Chapter 19

The Crowded Heavens

Angels, demons, and a map that runs past the text

Picture a man in a weekly Bible study who can no longer say a plain sentence about himself, such as “I was lazy this week.” When his work slips, he blames a spirit of delay. When his prayer life dries up, he calls it a spirit of lukewarmness, and when he stops speaking to his brother-in-law, he says a spirit of division has gotten into the family. He is a serious believer, and he did not invent these words. He learned them from a teacher he trusts, out of Dake’s course and the books drawn from it, where nearly every fault has a spirit behind it and a verse printed beside it.

The sentence behind that vocabulary is Dake’s own. It sits on page 88 of his course, God’s Plan for Man.

He printed the same two sentences in Bible Truths Unmasked in 1950, a year after the course first appeared, so this is his settled teaching and no editor’s gloss.² Read plainly, it says that every sickness, every sinful habit, and every wrong belief has a demon of its own. The demon has to be cast out before the person can be free of it.

My verdict is that Dake printed inference as revelation. He mapped the spirit world in confident detail, ranked the evil spirits in a chain of command, and assigned a demon to nearly every human fault. Then he set all of it beside the Bible in the same voice as the Bible. That is an error. The clearest proof is one of his own prooftexts. When Dake lists “divisions and strife” among the works of Satan, he cites 1 Corinthians 3:1–3, a passage in which Paul blames the Corinthians themselves for their quarrels.

The map starts from a large claim about how much God has told us.

The Bible is the only Book in the world that gives an insight into the heavenly and infernal worlds. There are hundreds of Scriptures revealing to man all that he needs to know, and we may say, all that he wants to know of the unseen worlds.God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Six, p. 84³

If the Bible tells us all we want to know about the unseen world, then a teacher who fills in every detail is only reporting what is there. Dake wrote that way. Lesson Six of his course works through seraphim, cherubim, living creatures, spirit horses and their drivers, archangels, common angels, and demons, and it gives each class a nature, powers, and duties.⁴ The later volume Heavenly Hosts gathers the same material into five chapters, with long lists of Satan’s methods and works. It is a compilation, put together by Dake Publishing’s editors in 1995 from his writings, and its preface says the editors wrote some of the connecting prose themselves.⁵ So I say when a passage comes from the compilation, and the weight of the case rests on what Dake published under his own name.

What a crowded map does to a believer

A study Bible teaches a way of reading along with its content. When a guess is printed in the same confident voice as the verse beside it, the reader soon stops telling the two apart. That habit does not stay in the lessons on angels. It goes straight into the lessons on God, where the same method gives God a body and a location. Chapter 4 examines the rule of reading that drives both.

The map also burdens the conscience. If a spirit is assigned to every fault, then no fault is simply mine, and the man in the Bible study has a name for each of his troubles that points away from himself. It breeds fear as well. A believer taught to read every headache and every argument as enemy action can come to feel unsafe in his own home.

I should say where I stand. I was trained in Pentecostal schools, and I believe in the devil, in demons, and in the gifts of the Spirit for today. My quarrel is with a map that claims more ground than the Bible gave it.

Dake’s map of the spirit world

Four ranks of evil spirits

Paul names the enemy in Ephesians 6:12: principalities, powers, the rulers of the darkness of this age, and spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. He gives a list, and he does not say which group outranks which. In Heavenly Hosts, under the heading “Angels Are Organized Into Ranks,” the section cites Colossians 1:16 for the fact that Christ created thrones, dominions, principalities and powers.⁶ Then it quotes Ephesians 6:10–13 and turns Paul’s list into a chain of command.

These are spirit beings in rebellion against God with whom we as saints must wrestle. Principalities are beings of the highest rank and order in Satan's kingdom. The powers derive their authority from and execute the will of the chief rulers. Then there are the world rulers of the darkness of this age, followed by wicked spirits in the heavenlies.Heavenly Hosts, ch. 1, “Angels Are Organized Into Ranks”⁷

In plain English, the enemy has four tiers. Principalities sit at the top, the powers take their orders from them, the world rulers come next, and the wicked spirits are at the bottom. This ranking restates Dake’s own note on Ephesians 6:12 in his Study Bible, which ranks the four groups in the same order. In that note the principalities are the chief rulers of highest rank in Satan’s kingdom, and the authorities are those who draw their power from the chief rulers and carry out their will.⁸ So the ranks are printed in the columns of the Bible itself, beside a verse that gives no ranks.

