Thought Tapestries

The Powers of the Air, Carmel, and the Fear of Looking

Oct 26, 2026

The Mug on the Table

At a Bible study not long ago, I said that we don’t take the powers of the air seriously enough. I said that Baal is abortion and Asherah is pornography, that the gods Elijah faced on Carmel never left the field, and that we serve them now without troubling to carve a statue. Someone across the table set a coffee mug down and said that if this mug were an idol of Baal, it would be nothing. It was a fair answer, and it came straight out of Paul.

I have thought about that mug ever since. I hold that both statements have merit, and that one of them ignores the real danger. To say why, I have to walk into ground most of us were taught to walk around, and I have to start with a word.

A Word Too Small for Its Work

When we hear the word “God” in English, we hear one being: uncreated, all-powerful, present everywhere. The word has been worn down almost to a name. Once it means that and only that, the phrase “other gods” sounds like a contradiction, and the reader is left with two choices. He can decide the other gods are imaginary, or he can decide the Bible describes a crowd of rivals standing on equal footing. The Hebrew allows neither one.

The Hebrew word is elohim, and it names a kind of being, created or uncreated. The Bible uses it for the LORD Himself thousands of times, always with singular verbs. It uses it for the gods of the nations, as when Moses sang at the sea, “Who is like You, O LORD, among the gods?” (Exodus 15:11), and when he told Israel that “the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords” (Deuteronomy 10:17). It uses it for a council in heaven: “God stands in the congregation of the mighty; He judges among the gods” (Psalm 82:1). The same word stands on both sides of that sentence, once for the Judge and once for those He judges.

The range goes further still. Psalm 8:5 says man was made a little lower than elohim, and the NKJV renders it “angels.” When the medium at En Dor sees the dead Samuel rising, she says she sees elohim coming up out of the earth, and the NKJV renders it “a spirit” (1 Samuel 28:13). The New Testament carries the same range in the Greek theos. Paul grants that there are “many gods and many lords,” yet “for us there is one God, the Father” (1 Corinthians 8:5–6). He calls Satan “the god of this age” (2 Corinthians 4:4). And Jesus answered His accusers out of Psalm 82: “I said, ‘You are gods’” (John 10:34).

The translators have to choose every time, and the capital letter does a work the Hebrew never did. Hebrew has no capitals. “God,” “gods,” “angels,” and “a spirit” are one word underneath, and an English reader sees four things where a Hebrew reader saw one kind of being named four ways. The English page is tidier than the one Moses wrote, and the tidiness costs us something.

None of this is new. Hebrew scholars have known it for a long time, and Michael Heiser spent the last years of his life helping ordinary readers see it. I came to it by a different road, sitting with Elijah on Carmel, but the ground was walked before me.

Where God Lives

I go looking for the gray areas in Scripture, because I hold that God lives in them. Most people shy away from a passage that won’t settle into a neat answer. I would rather dive in, since the places where the text refuses to be tidy are so often the places where it is telling the truth about something larger than our categories.

Jacob is where I begin. Genesis 32:24 says that “a Man wrestled with him until the breaking of day.” By verse 28 that Man tells Jacob, “you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.” In verse 30 Jacob names the place Peniel, “For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” Centuries later Hosea looked back on that night and said it both ways in one breath: “in his strength he struggled with God. Yes, he struggled with the Angel and prevailed” (Hosea 12:3–4). One opponent is called a man, God, and the Angel, and the text lets all three stand. When Jacob asks His name, he is answered with a question.

Watch the translators again. The NKJV capitalizes “Man” in verse 24, and that capital letter is a decision. The translator saw the gray and settled it in the typeface, so the English reader meets the answer before he has met the question.

The same pattern returns wherever the Angel of the LORD appears. Hagar is spoken to by the Angel, and then she names “the LORD who spoke to her” (Genesis 16:13). At the bush the Angel of the LORD appears in the flame, and then God calls to Moses from the midst of it (Exodus 3:2–4). God says of His Angel, “My name is in Him” (Exodus 23:21). Manoah asks the Angel’s name and is told, “Why do you ask My name, seeing it is wonderful?” (Judges 13:18). The text keeps setting the LORD and His messenger in the same place without drawing a line between them.

The gray in these passages comes from precision. The men who wrote them knew exactly what a man was and exactly what God was, and they wrote it this way anyway. A careless writer would have picked one.

