Welcome to Day 1521 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomThe Unseen Realm: God and the gods – Worldview WednesdayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend; I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1521 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical Worldview is essential to have a proper perspective on today’s current events. To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must have a proper understanding of God and His Word. This week, we will expand on the past course work as we continue reviewing the book from Dr. Michael S Heiser titled “Supernatural.” The book is an abbreviated version of his more comprehensive book, “The Unseen Realm.” I highly recommend one or both of these books. Creating a Biblical Worldview based on how the Old and New Testaments connect with God’s overall plan for humanity is essential. This book review will help us understand what the Bible teaches about the unseen world, and why it matters.
The Unseen Realm: God and the Gods
People are fascinated by the supernatural and the superhuman. Just think about the entertainment industry in recent years. Thousands of books, television shows, and movies have been about angels, aliens, monsters, demons, ghosts, witches, magic, vampires, werewolves, and superheroes in the past decade. Many of Hollywood’s blockbuster franchises feature the supernatural: the X-Men, the Avengers, the Harry Potter series, Superman, and the Twilight saga. Television shows like Fringe and, of course, Supernatural and X-Files have dedicated followings even long after filming new episodes end. Haven’t these things always been popular—in tales, in books, in art? Why?
One answer is that they’re an escape from the ordinary. They offer us a world that’s more interesting and exciting than our own. There’s something about good versus evil, magnified on a cosmic scale, that thrills us. The epic struggle by the heroes of Middle Earth (Gandalf, Frodo, and company) against the Dark Lord Sauron in The Lord of the Rings trilogy has captivated readers (and now movie-goers) for over a half-century now. The more otherworldly the villain, the more spectacular the triumph.
On another level, people are drawn to other worlds because, as the book of https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+3%3A11&version=NLT (Ecclesiastes 3:11) puts it, Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.  There’s something about the human condition that longs for something beyond human experience—something divine. The apostle Paul wrote about this yearning too. He taught that it comes from just being alive in the world God has made. The creation bears witness to a creator, and therefore to a realm beyond our own (Roman 1:18–23). In verse 18, Paul said the impulse to know more about God was so powerful that the wicked willfully suppressed that knowledge.
Yet we don’t seem to think of the epic story of the Bible in the same way we think of our own tales of the supernatural in books, movies, and legend. There are reasons for that, and they go beyond the lack of special effects. For some, the Bible’s characters are too ordinary or grandfatherly. They don’t feel dynamic or heroic. After all, these are the same people and the same stories we’ve heard since Sunday school as kids. Then there’s the cultural barrier. It’s hard for us to identify with what seems like an endless parade of ancient shepherds and men