Supernatural Seminar | Dr. Michael Heiser // Session 1

thank you for coming and hopefully everything will work and we'll have a good time I wanted to say it start off with a few sort of personal notes give you kind of a little bit of a roadmap of what we're gonna cover today and then sort of dive in this is going to be a bird's-eye view as stovall said of the supernatural world view of Scripture we're gonna cover a lot of concepts today that are gonna be on the surface familiar you know here's sort of a little mini grocery list you've heard a lot of these terms before family identity mission destiny supernatural rebellion family those sorts of things but I wanted to say upfront that while a lot of the terminology is going to be familiar I can guarantee that you're going to hear things today that are gonna be quite new and they might even be a little disturbing just a little bit of my personal story if you've read unseen realm or if you follow my podcast my podcast is the naked Bible podcast and we call it naked Bible because we're just trying to teach Scripture with you know creedal formulations sort of stripped away denominational distinctives and preferences stripped away what I care about is that you're able to read scripture in light of its original context the context of the writers and their original readers they come from quite a different world and they think way in ways that we as moderns are not used to thinking and for my own story I was I sort of had my watershed event if you've read unseen realm I relate this in the very beginning of the book where I was a graduate student students the University of Wisconsin and by that point I had taught for five years at a Bible College I had two masters degrees I was not a newbie to biblical stuff but one Sunday morning I was sitting in church and a friend of mine who was also in the Hebrew and Semitic s-- department was was there and you know you know how it is you have a few minutes to kill before the service starts and I don't remember what we talked about but I'll never forget the way it ended and he had his Hebrew Bible with him there and he said you need to read Psalm 82 in Hebrew and I did and what I saw there was life-changing I'm gonna show it to you today but I the first thing that sort of popped into my head was how in the world could I be a doctoral student and have taught five years you know 15 20 different classes and have never seen what I saw in the text that morning and it just changed the way I viewed everything and that sort of became you know just a fire I couldn't put it aside and it led to essentially my dissertation it led to the book we know as unseen realm it led to the book we know as supernatural it led to essentially what I do and in that process there were some uncomfortable moments because I had to make a decision to value what the text said more than what my tradition said and that was difficult I knew if I did it I was gonna lose some friends I knew if I did it I would never be invited to speak at this or that place and you know it was just one of those watershed things if we believe this thing we call the Bible is inspired and we believe things like God decided these are God's decisions God decided to prompt individuals to produce this thing we call the Bible at a certain time in a certain culture in a certain place with a certain worldview that is not ours then we really ought to not impose our own worldview on the text okay it's a simple idea we should try to read them the way they wanted to be understood what was going through their heads because they're not writing from the perspective of a 21st century white guy okay they're just not they're not asking the questions or addressing the questions that I have in my culture in my time period they're doing something different now it all applies to us but we have to realize the Bible while it was written for us it was not written to us it was written to somebody else and if we rightly understand that then we will know that we're applying things correctly and we will be able to understand more of Scripture I kind of specialize and focus on the weird stuff in the Bible okay I have this little I used to say this as a professor and it's sort of caught on if it's weird it's important okay and it and it really is because there's nothing thrown away it's not like the biblical writers going about his business and saying hey I need something weird here I got a few paragraphs to fill so you know this is part of the assignment so I got to throw this in here no it's weird to us but people living two or three thousand years ago with an entirely different worldview would have known exactly what to do with that they would have known why it's there what it means what role it plays in the bigger picture we lose an awful lot when it comes to that and because we do we won't find some of the ideas that we'll talk about today in the Creed's we won't find them in our doctrinal statements we'll just find them in the okay I mean that's where we find them in the biblical text and what I want to do you know I just want to you know sort of prep you a little bit Mike you're not gonna hear Mike say well you thought the gospel was a and Mike says it's B know the things that you believe you know I believe I'm a normal you know evangelical guy I know what the gospel is I accepted Christ as Lord it's an exclusive claim there is no other way of salvation I'm a normal Trinitarian dude okay all the boring things you can you know okay I'm that too but the reason why I think those ideas are coherent and arise from the text might be dramatically different