Episode Transcript
Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and this week I have Joshua Sherman with me, and it has been far too long since he has been on the podcast. So welcome, Joshua.
[00:00:25] Joshua Sherman: Thank you, Carey. It's good to be here.
[00:00:27] Yeah, I think it was probably one of the, the series we did on the image of God largely together that was kind of my last appearance on here. So it's great to be back.
[00:00:36] Carey Griffel: Yes. And I'm so excited about this topic I hope I won't start talking too quickly. Let me just put it that way, because when I get excited about things, I do tend to talk faster than I normally do. And I'm going to try to not do that today. But what we're going to be doing really is we're going to be engaging with some critiques of Dr. Michael Heiser's work specifically the Divine Council worldview. And we're going to be engaging in some discussion about definitions, because this is where we should really start, and this is where I think a lot of the disagreement sits, right? If we don't agree on terminology, we're really not going to have very effective conversations.
[00:01:23] And so we're going to start there, but I also want to say that this isn't the first place or time recently, that I've engaged with the ideas that I'm going to be talking about here. We're going to be talking about current conversations in relation to videos put out by Doreen Virtue, but I'm also going to loop in some of the other critiques that I've seen lately come out, and I don't know if they have anything to do with the fact that Doreen Virtue put out her video or not. It doesn't really matter because the critiques that I've seen have not been ones that have been new to me. They have been ones I've seen before.
[00:02:01] And before we even start really talking about those critiques specifically, I want to say that there probably is common ground that we can come in on this discussion. And for Doreen Virtue in particular, she says that her concern is for people who are following, that's her words, following Dr. Michael Heiser and his work and taking those kinds of ideas and running with them in ideas that are kind of unbiblical. And if that's what we're talking about, then I can absolutely get on board with that kind of a conversation because that is also one of my concerns is not necessarily with Dr. Heiser's work specifically, but just the topics that he addresses in general. They tend to have that tendency for people to really take them and really want to go these sensational directions. And to be quite honest, I don't think that that's what Dr. Heiser's work does. I think his work is actually a remedy for a lot of that.
[00:03:03] But, you know, you have to just let people do what they're going to do with the work. You can't take responsibility for what other people are going to use your work for . And Dr. Heiser was very strong in certain segments of the population, addressing people who are interested in these kind of stranger corners of the Bible, and trying to answer those from a biblical perspective.
[00:03:28] He was trying to give biblical responses to people who otherwise don't know what to do with these kinds of topics. So that's kind of where I meet the conversation in a way that I think can really intersect in a positive way.
[00:03:44] Joshua Sherman: Yeah, I think it's worth saying that the fact that someone like Dr. Michael Heiser would interact with the views of other people from different faiths even faiths that claim Jesus, the fact that he would interact with them doesn't necessarily mean that he agrees with them. Interaction is a different kind of thing.
[00:04:04] So we have to be really thoughtful about what kind of interaction is going on before we can start to throw out terms like strange bedfellows, as some of the people on Doreen Virtue's video did.
[00:04:15] Carey Griffel: Right, absolutely. And so we need to kind of really have a nuanced discussion on what people mean and why they're doing the things that they're doing.
[00:04:25] Some of the critiques I've seen in particular have taken Dr. Heiser's material in ways that it's not paying attention to his context of why he was writing some of this stuff, right? Because he actually wrote material for An LDS journal. He wrote an article for a BYU journal and because he was engaging With that audience, he wrote in a particular way with particular points that he was trying to make.
[00:04:57] And if you miss out that he is engaging with that particular audience, you're going to misconstrue what he says. And so what's really telling to me is that with a lot of the critiques, they either haven't read all of his work, Or, they haven't listened to him. And I think you need to do both.
[00:05:17] Because academic work is academic work, right? It's kind of constrained. It's going to have a certain direction, a certain audience, a certain purpose. Whereas Dr. Heiser's more popular material is really A good way to engage with what does he actually mean? If you're not engaging with that kind of material, then I think you're gonna miss out on a lot of his purpose.
[00:05:43] Joshua Sherman: I think we can say the same thing when we look at the context of polemic in scripture. Right? Because it's, it's one thing to say that there are similarities that we see in scripture between what the biblical authors are saying and some of the things that we see in Ugaritic literature about Baal or in the Gilgamesh epic or whatever.
[00:06:05] Seeing the similarities is one thing, but if we actually look and see the way that scripture is actually often addressing those ideas very specifically, very pointedly, and then correcting those ideas, it becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly that the biblical authors were not using motifs from the Baal cycle because they thought Baal was great. They're not using those motifs because they thought that he was better than Yahweh or comparable to Yahweh or anything else. Right? They're using them to show that the earth is Yahweh's and the fullness thereof, right, and not Baal's. So they're using that interaction in a way that subverts what the pagan neighbors around them were saying and provides a corrective and then provides a more complete, substantive, correct theology around who God is and who people are.
[00:07:00] If you miss the polemic part of that, You can start to get stuck in, there are similarities here. What do we do with this? And I feel like the same dynamic is happening here with some people that are interacting with Dr. Heiser's work. And they'll say, he's pointing out similarities with El's divine council. This is bringing paganism into Christianity. This is influencing whatever.
[00:07:24] It's like, no, actually that's not what's going on. Right? Most of the time there are similarities, there's polemic. And then there are some other times where it's more subtle, and you really have to look at it to kind of understand what's going on. But it's not just like, you know, Calvin sitting there looking at Susie's homework, right?
[00:07:44] That's not what was going on with the biblical authors. They're doing things very, very concisely and very pointedly and very purposefully.
