The Crowded Heavens

He could not say it. Not because it was not true, but because he had found a better name for his problem. A spirit of delay was at work on him. When his prayer life dried up in March, that was a spirit of lukewarmness. When he stopped speaking to his brother-in-law, a spirit of division had gotten into the family. He was not a fringe person. He was a serious believer with a study Bible and a yellow highlighter. He had picked up the words from the notes in the columns.

Two mistakes sit on opposite sides of that man. The first is the modern shrug: no devil, no demons, no unseen fight, and any talk of evil spirits belongs to a pre-scientific age the church ought to outgrow. The second is the crowded map: a spirit behind every symptom, a rank behind every spirit, and a chart of the heavens drawn with the confidence of someone who has been there and counted every office. The New Testament stands between these two mistakes. This chapter goes looking for that middle ground.

Dake's pages are why we need to look. His teaching on angels and demons is one of the most detailed parts of his system. It starts from a bold claim about how much God has revealed.

Read that twice. He is not just saying the Bible tells us what we need to know. He is saying it tells us nearly everything we could want to know. That claim is the engine of this chapter. Once you believe the unseen world has been mapped out in full, the only faithful thing left is to read the map aloud.

And that is what he does. Lesson Six of his course, titled "Satan and the Spirit-World," works through seraphim, cherubim, living creatures, spirit horses and their drivers, archangels, common angels, and demons. Each class gets a nature, powers, and duties.² The later volume Heavenly Hosts gathers the same material into five chapters, adding catalogs of Satan's methods and Satan's works.³ Put them together and you get an organized heaven and a staffed hell.

I have two jobs in this chapter. The order matters. First, I want to say clearly, with no hedging, that the war is real and that Dake was right to say so. Second, I want to ask one pointed question about his map. Not "Does the Bible teach about angels and demons?" It plainly does. My question is this: how much of what sits on his page came off the page of Scripture, and how much came from him?

Why This One Matters

Someone will wonder why a book about the doctrine of God spends a chapter on angels. I can think of four reasons.

First, it matters for how you read your Bible. A study Bible teaches a method along with its content. When inference gets printed in the same voice as revelation, a reader stops telling the two apart. That habit does not stay in the chapter on angels. It walks straight into the chapter on God. The habit itself is the subject of Chapter 4, where his hermeneutic is set out in his own words.

Second, it matters for repentance. If a spirit is assigned to every fault, then no fault is simply mine. Adam pointed at his wife. Now we can point at a line in a chart. Something quiet and terrible happens to a soul that never has to say a plain sentence about itself.

Third, it matters for fear. I have prayed with believers who were afraid of their own homes. They had learned to read every headache and every argument as enemy action. That is not sobriety. It is superstition wearing a Bible cover, and it is exhausting.

Fourth, and this is the reason people miss: it matters for the doctrine of God. Dake's argument about angelic bodies is not a side room in his house. It is a load-bearing wall. He builds a case that angels have real bodies with real parts, and then uses that finding as a stepping stone to a conclusion about the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. You will see the sentence below. The full weight of it is carried by Chapter 6 and Chapter 8.

One more thing before the exhibits. I want to say it here because it shapes everything that follows. I am not a skeptic writing about people who believe in the devil. I believe in the devil. I believe the gifts of the Spirit are for today. I have prayed for people who needed to be set free, and I have watched God set them free. My argument is not with taking the enemy seriously. My argument is with a map that claims more ground than the Bible ever gave it.

Dake in His Own Words

Four exhibits follow. The first two draw mostly from Heavenly Hosts; the third and fourth draw from God's Plan for Man. I have quoted enough of each passage that you can check my reading against his own words.

1. The Ranks

Start with the org chart. Paul lists four words in Colossians 1:16: thrones, dominions, principalities, powers.⁶ He gives no definitions. He gives no order of seniority. Here is what those four words become on Dake's page.

