood it is mind-boggling when you think of where it actually went today. So it raises a very important question. And there, there obviously is not this Persian Greek battle that's occurring on Earth in Daniel's 20-day time period. And he says very clearly that he's in the third year of Cyrus.

And we know historically that's approximately 536-535 BC. Persia is already dominant. The major Persian Greek wars came later. And the angel says the prince of Greece will come. So therefore, if you read what Daniel is saying in the context of the timeline of history, then he appears to be describing this heavenly political order connected with the, what do you call it? The succession of earthly empires that are merely angels that are mirroring earthly battles that are occurring not simultaneously, but in a different time period. And that's mind-boggling when you try to think of this. It's totally

unravels everything that I believed about this passage when I began to understand the ancients understanding of all of these, all of these peoples and places and empires and kingdoms. So he does not say who the prince of Persia is. He does not identify him by name. He does not research his hierarchy and map out his territory so he can go bind him. He does not claim a mountain and rebuke him or remind him that he needs to leave Persia or to take authority over him as they do in the New Apostolic Reformation. Because remember, God had mapped out the boundaries for the

nation of Israel. So when you have these New Apostolic Reformation people trying to do this and they go back to these passages, all you have to do is say, well, is that your territory? Who That's the one who is the God of that territory, because that's how the ancients would have read that passage, and very clearly it is stated in the Bible to this how they read it.

So the think of this, the difference between what Daniel did and what NAR believes, which is also the difference between what Christians believe and what NAR believes. Daniel's action is simply this, he prays, this is not my territory, I'm not going to go conquer it, conquer it, I'm not going to go bind the demons in it, I'm not going to do any of these things, he simply prays, and that's it.

And oddly, if you read the book of Daniel in the vision, that's really the purpose of this. Daniel prayed, and he tells the story of this huge battle that happened because his prayer was answered.

If you think of it in that simple of terms, instead of trying to read and understand all these cosmic mysteries and those who are in the doomsday camps, the ones who are predicting the end of days, et cetera, if you ignore all of that and just simply say, what is this book telling us?

It's telling us simply how you need to do his prayer. And when that hit me, I was a little bit upset, really, because they had taken from me, they had robbed from me something that was so simplistic of a message that even if you're not Christian, you can understand this concept.

Even if you're not Christian, you can say, all I need to do is trust that the higher power does this, and I don't have to fear, I don't have to worry. That's something that humanity, I think, needs, you wouldn't have many of the problems that you have today, but especially as Christians, and I know that modern New Apostolic Reformation interpreters can say that Daniel demonstrates all of these supernatural powers associated with nations, and therefore we're going to add to the text, all of these things like the territorial spirits, et cetera, but that's not really what he's saying.

A non-Nara interpreter can simply say yes, but Daniel never turns any of this into a Christian technique for fighting those beings or those people. He just simply prays, and that's really all that needed to happen.

If you take nothing else away from this podcast, think about this. Israel's view very clearly from the Bible itself, you don't even have to go to outside sources, Israel's view of the divine world changed over time.

From early Israel, you can see that they very similarly matched some of the nations of the ancient Near East, and you can go through some of those histories and cultures and compare them, and the views aren't that much different.

They do have a different theological system, and their view of who God is is a little bit different, of course. They don't worship the Sun, Moon, and stars, but if you understand the patriarch system of that ancient world.

used. Israel is very, very close to this. Then they go through the monarch period, the prophetic period, and during this time their views begin to shift even more. Why? Think about where Israel had come from and think about the time, the space of time that was between them and their worldview that was shaped by Egypt. It would make sense that a people in a culture would continue to change. You can read this in the text if you take the time to look, Exodus, kings, etc., the Bible texts call Israel to worship Yahweh alone and reject the other gods. Whereas before,

as I mentioned, it sounds very much like they're talking about a divine council. Go to the exile, the second Isaiah. Well, now you've got strong claims of Yahweh being completely unique. There is, besides me, there is no God, Isaiah says. So this strongly suggests that Israel begins to understand all of these other kingdoms, all of their powers, their worshiping, the sun, moon, and stars, and it's not really God. But when you look at this and understand that they're changing their perspective, you start to see God being shaped in their mind and what is God and what does it mean

to be following the true God. Then you go fast forward to the second temple period. Now you have one Supreme God who is alongside of an elaborate world of subordinate beings. And that's how things begin to shift and change for Israel and the Jews. Well, follow that into the New Testament. It continues to be shaped. Follow that past the New Testament. I've read some of the early church writings and what the people believed. And it's a little bit out there, not going to lie. I was a little bit shocked when I got into church history after leaving the cult and realized that some

of the people who shaped Christianity were also shaped by the ancient world. And it wasn't my worldview that they were shaping, but that continued to progress and theology continued to progress. That's why I say that if you study by theology alone, you're only looking at today's view of the ancient world. You have to actually look at the ancient world and it's history to understand why all of this matters and understand that it really does. It really does matter. It's not just a simple switch from many gods to no other supernatural beings. You have a history that is far more

complicated and far more complex. Then you can answer in a single comment thread in a single video which this podcast is actually doing. You have to understand that some questions are so complex that you have to educate the people what you're even trying to say because the subject matter itself has many different variants of how you can perceive and understand it. In this particular episode, I chose the ancient viewpoint and I chose to some extent how it- might bounce against the theological viewpoint, but think about all of the viewpoints in between this.

Our theology is shaped by those who deemed other theologies to be heretic, heretics. And those theologies were different, but because they had a different worldview, this continues to evolve. The point I'm trying to make is back to the manifested sons of God and New Apostolic Reformation, when you try to apply all of this that I've said into spiritual territories that you must go conquer, you have evolved it again past Christianity.

So I've talked about the ancient world what they believed, Israel, how their belief began to be shaped, Christianity as it was forming, post-Christianity, well now you've got Nar who's taking it a whole different direction.

And for me, that's problematic. I'll just say it like that and I'll leave it there. So if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web.

You can find us at www.William-Brandom.org. For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.

Weaponized Religion