[00:07:53] Carey Griffel: Right? Yes. This is a good point. There's a big difference between having a context where you're just fitting fully into that context and accepting everything in it and a context that is polemical to that.
[00:08:10] You've got to still have the context that is there, but you are subverting it. And that is absolutely essential to what we have to be able to understand in the divine council worldview.
[00:08:24] Joshua Sherman: Absolutely. And so, you know, I think about things like people saying, Oh, this is polytheism. If you really get into it , and you want to take a very wooden way of talking about things, right? You could look at something like the Nicene Creed and think, Oh, there's polytheism there.
[00:08:40] You'd be misreading it really badly. But you could do it, right? Because you have, I believe in one God, the father, and then later on, when you're describing the son, you say that he is God of God, right? Is that two gods? Do we now have polytheism? Like you could go there. You would just be wrong. Right?
[00:09:01] So some of the language that is used in scripture to describe some of these things, I think we'd have to be really thoughtful about the context in which we have people talking about the one God and people talking about the gods of the nations and what that actually means and the fact that the word God is used there to describe two completely different realities that have a relationship to each other that we need to understand in full biblical context, or we're going to completely get lost. Right?
[00:09:30] So I think part of what happens with a lot of these critiques and with people looking at Dr. Heiser's work is that they will look at some of the things that he is saying, and they will bring their own dictionary to the conversation. And then they're just utterly confused or they come away thinking he's a total heretic, right?
[00:09:47] You can disagree with his definitions, but it would be better if you're going to do a critique that involves both what he was teaching, what he said about things and the definitions he uses and critiques both and the interaction between them than just trying to critique what he said and kind of ignoring his definitions, bringing your own dictionary into the conversation and then realizing that that doesn't make any sense. It's like, well, of course it doesn't make any sense. You're trying to evaluate his worldview without the definitions of the terms, the way that he sees them. That's not going to work. Right.
[00:10:21] And so you can use that if you really get down to it and say, no, his definitions are wrong for this reason. You can set that up and say, okay, now I will do a reductio ad absurdum argument, and I will show how his definitions are false. And therefore interacting with what he said, there are these conflicts that arise. That's a kind of argument you can make.
[00:10:41] But you'll notice that with a lot of the critiques, what we ended up missing is an actual critique of his definitions.
[00:10:48] And so that's one of the things that we wanted to get into tonight, because I think there are these ideas out there that he just kind of came up with definitions that were convenient for the way that he saw scripture. And that's really not the case. And , so we'll talk through some of those as we keep going.
[00:11:03] Carey Griffel: Right, exactly, and so the whole conversation about definitions, we're going to probably use the word definition like a million times tonight, but the whole reason we're having a conversation about definitions is that it really is something that people struggle with because they have these deeply embedded ideas, and they have them for good reasons, you know, these are not things that we're putting on them as if they're being malicious in this intent, except that if you are trying to critique an idea, then you have to critique it in its strongest form, in the form that the other person actually holds it in.
[00:11:44] Right? Because over and over in these critiques, I see the claim that they say, well, People tell me that I don't understand Dr. Heiser's work, but I understand Dr. Heiser's work. And then they go and give a definition and claim that Dr. Heiser said things that he really wasn't describing things the way that they have it formed.
[00:12:08] So this is classic straw man argument. Like, you're gonna set up your own definition of what Dr. Heiser said, and then you're gonna knock that down and say, aha, I defeated his position. Well, you didn't because you didn't actually engage in his position. Now it's very nuanced here. It ends up being kind of difficult for people to really wrap their heads around if they don't have the exact kinds of definitions that another person has. But that's why you go to the source. That's why you ask the source, the person you're actually critiquing, to look deeply into their work to see what do they actually mean, because meaning is really really important to all of this.
[00:12:53] And so you brought up the term polytheism. Polytheism is as opposed to monotheism, right? And we think that we understand these terms. And I think most of us have a general good definition of what monotheism means and what polytheism is.
[00:13:10] The problem that we come to the Bible with is that the Bible doesn't really fit in either the boxes of polytheism or monotheism. And we're going to kind of get into the nuance of what that means. But I mean, let's go ahead and actually look at the terms polytheism and monotheism because we need to know what we're talking about.
[00:13:32] So, polytheist and monotheist are two, like, we think of them as opposite terms, right? Polytheism, according to the good old dictionary. com, it says, it's the doctrine or the belief in more than one god, or many gods.
[00:13:49] Carey Griffel: So again, that's a broad definition. It doesn't speak to what God is. It's just if you believe in more than one God, then you're a polytheist. Wikipedia is a little bit More specific, not much, but a little bit. It says it's the belief in or worship of more than one god. So you can have a belief in multiple gods, and that's lowercase g that we're talking about.
[00:14:15] Doesn't mean you're necessarily worshipping them all if you're a polytheist, but it might. And then Wikipedia goes on to talk about specifics of how polytheism is often a belief in Pantheon and, you know, things like that. But again, none of that is blatantly new information to anyone here.
[00:14:34] So polytheism is as opposed to monotheism, which is the belief in or the doctrine of only one God. And so the whole reason these terms were actually defined was to fit the certain boxes that scholars were looking at. So we fit Christianity, Judaism and Islam into the monotheist camp. At least most of us do.
[00:14:58] Islam would actually claim Christianity as a polytheistic religion because of the Trinity. But from the Christian perspective, we say these three main religions are monotheistic. But note what we're kind of sneaking into the definition. We're sneaking in the idea of God and who he is.
[00:15:19] It's like, nobody thinks that somebody who believes in a single God of money or the God of like your stomach is your God, they're not called monotheists because they don't believe in like a single creator God. Right? So we're sneaking in this idea of characteristics into the terms, but we're not admitting that that's what we're doing.