In plain English: the enemy has four tiers and a chain of command. Principalities at the top. Powers taking orders from them. Below powers, the world rulers. At the bottom, wicked spirits in the heavens. That is a rank order with a reporting structure. But Paul's sentence in Ephesians 6:12 is a list. He does not say which group outranks which, or who takes orders from whom.

The same confidence runs through his account of angelic nature. Angels have bodies with hands, feet, eyes, voice, head, mouth, hair, and face. They need no rest. They eat food. They appear and disappear. They travel at speeds beyond our imagining.⁸ Some of that really is in the text. Angels do eat in Genesis 18. But some of it is drawn out by inference. Nothing in Scripture catalogs an angel's hair.

Stay with that last sentence. All wars. Every war ever fought on earth, won or lost, was decided first by a battle between angels. Not the wars in Daniel. Not some wars. All of them.

Daniel 10 shows us something real, and I will grant it fully in a moment. But Daniel 10 does not state a universal rule about all warfare in every century. That rule is Dake's. He drew it from one passage and applied it everywhere.

Now the sentence I flagged earlier. In Lesson Six, after building the case that angels have real bodies with real parts, he draws his conclusion.

There it is. The angel chapter is the ramp, and the doctrine of God sits at the top. He climbs from "angels are three-part beings with bodies" to "the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three spirit beings with bodies." That is why a chapter on angels belongs in this book. What that sentence means for his Godhead is worked out in Chapter 6. What it means for God's body and God's visibility is the subject of Chapter 8.

2. The Methods

The second exhibit is a catalog of enemy tactics. Each item gets its own heading in Heavenly Hosts.

The list goes on. Suicide. Deception about sin. Deception about serving God. Deception about wealth. Compromise in church leadership. Taken as pastoral warning, much of this is fine. Believers do go cold. Church leaders do water down their message to keep the donations coming. Any faithful pastor might preach these same warnings on a Sunday morning.

But notice what the format is doing. Each ordinary temptation gets a heading and gets assigned to an agent. Coldness is not described first as a heart that drifted. It is described as something Satan does to you and then urges you to keep doing. The subject of nearly every sentence is the enemy, not the believer. That is a small shift in grammar. It has a large effect on a conscience.

One entry in this catalog promises that anyone who truly serves the Lord "can be abundantly prosperous with God's help."¹² Read alone, that looks like an anti-greed warning, and it is meant kindly. But what it actually commits God to is weighed in Chapter 18, which handles his law-machinery of prayer and blessing.

3. The Causes

The third exhibit is the heart of the chapter. Heavenly Hosts gathers a long list of things Satan "now works to" do. Here is one stretch of it, with his prooftexts exactly as printed.

Later in that same catalog: cause infirmities, cause lunacy and mania, urge suicides.¹⁴ So the man in my church had his vocabulary ready-made. Doubt, spiritual dryness, procrastination, a family quarrel: each one had a satanic cause and a proof verse printed beside it.

Romans 14:23 says that whatever is not from faith is sin. It says nothing about a spirit causing the doubt. Acts 24:25 records Felix telling Paul to go away and come back some other time. Felix's reluctance is his own. There is no spirit of delay in the verse. And look at the prooftext for divisions and strife. First Corinthians 3:3 is where Paul asks the Corinthians where their fighting comes from, and he gives his own answer:

The verse Dake cited to prove that Satan causes division is a verse where Paul blames the Corinthians themselves. That is not a minor detail. It is the whole argument of this chapter packed into one line of one catalog.

I want to be fair. One reference in that run does fit. Genesis 3:4-5 really does show the serpent planting doubt. The enemy is a liar and he does tempt. Nobody is disputing that. But the catalog takes a real biblical fact and stretches it into a rule of causation, then hangs verses on the rule that say something else entirely.

The same kind of map shows up in Dake's own course, in his own words and under his own name. God's Plan for Man gives a list of what demons cause when they possess people.

The Gospels do record demons behind some of these conditions. Dake is reading real accounts. But then, two paragraphs later on the same page, the rule drops with no limit at all.