The same confidence runs through his account of what angels are like. Angels have bodies with hands, feet, eyes, voice, head, mouth, hair, and face. They need no rest, and they eat food.⁹ Some of that is in the text, since angels eat at Abraham’s table in Genesis 18. The rest is drawn out by inference, and no verse lists an angel’s hair.

Angels at war behind every war

The chart is then stretched to cover the history of the nations.

Satan has trusted angels over all the governments of this world. They are responsible to him for carrying out his will in those governments. He seeks to hinder God's plan in the fulfillment of prophecy regarding world kingdoms. God also has trusted angels who carry out His will concerning what He has predicted to take place in the kingdoms of this world (Dan. 10:11-21; 11:1; 12:1). Hence, there are wars between these two groups of angels in the heavenlies (Dan. 10:13, 20-21; 11:1; 12:1; Jude 9; Rev. 12:7-12). All wars lost or won on earth are results of wars lost or won by these heavenly armies.Heavenly Hosts, ch. 4, “Satan and World Governments”¹⁰

The last sentence makes a rule for every war ever fought: each one, won or lost, was decided first by a battle between angels. Daniel 10 shows something real, a conflict over Persia and Greece in Daniel’s day, and I will come back to it. The rule about every war in every century is Dake’s addition, drawn from one passage and applied to all of history.

From angels’ bodies to God’s body

The lesson on angels also does work in Dake’s doctrine of God. After arguing that angels have real bodies with real parts, he draws this conclusion.

Thus all seraphims, cherubims, living creatures, archangels, angels, and other spirit beings have bodies, souls and spirits like men. If it can be conceived that all these spirit beings are real and have personal bodies, souls, and spirits, then it certainly is conceivable that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, as three spirit beings also have spirit bodies, souls, and spirits.God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Six, p. 87¹¹

He climbs from angels with bodies to a Father, Son, and Spirit who are three spirit beings with bodies. That is why a book about the doctrine of God needs a chapter on angels. Chapter 6 shows what this means for his Godhead, and Chapter 8 shows what it means for God’s body.

A catalog of Satan’s methods

Heavenly Hosts gives the enemy’s tactics one heading at a time.

Satan uses every conceivable means to hold men in subjection to himself and keep them from turning to God. If he fails in this, he tries to kill the believer's testimony and ruin his influence for God.

Lukewarmness. Satan tries to get others in a lukewarm condition and, if he succeeds, urges them to stay in that condition so that God will cut them off in the end.

Unholy Passions. He stirs up unholy passions, causing people to throw away all restraint and live a life of revelry.Heavenly Hosts, ch. 4, “Methods of Satan”¹²

The list goes on to suicide, deception about sin, deception about serving God, deception about wealth, and compromise in church leadership. As pastoral warning, much of it is sound. Believers do grow cold, and church leaders do soften their message to keep the money coming. The trouble is in the form. Each ordinary temptation gets a heading and an agent, so that coldness becomes something Satan does to you and then urges you to keep doing. In nearly every sentence the enemy is the subject and the believer is the object, and a reader who takes in that grammar for years learns to see his own life the same way. One entry promises that whoever truly serves the Lord “can be abundantly prosperous with God’s help”; Chapter 18 weighs that promise with his laws of prosperity.¹³

A cause for every fault

The same chapter of Heavenly Hosts lists what Satan “now works to” do, with a proof text beside each line. Here is one stretch of it, with the references as printed.

Cause doubt and unbelief (Rom. 14:23; Gen. 3:4-5); Cause darkness and oppression (2 Cor. 4:4; 2 Pet. 1:4-9); Cause deadness and weakness (Heb. 6:1; 9:14); Cause delay and compromise (Acts 24:25; 26:28); Cause divisions and strife (1 Pet. 5:8; 1 Cor. 3:1-3).Heavenly Hosts, ch. 4, “The Work Of Satan”¹⁴

Later lines in the same list have Satan causing infirmities and lunacy and urging suicides. Dake gave the same references for “divisions and strife” in his own course.¹⁵ So the man in the Bible study had his words ready-made: doubt, spiritual dryness, putting things off, and a family quarrel each came with a satanic cause and a verse.