[00:15:42] And really there's a tension with the terms. We want to be monotheists because we do worship only one God. We know of only one sovereign supreme creator who is unique and no other creation can compete or is similar to Yahweh God. So in that sense, we are all monotheists, but It's not just that we believe in only one God, it's that we believe in one, single, sovereign, uncreated creator, who is the origin of life and the sustainer of all things.
[00:16:16] So we believe in a single God who has unique attributes. It's really key, and I don't think most Christians Are going to say that you can leave out those attributes of God when you're talking about him. It's not just that we believe in a God. It's that we believe in the God. And so there's a whole bunch of attributes that our God has.
[00:16:39] And, you know, in the conversation about monotheism and polytheism, we aren't really willing as Christians to leave out those attributes. So then when we turn to the idea of polytheism. What do we do about those attributes?
[00:16:56] And I would submit that a lot of times we're still sneaking in attributes. We're still assuming that the polytheistic gods are literal rivals to the supreme sovereign creator.
[00:17:11] So my point here is that monotheism, at least in our minds, really isn't as narrow as what the dictionary says.
[00:17:18] Joshua Sherman: Yeah, which is really interesting because you can even have an application of the term. So one of the things that sometimes people will study is a theory of original monotheism. And original monotheism is basically looking at the history of religion and saying, well, instead of religion basically evolving from people just deciding that every little thing had a spirit or a God to it and saying there are gods in everything to There's only one God. Instead of saying you know, we believe in all of these you know, these gods that are, you know, up here that are, are really great, that are doing these things. Maybe those are kind of derived from the grammar because, the grammar for the sun is masculine and the grammar for the moon is feminine. And so eventually people personified these things and then they became gods. And then eventually people figured out, no, there's actually only one God.
[00:18:08] And the people that were asking questions really were looking at this from an anthropological perspective and from the perspective of ethnology. So you think Andrew Lang and Wilhelm Schmidt and looking at things and saying, if we look at some of the oldest, most isolated cultures in the world, what do we actually see about what they believe, right?
[00:18:27] And what they ended up finding was that when you went to a lot of these old cultures, they had a lot of polytheistic stuff going on. They had a lot of animistic stuff going on, and that might be the only thing they would share with outsiders. Right. And, but in some of these cultures, you basically had to be initiated into like the secret part of them to, for them to actually be like, okay, let us tell you the real thing.
[00:18:52] And they actually like, had an idea of a high single creator God that was above everything else That had become more distant And so they basically were interacting with these other kind of intermediate spirits if you will in order to get things from them, Right. And if you think about that and you start thinking about the idea that someone might classify that as original monotheism, yes, it's original monotheism as in you know, seems like they originally believed in only one God, but then they actually became polytheists. Right. I think that that's an interesting kind of reversal to the way that a lot of people understand the relationship between polytheism and monotheism historically.
[00:19:36] And it also happens to be A way of looking at things that aligns a lot more with what we see in scripture , because in scripture we have in the beginning of God, and then we have a dispersal at Babel of people into lands and nations, et cetera. And there are a number of things that contextually will start to connect into ideas in the ancient world about the fact that not only land and peoples and nations were allotted to each other, but also gods right.
[00:20:02] Who did that allotting? Right. When did it happen? How did it happen? . Those are all ideas people were kicking around in the ancient world. And it's very interesting to me if we look at something like original monotheism, that fits very well with that view. And so then you have the question of, you know, are these people that believe this monotheists or polytheists? Are they monotheists or animists? And you kind of get the sense that it's like, well, they're kind of in some ways, kind of both, but what does that even mean? Right. And then you have to start asking the question about, well, do they mean God in different senses when they're talking about these different things?
[00:20:41] And what does that mean? What does that tell us and is that useful for us as we start to talk about the things that we see in scripture when the words Elohim or Theos are used to describe God, they're used to describe the gods of the nations, they're used to describe different things. Right. Do we perhaps mean different things by those different uses of those terms?
[00:21:02] And I think we would both suggest that the, the answer in the, in scripture is yes, yes. Very different things are meant when we say the one God versus the gods of the nations.
[00:21:12] Carey Griffel: Absolutely. And so again, it's like, if you're going to lump in all of the gods and polytheism to be either the same as the one God of monotheism or to be legitimate rivals to that God. Well that's not at all what we're talking about here. That's not what we can see in scripture. That's not what Dr. Heiser taught. None of that really fits. So the claim that Dr. Heiser is a polytheist and the divine council worldview is polytheism, it's like, take a step back and ask yourself, does that make any sense?
[00:21:50] Are these the only two buckets we can put the concepts in? And we know that it's not. And even some of the critics who are actually read in Dr. Heiser's material, they also know that this isn't how you can actually parse things out and how Dr. Heiser was actually putting it.
[00:22:09] Joshua Sherman: So, I mean, if we just run down the main terms really quickly that people use to try to describe what they see in scripture or to try to classify different religious beliefs. You're usually going to have the main four. You're going to have monotheism, polytheism, henotheism, and monolatry. And I think it's actually pretty quick to look and see what do we actually see in scripture and can any one of those terms contain what we see in scripture? If that's not the case, then maybe those terms aren't the best way to describe things.
[00:22:40] Right? And this is exactly what Dr. Heiser did multiple times in his work, which is why it's so frustrating for someone to just come back and say, well, this meets some bare definition of polytheism somewhere. So it must be polytheism. And we look at it and we're like, well, yeah, but it also doesn't fit other parts of polytheism the way that we actually see it practiced in history. And so to use that term is actually too simple. It doesn't describe everything. Right?