Every sickness. Every unholy trait. Every doctrinal error. And only one remedy: the spirit must be cast out.

That sentence is the doorknob demonology in a nutshell, and it is Dake's own work. This is not an editor's gloss. It is not a late development. The identical claim appears in Bible Truths Unmasked, a book he wrote and published himself in 1950, under the heading "Demons and Disease Germs."¹⁸ Two separate books, about thirty years apart in printing, carry the same sentence. On that same page of his course he adds that "All unbelievers are more or less possessed with them."¹⁹ And the very next sentence puts disease germs and unclean spirits in the same family of corruption.²⁰ Sickness has its own chapter in this book, so I will not press the medical side here. Chapter 17 takes it up.

What I want you to notice is the reach of that one sentence. Not some sickness. Every sickness. Not some errors. Every doctrinal error, which would mean the person who disagrees with you about baptism has a spirit. And no second remedy is offered. Not repentance. Not teaching. Not medicine. Not time. Not the slow, patient work of the Spirit in a stubborn heart. Cast it out. Period.

4. The Marriages

The fourth exhibit is Genesis 6. I have to be careful here, because this is the spot where a critic can be unfair. I do not intend to be.

Genesis 6:1-4 says that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, took wives, and that there were giants on the earth. Who those sons of God were has been debated for two thousand years. The reading that takes them as angels is old and respected. It appears in Jewish writings before Christ, in Josephus, and in several early church fathers. It draws real support from Jude 6-7 and 2 Peter 2:4.²¹ Good evangelical scholars hold this view today. Dake is in serious company. He says at the start of his treatment that we should be "fair and open-minded to everything in Scripture, letting the Word of God itself settle every question."²² That is a good standard. I intend to hold him to it.

His argument runs through nine numbered points across five pages. Here is the hinge.

Put plainly: angels have real bodies, so there is no reason they could not father children. That is an argument from possibility, and he presents it as proof. Notice too how it leans on Lesson Six. The bodies he built in the angel lesson are doing work in the Genesis lesson.

Two separate outbreaks. Races of giants each time. And on the pages that follow, a strategy: the post-flood giants settled in Canaan ahead of Abraham in order to block the coming of Christ.²⁵

This is the superstructure, and it needs to be separated carefully from the foundation underneath it. That the sons of God in Genesis 6 may be angels is an old and arguable position. That there were exactly two eruptions, that they produced races of giants each time, and that the giants carried out an anti-messianic strategy in Canaan is not in the passage. It is built on top of it.

And the conclusion is not offered as one reading among several. It is sealed shut: "to deny it is to deny part of the Word of God."²⁶ That sentence is why this exhibit is in the chapter. The contested becomes the certain, and the certain becomes the Word of God itself.

The Answer from Scripture and the Historic Faith

1. First, the War Is Real

Before I say one word of correction, I want to say something else first. A full concession.

The Bible teaches a real enemy, real evil spirits, and a real fight. Paul does not treat any of this as a symbol.

Peter is just as concrete, in a verse Dake himself leans on through all his catalogs, and rightly so: "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour" (1 Peter 5:8). And Daniel 10 gives us the Bible's own look behind the curtain. An angel is delayed twenty-one days by the prince of the kingdom of Persia. Michael, one of the chief princes, comes to help. A prince of Greece is mentioned next.²⁷ Ranks exist. Territory is contested. Prayer meets resistance in the unseen world.

So I grant Dake his foundation without any reservation at all. And I will say something sharper. The embarrassment many educated Christians feel about the demonic is not maturity. It is unbelief dressed in a good vocabulary. On this point, my Pentecostal brothers and sisters have been right, and their critics have been wrong. If I had to choose between the shrug and the crowded map, I would take the map every time. At least it believes the Bible about the war.

2. The Line God Drew

That verse draws a line and tells you what the revealed side is for. It is for doing, not for charting. God gave us enough to obey with. He did not promise us enough to draw an org chart with.