than you've heard some of your favorite arguments for things I might say that's just a terrible argument okay so I'm prepping you I'm used to people looking at me like I've got two heads so that won't bother me I'm used to this kind of look but I will take that over this so now you know where I'm coming from okay so let's jump in you're not gonna hurt me I'm not gonna hurt you either so let's start with Psalm 82 this was my watershed event if you have a Bible you could turn there if you like I'm going to show you the text I like people to see the text rather than what I say about it and don't stress out by the way you know if don't feel like you've got to write down every word I'm gonna give the slides to Stovall he'll put them up somewhere and you'll all get them you can throw them on YouTube or whatever you know I'm on YouTube about you know hundred thousand times and don't know how I got there so it it's okay you'll get you'll get the notes but this was the passage that my friend on that morning in church said you need to read this in Hebrew okay it's in English but I'll show you the relevant parts here let's just open up our little if I can find my mouse here open up our little Hebrew section the Hebrew line for a verse 1 says Elohim nitsa by a dot L God has taken his place in the divine council if I click on God I'll feel it'll show up no but you'll see in the blue column you can at least see the blue column we have the word Elohim this is a word you've probably heard before it's a standard word for God okay real easy well it's not so easy when you go down to the second part of the verse the kariv Elohim ish pote in the midst of the gods you'll see it's the same word Elohim he passes judgment so when I read that on that Sunday morning in Wisconsin I knew it in a Hebrew grammar to know that the first Elohim was capital G because nit Saab is a singular participle sorry for the grammar spasm that that's why you know but the care of elohim yesh pote in the midst of you can't be in the midst of one you're in the midst of a group and the group is referred to as Elohim God's plural now my first thought was okay that looks like a pantheon that looks like something we'd read about in Greek and Roman mythology unfortunately I had a later thought and that was I'll bet jesus knew that verse I bet the Apostles knew that verse about the New Testament writers knew that verse and somehow it didn't deter them or deny a theology of one unique God and a trinity and a heavenly I mean so how do how do we articulate what we believe about God as a Trinity God and the Godhead and handle this verse because we don't want the Trinity to be these gods here because if you keep reading the psalm let's just turn it off you keep reading the psalm look at what God says to the other gods how long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked give justice to the weak and the fatherless maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute rescue the weak and needy deliver them from the hand of the wicked they have neither knowledge nor understanding they walk about in darkness all the foundations of the worth are shaken and then he says in verse 6 I said you are gods let me just creep that up a little bit and you'll notice it's the same word again I said you are Elohim all of you sons plural of the Most High nevertheless like men you shall die that's not the Trinity okay the Trinity is not corrupt the Trinity doesn't need a verbal spanking from God okay and they're not sentenced to death so we have in this passage verse one we have God speaking to a group of gods now if you want if you do what I did at the time I said well you know I'm gonna go look at commentaries you know surely surely some of my you know favorite scholars you know have addressed this question and what you get is you get the idea in verse one that the gods in this council are people their Jewish elders they're members of the Sanhedrin they're Israelites I know that sounds a little odd but trust me I mean if you I could open up commentary after commentary after commentary and that is what you'll read Jesus quotes psalm 82 in fact verse six in one of his debates with the Jewish leadership to defend his assertion that I and the father are one he isn't saying look quit thrown you know quit being mad at me because we're all just God's okay we're you're just like me and I'm just like you it's not what Jesus was saying he never said you're just like me okay but this is the common view I ran into this everywhere which was troubling because I knew that that just didn't work if you go over to Psalm 89 let's just click on that psalm 89 and you go down we'll start here in verse 5 let the heavens praise your wonders O Lord your faithfulness in the Assembly of the Holy Ones there's another reference to that council idea for who in the skies can be compared to the Lord who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord a God greatly to be feared in the counsel of the Holy Ones now heavenly beings here and esv nicely gives us a footnote in the Hebrew it says sons of God okay sons of might is not a good translation of Bonet aleem sons of God it's literally what it is here this Council of the sons of God remembers back in Psalm 82 God speaking to the Elohim the gods and then in verse 6 he says he calls them sons of the Most High well we know who the most high is that would be the God of the Bible so these Elohim in Psalm 82 are sons of God also called God's here we have sons of God in a council in the skies in the heavens the last time I checked my Bible we don't have a bunch of Jewish guys ruling in