Welcome to Day 1461 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Arguments for a Divine Council – Worldview Wednesday
Wisdom – the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1461 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical Worldview is essential to have a proper perspective on today’s current events. To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must have a proper understanding of God and His Word. This week, on our Worldview Wednesday episode, we will continue with our study based on a course I recently completed taught by Dr. Michael Heiser. Our study is titled “Sons and Daughters of God: The Believer’s Identity, Calling, and Destiny” Throughout this multi-week course we will demonstrate that, in the Old Testament, “sons of God” and “holy ones” refers to supernatural beings whose Father is God and who work with God to carry out His will and that this divine family was present before humanity. By fully engaging with biblical texts such as Psalm 82; Psalm 89, and Deuteronomy 32:8–9, our study will show that this divine family functions as a template for God’s human family. God desires of humans, as His imagers, to participate in His council. This study addresses issues such as polytheism, the nature of the (little ‘g’) “gods,” and the uniqueness of Yahweh. Within this study, we will apply insights to the New Testament texts and shows how the metaphor of being in God’s family informs our sense of identity and mission as believers.
Arguments for a Divine Council
· Segment 12: Polytheism: Are The Gods Real?
Denying the Reality of the elohim as gods mocks God
Now, aside from trajectories that sort of try to blunt or strip away the supernatural element of the plural elohim, the plural sons of God in the Old Testament, by making them idols or making them people, when we dispense with that, that brings us to a certain set of issues that we have to address. If it’s not those other things, then it must be divine beings. Then typically, what’s asked is, well, maybe this is just sort of imaginative. Perhaps the gods, these other elohim just aren’t real at all.
Biblical Writers Had a Supernatural Worldview
How do we handle that? Because these are biblical writers writing things about these other elohim. Now, we as modern people, we sort of reflexively go to this question, and we sort of assign unreality to these beings. A biblical writer would not do this. A biblical writer is predisposed to supernaturalism. That’s why the Unseen Realm has its subtitle: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible.
Then you might say, “Well, if you are going to say that these gods are real (and I do because the biblical writers do), isn’t that polytheism? Then what about these phrases about ‘there is no other God besides Yahweh of Israel,’ ‘besides Him there is no other,’ these sorts of phrases?”
Denying Reality of the Elohim Mocks God
So this is the territory that we need to cover now. What we’ve already established has God’s members of His council as spirit beings. There are other ways to discern that and discern God’s relationship to them. I would suggest this. We’ll start here: that if you are going to deny that the other elohim, the members of God’s council, if you’re going to say they are not real, then doing that actually mocks God because God is going to be described as being above these other elohim, as being the elohim of elohim, the God of gods.
If those beings don’t really exist, there is no glory for God to be had there. In fact, it makes God a caricature. These sorts of statements that God is above these gods, God is the God of gods, these kinds of statements, in the Psalms, there is a lot of them (Psalm 86:8; Psalm 95:3; Psalm 96:4; 97:7, 9; Psalm 136:2); the one I like though is in Exodus (Exodus15:11). In that particular passage, it’s right after the crossing of the Red Sea, and it’s part of Moses’s song, where he says, “O Lord, O Yahweh, who is like you among the gods?”
Well, if those gods aren’t real, what does that say? It sort of eviscerates the praise of God at that point. It’s like saying, “O Lord, who is like you among these beings that don’t exist?” Think about it in this manner. I am better than a being that doesn’t exist, and so are you. If you strip away the reality, if you deny them reality, there is no praise of God when God is compared to them. It’s comparing God to nothing or a cartoon character or some fictional entity. We are better than that as well, and so, where is the glory for God? This is why I said stripping away the supernatural ends up making God a caricature and mocks Him. I think we need to be careful with that.
Judgment Cast on Gods, Not Idols
Exodus 12:12, referring back to the final plague—and of course, that’s going to be the precursor of the crossing the Red Sea where we get Exodus 15:11—look at the language there: “For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the Lord [I am Yahweh].”
So here, we have the death of the firstborn; this is direct and specifically (and the other plagues were as well in most cases) to the gods of Egypt—their defeat. Well, it doesn’t say much if God is defeating beings that don’t exist. Where is the glory in that? Now, we are not saying that idols don’t matter, or they are never in the picture, but idols are not to be equated with gods. We’ve already talked a little bit about that, but you can’t import idols into Psalm 82 and some of these other passages because God doesn’t work with them.