[00:23:06] So if we think of monotheism, monotheism, one God, right? Well, of course, you know, in the beginning, God, you know, we have seen lots of places in scripture where it talks about the one God the, you know, the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, like all of these things, like you see a lot of places where that, is set.
[00:23:22] And yet you also see things like Exodus 12, 12. Right. Where you have Egypt has many gods, At least they think they have many gods. We can look into, you know, how deluded they were with that, but scripture talks about that. And you even have things where Moses records, Yahweh saying, I am going to judge the gods of Egypt, which is kind of odd to say, like, I am going to judge the figments of these people's imagination. It doesn't capture everything that's going on in scripture to just describe it as monotheism, right? Especially if we're going to talk about radical monotheism in certain ways, because if we get into that too far, we start to ask questions about, is this a unitarian monotheism? Or are we talking about plurality within the deity?
[00:24:08] And Dr. Heiser's work on the two powers in heaven really kind of pulls at some of those things and says, you know, there are passages in Genesis, there are passages in Daniel seven where, You have a lot of writings in second temple Judaism that are struggling with the fact that there really seemed to kind of be two powers in heaven. What do you do with that? Right. Is God one? Yes. But what does one mean? Is it a unity or are we talking about the union of multiple persons? Like this is the kind of stuff that people wrestled with and the kind of things that the Christian church had to try to figure out how to express very clearly to people that started to get the wrong idea as church history went on.
[00:24:44] So monotheism doesn't fully capture everything. If we get into polytheism, right. It's like, okay, there are many gods. Okay, Can you tell me, is there a difference in the nature of those gods or not? Well, polytheism isn't going to answer that question, right? Generally speaking, when we see polytheism practiced in history, and we look at the myths of different groups, you do have a sense that all of the gods are gods that would, reproduce by procreation, Whether it was with other gods or whether it was with humans. And then you have demigods, like this is all kind of built into who they are.
[00:25:17] Can you fit the Bible into saying that it fits polytheism? Like, well, clearly not because you have one God who stands completely apart from creation. Let alone from anything else where the word God is used to describe another being. So polytheism is too simple.
[00:25:33] You get into monolatry. It's like, well, there's only one God that's worthy of worship. Okay. You know, that seems closer, right? But then what do we do with that? ? Because you're not describing why that one God is worthy of worship and the others are not, right?
[00:25:50] You get into Henotheism and same kind of thing, you know, you might have a pantheon of gods and you might say that, well, this is the only one that we worship. This is the one that we believe is supreme, right? Okay. That seems like it might be kind of close, but can that supreme God be knocked off their throne?
[00:26:06] If the answer is yes, and in most of what we see that would be described as henotheism, the reason people use that term is because they're describing a system where that can happen. That's not what we see in scripture. Every time you, have this idea of a succession myth in scripture whether, you know, it's Genesis three or Isaiah 14 or Ezekiel 28. The one that tries to rebel gets shot down, right? It doesn't work. In fact, the only kind of succession we see in scripture that really happens is with the Father and the Son or the Ancient of Days, and this, the one like a son of man, and that's a cooperative thing and it's not a replacement, right? It's co regency, right?
[00:26:43] So again, the idea of Hinotheism is too simple to try to describe what we see in scripture. So to try to put any one of those labels on what we see in scripture ends up just becoming too simple. It doesn't capture all of the different dimensions that are involved in what we see being described in scripture, and they're not helpful terms.
[00:27:02] And this is one of the things that Dr. Heiser was very passionate about pointing out because he wanted to get us back to the text to actually say, what does the text say? What does the text use this language for? And when we do that, we see that, you know, yes, There are different kinds of beings that are called Elohim and we can talk about what that term means in Hebrew Right, but we also have very much the sense that Yahweh is unique .That he is the creator. He's the sovereign that he's eternal. There's no competition, right? All of those things are also true . And if you can't have all of those things that scripture says, being true at once within the term you're using for something, your term is insufficient.
[00:27:40] Carey Griffel: And that is like the point of having a definition is to define something closely enough that it can describe that one thing and only that one thing.
[00:27:52] If it's too broad, then what you have is a definition that fits maybe. But not perfectly. And so, you know, Dr. Heiser did push back on all of those definitions. And in each one of them, we're still leaving out the attributes question. We still aren't actively defining the word God in any of those definitions, except maybe monotheism, but even then, we're kind of hedging it and not trying to define it, and I think maybe the reason for that is because if you say that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all monotheistic religions, well, then the question is, if you insert the attributes and nature of God into that definition, ya got a problem, right? Because the God of Islam is not the God of Christianity, and there's differences there. Wide, wide differences. So you can't purposefully, intentionally put the attributes of God into the definition of monotheism if you're going to have all three of those religions be monotheistic. So, what are we going to do with that, and how can we make this more specific?
[00:29:05] Dr. Heiser didn't come up with a term. He didn't come up with a new term and say, this is what we see in scripture. He didn't find need for that because he just said, this is what scripture says. We don't need to put that label on it.
[00:29:23] Joshua Sherman: In fact just to quote from unseen realm this is in chapter two this is under a section called plural Elohim does not mean polytheism.
[00:29:31] Gee, I wonder what he was getting at here. He says he actually lists out a number of things that the word Elohim can refer to. Right. He says they can refer to Yahweh, the God of Israel. And of course he cites scripture for that. He says it can refer to the members of Yahweh's council. He cites scripture for that. It can refer to gods and goddesses of other nations. And we can, you know, of course, talk about whether they exist or whether they don't exist, all those kinds of things. Those are also part of this whole discussion and debate, but those terms are used for them. It can refer to demons. It can refer to the deceased Samuel in first Samuel 28, 13. And also to angels or the angel of Yahweh in Genesis 35, seven.