Jude pushes the point harder, and Jude matters here because Jude is one of Dake's own supports for the Genesis 6 reading. In the same short letter, Jude praises restraint about angelic matters. Michael, disputing with the devil over the body of Moses, "dared not bring against him a reviling accusation, but said, 'The Lord rebuke you!'" Then Jude turns to the false teachers: "But these speak evil of whatever they do not know."²⁸ An archangel with firsthand knowledge of the spirit world held his tongue. The men Jude condemns are the ones speaking confidently about things they have not seen.

The word for "intruding into" pictures someone stepping onto ground and planting his feet (Greek embateuo, "to enter, to take one's stand on a place").²⁹ Paul is not describing devil worship. He is describing detail. Somebody at Colossae had a fuller account of the heavenly realms than the apostles offered, and Paul names the source: a fleshly mind, puffed up.

I want to be careful with that verse. It is not aimed at Dake, and I am not pretending it is. Paul is answering a particular error in a first-century city. But the instinct of the New Testament is hard to miss. Where the spirit world is concerned, Scripture keeps telling us less than we want to hear. And it keeps warning the people who supply the difference.

3. Genesis 6 and What Four Verses Will Carry

Three readings of Genesis 6:1-4 have held the field for centuries. An honest chapter states all three.

The angelic reading takes the sons of God as fallen angels. It is the oldest reading. It fits how "sons of God" is used in Job, and Jude and Peter appear to back it up. The Sethite reading takes them as the godly line of Seth marrying the ungodly line of Cain. Augustine held it. Calvin held it. It avoids the problem that Jesus says the angels in heaven do not marry. The royal reading takes them as ancient kings, since rulers in the ancient world were often called sons of the gods. That fits the tyranny and the "men of renown" in the passage.³⁰ Careful, reverent scholars have landed in all three camps.

So this is not the place where I say Dake is wrong about who the sons of God are. This is the place where I say something more limited and, I think, more important.

Genesis 6:1-4 is four verses long. Whatever reading you hold, those four verses will not carry what has been loaded onto them. The text says nothing about two eruptions. It says nothing about races of giants. It says nothing about a strategy to occupy Canaan ahead of Abraham. It offers no account of how angelic bodies might produce children. Every one of those items came from outside the passage and was then printed in the same confident tone as the passage itself.

Read the text and you feel Moses's restraint. He gives four verses and moves on to the flood. He is plainly not interested in the family trees of giants. He is interested in why the earth deserved judging.

4. Three Sources, Not One

Now the pastoral center of the answer. The New Testament names three sources of human trouble. Not one. Three.

The world is one. The devil is another. And the flesh (our own disordered wanting) is a third. Paul packs all three into a single sentence in Ephesians 2, describing the way we used to walk: according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, and in the lusts of our flesh.³¹ Three agents in one breath. The devil is in that list. He is not the whole list.

Three chapters later, James asks where the fights among believers come from. His answer is blunt: from your own desires for pleasure that war in your members. Then, in the very next breath, he says, "Resist the devil and he will flee from you."³² James holds both truths together. Your desires start the fight. The devil is real and must be resisted. Neither truth swallows the other.

A single-cause map cannot hold both. And when it fails, something important gets lost. What gets lost is repentance. If my coldness is really an assignment from a spirit of lukewarmness, there is nothing for me to confess. There is only something to be delivered from. If my temper is an intruder, then my wife is owed an exorcism, not an apology. The gospel has a powerful answer for a sinner who says, "I did this." It has very little to say to a man who has been taught that he never really does anything at all.

There is a second loss too. When the enemy explains everything, he ends up looking bigger than he is. Ask any believer who has lived under this kind of teaching for a while. They can describe the enemy's ranks in detail. They can say very little about their Savior.

5. Sober, Resisting, and at Rest

So what does the New Testament actually give the believer who takes the fight seriously?

It gives a finished victory. "Having disarmed principalities and powers, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it."³³ Those are Paul's words about the very powers Dake maps and charts. They have already been stripped and paraded. That is the tense the New Testament uses for them. Past tense. Done.

