What Does Powers and Principalities Mean?

Question 08091

The phrase powers and principalities has become one of those bits of church vocabulary that everyone recognises and few can define. It sounds impressive from a pulpit, it turns up in hymns and prayers, and if you stopped ten believers on a Sunday morning and asked what it meant you would probably get ten different answers.

Paul used the language deliberately, and he used it more often than most people realise. Once we see where it appears and what it is doing in each place, the meaning becomes reasonably clear, and so does the way it ought to shape how we think about the unseen world.

Where the Language Comes From

The best known instance is Ephesians 6:12: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Older translations render the first two terms as principalities and powers, which is where the familiar pairing comes from.

The Greek words are archas, from arche, meaning a first place, a beginning, a rule, and exousias, meaning delegated authority or the right to act. Both were ordinary political words in the first century. Paul is not inventing exotic terminology. He is borrowing the vocabulary of government and applying it to the unseen realm.

That is the first thing to grasp about powers and principalities. The imagery is administrative. It suggests structure, rank and jurisdiction rather than a swarm of freelance spirits doing as they please.

Not All Powers and Principalities Are Evil

Here is where many readers are surprised. Paul uses the same vocabulary of beings that are not fallen at all. In Colossians he writes that by Jesus “all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities” (Colossians 1:16).

So the original angelic order included rank and structure, and Jesus made all of it. Some of those beings fell with Satan and some did not. The powers and principalities Paul warns about in Ephesians 6 are the rebels within a created hierarchy that was good in itself. Evil never invented anything; it only corrupts what God made.

Ephesians 3 makes the same point from another angle. Paul says that through the church “the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.” Angelic beings are watching the church and learning something from it. That is a startling thought for a wet Sunday in a half empty building. The congregation you belong to, with its awkward silences and its rota problems and its faithful older members who have kept going for fifty years, is an exhibition. Angelic beings are looking at it and learning what God is like.

What Paul Means by Cosmic Powers

The third term in Ephesians 6 is kosmokratoras, world rulers, qualified as rulers of this present darkness. The fourth is the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Taken together the four terms describe an organised opposition with reach across the whole world system.

I would resist the urge to assign each term a precise rank. Commentators have tried for centuries and the results tell you more about the commentators than about the text. Paul is piling up words for effect, in the way a man might say the whole administration, top to bottom. The point is comprehensiveness, not taxonomy. Paul wants the Ephesians to understand that there is no corner of the opposition that lies outside the scope of what he is describing, and he reaches for four terms because one would not have carried the weight.

What we can say confidently is that the opposition is organised, that it operates at a level above individual temptation, and that it works through the structures and assumptions of the world as much as through personal attack. If you want the wider picture, see my answer on what spiritual warfare actually is.

Powers and Principalities Have Already Been Defeated

Every time Paul mentions these beings, a statement of their defeat is close by. Colossians 2:15 says God “disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.” The picture is a Roman victory parade with the beaten enemy displayed for all to see.

Peter says the same thing plainly: Jesus is at the right hand of God “with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.” Paul tells the Romans that neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

This is why the New Testament can speak about powers and principalities without a trace of panic. They are real, they are organised, and they are already beaten. The believer is not fighting for a victory that is still in doubt.

What This Means for How We Fight

Paul’s response to the powers is the armour of God, and it is worth noticing what he does not include. There is no instruction to name them, address them, bind them or map their territories. The kit is truth, righteousness, readiness, faith, salvation, the word and prayer, and the repeated verb is stand.

The prayer of Ephesians 6:18 is offered to God, not shouted at the enemy, and the specific request Paul makes for himself is boldness in preaching. Whatever the powers and principalities are doing, the counter measure is gospel proclamation by people who are standing firm, not spiritual technique by people who have learned a formula.

I say that with some feeling, because I have watched sincere Christians spend years in strategic warfare exercises with nothing to show for it, while the ordinary work of preaching, prayer and patient love goes on doing what it has always done. For more on the boundaries here, see whether we should pray against principalities over cities.

How the Powers Work Through Culture

One of the more useful observations about powers and principalities is that they rarely appear as themselves. They work through what everybody already assumes. A whole society can take a view of money, or sex, or status, or human worth, and nobody in it can remember choosing that view or ever examining it. It simply feels like reality.

Paul describes the unbeliever as walking according to the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air. The word for course there is aion, an age, a spirit of the times. That is the natural home of the powers and principalities: not the seance and the horror film, but the assumptions of a culture that has quietly agreed to leave God out.

Which is why Paul’s remedy for a Christian is the renewing of the mind rather than a warfare technique. Do not be conformed to this world, he says, but be transformed. If the enemy’s chief weapon is a plausible account of reality, then the counter weapon is a mind soaked in Scripture until the plausible account stops sounding plausible.

Flesh and Blood Is Not the Enemy

Perhaps the most practical line in the whole passage is the one we hurry past. We do not wrestle against flesh and blood. That is not poetry. It is a working instruction about how to treat people.

The colleague who mocks your faith, the relative who will not speak to you since you were converted, the neighbour whose politics you find impossible: none of them is the opposition. They may be captives of it. Paul told Timothy to correct opponents with gentleness, since God may grant them repentance and they may escape from the snare of the devil, having been captured by him to do his will.

If we understood powers and principalities properly, we would argue with people less and pray for them more. It is very hard to hate someone you have started to see as a prisoner.

So, now what?

Take the phrase down off the shelf and put it to work. When you next find yourself in a conflict at church, at home or at work, ask who the actual opposition is. If your answer is a person with a name and a face, you have probably misread the situation.

Then put the armour on, which in practice means telling yourself the truth, living honestly, staying ready with the gospel, trusting God when you cannot see, and praying. The powers and principalities are real and they are beaten, and the Christian who grasps both halves of that sentence will neither be frightened nor foolish.

Who have you been treating as the enemy when they were only the battlefield? It is worth naming that person honestly, and then praying for them by name tonight rather than rehearsing the argument you would like to win.

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

Ephesians 6:12 (ESV)