[00:30:10] So he lists those things out. And then he says, you know, "The importance of this list can be summarized with one question. Would any Israelite, especially a biblical writer, really believe that the deceased human dead and demons are on the same level as Yahweh? No, the usage of the term Elohim by Biblical writers tells us very clearly that the term is not about a set of attributes. Even though when we see G O D in English, we think a unique set of attributes, when a Biblical writer wrote Elohim, he wasn't thinking that way. If he were, he'd never have used the term Elohim to describe anything but Yahweh. Consequently, there is no warrant for concluding that plural Elohim produces a pantheon of interchangeable deities."
[00:30:54] And interchangeable is a very important word there, right? " There is no basis for concluding the biblical writers would have viewed yahweh as no better than another elohim A biblical writer would not have presumed that yahweh could be defeated on any given day By another elohim and why not any of them had the same set of attributes that is polytheistic thinking, it is not the biblical picture. We can be confident of this conclusion by once again, observing what the biblical writers say about Yahweh and never say about another Elohim. The biblical writers speak of Yahweh in ways that telegraph their belief in his uniqueness and incomparability."
[00:31:33] And then he lists out a number of those things, basically just gets into like, you know, here you have, you know, the creator, you have the one who knows all. The one who is eternal, like all of these things, uncreated, like these all set Yahweh apart from anything else, from anyone else in scripture that could be referred to with either the term Elohim in Hebrew or the term Theos in Greek.
[00:31:56] Carey Griffel: Yeah, so, I mean, words right from Dr. Heiser's mouth. Now, I understand that a lot of people will still latch on to this idea that Dr. Heiser was teaching that Yahweh could be defeated. And they said that because of some of the things that Dr. Heiser says about the nature of Jesus coming incarnate, and the plan of what that ended up looking like, right?
[00:32:26] You know, why Jesus had to die, and things like that. There's a lot of, I guess, famous clips from Dr. Heiser saying that the reason and the story of the Messiah was hidden in scripture, and, you know, so you're using these terms that really pique people's interests, right? When people say, aha, it's hidden, it's a secret, then they start paying attention. Yeah, it's going to start thinking that, oh, there's secret things going on.
[00:32:56] But I think that's still misinterpreting what's going on here. Dr. Heiser was never trying to say that Satan could defeat God, right? He wasn't saying that there was this possibility that the bad guys were going to win. That was never the sense that I got from what Dr. Heiser said. But from boots on the ground, people and the actual divine powers, they weren't omniscient.
[00:33:22] like, that's not a controversial statement, is it? To say that Satan or the bad guys are not omniscient? I don't think that's very controversial for anyone to claim that. So, because they're not omniscient, it means that they don't know everything God is doing. They don't understand the Messiah, and I don't really know why that is such a big obstacle, here.
[00:33:48] It doesn't mean that they could have defeated God. It doesn't mean that God had to do it this way or else he would have been defeated. I think that maybe some of the things I've heard Dr. Heiser say could be taken that direction, but I have a hard time, wrapping that up in with the ideas that you were just explaining.
[00:34:10] This very clear idea that Yahweh could not be defeated. His purposes were not going to be ruined by anyone, anywhere.
[00:34:20] Joshua Sherman: I think maybe what we have is that there are some places where, when Dr. Heiser was describing the story of things, he was presenting it the way we would, normally understand a story that has human characters, right? And so there is a sense of tension. There's a sense of mystery. There's a sense of, could this possibly have failed in that? Because that's what we understand. Good story to be right. Where, you know, when you get into the kinds of things that Dr. Heiser is describing here he's very clearly laying out like, no, here are the boundaries right?
[00:34:55] So there may be places where perhaps he crossed over a little bit from what I would say would be descriptive, like, this is what God did. And this is how it happened. And that deception of the powers you know, was part of bringing about God's plan, into Maybe more of, I don't even want to say prescriptive, but more of like, this is how it had to be, right?
[00:35:15] Perhaps some of the ways he talked about that could have been taken that way. But I think if you try to take the two things together, , you realize that when he's talking about the story, there is some sense of that personification and, and looking at things and saying, you know, story has tension.
[00:35:30] So of course we understand that, right. Versus this, that really does draw those clean boundaries. And I think this is what I would say is more the bedrock of his understanding of who God is compared to any other God or any created being. I don't want to say any other created being cause he wasn't created, right? That's a key part of this. You know, I think that's really, really key to understand the difference there.
[00:35:51] Carey Griffel: Well, and we have to remember that Dr. Heiser was all about biblical theology. And in biblical theology, what you have to do is you have to take the text and the author of the text, the human author, the human who produced the text, and that original audience that the text was for. You have to take those seriously first and foremost.
[00:36:16] And of course, then you have the overarching narrative of salvation history of the Bible and Jesus as center of that. But when you're taking the text and you're looking at it from that perspective of Here's what we have in the Old Testament, and here's what we have now in the Incarnation and the Revelation of Jesus as he was walking on earth, as he was living, it's like nobody could predict everything that Jesus did, even though he was fulfilling the Scriptures. I mean, that's not how this worked. Like, that's Dr. Heiser had guests on who talked about this kind of stuff, right? Who said that , yes, there's a level of prophecy that is about foretelling, and there's that other level of prophecy that is more like typology, and action, and reaction, and things like that, right?
[00:37:09] So, you have something that happens in the past, And Jesus fulfills it in that better way. So that doesn't discount what happened in the past. But you're not going to be able to take the whole Old Testament, draw out all of those things yourself and say, aha, this is what it's going to look like.