When you open the verses, most of them say something else. Romans 14:23 says that whatever is not from faith is sin, and it says nothing about a spirit causing the doubt. Acts 24:25 tells how Felix sent Paul away until a more convenient time. The delay was Felix’s own, and the verse names no spirit. The reference for divisions and strife is the plainest case. In 1 Corinthians 3:1–3 Paul tells the church why they quarrel, and his answer is about them.

for you are still carnal. For where there are envy, strife, and divisions among you, are you not carnal and behaving like mere men?1 Corinthians 3:3 (NKJV)¹⁶

Dake cited this passage to prove that Satan causes division, and in it Paul blames the Corinthians themselves. One reference in the stretch does fit, since Genesis 3:4–5 shows the serpent planting doubt. The enemy lies and tempts, and no one disputes it. The list takes that true fact and makes it a rule that explains every fault, and then it hangs verses on the rule that teach something else. The method works by a quiet step. A passage shows an evil spirit doing a thing in one case, and since no verse says spirits never do it, the general claim is printed as Bible teaching with the first verse attached. But a verse that does not rule a thing out has not taught it.

A demon for every sickness and every error

The course itself, under Dake’s own name, gives a list of what demons cause when they possess people.

THE WORK OF DEMONS—They possess people and cause: dumbness and deafness (Matt. 9:32-33; Mark 9:25); blindness (Matt. 12:22); grievous vexation (Matt. 15:22); lunacy and mania (Matt. 4:23-24; 17:14-21; Mark 5:1-18); uncleanness (called unclean spirits twenty-one times, Luke 4:36); supernatural strength (Mark 5:1-18); suicide (Matt. 17:15; John 10:10); fits (Mark 9:20); lusts (John 8:44; Eph. 2:1-3; 1 John 2:15-17).God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Six, p. 88¹⁷

The Gospels do record demons behind some of these conditions, so here Dake is reading real accounts. At the foot of the same page, though, comes the sentence in the box at the top of this chapter, and it has no limit at all. It names every sickness, every unholy trait, and every doctrinal error, which would mean that a believer who disagrees with you about baptism has a spirit. It offers one remedy, which is to cast the spirit out. Repentance, teaching, medicine, time, and the patient work of the Spirit in a stubborn heart do not appear. On the same page Dake writes that “All unbelievers are more or less possessed with them” and then ties disease germs to unclean spirits.¹⁸ Sickness has its own chapter, Chapter 17, so I leave the medical side there.¹⁹

Angels, women, and giants

Genesis 6:1–4 says that the sons of God saw the daughters of men and took wives, and that there were giants on the earth in those days. Who the sons of God were has been argued 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, and it draws support from Jude 6–7 and 2 Peter 2:4.²⁰ Good evangelical scholars hold it today. Dake opens his treatment with a sound standard: we should be “fair and open-minded to everything in Scripture, letting the Word of God itself settle every question.”²¹ His argument then runs through numbered points across several pages. This is its hinge.

ANGELS DO HAVE REAL BODIES AND CAN LIVE LIKE MEN. We have seen in Lesson Six that angels do have real bodies like men and that they have appeared to man as men many times. If they do have real bodies and have done and can do bodily acts such as man does, then why could they not live with the daughters of men and produce offspring?God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Eleven, p. 195²²

Angels have bodies, he reasons, so nothing stops them from fathering children. That is an argument from what might be possible, and he presents it as proof. It also leans on Lesson Six, so the bodies he built in the lesson on angels carry weight in the lesson on Genesis. Then he goes well past the ancient reading.

THERE WERE TWO ERUPTIONS OF THE FALLEN ANGELS AMONG MEN. They produced races of giants on the Earth each time. The first eruption was before the flood, and the second one was after the flood.God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Eleven, p. 197²³

On the same page he adds a strategy. The giants after the flood settled in Canaan ahead of Abraham, he says, “to thwart God’s promise, if possible, of the coming of Christ” through Abraham’s line.²⁴ That the sons of God may be angels is an old position that can be argued either way. Two eruptions, races of giants each time, and a plan to block the Messiah in Canaan appear nowhere in the passage; he built them on top of it. He also refuses to treat the result as one reading among several. Earlier in the argument he writes that “to deny it is to deny part of the Word of God.”²⁵ A disputed reading has become certain, and the certain reading has become Scripture.