the skies okay it just doesn't make any sense but that is what you will run into time after time after time after time so when I'm confronted with this you know I I'm having a bit of a quandary you know and it's again it this I didn't I didn't run into this in Sunday school I went to Bible College I never ran into this I taught Bible College in Christian College and even then in class prep I never ran into this and here it was hitting me right between the eyes and I couldn't just pretend that it wasn't there I couldn't let it go but I had confidence that this is the Word of God I'll bet Jesus knew this well but Paul knew it I'll bet the Apostles knew it but the New Testament writers knew it there must be a way to make this comprehensible and what I had to do was I had to set aside the worldview that I had I had to set aside what I had been taught in my tradition and just say let's go with the text at the end of the day it's probably still gonna be standing I'm not gonna hurt it I'm not gonna harm it if it's the Word of God it's not going to harm me so let's noodle this and again this became you know the thing that you know drove me really through you know almost ten years of graduate school coming to grips with this as an academic and again as an academic my field is just my specialty is this kind of stuff so let's look at a couple other passages I mean if you if you drill down into this you're gonna run into other things that are kind of interesting this is first Kings 22 starting in verse 19 now if you know a little bit about your Old Testament history after Solomon passes off you know away the kingdom splits so you have the twelve tribes they split into two kingdoms ten in the North two in the South the North is called Israel or Samaria the south is called Judah and you've got prophets running around in both kingdoms basically saying we shouldn't be split up okay because down there in Judah is where Jerusalem is this is where we worship Yahweh we should be twelve tribes or worshiping one God but in the north they're off doing their own thing that they create an alternative worship center or centers and they slide into idolatry pretty quickly now in this scene the king of the north is a hab again who's probably the worst guy and maybe next to Manasseh in the history of Israel the northern kingdom and he talks to the king of the south the southern kingdom who's Jehoshaphat and he wants Jehoshaphat to partner with him in an alliance to go destroy a city so Jehoshaphat goes up there okay I'll meet what they have you know it's kind of like South Korea and North Korea you know let's just go up there and talk and so he goes up there and a hab brings out all the prophets of Bale and they do whatever prophets a Bale do and they say a hab you're the man go up in conquer remote Gilead you're just awesome you're gonna win and you host you fats a little suspicious and he says isn't there like a prophet of Yahweh around here that we could ask him and and Jehoshaphat says it's not it's it's in the verses prior to this is one of my favorite lines a hab says was my paraphrase yeah we got one of those here and I hate that guy because he's in prison because because he never prophesies anything good so that's verse 18 he's only prophesized evil you know to me and so they bring mkhaya out Joe at jehosophat's insistence and at first he kind of mocks the whole thing he's like oh you know yeah go up there you're gonna win you're great you're Ahab you know he's miming you know what a haps prophets told him and Ahab gets a little tick like come on you know give it to us straight and so mkhaya says in verse 19 you want to know what I see macaé said therefore hear the word of the Lord hear the word of Yahweh by the way in your English Bibles when you have all small caps that is the English Convention for the divine name Yahweh therefore hear the word of the Lord I saw the Lord I saw y'all ways sitting on his throne and all the hosts of heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left and the Lord said who will entice Ahab that he may go up and fall at remote Gilead and one said one thing and another son another so the members of the heavenly hosts who are again it's a council god opens up you know you you if you're right if we read the whole chapter God has decreed that it's time for Ahab to die he's finally gonna be judged for his wickedness and then the events ensue and we get to this scene so God opens it up not because he needs information God's like yeah I want to get rid of it but I can't figure out you know no he let them partner with him to decide how a hab is going to be judged and they have a little debate one said one thing another sin another and then a spirit came forward and stood before the Lord so we know that the members of the heavenly hosts are spirits they're not Jewish guys in the skies okay a spirit came forward and stood before the Lord saying I will entice him and the Lord said him by what means and he said I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets and he said you know God comes back you are to entice him and you shall succeed go and do so and mkhaya says now therefore behold the Lord has put a lying spirit the mouth of your prophets and the Lord has declared disaster for you now God is omniscient so if the spirit comes forward and says oh call on me you know I got an idea if it would have been a dumb idea God would have said oh just go sit down we'll call on you later okay he knows what's going to work and what isn't but the point is he has a counsel he lets them partner with him in making certain decisions you get the