Relationship between Deity and Idol in Ancient Thought
You have to understand the ancient mindset—how an ancient person thought about an idol and thought about the deity. An ancient person built an idol with the belief that after doing certain rituals that an entity, a spiritual being, a deity would come and attach itself to that object, would come and reside in that object. So there was an identification of two things: a deity that they thought was real, and an object that essentially became that deity’s domain or, again, attached to that deity.
If you smashed an idol, an ancient person wouldn’t sit there and cry or imagine that, “Oh, now my deity is dead; Baal is dead,” or whoever. They are not going to imagine it that way; what they would do is they would go home and make another one because the entity that inhabited that thing that is now destroyed needs to be reattached to it. That object is no longer fit for the deity to inhabit. So we make another one. The deity doesn’t die; it doesn’t go away. In their minds, it is real, and it’s there, and we need a place for it to dwell among us.
Summary
So if we look at it the way an ancient person does, yes, they thought (and the biblical writers thought with them) that the gods were real. They were real entities, and because they thought that, when they compared Yahweh to those other gods, they were making a theological statement that is really, frankly, more important than any other theological statement in the Old Testament.
God is the God of gods; He is the only one who deserves worship. He is the creator. He is the sovereign. He is … fill in the blank. All of these things are attributable to Yahweh alone in Israelite thinking, but if you say that these beings aren’t real at all, then He is being compared to nothing, and there is no praise in that.
· Segment 13: The G-O-D Problem
Cultural and Contextual Problem
So let’s confront the question: Does multiple elohim mean polytheism? I’ve said repeatedly already no. What we have here, we need to think culturally. We don’t have a theological problem in Psalm 82 when the biblical writer talks about multiple elohim being in a council with Yahweh. What we actually have is a cultural and a context problem.
Modern Views on the Term “God”
I like to explain it this way: When we as modern people, modern Westerners, Christians, or just generally modern people, when we see the letters G, O, and D on a page or a screen, our brain, because of our culture, our Western culture, Judaeo-Christian culture, and our traditions, when we see those letters, our mind immediately assigns a specific set of unique attributes to the letters G, O, and D. We can’t help it. It’s just the way our mind works because of our cultural context. We see G, O, and D, and then we think of things like omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence.
Again, because of the way we are taught and raised in our culture, there can only be one of those, and so we get creeped out when you put an S on the end of that word (G-O-D-S) because our brains assign a specific set of attributes to those letters.
Elohim Not Connected to Unique Attributes
That is not what a biblical writer thought when he thought about the word elohim. Elohim does not carry with it a specific set of unique attributes. We know that is the case. Why? You don’t have to take my word for it. We know that’s the case because biblical writers used the term elohim of different entities besides the God of Israel. And when they did that, they aren’t assigning those attributes or any specific attributes that should belong to Yahweh to other entities. They are not thinking about attributes at all; that’s our problem.
When we see the letters G, O, D, our brain assigns those attributes. Elohim does not work that way. It is not about a specific set of unique attributes, and the evidence for that is really right in front of us in the biblical text by virtue of the way biblical writers used elohim of a variety of different entities besides the God of Israel. So next week, we will study how the term is actually used.[1]
That will finish our study for this week’s Worldview Wednesday. Tomorrow we will enjoy our 3-minute Humor nugget that will provide you with a bit of cheer, which will help you to lighten up and live a rich and satisfying life. So encourage your friends and family to join us and then come along with us tomorrow for another day of ‘Wisdom-Trek, Creating a Legacy.’
If you would like to listen to any of our past 1460 treks or read the Wisdom Journal, they are available at Wisdom-Trek.com. I encourage you to subscribe to Wisdom-Trek on your favorite podcast player so that each day’s trek will be downloaded automatically.
Thank you so much for allowing me to be your guide, mentor, and, most of all, your friend as I serve you in through this Wisdom-Trek podcast and journal.
As we take this Trek together, let us always:
- Live Abundantly (Fully)
- Love Unconditionally
- Listen Intentionally
- Learn Continuously
- Lend to others Generously
- Lead with Integrity
- Leave a Living Legacy Each Day
I am Guthrie Chamberlain….reminding you to ’Keep Moving Forward,’ ‘Enjoy your Journey,’ and ‘Create a Great Day…Everyday’! See you Tomorrow!
[1] Heiser, M. S. (2019). Sons and Daughters of God: The Believer’s Identity, Calling, and Destiny. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.
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