What Scripture says

The war is real

Dake was right about the foundation, and I grant it in full. The Bible teaches a real enemy, real evil spirits, and a real fight, and Paul does not treat any of it as a figure of speech.

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.Ephesians 6:12 (NKJV)

Peter is just as plain: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8). Daniel 10 gives the Bible’s own look behind the curtain. An angel sent to Daniel is withstood twenty-one days by the prince of the kingdom of Persia, Michael comes to help, and a prince of Greece is named as coming next.²⁶ There are ranks among the spirits, there is conflict over nations, and prayer can meet resistance in the unseen world. Many educated Christians are embarrassed by talk of demons, and that embarrassment comes from unbelief, however polished its vocabulary. On this point Dake and the Pentecostal churches have been right. The question is how much more than this the Bible tells us.

The line God drew

Scripture is sparing about the unseen world, and it is sparing on purpose.

The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.Deuteronomy 29:29 (NKJV)

Moses draws a line and tells Israel what the revealed side is for. It is for obeying. God gave us enough to live by, and He never promised us enough to draw the enemy’s organization chart.

Jude presses the point, and Jude matters here because Dake leans on his letter for the Genesis 6 reading. In that same short letter, Michael the archangel, disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, “dared not bring against him a reviling accusation, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you!’” Jude then turns to the false teachers, who “speak evil of whatever they do not know” (Jude 10).²⁷ The archangel, who knew the spirit world firsthand, held his tongue. The men Jude condemns spoke with confidence about what they had not seen. Paul says the same thing about angels by name.

Let no one cheat you of your reward, taking delight in false humility and worship of angels, intruding into those things which he has not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, . . .Colossians 2:18 (NKJV)

The word translated “intruding into” pictures a man stepping onto ground and planting his feet there (Greek embateuo, “to enter, to take one’s stand on a place”).²⁸ Paul is answering a particular error in one city, and he was not writing about Dake. Still, someone at Colossae claimed a fuller account of the heavenly realm than the apostles gave, and Paul traced it to a fleshly mind. Across the New Testament the pattern holds. Where the spirit world is concerned, Scripture tells us less than we want to know, and it warns the people who supply the rest.

What Genesis 6 will carry

Three readings of Genesis 6:1–4 have held the field for centuries. The angelic reading is the oldest. It fits the way “sons of God” is used in Job, and Jude and Peter seem to support it. The Sethite reading takes the sons of God as the godly line of Seth marrying the ungodly line of Cain. Augustine and Calvin held it, and it avoids a difficulty, since Jesus says the angels in heaven do not marry. The royal reading takes them as ancient kings, because rulers in the ancient world were often called sons of the gods, and that fits the tyranny and the “men of renown” in the passage.²⁹ Careful and reverent scholars have held each of the three.

So my objection is not to Dake’s answer about who the sons of God were. Whatever reading you hold, four verses will not carry what he loaded onto them. The text says nothing of two eruptions, nothing of races of giants, and nothing of a plan to hold Canaan against Abraham. It gives no account of how angels might father children. Every one of those details came from outside the passage and was then printed in the same confident tone as the passage. Moses gives the account briefly and moves on to the flood, because his concern is why the earth deserved judgment.

Dake would answer with a principle of his own.

We are obligated to believe plain Scriptures or make Jude, Peter, Moses, and others false teachers. We are not required to understand how spirit-beings could do things that man can do; we are simply required to believe it if it is so stated in Scripture.God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Eleven, p. 196³⁰

I hold that principle myself. If Scripture states a thing, I believe it whether or not I can explain how it works. The whole question turns on the words “if it is so stated in Scripture.” Scripture does not state two eruptions of fallen angels, a demon behind every doctrinal error, a chain of command among the principalities, or a rule about all the wars on earth. Applied honestly, Dake’s principle would trim his own page.

The world, the flesh, and the devil

The New Testament names three sources of human trouble. Paul puts all three in one sentence in Ephesians 2, describing how we once lived: 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 The devil is on that list, but he is one source among three. James is even more direct about where temptation starts.