same thing in Daniel 7 we're not gonna go through all these we'll had a couple more in a few minutes but Daniel 7 this is the the vision of the four beasts which are four empires and you get down to this scene in verse 9 Daniel says as I looked Thrones plural that's a plural as an S lonna Thrones plural were set in place and the Ancient of Days took his seat like and we know who the Ancient of Days is it's not a brainteaser this is God God is seated the other Thrones you know they're nobodies sitting in there yet his clothing was white as snow the hair of his head like pure wool his throne was fiery flames its wheels were burning fire by the way where have you seen that description before that's Ezekiel 1 it's the same you know divine chariot throne description a stream of fire issued and came out before him a thousand thousands served ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him the court the council council sat in judgment and the books were opened heavenly books by the way are an interesting topic we did a whole episode on my podcast on that it's part of the job of the heavenly hosts to keep track of everything that happens not because God needs information or God has a bad memory it's it's a metaphor designed to tell us that God doesn't miss anything but look who participates in the proceedings it's a heavenly Council so I mean you run into these things that are very easy to sort of read over it the heaven the supernatural realm has organization it's not a chaotic mess it's not a Keystone Cops scene it has order and coherence and the biblical writers who are not privy to that world it's the supernatural world to describe its order and its coherence they use a metaphor that they're familiar with the language of the royal court God is king he has a council he has an administration the administration has certain tiered levels you run into this in Scripture if you read your Bible closely now going back to the matter of the plurality and I'm gonna I'm gonna unpack this for you it's not really that big of a conundrum even though at the time it was again it was a conundrum for me and it was disturbing but what I'm suggesting to you is that your Bible presumes the biblical writers presume and the biblical text says that the gods are real they are real spirit beings some of them are loyal to Yahweh spirit beings loyal to Yahweh we tend to think of them as angels and I'll comment on that terminology a little bit later but they're real some of them are loyal and some of them are in rebellion and they are hostile to God and his people this is pardon the pond this is the genesis of spiritual warfare in scripture has very long history and when the Bible says in verses like these my list here that Yahweh is the God of all gods the text means exactly what it says it doesn't mean God is the god of these things that don't really exist why not just say God is the god of the Avengers or the DC Universe or spongebob you know bikini bottom okay because those are all fictional characters it gives no glory to God to say he's better than a fictional character okay I am better than that and every one of you are so when it says Yahweh is the god of all gods it means exactly what it says now why does this trouble us well it's kind of obvious why this troubles us because we as Westerners as modern Westerners and again I'm I'm in there we are trained by both our Western culture and our Christian traditions to believe that the word g.o.d when we see on a piece of paper when we see on a screen when we see the letters G O and D that those letters signify and I catch this this phrasing is important we we are trained to think that the letters G o and D signify a specific set of unique attributes that things like omniscience omnipresence sovereignty creatorship those are all packed into the letters G o and D so that when you put them together it refers to a unique set of attributes that's why it creeps us out when you put an s on the end because we have been trained to think a certain way about a certain word now the biblical writers did not think that way about the word Elohim how do we know Mike are we just supposed to say oh that's nice dr. Heiser you have a PhD so I'll believe that no you get it by doing boring things like looking up the 2,000 plus occurrences of Elohim and reading them all it's a it's a recipe for curing insomnia all right so if you actually do that you will run across the fact that the biblical writers use Elohim of four or five different things we will use round numbers say roughly half a dozen things that are not the God of the Bible now that alone should tell you that the biblical writers when they wrote out Elohim they are not thinking of a unique set of attributes because if they were they would never use the term of something else they don't think about Elohim the way we are trained to think about G and D that's the disconnect that's the problem it's a problem in academia and it's a problem just you know in general in general interest in biblical studies anybody who's interested we're just trained to think that way if you mean we could go through different passages to just give you a few references we have the God of Israel Psalm 82 1 he's definetly Elohim we have the council members who are not him because he's judging them for being corrupt their Elohim the gods of the nations if we looked up first kings 11:33 we'd have you know commotion moab we'd have Asherah Ashtaroth you know these deity figures they're also called Elohim they're not at the level of the God of Israel for the biblical writer he's not they're not thinking attributes