It gives a simple command with a promise attached: "Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you" (James 4:7). Submit, resist, he flees. There is no technique in that verse. No chart is required.

It gives a settled comparison: "He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world" (1 John 4:4). Greater. Not evenly matched. Not narrowly ahead. Greater.

And look at how the Lord Himself did the work. Matthew says they brought Him many who were demon-possessed, "and He cast out the spirits with a word" (Matthew 8:16). A word. He did not name ranks. He did not diagnose assignments. He did not question a spirit about its job title. The apostles worked the same way. When they ran into a case they could not handle, Jesus told them the answer was prayer, not a better chart (Mark 9:29).

Sober, then. Watchful. Not afraid. Resisting the enemy when he shows up. And at rest, because the war is real but the outcome is not close.

Answering the Defenses

A second defense is more practical, and it deserves respect. Deliverance ministry works, the argument goes, and the map is a useful tool. Pastors who use it have seen people set free.

I have seen people set free too. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But two things follow. First, the New Testament's own deliverance needed no map. A word, a name, a command. If the map were essential equipment, the apostles were very badly equipped. Second, fruit is measured by Scripture, not the other way around. Colossians 2 warns about exactly this sort of thing: rules and techniques that carry "an appearance of wisdom" but no power against the flesh.³⁴ And Acts shows what happens when technique replaces Christ. The sons of Sceva knew the right words. The spirit answered, "Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?" (Acts 19:15). Authority is a person. It is not a procedure.

A third defense speaks to Dake's conscience and to the reader who worries where a chapter like this leads. You will lull believers into ignoring the enemy, the objection says. Critics like you make Christians soft.

Go back and read my concession. I granted the war, the ranks, the devouring lion, the delayed angel, and the reality of deliverance. My quarrel is not with the war. It is with the crowding. And I would put the case the other way. The soldier who studies his Captain fights better than the soldier who memorizes the enemy's org chart. A believer who knows Colossians 2:15 in his bones is harder to frighten than a believer who has been taught there is a special spirit assigned to every bad day.

One more defense remains, and it comes in Dake's own voice. It deserves a hearing on its own terms.

That is a fine principle. I hold it myself. If Scripture states a thing, I believe it whether I can explain the mechanics or not. The whole question, and it is the question of this entire book, is the phrase "if it is so stated in Scripture." Two eruptions of fallen angels is not stated in Scripture. A demon behind every doctrinal error is not stated in Scripture. A chain of command among principalities is not stated in Scripture. A rule about all wars on earth is not stated in Scripture. Dake's principle is right. Applied honestly, it trims his own page.

The Words, and the Captain

Here is what we have documented. A four-tier enemy hierarchy with a reporting line, built on a four-word list in Colossians. A universal rule that every war on earth is decided first by angelic armies. A catalog assigning doubt, dryness, delay, and family quarrels to satanic causes, with prooftexts that in one case say the opposite. A sentence in Dake's own course teaching that there are demon spirits for every sickness, every unholy trait, and every doctrinal error, and that they must be cast out. And a reading of Genesis 6 that is old and arguable, carrying a superstructure that is neither, sealed with the claim that denying it denies the Word of God.

And here is what has been conceded, because it is true. Angels are real, organized, and active. Demons are real, and the Lord cast them out. Ranks exist. Territory is contested. Believers face an enemy who is stronger than they are and weaker than their Savior. Dake believed all this at a time when many in the church were explaining it away. He was right to believe it.

The word that failed him was "revelation." He used it the way the church uses it, but he filled it with something the church has never put in it: the confident detail of a system built up from inference, then taught as though it were Scripture. That is the same swap this book has traced through his doctrine of God. It works the same way here. Nobody notices, because the vocabulary never changes. The full anatomy of that swap is in Chapter 5.