Before My Face

That brings me to the commandment. “You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exodus 20:3–4). In Hebrew, “before Me” is ‘al-panay, “before My face.” The commandment forbids any other god a place in His presence at all. Remember Peniel, the face of God, where Jacob stood and held on.

Verse 4 lays out a map of creation: heaven above, earth beneath, water under the earth. Israel may not copy anything found in any of those places. Paul uses the same kind of map when he writes of Christ, “For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him” (Colossians 1:16). Exodus lists the places where a man might find a god to copy. Paul lists the same places and says that everything in them, seen and unseen, was made by Him. The carved image is the visible half of idolatry, the thing you can shape and set on a shelf. Paul names the invisible half, the thrones and dominions and principalities and powers, and he calls every one of them created.

In another letter Paul names one of them at work. He reminds the Ephesians of the life they once lived, “in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2). There is a prince, he is at work now, and he works in people. Paul’s readers had walked by his course themselves. Four chapters later Paul names the prince’s ranks: “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). The principalities and powers of Colossians 1:16 are here again, the same words, and now they stand in opposition. They were made through Christ and for Him, and some of them have set themselves against Him. Paul tells the Colossians how that ends: “Having disarmed principalities and powers, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15).

Put those passages together and the first commandment opens up. YHWH is the name, and elohim is the kind. The LORD belongs to that kind and stands alone above it, the one elohim who was never made. Every other member of the class was created through Him and for Him. The line Scripture draws runs between Creator and created, and the word “god” doesn’t mark that line by itself. The name does. Read that way, “You shall have no other gods before Me” never asks whether other gods exist. It assumes they do, and it forbids every one of them a place before His face.

The Battle No One Fights

Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War that “supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” He also wrote that “all warfare is based on deception.” The two belong together. The cleanest victory comes when the other side never learns there is a war.

Daniel 10 shows the war. Daniel prays and fasts for three weeks, and when the messenger finally comes, he explains the delay. “From the first day that you set your heart to understand, and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard; and I have come because of your words. But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days; and behold, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me” (Daniel 10:12–13). Before he leaves, the messenger says he must return to fight with the prince of Persia, and that when he goes, the prince of Greece will come (10:20). Nations have princes, the princes resist God’s messengers, and what happens on earth follows what happens there. Daniel saw none of it. From where he knelt, it was three weeks of silence.

I believe Satan wins when he convinces people that no one is out there but God, and that Daniel 10 can be passed over. Scripture does say there is one God. “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one!” (Deuteronomy 6:4). That is Israel’s confession, and it is mine. It declares the LORD one and unique. The flattened version we often carry says something else, that nothing else is out there at all, and that version empties the field so the enemy can cross it unseen.

Think of what that does to Ephesians 6:12. If there are no powers, Paul’s verse has nowhere to land, and every struggle must be against flesh and blood, because flesh and blood is all that is left. The prince of Ephesians 2:2 works in people, and so people are where his work shows. A believer who cannot see the prince will fight the people instead: neighbors, rulers, family, other believers. The enemy then has what Sun Tzu called supreme excellence. He never has to fight the church, because the church is busy fighting the very people he works through.

This deception has two flanks, and he has used both. In Elijah’s day the lie ran toward too many gods, Baal for the rain and Asherah for the harvest, each worth an altar. The danger then was taking the powers too seriously. In our day the lie runs the other way, and the danger is not taking them seriously at all. Either lie keeps people from standing before the one face that matters, and either one wins without a battle.

Back to the Mug

The answer with the mug was Paul’s, and Paul stands behind it for about one chapter. “We know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no other God but one” (1 Corinthians 8:4). But Paul keeps going. In the next verse he grants the many gods and many lords. Two chapters later he comes back to the question and answers it himself: “What am I saying then? That an idol is anything, or what is offered to idols is anything? Rather, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice to demons and not to God, and I do not want you to have fellowship with demons” (1 Corinthians 10:19–20).

Paul holds both statements, the same two that met across that table. The carved thing is nothing, whether clay or wood or a coffee mug. The worship is something, because it goes somewhere and someone receives it. The answer at the table stopped at 8:4, and the danger lives in 10:20.

Psalm 106 joins the idol, the demons, and the blood in a few lines. “They served their idols, which became a snare to them. They even sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons, and shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan; and the land was polluted with blood” (Psalm 106:36–38). The psalmist names the idols of Canaan and names the demons, and he doesn’t treat them as rival explanations. The idols are what Israel saw. The demons are who received the offering.