[00:37:27] And so that's what Dr. Heiser was really drilling down into is that textual basis of what we have here.
[00:37:35] Joshua Sherman: Yeah, that's so good. And there are a couple of things that that brings to mind for me. So one of them is just looking at the way that a lot of people deal with prophecy and they'll look at Messianic prophecy.
[00:37:46] And I feel like that category is misapplied sometimes to typology and that causes all kinds of problems. Right. So you think it's about something like the Virgin will conceive. It's like, well, actually, that was Isaiah talking about this. And then of course, well, it can't be a prophecy if that's true.
[00:38:02] So you have those kinds of things where people will argue over this and that. You have the same kind of thing with Matthew when he says, out of Egypt, I have called my son. Which originally was about Israel and then it's getting applied to Jesus, right? Because he and his family go and seek refuge when Herod tries to kill all the male firstborn in Israel they go to Egypt to seek refuge and then they come back into the promised land, right?
[00:38:25] Is that prophecy? Or is it something else? And a lot of times we look at it as prophecy, right? As he, Oh, by the way, I'm going to tell you what's going to happen in the future. I don't think that's a lot of what's going on with some of these passages like that. I think it's closer to say that what they're doing is they're establishing a pattern.
[00:38:43] They're establishing a sign where it's like, you say that, you know, you see like, okay, just as with Isaiah, when he said, you know, that he prophesied that you're going to see this child and before that child knows the difference between good and evil, this thing is going to happen. Now we have a child from a virgin and that is going to bring about these things, right.
[00:39:05] And same thing with Matthew, you have this idea of this establishment of a pattern. So out of Egypt, I have called my son. Isn't necessarily meant to be, Oh, everyone now is looking for the Messiah to come out of Egypt, right? It wasn't necessarily meant to set that off. It was meant so that when people saw that Jesus did come out of Egypt, they could be like, hold on. We remember that kind of thing happening before in Israel's history. I wonder if there are connections here. And the layers and layers and layers of those kinds of connections are the kinds of things that would clue people that were really into the scriptures enough to say, I think I know who Jesus is.
[00:39:43] So it's not even necessarily like a prophecy, like the people in Isaiah's day or in with Exodus, we're looking forward to the Messiah in very specific ways, though, we do see things where they were looking forward to the Messiah. Some of the things that we see attached to Christ are things that are really meant to kind of be a neon sign pointing back when you actually see the way that his life unfolded, and then people could go, Oh, I get it. I see who he is. Right?
[00:40:11] So I think that's a really important distinction to make. The other thing that I would rabbit trail on just slightly is your use of biblical theology. Because I just want to point out that you're using that term correctly in the way that academics actually use the term and Doreen virtue was not.
[00:40:27] So she referred to biblical theology and the way that she meant it was very clearly, we need to do biblical theology in the sense that we are incorporating all of scripture all at once when we look at any given passage. That is not what biblical theology is. Biblical theology can have that as part of what you're doing, but it's, you know, usually what you're doing is you're starting with, we have a book. That book was written in a particular time to a particular audience. You have certain ideas that were being brought forward in certain ways. We need to understand that in and of itself before we move on to the next thing.
[00:41:04] And then as we see the unfolding over time, we can see how, Oh, in this book, we can see the development of these ideas. We can see this became obvious to people. This was a problem they needed to deal with. And you can start to see the unfolding of the story of scripture through time and different situations. And eventually, yes, you get that whole picture and you can look at that whole picture together, but you can't just say, let's take the whole picture and ignore The progression and ignore the individual context of the different books. That's not doing biblical theology. Right. So I just want to kind of point that out because I think it's really important for people to get that.
[00:41:36] Carey Griffel: Right. It is. And it's hard for us to understand when we come from the perspective of systematic theology that does have that tendency to see, okay, what does the Bible say about this? What does the Bible say about that? And we want to pull out one single answer for those questions. That's what systematic theology does. And there's, you know, a point and a purpose and important things that you can do with systematic theology, but it's different from Biblical theology.
[00:42:06] And when you have your head in the Biblical theology here, and we're looking at these different texts, you can see the Old Testament for what it is, and instead of jumping forward in time to the end of the New Testament, when you're looking at what's happening in The history of the New Testament, as it plays out, nobody really knows what's going on fully at that time.
[00:42:33] Like, they can recognize Jesus as the Messiah because of this idea of the cyclical patterns and the typology and things that they already recognize from the past. But they're not gonna be able to see that until Jesus is right in front of them. They're not gonna be able to, like, take the jigsaw puzzles from the Old Testament and say, Oh, look, I've got this picture of the Messiah that I've just made out of these puzzle pieces.
[00:43:02] it's just not how it worked. And when you have that realization of there is this difference in time, there's this difference in, what we have going on from the Old Testament into the fulfillment of all of this in Jesus, it becomes clear that it's not something that can be predicted. And so, you know, maybe you can say that Dr. Heiser leaned a little bit too far and too heavily into these things to get the idea that God can possibly be thwarted and that, you know, he had to make it super secret. And okay, maybe that's not the case. Does that dismantle any of this though? Because you go to Dr. Heiser's actual definitions where he's laying all of this out, and he is absolutely clear that Yahweh's not gonna be defeated.
[00:43:56] So it, it's just we're going to take something that Dr. Heiser said over here and we're going to combine it with something over there, and we're going to say that he's talking about the exact same thing when , it's not fair to do that. He's talking about different things.
