What does Tribe teach about spiritual beings?

At Tribe, the teaching on spiritual beings starts with an honest look at how most people picture the spiritual universe: two roughly equal forces, God and Satan, facing each other like a yin and yang symbol. Brian Sauvé has walked the congregation through why that picture actually shrinks the story. The Bible, he argues, describes a far more populated spiritual realm than most churchgoers tend to think about. The Hebrew word Elohim functions as a broad category that includes angels, demons, seraphim, cherubim, and other beings alongside God himself. That category has always been in scripture; the invitation is simply to let it widen the picture.

Brian introduced what he calls the divine council, a framework drawn from passages like Psalm 89 and the book of Daniel, where an angel tells Daniel his prayer was heard immediately but that the 'prince of Persia' delayed him. The idea is that God at some point delegated jurisdictional authority over nations to certain lesser spiritual beings, and those beings corrupted the role by drawing human worship toward themselves rather than toward Yahweh. The gods of history, Baal, Molech, Apollo, Zeus and others, were not simply products of human imagination. They had real influence, shaped cultures, and failed the assignment they were given.

All of that background exists in the teaching to make one contrast land with its full weight. When you hold Yahweh up against every other being that has ever claimed divine status, the gap is not close. Brian says, "He has no end, but he also never had a beginning. He stands outside of space and time." And yet the same teaching insists that this is not merely a theological point to file away. The God who dwarfs everything else in the cosmos is not remote. Brian says, "Not only does he not keep you at arm's distance, but he longs to draw close to you."

Taught from Psalm 89:6-8 · Exodus 15:11