I paired Baal and Asherah as I did because of what those gods were served with. Jeremiah says Judah built “the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings to Baal” (Jeremiah 19:5). When Josiah cleansed the temple, he tore down the booths of the cult prostitutes in the house of the LORD, “where the women wove hangings for the wooden image” (2 Kings 23:7), and that wooden image was Asherah’s. The same powers can be served without a statue. The missing statue only makes the service easier to miss.

Elijah holds both statements on Carmel. He mocks Baal as nothing: “Cry aloud, for he is a god; either he is meditating, or he is busy, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is sleeping and must be awakened” (1 Kings 18:27). Yet he treats the day as a matter of life and death, rebuilding the altar of the LORD stone by stone, drenching it with water, and calling down fire. The prophets of Baal show the other half. Their god never answers, and still “they cried aloud, and cut themselves, as was their custom, with knives and lances, until the blood gushed out on them” (18:28). Baal did nothing that day, and his worshipers bled anyway. That is the mug on the table, empty in itself, still costing blood from the people who serve what stands behind it.

The Silence of Baal

The absence of any action by Baal leads people to a conclusion: Baal is nothing. It is the conclusion an enemy would choose for them, because it looks like victory and it ends the watch.

Listen to what the people actually said when the fire fell. “The LORD, He is God! The LORD, He is God!” (1 Kings 18:39). In Hebrew it is YHWH hu ha-elohim, with the article: the LORD is the God. They confessed which elohim stands alone. Carmel settled who holds the power, and the people on the mountain took it that way.

The chapters that follow argue against the easy reading. The day after the fire, Jezebel sends Elijah a single message, and she swears it by the very beings Carmel was supposed to have disproved: “So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time” (1 Kings 19:2). Elijah runs for his life. Baal’s altars stand for another generation, until Jehu gathers his worshipers into his temple and tears it down (2 Kings 10). A god who was nothing would hardly need Jehu. In 1 Kings 22 the prophet Micaiah sees the LORD on His throne with the host of heaven around Him, and a spirit comes forward and says, “I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets” (22:22). And when Ahab’s son falls through a lattice, he sends to inquire of Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron, and Elijah meets the messengers with the LORD’s own question: “Is it because there is no God in Israel that you are going to inquire of Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron?” (2 Kings 1:3). After Carmel, after the fire, a king of Israel still sends to another god. The Gospels will speak that name again as Beelzebub, ruler of the demons.

Daniel 10 cuts the same way. If the silence of Baal proves Baal is nothing, then twenty-one days of silence from heaven would prove the same about God. Daniel heard nothing because a battle was being fought that he couldn’t see. Silence tells us that nothing answered. It cannot tell us that nothing is there.

There is one more thing about Baal’s silence. Baal was the storm god, the rider of the clouds, the one his worshipers trusted to send the rain. Elijah’s contest began three and a half years before the altars, with the first words he speaks in Scripture: “As the LORD God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, except at my word” (1 Kings 17:1). Before whom I stand is, in Hebrew, before His face. Elijah stood where the first commandment allows no other god to stand, and from the first verse of his story Baal was failing at his own work. The fire only made it public.

Why We Don’t Look

If all of this is in the text, why do so few of us see it? Part of the answer is fear. People shy away from the gray areas, and the fear is old. It is as old as the commandment itself.

Seventeen verses after “You shall have no other gods before Me,” Israel stands at the foot of the mountain. The people see the thunder and the lightning, hear the trumpet, watch the mountain smoke, and stand afar off. Then they say to Moses, “You speak with us, and we will hear; but let not God speak with us, lest we die” (Exodus 20:19). They want a source, someone to stand between them and the voice from the fire, in place of THE source. Moses answers them, “Do not fear; for God has come to test you, and that His fear may be before you, so that you may not sin” (20:20). One fear keeps them from sin. The other keeps them at a distance, and they ask for the distance.

Manoah has the same fear. After the Angel ascends in the flame of the altar, he tells his wife, “We shall surely die, because we have seen God!” She answers him by reasoning from what God had actually done: “If the LORD had desired to kill us, He would not have accepted a burnt offering and a grain offering from our hands, nor would He have shown us all these things” (Judges 13:22–23). He reasoned from his fear, and she reasoned from the evidence.

The fear we carry now has its own shape. Mention other gods, and people hear polytheism. Look closely at Psalm 82, and it feels like betraying God as we were taught to know Him. So we leave the gray alone, and we call the leaving faithfulness.