If you have lived under the crowded map, I want to leave you with something better than a correction. You do not need to know the enemy's table of organization. You were never asked to. You are asked to submit to God, resist, and stand. The One who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. And the powers you were taught to chart have already been disarmed and paraded through the streets by a Man with holes in His hands.

Keep your Bible open. Read Genesis 6 and read the note beside it, and notice which one is shorter. Then ask the question this book keeps asking, the one Chapter 25 puts in your hands for good: is this in the verse, or is it in the note? The heavens are not empty. But they are God's, and He has told us exactly as much about them as He meant us to have.

Notes

↑ 1. Finis Jennings Dake, God's Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, 1949; 1977 printing), Lesson Six, 84. All page numbers for this work are the printed page numbers embedded in the resident OCR text of the 1977 printing. Obvious OCR breakage (split words, stray spaces inside Scripture references) has been silently repaired in the quotations; no wording has been altered.

↑ 2. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Six ("Satan and the Spirit-World"), 84–89. The lesson's numbered divisions run: seraphim, cherubim, zoa or living creatures, spirit horses and chariot drivers, archangels, common angels, and "Devils or Unclean Spirits Called Demons."

↑ 3. Heavenly Hosts (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Publishing, 1995), copyright page: "HEAVENLY HOSTS by Finis Jennings Dake, © Copyright 1995 by Finette Dake Kennedy, Annabeth Dake Germaine, Finis Jennings Dake, Jr." Its five chapters are: An Introduction to Angels; The Nature of Angels; Types of Angels; The Devil; The Work of Angels. This is a posthumously compiled edition of Dake's material, and this book cites it as such throughout; see note 4.

↑ 4. Heavenly Hosts, preface, signed David Patton, editor, Dake Publishing, Inc., May 1995: "The thoughts are Dake's own, as is a significant portion of the text. However, because the material is a compilation from his other writings, portions of the narrative have been constructed in order to provide a necessary flow from point to point.... additional pieces of narrative were written for the sake of transition between supporting verses. All in all though, this is a book by Finis Jennings Dake." The preface also states that the volume follows his practice of taking the Bible literally and supplying "two or three plain Scriptures" for each point; on that hermeneutic see Chapter 4.

↑ 5. The resident digitization of Heavenly Hosts carries chapter numbers but no printed page numbers, so citations here degrade one step, from page to chapter and section heading, per this book's standing citation rule. A small illustration of why the compilation is used with care: the opening of chapter 1 reproduces Dake's Lesson Six paragraph but drops one clause. God's Plan for Man, p. 84, reads "all that he needs to know, and we may say, all that he wants to know of the unseen worlds"; the compilation reads "all that he needs to know of the spirit world." The difference is recorded here as a fact about the two texts, with no claim about why it was made.

↑ 6. Colossians 1:16 (NKJV): "whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers." The Greek terms are thronoi ("thrones"), kuriotetes ("lordships"), archai ("rulers, beginnings"), and exousiai ("authorities"). Paul supplies no definitions and no order of precedence, in this passage or in the parallel lists at Ephesians 1:21, 6:12, and Colossians 2:15.

↑ 7. Heavenly Hosts, chap. 1, "Angels Are Organized Into Ranks," following the block quotation of Ephesians 6:10–13.

↑ 8. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Six, 86, under "THE NATURE OF ANGELS": angels have "spirit bodies with hands, feet, eyes, voice, head, mouth, hair, face, and other parts and passions as do men (Judges 13:6; Dan. 10:5-21; Rev. 8:1-9:21; 14:6-11; 15:1-16:21; 2 Thess. 1:7-10). They need no rest (Rev. 4:8); eat food (Gen. 18:8; 19:3; Ps. 78:25)." Compare Heavenly Hosts, chap. 2, "Similar To Men," where the same material appears with the added summary that angels "walk and talk and can even cook!" The angels who eat at Abraham's table (Genesis 18:8) and in Lot's house (Genesis 19:3) are of course in the text; the inventory of facial features is an inference from the appearance narratives.

