The Bible Was Never Flat
What the Disclosure Moment Exposes About the Church's Shrunken Cosmos
I’ve always been somewhat interested in the paranormal, supernatural, preternatural, or whatever you want to call it. Cryptids, ghost shows, offbeat stories of the weird and strange. Call it my backwoods Appalachia family lineage, or maybe my penchant for curiosity, but something’s drawn me toward searching for what’s not readily visible.
I had issues reconciling my preoccupation with these things and my faith, especially growing up in the church at a time when no one liked to talk about the things that might go bump in the night. How could ghosts and God coexist? It was a non-starter for most of the years I was learning to study Scripture seriously. I came close to deciding the whole topic was just our minds reaching for an explanation of religion that wasn’t really there.
Then came Michael Heiser. And I think that name says all I need to say, both because of how much weight his work carries and for what follows in this article. I wrestled deeply to reconcile what the spiritual realm really was in tandem with the other theological convictions I held. Along with Heiser, the guys from Blurry Creatures cropped up and took over my podcast feed. I devoured their content, and still do. I couldn’t ignore that much had been buried — even demythologized — by the people who shaped most of modern theology.
I felt like I had a pretty settled notion and balance of the push and pull of the unseen realm: some things I knew for sure, some things I could acknowledge, and some things I just couldn’t. And I was okay with that. Bigfoot, mothman, and other cryptids are just fun to talk about, but aliens are something I often shy away from. Demons are real, I nerd out about the Nephilim, and I have the passages down pat that everyone who presses in on the topic cites.
And then this happened last week.
We had all been anticipating it, but something actually dropped. Disclosure. A website. UFOs. Files (and not the ones we really wanted). Aliens. And not just the government, but pastors and influencers touting all sorts of primary or secondary information about meeting on the subject of disclosure and how it could rock the Church.
And it occurred to me, somewhere between the third forwarded video and the second flinching pastor, that I was not the only one trying to figure out what to do with all of this.
You’re not the only one.
If you’ve spent any time on Christian Twitter, in church group chats, or on the back row of a small group this past week, you’ve watched the same two reactions play out on a loop. On one side, pastors flinching — it’s lies, it’s demons, it’s not worth your time, why are you even watching this stuff. On the other side, believers drifting — into Joe Rogan clips, into long YouTube rabbit holes, into Telegram channels run by men who claim to know what your pastor refuses to say.
Two reactions. One underlying problem.
C.S. Lewis named it eighty years ago, in the preface to The Screwtape Letters: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”1 Lewis was writing about wartime Britain. He could have been writing about your group chat last Tuesday.
The flinch is the first error. The drift is the second. Lewis’s twin errors are playing out in real time, on the same news cycle, often inside the same congregation. Underneath both is the same shrunken cosmos — Bibles we’ve flattened for so long that when something doesn’t fit the flat version, debunk or demonize is all we have left.
Buried in the war.gov release is a 2023 case file from the western United States. A woman with deep professional experience around military aircraft and drones reported seeing an oval metallic object hovering above a treeline. Multiple corroborating witnesses across two cars. Credible, specific, official. And then this line, in the Pentagon write-up:
“Several of her co-workers subsequently made fun of her due to her report.”
The file also notes she would not have reported the object had she seen it alone.
It’s hard to read that paragraph without thinking of the believer in the pew. The one who finally worked up the courage to bring a question they’d been carrying for months — about the nephilim, or the divine council, or what they’d watched on a podcast — and got back the same shape of response that woman got from her co-workers. A look. A laugh. A change of subject. A small but unmistakable signal that the question itself was the embarrassment.
She wouldn’t have reported it alone. The believer wouldn’t have asked alone. Both wounds have the same shape — a community that can no longer hold the weight of what it has actually seen.
The disclosure moment is not, in the end, about UFOs. It is about a culture searching for transcendence with a flattened cosmology — and a church that flattened its own cosmology first, and now has nothing better to offer.
The world we forgot we lived in
Here is the strange thing about reading Genesis 1 like a modern person: nothing in it surprises us anymore.