when they write the word Elohim the shading deuteronomy 32:17 if we could click out to this now in your English Bibles this typically gets translated it's over here in the NL team enlarge this just a bit so you can read it they offered sacrifices it's a reference to the Israelites to demons this is the word shading these are not the demons of the Gospels by the way we're gonna get into this later today we're used to thinking of good guys angels bad guys demons that is really really over simplistic okay there are different groups of bad guys they are not all the same and they don't they don't derive from the same source or event either but in this case the shading which are it's a term it's an Akkadian term that refers to a territorial entity they are referred to as gods they offered sacrifices to the shading which are not God no kidding to gods they had not known if we click on the word gods again you'll see that we have Elohim so here we have again clearly lesser beings referred to by Elohim first samuel 28:13 i'll just run through this one without clicking out this is the account of Saul going to the medium office often translated which at Endor to get information the medium at Endor so Saul shows up at her house he has previously run out all the mediums and the necromancers and all you know all the occult you know figures you know out of out of Judah but he somehow knows where to find this one so Samuel has died and Saul's in trouble and God will not answer his prayers and so he says I need information from the the supernatural world so he goes to this woman's house she doesn't know who he is she finds out fairly quickly I'm gonna click out anyways it's kind of an interesting passage so let's go down here just a bit so the woman says who shall I bring up for you he said bring up Samuel for me when the woman saw Samuel she cried out with a lied a loud voice kinda freaks her out and the woman said to Saul why have you deceived me you are Saul so something about being actually able to get Samuel as opposed to hoodwinking this guy we're doing or get into some of the other evil spirit maybe that she's used to she knows I got Samuel here and that means I'm in heat big trouble because this this is Saul this is who Samuel would talk to about the things of God and then the King says to her do not be afraid what do you see and the woman said to Saul I see a God coming up out of the earth the word there is Elohim the disembodied dead are referred to as Elohim now again if this is about attributes that's ridiculous okay you know an Israelites dead aunt or deceased child or grandpa or grandma they are not at the level of the God of Israel they just start it has nothing to do with a specific set of unique attributes so what does it mean biblical writers would use Elohim as a word to denote and describe a member of the disembodied spiritual world that's all it is it has nothing to do with attributes Yahweh is an Elohim and there are lots of Elohim because there are lots of spirit beings in the spiritual world but no other Elohim is Yahweh and you don't get that theology from the word Elohim where you get it is you read the text carefully and you and you realize this particular elohim is described in ways that no other elohim ever are described this one is the creator not only of all of our physical world the embodied world but he's the creator of them the other elohim he is sovereign he is omniscient he is omnipotent not only do the biblical writers never describe any other Elohim in those terms but they specifically deny those attributes to other Elohim all in that will he miz is a spirit being yahweh is an Elohim no other Elohim is Yahweh he is I like to say species unique there's only one of those but they're all Elohim because they're all part of the spiritual world the disembodied human dead are Elohim why because they're no longer embodied they are now in the afterlife they're in the spiritual world it's not very a really hard concept but it's hard for us because we never have this discussion we avoid passages like Psalm 82 or we make up stuff about them and say oh it's just a bunch of Jewish guys there's nothing to see here citizen move along and there are lots of passages like this I talked about hierarchy a little bit earlier in the ancient Near Eastern conception of the divine the supernatural bureaucracy there are always tears in the Israelite version of this the tears are as follows and you're going to see this graphic at the end of the day and it's going to it's going to kind of shock you as because it'll have a different context for our discussion but at the top is Yahweh Yahweh is more than one person at the same time now you know today we're not going to go through the Old Testament evidence my dissertation was actually actually included God as man in the Old Testament the idea of a God had in the Old Testament that's where Trinitarian thinking comes from a God had idea it begins in the Old Testament so we have Yahweh as a Godhead at the top the middle tier are the sons of God this is not an ontological term it doesn't tell you what it what a thing is it tells you what a thing does what their role is I have a book out on angels I don't know if your Resource Center has this one but we have another problem with the way we think about the supernatural world and that is our vocabulary vocabulary works this way if you're you know if you're an English major or semantics or you had a good high school English teacher you know about semantics its word meanings words never have just one meaning they denote different things so there are terms that describe