↑ 9. Heavenly Hosts, chap. 4, "Satan and World Governments," following the block quotation of Daniel 10:11–21. The immediate context is a discussion of Daniel's angelic visitor; Dake extends the principle of that passage into a universal rule about all earthly warfare. A similar statement stands at Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Six, 85, in the section on angelic activities.

↑ 10. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Six, 87, closing the section headed "ANGELS HAVE REAL, TANGIBLE BODIES WITH BODILY PARTS LIKE MEN." The inference from angelic three-part nature to a three-part nature in each divine person is documented and answered in Chapters 6 and 8; it is quoted here only because it is the conclusion of the angel argument itself, and the reader should see where that argument was going.

↑ 11. Heavenly Hosts, chap. 4, "Methods of Satan," headnote and the first two entries. The entry headings are italicized subheads in the original; they are reproduced here in italic type.

↑ 12. Heavenly Hosts, chap. 4, "Methods of Satan," under "Deception About Wealth": "The devil preaches to the diligent businessman that he needs to spend all his time getting rich before serving the Lord. The truth is, if one will truly serve the Lord, he can be abundantly prosperous with God's help." The passage is a warning against putting wealth ahead of God; the promise attached to it is weighed in Chapter 18.

↑ 13. Heavenly Hosts, chap. 4, "The Work Of Satan," from the bulleted catalog introduced by the words "In general Satan now works to." The entries are printed as separate bulleted lines in the original; they are run together here with semicolons, with every word and reference reproduced as printed.

↑ 14. Heavenly Hosts, chap. 4, "The Work Of Satan," later entries in the same catalog: "Cause infirmities (Mt. 8:17; Lk. 13:16; Jn. 10:10; Acts 10:38)"; "Cause lunacy and mania (Mt. 4:23-24; 17:14-21; Mk. 5:1-18)"; "Urge suicides (Mt. 17:15; Jn. 10:10)." The catalog runs to more than forty entries.

↑ 15. Scripture quotations in this book are from the New King James Version unless otherwise noted; Scripture inside Dake's own material is his King James text, reproduced as he printed it. On 1 Corinthians 3:1–3, Paul's diagnostic word is sarkikos ("fleshly, of the flesh"), and the whole passage attributes the Corinthian factions to immaturity and carnality rather than to an external agent.

↑ 16. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Six, 88, opening of the section headed "THE WORK OF DEMONS." The heading is followed in the original by an em dash rather than a colon. The full list continues past the portion quoted here through counterfeit worship, error, sicknesses and diseases, torments, deceptions, lying, enchantments and witchcraft, heresies, false doctrines, wickedness, fear, worldliness, bondage, discord, violence, betrayals, oppression, sin, persecution, jealousy, and false prophecy.

↑ 17. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Six, 88. The sentence stands at the foot of the page, immediately after the paragraph on resources against demons, and immediately before the sentence on disease germs quoted in note 20.

↑ 18. Finis Jennings Dake, Bible Truths Unmasked (Atlanta: Bible Research Foundation, 1950), 14, section "(5) Demons and Disease Germs": "There are demon spirits for every sickness, unholy trait, and doctrinal error known among men. They must be cast out in order to get relief from them." The page is given per the embedded page markers in the resident text, which set the number at the head of each page; the section heading is the surer locator. The catalog of demonic works preceding it in Bible Truths Unmasked corresponds closely to the Lesson Six list quoted above, with small differences in the references cited. The point of the parallel is simply that this teaching is Dake's own and was in print under his name in 1950, well before the posthumous compilations.

↑ 19. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Six, 88: "All unbelievers are more or less possessed with them (Eph. 2:1-3)." The same page distinguishes demon possession from demon influence and states that the only resources against demons are "prayer, bodily control, and the whole armour of God."

↑ 20. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Six, 88–89: "Disease germs, which are closely allied with unclean spirits, are really living forms of corruption which come into the bodies of men bringing them to death." The sentence spans the page break. Dake's account of sickness and its causes, and the pastoral weight it puts on the sick, is the subject of Chapter 17.