A spirit hovering over chaotic waters. A God who speaks worlds into being. A garden where the divine and the human meet. A talking serpent. A plural verb in the mouth of the Creator — let us make man in our image — like there were others in the room.
We’ve read those pages so many times, we’ve stopped noticing what they assume. Not a sterile universe with one God and one species, but a household with two families. A heavenly host that already existed when humanity was made. A meeting place — Eden — where the seen and the unseen lived together without friction.
Joel Muddamalle puts it this way in The Unseen Battle: “Eden was the place where God enjoyed the presence of both his human and supernatural family, all dwelling together.”2 Eden is not the start of a private relationship between God and humans. It is the introduction of a new family member into a household that was already full.
That’s the worldview the biblical writers had when they sat down to write. It’s not the worldview most of us have when we sit down to read. And the gap between those two is the reason a Pentagon press release can throw an entire generation of believers into a crisis their pastors don’t know how to address.
The Bible we made, and the Bible we received
This is where Redemptive Correlation does its work — not by bringing Scripture down to fit the cultural moment, but by bringing the cultural moment up under Scripture’s gaze. The disclosure files do not get to set the terms of the conversation. Genesis 1 does. Deuteronomy 32 does. Colossians 2 does.
What we are watching this week is not a crisis of theology. It is a crisis of cosmology.
Heiser named the problem this way: “Today’s Christian processes [life] by a mixture of creedal statements and modern rationalism.”3 We affirm the supernatural in the creed and then live as if it never breaches the wall between Sunday and Monday. Heiser called this the desupernaturalization of Scripture, and he meant it as an indictment.
We did not lose the supernatural worldview to liberal theology. We lost it to ourselves. We flattened the Bible because the flat version was easier to defend, easier to teach, and easier to live with. We kept the resurrection because we had to. We quietly retired everything else.
The result is a church that can recite the creed but cannot read its own Bible. When something appears in the world that doesn’t fit the flattened cosmology — an unmarked craft, a corroborated sighting, a 1948 intelligence memo describing phenomena “perhaps slightly beyond the scope of our present intelligence thinking”4 — the flinch and the drift are the only moves we know.
Three rebellions, not one
To recover the cosmology, we need to recover the story. Genesis does not give us one fall. It gives us three.
Most of us learned a single rebellion: Adam and Eve, the serpent, the fruit. The fall happened. Sin entered. End of cosmological action — on to soteriology. But Second Temple Jewish readers — the people whose worldview the apostles inherited — read Genesis as a sequence of three rebellions, each one extending the damage further into both the earthly and heavenly families of God.5
The first is the one we know. In Genesis 3, the nachash — translated as serpent but carrying the connotations of a divine throne guardian, a shining one — deceives the woman, and the human family rebels against the head of the household. Eden is closed. The earthly family is exiled.
The second is the one most modern Christians skip. Genesis 6 opens with four verses we have learned to read past — sons of God, daughters of men, Nephilim, the heroes of old, men of renown. The earliest Christian writers — Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen — read this as a second rebellion, this time in the heavenly family.6 Members of the divine council crossed boundaries they were not given, and the unholy union spread evil so far that the flood became the only response.
The third is the one almost no one connects. Genesis 11 — Babel — is usually taught as a story about pride and language. But Deuteronomy 32:8–9 is the commentary track:
When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance and divided the human race, he set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the LORD’s portion is his people; Jacob, his own inheritance. (CSB)
When humanity rebelled at Babel, God did not simply scatter them. He disinherited them. He handed the nations over to the sons of God and kept Israel for himself. The world was carved up between Yahweh and a constellation of lesser elohim who were given stewardship over the nations and almost immediately abused it.
Three rebellions. Three failures. Three judgments. And one running thread: the cosmos has been contested from the beginning, in both of God’s families.
This is the biblical story underneath every passage about principalities and powers. It is what Paul is talking about when he says we “do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness” (Eph. 6:12 ESV, emphasis mine). He is not being metaphorical. He is naming the disinherited gods of Deuteronomy 32 and saying they are still active.