the members of the heavenly host in terms of what they are by nature that's our fancy word ontology what a thing is and these are terms like Elohim rooh coat spirits okay it just tells you what it is and then there are terms that describe rank in hierarchy sons of God is probably the leading one for this because in royal bureaucracy of the ancient Near Eastern world who got the most important positions typically family members you know there was wisdom in that because they're family they'll do a good job and they're family I keep my eye on them okay there is an upper elite that often included family members they get the really big administrative jobs and then you have essentially like a bureaucratic staff that are essential to preventing chaos in an administration in fact because there's more of these they're probably you know some of the most important they are described with terms that describe the specific things they do angel is one of those terms in Hebrew it's mahlock in Greek it's Unga loss it means messenger it describes a task what angel is is essentially a job description any given spirit being might take a message when he takes the message he's performing the task of a mahlock of an angel because it describes a task now I'm gonna give you a little heads up here this is just to little what the appetite sons of God in the Old Testament and words like Holy Ones are overwhelmingly in fact almost exclusively used of members of the spiritual world that is not true in the New Testament there the Holy Ones and the sons of God are you this is why Paul in first Corinthians 6 when he's trying to get the Corinthians to stop fighting with each other it's a really obscure passage he says look why are you taking each other to court all the time don't you know that you're going to judge angels you could also translate the verb there rule over don't you know that you outrank them if you look at the hierarchy we're the children of God in the next world in the you know in the New Eden we out rank them the vocabulary is transferred from the supernatural world to us I often get asked why should I care about angelology the supernatural world because the way God and we're going to go through a lot of this today the way God looks at his heavenly family his heavenly hosts his heavenly children his heavenly bureaucracy if you will the way God looks at them and the way he involves them and what he does is a template for how God looks at you how God looks at us and how God looks at us as partners family and partnership identity and mission the supernatural realm is a template for our realm but we typically avoid angelology like the plague or we just say wacky stuff it's a neglected area of biblical study but we're gonna see this again now I often get questions specific questions I'll go through these quickly this won't take too long we'll finish on time people often ask but what about those Bible verses that say there's none besides me there's none like me these are phrases that are not denying the existence of other Elohim because there are verses that affirm the existence of Elohim so unless you love a hopelessly contradictory Bible okay we need to adjust our thinking these are not statements of denial of existence they are statements of incomparability and that's easy to demonstrate I mean we could take a tour through Deuteronomy we don't have time for that but if you look at Deuteronomy 4:35 there's one of these statements besides me there's no God there's actually 11 variations to this well kind of similar but expressing the same thought there's none besides me well if you looked at Deuteronomy 4:19 and 20 Deuteronomy 17 Deuteronomy 20 not all the way with deuteronomy 32:17 which we just looked at a few moments ago you will see that elsewhere in Deuteronomy the reality of other Elohim is affirmed okay you don't have four or five affirmations and then verse 35 we have a contradiction all is it all that it's saying is there's a lot of Elohim Yahweh is among them but none of them are like him he's unique that's all it is so you know these statements are not an obstacle to what I'm saying this is my favorite illustration of this and I'm not going to click out to save time here but there are two occasions isaiah 47 and yes believe it or not the book of Zephaniah is good for something okay so Zephaniah 215 for minor prophets meditations okay these phrases occur in these passages in Isaiah 47 it's the city of Babylon saying there's none besides me what Babylon thinks that that she's the only city that exists she's denying the existence of all other cities that's ridiculous the Prophet wouldn't say that either because the prophets not a dunderhead okay in Zephaniah it's Nineveh the capital of Assyria a different context this is where he's doing his ministry Nineveh says there's none besides me they're not saying I'm the only city on the planet all the other cities aren't real no it's saying we're the best we're incomparable that's all it is FAQ number two why does God need a council we looked at first Kings 22 we looked at Daniel 7 I will click out to Daniel 4 it's kind of an interesting passage this is Nebuchadnezzar okay remember Nebuchadnezzar has this dream and he sees a watcher that is a holy one here in verse 13 comes down from heaven and you know they're gonna talk about his dream and essentially the the Holy One The Watcher says hey I sure hope you like to eat grass because that's gonna be your diet for a while you're going to be driven insane you're gonna be temporarily insane as a judgment from God because of your hubris and your pride and he look at what