↑ 21. The angelic reading of Genesis 6:1–4 is attested in Second Temple Jewish literature, in Josephus, and in a number of ante-Nicene writers; Jude 6–7 and 2 Peter 2:4 are its principal New Testament supports. Dake cites Josephus and the Ante-Nicene Fathers for it himself in Heavenly Hosts, chap. 3, under "Proofs Outside the Scriptures." These works are not held in this project's libraries, so they are named at work level here and not quoted; readers wanting the primary texts will find them in any standard collection. See Appendix F.

↑ 22. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Eleven, 193: "The subject of the sons of God marrying the daughters of men is much misunderstood, and for this reason we should be fair and open-minded to everything in Scripture, letting the Word of God itself settle every question." Lesson Eleven treats the Dispensation of Conscience; the sons-of-God section runs from p. 193 to p. 197.

↑ 23. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Eleven, 195, point (7) of the numbered argument. A photograph of this page is resident in the FULL library under the filename GPFM_195_Demons_Impregnate_Human_Women.PNG; the text is quoted here from the resident OCR of the printed page rather than from the photograph, and the page numbers agree.

↑ 24. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Eleven, 197, point F of the discussion of the spirits in prison.

↑ 25. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Eleven, 197: "The giants after the flood occupied the land of Canaan in advance of Abraham and his seed to thwart God's promise, if possible, of the coming of Christ, the seed of the woman, through Abraham."

↑ 26. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Eleven, 195, closing point (6): "Thus we have plain proof that angels did live with the daughters of men, and to deny it is to deny part of the Word of God."

↑ 27. Daniel 10:12–21 (NKJV). The passage names the prince of the kingdom of Persia, Michael as "one of the chief princes," and a coming prince of Greece. It is the clearest window Scripture opens onto territorial conflict among spirit beings, and nothing in this chapter minimizes it.

↑ 28. Jude 9–10 (NKJV). The juxtaposition is the point: the archangel's restraint in verse 9 sets up the charge in verse 10 against men who "speak evil of whatever they do not know."

↑ 29. Colossians 2:18 (NKJV). The verb rendered "intruding into" is embateuo, literally to step into or take one's stand upon a place; it was used of entering a sanctuary and, in some inscriptions, of initiation into mysteries. The exact background of the Colossian error is debated, and this chapter presses no more from the verse than its plain warning about confident detail concerning the unseen.

↑ 30. The three readings are standard in the commentary literature. The Sethite view is associated with Augustine and with Calvin; the royal or dynastic view appeals to the ancient Near Eastern use of divine sonship language for kings, and to the emphasis on tyranny and renown in Genesis 6:4. The counterweight to the angelic view is Matthew 22:30, where Jesus says the angels in heaven do not marry; Dake answers this at God's Plan for Man, Lesson Eleven, 195–196, arguing that the verse concerns angels in heaven rather than angels who left their habitation. These commentators are named at work level rather than quoted, since their texts are not resident in this project's libraries.

↑ 31. Ephesians 2:1–3 (NKJV). The three agents are named in sequence: "the course of this world," "the prince of the power of the air," and "the lusts of our flesh." Older writers summarized the trio as the world, the flesh, and the devil, and the summary is exactly right.

↑ 32. James 4:1, 7 (NKJV). Verse 1 locates the fighting in "your desires for pleasure that war in your members"; verse 7 commands submission to God and resistance to the devil. The passage is a model of the balance this chapter is asking for.

↑ 33. Colossians 2:15 (NKJV). The image is a Roman triumph: the defeated are stripped and led publicly behind the victor.

↑ 34. Colossians 2:23 (NKJV): such regulations "indeed have an appearance of wisdom in self-imposed religion, false humility, and neglect of the body, but are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh."

↑ 35. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Eleven, 196. His companion principle, that all Scriptural language "is to be taken literally when it is at all possible," stands at Lesson Forty-nine material in the Supplement, p. 782, and is examined in Chapter 4.