Wherever you land on what is hovering above military airspace in 2026, the Bible has not been quiet on the question. Scripture describes a cosmos with categories of non-human intelligences operating in the created order, opposed to God’s purposes and contested by Christ. We just weren’t checking the Bible for them.
What the world calls “aliens”
Here is the part that surprised me when I read it.
In The Unseen Battle — published this past January, three months before the war.gov portal went live — Muddamalle includes a sidebar titled “Are There Aliens in This World?” It’s one of the most direct treatments of the question I’ve read in a popular-level theology book. And it landed in print before the moment we are now living through.
His answer:
I believe that what the world calls “aliens,” the Bible refers to as “spiritual beings” who reside in the “unseen realm.” At times, the unseen realm breaks through into the physical realm, and in those instances we may see glimpses of spiritual beings. What the mind can’t comprehend, we’ve labeled as aliens.7
He then walks the reader through 2 Kings 6 — Elisha at Dothan, surrounded by an enemy army, with a terrified servant who couldn’t see what Elisha saw. Elisha prays: “Lord, please open his eyes and let him see.” The servant suddenly sees the mountain “covered with horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha” (emphasis added).
Muddamalle’s pivot lands hard:
Imagine what someone in the twenty-first century would say about this situation. They might call this an “alien encounter” when in reality they had a peek into the spiritual realm described in the Bible.8
The category is not new. The phenomena are not new. The framework has been in our Bibles the whole time. What’s new is how completely we forgot we had it.
This is not a claim that every reported phenomenon is angelic — Muddamalle is careful to reject the ancient alien view that treats Scripture as one source among many about extraterrestrial visitors. The point is narrower and more disruptive: the Bible’s cosmos is already populated. You do not need to pick between the materialist’s “must be aliens from another planet” and the panicked Christian’s “must all be demons.” Scripture has been offering a third option since Genesis 1 — and that third option is the worldview the apostles assumed.
Christ over all of it
If the story stopped at three rebellions and a contested cosmos, the disclosure moment would be a reason for fear. It does not stop there.
Paul writes to a young church planted in the shadow of the Temple of Artemis — the most magnificent house of a rebel elohim in the ancient world — and says this:
He erased the certificate of debt, with its obligations, that was against us and opposed to us, and has taken it away by nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and disgraced them publicly; he triumphed over them in him. (Col 2:14–15 CSB)
Stripped. Disarmed. Disgraced publicly. Triumphed over.
This is the cosmic logic of the cross. Whatever is contested in the heavens — whatever rebel powers were given the nations at Babel — has already been defeated. Not subdued, not negotiated with, not appeased. Defeated. The crown of every disinherited elohim has been removed and placed at the feet of Jesus.
The household is being regathered. The nations are being reclaimed. The multiethnic church — the gospel arriving in every tongue at Pentecost, reversing Babel — is the visible evidence of an invisible victory.9 The unseen battle is not a battle to win. It is a battle that has been won. Our work is to live like it.
What restoration is for
The Bible does not end with souls evacuating a doomed cosmos. It ends with a cosmos restored. Heaven and earth reunited. A garden city descending. The dwelling of God with humanity, again — only this time forever (Rev. 21:1—4). All that is contested in the unseen realm is being brought under Christ’s feet, not sealed off from his rule. The cosmos belongs to him. The disinherited nations are being re-inherited. The household is being put back together.
This is the frame the disclosure moment fits inside. Not a panic. Not a vindication. A reminder that the Lord of a much larger world has already triumphed over everything in it.
You do not have to know what UFOs are to know what your Bible says about the cosmos you live in.
You do not have to choose between the people laughing at the woman in the September 2023 file and the people building cosmologies from Joe Rogan clips. Both have already chosen for you, and both are choosing too small.
What Scripture invites you into is something stranger than either: a worldview where the cosmos is full, the household is contested, the powers are real, and the King has already won.
