There are few topics the church is as confused or uneducated about as angels and demons. Some churches add to the Scriptures in their attempts to understand these angelic beings. Others simply shy away from the topic altogether. But a new video series called “The Bible Project” is unpacking what Scriptures really say about angels, demons and other spiritual beings.
The series features seven episodes that explore what the Bible says about Elohim, the divine council, angels and cherubim, the angel of the Lord, Satan and demons, and “the new humanity.”
The entire series is crowdfunded by over 100,000 supporters.
Charisma News recently interviewed Ken Weigel, senior director at the Bible Project. Read the interview below:
You’ve made so many videos at this point; what prompted this series?
There are many modern readers of the Bible who think of God and people as the main characters of the biblical story, and spiritual beings as sort of interesting, exotic background characters; I suspect this is because they are hard to get your head around. But this is not how the original biblical authors thought about spiritual beings. For them, spiritual beings played a significant role in their conception of the world and of our role within it.
Why do you think this is an important issue to raise?
Popular understanding of spiritual beings often includes a devil with red horns and a tail, or fat babies flying around with wings. But this is not how the Bible portrays these beings—rather—in the Bible, spiritual beings are free agents to interact in God’s world in a variety of ways, much like humans. Spiritual beings are present from the beginning of the story in Genesis all the way through Revelation. In the New Testament, Paul talks to his audience frequently about the roles that spiritual beings play in daily life. In our efforts to continually provide engaging educational resources to followers of Jesus, we felt that an accurate understanding of these beings would be valuable.
Who should watch this series?
Christians with a desire to better understand the richness and reality of Scripture will love this. We have developed a trusted and robust list of materials for those who want to read the Bible. Similar to our “How to Read the Bible Series,” we are creating a library of content to help any Christian as they engage with Scripture. As we serve followers of Jesus from around the world, we educate based off of how the biblical story informs the topic.
How was this series received by your audience?
In a culture fascinated by content about fantasy, the supernatural and heroes, this is a conversation people are already ready to have. And the best part is, it’s not fantasy. It’s incredible to see the interest in this topic—the videos within these series already have over 3 million organic views with a great amount of comments and interaction. Due to the attention and number of questions, we already had to release a 45-minute video responding to audience questions.
How do you decide what video series to do and when?
That’s a question we get asked all the time. We have so many video ideas that it seems like we can never get to everything we want to make. That’s a good problem to have. With this in mind, we are thoughtful, strategic and prayerful about what to do and in what order. God cares about order, and we do our best to honor that.
How did you decide to portray the spiritual beings the way you did?
This is a fascinating process at our studio. We pick unique artistic styles for each of our series. Our art team decided to portray the spiritual beings character design very simplistic. This decision was made deliberately because the content of the Spiritual Beings videos is so difficult to understand. We made the decision because they’re meant to be clay representations of humans. We’re not trying to mimic realism. In short, we are trying not to take too much attention away from hearing and understanding the message. Simple design for a complex message.
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