[00:44:11] Joshua Sherman: I also think it's really important to take this from kind of a bigger Even eternal perspective. So you have scripture that talks about, him being the God that declares the end from the beginning. And some people will take that as a proof of determinism of all things. But if we really get into things and we start to think about this, you have plenty of time in scripture where God says, you know, do this, he commands, he encourages, and then people go the other way.
[00:44:39] You have this idea of the rebellion. Of angels, right? Like what is rebellion if it's not trying to do something other than what God has commanded or God has told people or encourage them or, you know, angels, whoever to do? Right. The very idea of rebellion is people going against something that God has said.
[00:45:02] But, part of the question here is, can you go against something that God has said, you should do this, right? Versus can you go against something that God has set in stone? Those are two different things for me. And I think if we take the eternal perspective, we can very easily see things where it's like, God says to Israel, you do this. He knows that they're not going to, and you see a lot of Deuteronomy 32, and in the end, kind of really saying what's going to happen. But at the same time, the end things that God says he's going to bring about, the eschatology that we have, God wins. There is nothing that's going to keep that from happening in the way that God has plans to bring it about.
[00:45:41] Some of these in between things where people are rebelling when God, you know, said, you know, Hey , this is what you should do. Or if you do this and I will bless you in this way. If you don't, then, you won't have that blessing. And in fact, you're going to have , this arise as a challenge, right? This is going to be something that will hurt you.
[00:45:58] Those kinds of dynamics cannot change the end of what God is bringing about for creation and what he has promised. So I think it's helpful to realize the difference between the eternal perspective on these things and a temporal perspective that we would have, where we would look at things and say, you know, if I were in Egypt, I would be thinking long and hard as a slave, like Israel was, I would be thinking long and hard about whether my God had been defeated or not. If I were in Babylon in the exile, I would be thinking long and hard about whether my God had been defeated or not. That does not in any way change the fact that God was not defeated. Right.
[00:46:36] And we see the prophets very clearly proclaiming that that wasn't what was going on. But from a human perspective, in the moment, we can see how you can really see that dynamic and feel those feelings and have that perspective and feel stuck. And yet God is still working, even in the midst of that, to bring about what he has planned and to bring good out of things that other people and other beings have meant for evil.
[00:47:03] Carey Griffel: Taking seriously the fact that there are legitimately rebellious beings, whether that's humanity or spiritual beings or Satan or whoever, and realizing that rebellion isn't Going to impugn on God's actual working out of things in history. But that doesn't mean that they don't have an impact in the moment because clearly they do.
[00:47:29] Otherwise, we wouldn't see everything that happens in history if rebellion didn't actually kind of work sometimes in a small kind of a sense, right? But what we see is God using those things and triumphing in the end. And that's what we have in Jesus. And I don't know. I just think it's really disingenuous to take Two different things that Dr. Heiser is talking about in different ways, trying to mash them together and say, look, he's talking about polytheism, and he thinks that God really can be defeated.
[00:48:01] That is not the sense that we get at all. But anyway, let's go ahead and move on to talk about the term divine, because I do want to get into this particular term in this conversation as well, because the term divine is a really hot button topic when we're talking about these kinds of critiques.
[00:48:22] Joshua Sherman: So I think maybe the easiest way that I would try to frame a conversation like this is to just start with what we all probably hold in common. So, you know, if we were to ask Doreen Virtue or any of the other guests that she had on her critique panel, or these other critiques that we've seen pop up from a few different places lately. You know, what do you think about these things?
[00:48:44] We probably would agree on a lot of the details here, right? So do we believe that there is one God who is eternal? Who is the creator who created all things? Yes. Okay, good. That's a good start. Do we believe that God created humanity? Yes. Do we believe that God is the only one that created humanity? Yes.
[00:49:07] Do we believe that God also created beings that exist on a spiritual level or in the heavens? Yes, we do. We might have slightly different terms for those, right? But when we talk about angels, When we talk about demons, when you talk about these different kinds of beings, like we would tend to say, yes, we do think scripture teaches that these are things. These are kinds of beings that God created. Right. And we see them interacting with God and we see them interacting with creation in scripture. Okay, great. That's awesome. We have a lot of common ground to work with, right?
[00:49:44] What do we see also in scripture? Not in the way that Milton thought of it in terms of a pre creation rebellion, but we do see that there are rebellions of both humans and of spiritual beings in scripture, right? So some of them are not serving God the way they were created to, and this is bad and this brings chaos and this brings sin into the world. And what we see in scripture is the story of God undoing that. So that in the end we have a world that has no sea, no tears, no death. Right. So again, all of these things, we have this large framework that I think we could all agree on.
[00:50:23] Where we start to get into some interesting territory is then what do you do when you are trying to define a being that is created, that is not the creator, that is not all powerful. That is not the God of heaven. That is spiritual, and that seems to exercise some kind of level of authority, whether it's something that God has given to them or whether they are usurping that authority in some way. What do we call them? Do we call them gods? Do we say that they are rebellious angels?
[00:50:55] Do we say that they are divine in some way? How do we describe that class of beings? Because I think that's really what we're talking about when we're talking about the disagreement. Some people are really, really not okay with using a term like gods to describe the gods of the nations or divine to describe beings that are made for the heavens that exercise power and authority, even if they are created and below the one true God, right?
[00:51:23] And they're okay with saying angels do this or rebellious angels or fallen angels or demons, right? So what we have here, conceptually, is a lot of the same things going on, regardless, on both sides of this disagreement. A lot of it comes down to what term are we going to use to describe this? And so we're starting with the term divine because I think that's a really important one.
[00:51:45] Carey Griffel: Yes. So. This is really where people often have a knee jerk reaction against Dr. Heiser's work, and fair enough, because when you look in the dictionary, at the term divine, it says having the nature of, or being a deity, or being the expression of a deity, or being in the service or worship of a deity.