he says here you go down to verse 17 he says the sentence upon Nebuchadnezzar is by decree of the Watchers plural the word of the Holy Ones this decision is according to the word of the Holy Ones plural but a few verses later we see scroll down here come on keep going let me go back here 24 this is the interpretation Oh King it is a decree of the Most High there's only one of those so the same sentence the same judgment on Nebuchadnezzar is decreed by a group and by the Most High this is participation God allows them to participate you say well well why does God need a council the answer is he doesn't he just likes to do stuff like this he likes to create beings who are like him and let them partner with him God doesn't need anything I liked it when I get this question I like to flip it around and say why does God need you why does God need the church I mean couldn't God like just decide who's gonna be a believer and so we'll call it good now I mean I'm just tired of waiting for the Great Commission I mean good grief you know like look what time it is here can't he do that why did God have to give the Great Commission no God could just make all these decisions himself but he doesn't do that he likes the family business okay that's what he wants he wants children who are part of the family business he's got supernatural children who work with him in that realm he's got believers human children of God in this realm who help him do what he wants done here he doesn't need anything what about Jesus how can he be the son of God if other divine sons of God are real again it sounds like a difficult question but it's a really easy question John 3:16 you probably all know this verse for God so loved the world that He gave His see only begotten is what a lot of translations have only begotten son some have a better translation I'll get to in a moment the Greek word there is mono Ganesh now in the old days a biblical scholarship which was the first half of the 20th century backward scholars thought that mono Ganesh was composed of two Greek words Manas which means one or only mono again we can see that pretty easily and then the second half they thought was from a verb ganado to mean beget like in having children mono kinase only begotten that's actually where the translation comes from second half of the 20th century that changed because there was more Greek material of the same Greek dialect as the New Testament the Koine Greek actually thousands and thousands you know of lines worth of new material and scholars were able to determine that you know what we were wrong about that mono Ganesh actually comes from Manas and jennae which means kind one of a kind unique this is why some of your more recent translations will translate that term as unique or something like that and the and the really good sort of test case for that is Hebrews 11:17 this is the Hebrews 11 the Hall of faith chapter you get to Abraham and it says this by faith Abraham when he was tested offered up Isaac and he who had received the promises was in fact was in the act of offering up his only son okay Bible trivia time was Isaac Abraham's only Son no he wasn't even the firstborn generally speaking he had Ishmael Ishmael was the son of Abraham by Hagar so that tells you that the monoghan ace here again only son let's just open up our interlinear pane click on only monoghan ace it can't mean the only one that exists it does mean unique what what was unique about Isaac he's Sarah's boy who could not have children he is the son of the promise that's why he's Monogue anis and that's why Jesus is Monogue anis he is unique what makes Jesus unique among all other heavenly beings he is Yahweh who is unique and that's actually why G we're not gonna go into John chapter 10 but that's actually why Jesus quotes Psalm 82 verse 6 in John 10 to defend his deity he's saying look fellas doesn't your own look wasn't your own scripture say have God speaking to other sons of God his point is that you know there are other sons of God out there who are not human they're supernatural that's point number one dudes ok so when I say I'm more than a man your own scripture says that that category exists so don't tell me it doesn't and then he had just said I and the father are one so I'm not only like a member of the council in the supernatural world I'm the lord of the council okay you know I am him and he follows that he follows that in verses 37 38 by saying the father is in me and I'm in the father that's why he quotes it you know just to stick it to him I love I like when Jesus sticks it's home significance this is our last slide for this session what I want you to take away from this again think of the template the way God looks at his supernatural family and his partnership relationship with them is the way he looks at you because his supernatural family do you realize this existed before human creation we're gonna look at that in the next session but in job 38 the sons of God were witnesses when God laid the foundations of the world and then God goes on to create humankind he already has a family God already has kids okay before we get to Adam and Eve and his relationship with them and his partnership with them are going to serve as a template for what he wants on earth you

Channel: Celebration Church

Views: 633,345

Rating: 4.7993636 out of 5

Keywords: Celebration Church, Celebration Jax, Celebration Church of Jacksonville, Jacksonville, Supernatural, Seminar, Michael Heiser, Awakening 2019, AWKG 2019

Id: IZKy1Xt2Ow0

Length: 51min 47sec (3107 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 23 2019