But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed.James 1:14 (NKJV)

Later in the same letter James asks where the fights among believers come from, and he answers with another question: do they not come from “your desires for pleasure that war in your members”? A few verses on he says, “Resist the devil and he will flee from you.”³² James holds both truths together: our own desires start the fight, and the devil is real and must be resisted.

A map with one cause cannot hold both, and repentance is what gets lost. If my coldness is an assignment from a spirit of lukewarmness, I have nothing to confess and only something to be delivered from. If my temper is an intruder, my wife is owed an exorcism instead of an apology. The gospel has a powerful word for the sinner who says “I did this,” and very little to say to a man who has been taught that he never really does anything at all. There is a second loss. When the enemy explains everything, he grows larger in the believer’s mind than he is, and a person can end up knowing the enemy’s ranks better than he knows his Savior.

Sober, resisting, and at rest

The New Testament gives the believer who takes the fight seriously a finished victory. Paul writes of the very powers Dake ranks: “Having disarmed principalities and powers, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it.”³³ They have already been stripped and led in Christ’s triumph, and Paul speaks of it as done.

It gives a simple command with a promise: “Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). The verse needs no technique and no chart. It gives a settled comparison as well: “He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). And it shows how the Lord Himself did the work. When many who were demon-possessed were brought to Him, “He cast out the spirits with a word” (Matthew 8:16). He did not name ranks, diagnose assignments, or question a spirit about its office. When His disciples met a case they could not handle, He pointed them to prayer (Mark 9:29). The believer is called to be sober and watchful, to resist the enemy when he comes, and to rest, because the war is real but its outcome is not in doubt.

Questions a Dake reader will ask

Don’t Daniel 10 and Ephesians 6 give us ranks?

Some readers will say that Daniel 10 and Ephesians 6 give us ranks, and that Dake only filled in the picture. The premise is true. There are ranks, and there is conflict over nations, because Scripture says so. But filling in the picture is the very thing at issue. A reader can see where Paul’s list ends and the chain of command begins only if someone shows him, and the notes never show him. They print the verse and the filling in one voice, so the reader has no way to tell them apart.

But deliverance ministry works

A second reply is practical. Pastors who use the map say they have seen people set free, so the map must be a useful tool. Christ does set people free, and I do not doubt it. Two things still follow. The deliverance recorded in the New Testament needed no map. It came by a word and a command in Jesus’ name, and if the map were necessary, the apostles were badly equipped. And results are tested by Scripture, not Scripture by results. Paul warns about rules and methods that have “an appearance of wisdom” but no power against the flesh.³⁴ Acts shows what happens when method takes Christ’s place. The sons of Sceva used the right words, and the spirit answered, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?” (Acts 19:15). Authority belongs to Christ, and no procedure can borrow it.

Won’t this make believers careless about the enemy?

A third reply worries that a chapter like this will lull believers into ignoring the enemy. Everything I have granted stands: the war, the ranks, the roaring lion, the delayed angel, and the reality of deliverance. My argument is with the crowding. A soldier who knows his Captain fights better than one who has memorized the enemy’s table of organization. A believer who knows Colossians 2:15 by heart is harder to frighten than one who has been taught that a special spirit is assigned to every bad day.

The Captain and the map

Dake was right that angels are real and active, that demons are real, and that the Lord cast them out, and he believed it when many in the church were explaining it away. But he filled the word “revelation” with something the church never put in it, a confident system built from inference and then taught as Scripture. The evil spirits are ranked beside a verse that gives no ranks, and every war becomes the result of a battle among angels. A demon is assigned to every sickness, every sinful habit, and every doctrinal error, with a passage cited for division in which Paul blames the church. Four verses of Genesis carry two eruptions of giants, and any denial is called a denial of the Word of God. That is inference printed as revelation, and it is an error, the same swap of meanings that runs through his doctrine of God. Chapter 5 describes how the swap works.

If you have lived under the crowded map, you do not need to know the enemy’s table of organization. You were never asked to learn it. You are asked to submit to God, resist the devil, and stand. The One who lives 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 led in triumph by the Man who was crucified. Read the four verses of Genesis 6 and then Dake’s pages on them, and ask the question Chapter 25 puts in your hands: is this in the verse, or only in the note? The heavens are not empty, but they are God’s, and He has told us as much about them as He meant us to have.