Jacob looked. He wrestled until daybreak, and when the Man said, “Let Me go, for the day breaks,” Jacob answered, “I will not let You go unless You bless me!” (Genesis 32:26). He was blessed, and he was given a new name. “Just as he crossed over Penuel the sun rose on him, and he limped on his hip” (32:31). That is the price of looking, and I think it is what we are truly afraid of. Jacob paid it and walked into the sunrise with the name Israel.

Why We Get Angry

Fear keeps a person from looking. Anger comes when someone else looks and brings back what he found.

Here is a thing that happens. Person A is told something and believes it, but his belief is grounded in his source, the teacher or pastor or book that told him, rather than in THE source. Then person B comes along and explains the matter in greater and more accurate detail, and it runs against what person A understood. Person A responds with anger. It happens nearly everywhere, whatever the subject.

Medicine even has a name for it, the Semmelweis reflex. In 1847 Ignaz Semmelweis, working in a maternity ward in Vienna, had the doctors wash their hands in chlorinated lime between the autopsy room and the delivery ward, and the deaths of mothers from childbed fever fell sharply. The doctors took offense at the suggestion that they carried death on their own hands. Semmelweis lost his post and died in an asylum, years before germ theory was accepted and proved him right. Galileo was tried for saying the earth moves around the sun. In the 1980s Barry Marshall and Robin Warren argued that a bacterium, H. pylori, caused most stomach ulcers, and they were dismissed until Marshall drank a culture of it to prove the point; they received the Nobel Prize in 2005. When Mercury’s orbit refused to follow Newton’s laws, astronomers proposed an unseen planet, Vulcan, rather than question Newton, and it took Einstein to account for the orbit. The physicist Max Planck said that a new truth wins less by convincing its opponents than by outliving them.

The anger makes sense once you see where person A’s belief rests. If it rested on the evidence, better evidence would simply change his mind. It rests on someone he trusted, so the correction lands as an accusation against two people at once: it says his source was wrong, and it says he was wrong to trust that source. Defending the belief becomes defending a relationship and his own judgment, and the facts are almost beside the point. My examples come from science because science keeps dated, signed records of its corrections. Most fields correct themselves quietly, and the anger is forgotten.

Scripture keeps the same kind of record, and one of the clearest cases comes out of Elijah’s own story. In the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus told the people, “But I tell you truly, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elijah… but to none of them was Elijah sent except to Zarephath, in the region of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow” (Luke 4:25–26). He added Naaman the Syrian. “So all those in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath,” and they tried to throw Him off a cliff (4:28–29). He told them nothing outside their own Scriptures. He only read them more accurately than they had been taught. Ahab did the same. He greeted Elijah with “Is that you, O troubler of Israel?” (1 Kings 18:17), and of Micaiah he said, “I hate him, because he does not prophesy good concerning me” (22:8). The man carrying the accurate word is treated as the source of the trouble.

Luke also gives us the other way. The Bereans “received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so” (Acts 17:11). They heard Paul, a new source, and went past him to THE source. I know of no other cure. Hold your belief on the text itself, and a correction from the text will cost you nothing but the error.

Only One God

And here we are, back at the one God. People are afraid to learn otherwise, and I understand the fear. Person A was taught that believing in one God means believing in one divine being and nothing else. When someone opens Psalm 82, he hears the faith itself under attack, and the reflex fires to protect what he loves. He believes he is defending God, and in a sense he is. He is defending God as he was taught to see Him.

What he can’t see from where he stands is that the fuller reading raises the LORD higher. “God of gods” means little if the gods are nothing. It means a great deal if they are real and every one of them answers to Him. Psalm 96 holds both in two lines: “He is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the peoples are idols, but the LORD made the heavens” (Psalm 96:4–5). The word for idols there is elilim, which sounds like elohim and means something close to “worthless ones.” The psalmist calls them gods and calls them worthless in the same breath, and then he draws the line exactly where Colossians draws it. He made the heavens, and they did not. Moses asked the question at the sea, and the whole of Scripture answers it: “Who is like You, O LORD, among the gods?”

I keep going back to Carmel, to the long afternoon after the prophets of Baal had cried and leaped and cut themselves. “And when midday was past, they prophesied until the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice. But there was no voice; no one answered, no one paid attention” (1 Kings 18:29). I have read that verse many times. It counts what was missing, no voice, no answer, no attention, and there it stops. It never says the mountain was empty.

“Then Elijah said to all the people, ‘Come near to me.’ So all the people came near to him. And he repaired the altar of the LORD that was broken down” (18:30).