If you’ve been the believer whose pastor flinched — who brought a question and got it’s just lies or it’s all demons and walked away with less than you came in with — hear this: your question was not the problem. The frame you were handed was. You weren’t asking too much. You were asking with a cosmology two sizes smaller than the one your Bible actually teaches. The recovery isn’t speculation. It’s reading your own book carefully.
If you’ve been the believer drifting toward the conspiracy corners — pulled in by podcasts that promise to take the weird parts of the Bible seriously when no one in your church will — hear this too: your hunger was right. The flatness was real. But the answer is not to trade one shrunken frame for another that’s just as flat in a different direction. The Bible isn’t a code to crack. It’s a story to inhabit. And the story is bigger, stranger, and more orderly than any conspiracy will ever offer.
The work is the same either way. Open the Bible. Read it like the people who wrote it. Let Genesis 1 be as wild as it was meant to be. Let Deuteronomy 32 say what it says. Let Colossians 2 do what it claims. The cosmos God made is full, the Christ who rules it is sovereign, and the household you’ve been adopted into is bigger than you knew.
You can hold the question without panic. Christ is already holding the cosmos.
The disclosure files will keep coming. The flinch will keep happening if we let it.
But we have an older and stranger book than the one our discomfort taught us to read. We have a cosmos with two families and one King. We have a Christ who has stripped, disarmed, and disgraced the powers — and a Spirit who is regathering the household one tongue, one tribe, one rebel-claimed corner at a time.
Whatever is in the unseen realm, Jesus is Lord of it.
Whatever the next tranche of files contains, our Bible has not changed.
Whatever the church forgot to teach us, the text is still there for the recovering.
The Bible was never flat. We made it flat. And the work in front of us — for the curious believer, the bristling pastor, the dechurched friend who quietly believes more than they would admit at a dinner party — is the same.
Open the book. Read it again. Let the cosmos be as full as it was always meant to be.
The light has already won.
This piece is part of the Reading ___ Through Eden series — applying Redemptive Correlation to cultural questions through Scripture’s four-act arc.
If this piece resonated, two pieces from the archive sit alongside it: The Vicarious Life walks the same Eden-shaped framework through atonement, and Why Content Can’t Replace Covenant addresses the same flatness problem from the ecclesiology side.
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C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942), preface.
Joel Muddamalle, The Unseen Battle: Spiritual Warfare, the Three Rebellions, and Christ’s Victory Over Dark Powers (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Reflective, 2026), Chapter 1, “The Garden House of God.” Muddamalle’s first book on this topic and the popular-level extension of the late Michael S. Heiser’s scholarly project; the foreword is by Heiser’s widow, Drenna Heiser-Hollander.
Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015), 13.
U.S. Air Force Directorate of Intelligence, “Top Secret Report on Unidentified Aerial Objects Over Europe” (November 1948), released by U.S. Department of War, Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), May 8, 2026, https://www.war.gov/UFO/.
Muddamalle, The Unseen Battle, Chapter 3, “The Rebellions of Genesis 3 and 6,” and Chapter 4, “The Third Rebellion at Babel.” See also Heiser, The Unseen Realm, Part II. The reading of Deut 32:8 as “sons of God” follows the Dead Sea Scrolls (4QDeut^j) and Septuagint witnesses, adopted by both the ESV and CSB and increasingly accepted in modern critical scholarship over the later Masoretic bene Yisrael. See further Michael S. Heiser, “Deuteronomy 32:8 and the Sons of God,” Bibliotheca Sacra 158, no. 629 (January–March 2001): 52–74.
Justin Martyr, Second Apology 5.3; Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.36.4; Tertullian, On Idolatry 9.1; Origen, Contra Celsum 5.55. Cf. Muddamalle, The Unseen Battle, Chapter 3.
Muddamalle, The Unseen Battle, Chapter 4, “The Third Rebellion at Babel,” sidebar: “Are There Aliens in This World?”
Muddamalle, The Unseen Battle, Chapter 4, sidebar.
Acts 2:1–13. Cf. Muddamalle, The Unseen Battle, Chapter 4, on Pentecost as the redemptive reversal of Babel.