[00:52:09] So that's dictionary definition of the term divine. So when people use the term divine, they're thinking God. They're not thinking any other being than God. They're certainly not thinking of a rebellious being, right? That's not in people's conception of the word divine in just an English conception of the word divine.
[00:52:32] And now Dr. Heiser often did explain his definition. So it's not like it was a mystery. He said he used the term to refer to beings in the spiritual realm. Simple as that. And I think that there were reasons he did that because of this strange fuzziness we actually have, especially in the Hebrew terminology of Elohim, and what does that mean? Why do we have the same Hebrew term used for God, as well as for beings who are not like God at all in characteristic, right? How do you kind of combine those ideas?
[00:53:13] Dr. Heiser didn't make up the term divine council, that was already a term that was in use. Now, divine council itself doesn't have to be a problem necessarily, because, again, divine can mean that it's something that is in the service of a deity. So God's council would be a divine council because it belongs to God, right? So that's not really a problematic term, or it shouldn't be a problematic term, because we do see God having a council in various places, having council in the heavens, in Psalm 89, things like that, right?
[00:53:51] So that shouldn't really be all that much of a problem. What I see as a problem is when we then apply that to other beings, and I kind of get that. But again, Dr. Heiser he did define it. He defined it himself.
[00:54:08] Joshua Sherman: And this is a place where, you know, if I were going to give , any level of, you know, I, I think someone's making a good point in some of these disagreements. . When you look at the word Elohim, and it has a lot of different potential meanings, but it seems to be a word that primarily denotes where a being is located, whether it's in the spiritual realm or the physical. And so Yahweh is an Elohim, members of his council are Elohim, demons can be referred to as Elohim, the deceased Samuel, angels or the angel of Yahweh, gods and goddesses of other nations.
[00:54:38] If all of these things can be described with that term, and it really is just kind of a, which realm are you in. Then what word do you use to describe the beings that you see described in scripture with that term? If what you're saying is, you know, I'm going to use gods and goddesses and divine a lot when I talk about those terms, like that feels like it may be doing too much with the terminology. Because it's literally saying, well, Elohim doesn't mean only God, but let's use gods and God a lot when we talk about it. Right?
[00:55:11] The key here, I think, is that we have to really be careful about the context in which we are talking about these terms. Right? So there are perfectly legitimate ways that scripture uses Elohim as a term to refer to Gods and goddesses of other nations that doesn't necessarily, you know, have to mean that it's, you know, talking about, oh, this rival of, Yahweh that could defeat him. Right? It's very clear from scripture that that's not what it's talking about. So I think we can give a little bit of a sense of, yeah, I can understand why people have a hesitation when they see that term.
[00:55:43] And I can even see some of the pushback on using, you know, gods and Divine to describe Elohim. If we're not really careful with the context, and so we need to be very careful with the context. And that's part of, I think, maybe the challenge for people is that they really want a definition that can kind of just make all of this fuzziness go away.
[00:56:03] And that's not what we see. This is not math, right? It's not an equation. It's language and language gets complicated. Language involves idioms. Language involves poetry. Language involves polemic. Right. So polemic isn't saying like, Oh, this, this is this thing. And it's good. Right. No, it's actually saying, I'm going to use this terminology, maybe because maybe I'll say God's because the neighbors of Israel use it. And then I'm going to say, but that's a bad idea. Right. All of that is wrapped up in language and it's complicated. Right. So I do think we have to be really careful to look deeply at the context and that can really help us to understand. And I think looking at that context is part of why Dr. Heiser used the terms that he did when he was referring to Elohim in different parts of scripture.
[00:56:46] Carey Griffel: Right. Well, and I've seen people try to say that when Dr. Heiser was using the term divine, he was like exegeting it from scripture. And I, I really don't think that's what he was doing.
[00:56:59] He wasn't applying the term divine specifically to anything except the word Elohim, and again, that's not about divine characteristics as far as godly characteristics. Like, it didn't have to include the idea of power or even authority. It was just, this was a place of residence term. If you were in the spiritual realm, you were divine.
[00:57:24] That's how he used the term, and you don't have to like how he used the term. You can disagree with the fact that he used the term that way, but he still did. And so trying to say that, well, if you use that term, you're going to fit my definition. That's not very good communication now, is it?
[00:57:43] Joshua Sherman: Yeah. I mean. I think for a lot of what we would refer to with that, if we wanted to use a different term something like heavenly would make a lot of sense to me because most of the time we're talking about a being that's described with the term Elohim, you're going to have that kind of heavenly context.
[00:58:02] That is not always the case. Right. So with demons, we would probably be talking about something a little bit different. With angels or the angel of Yahweh, depending on where they are appearing, right? Yes. They are heavenly beings, but are they in the heavens? You can start to kind of say, well, if they're walking with Abraham, maybe they're not.
[00:58:19] But they kind of are, right. So that can get a little bit fuzzy. But that may be one way to kind of look at a term that could potentially help a lot of people understand this in a way that maybe is a little bit less threatening. The other thing that I would think, and I don't know if you want to go into the functional stuff and eternal versus time bound and all of that now.
[00:58:38] Carey Griffel: It's like divine is this really hinge point, but if we can start to see things as far as functional definitions, then I think that's really, really helpful.
[00:58:50] Joshua Sherman: . And in fact I would suggest to you that a lot of people giving this critique already take a functional definition of Elohim and they don't even realize it. Right? And because if you are going to take the term Elohim, which primarily applies, again, to beings that are in the spiritual realm, and you're going to say that Elohim can be used to describe human judges in certain passages of scripture, what exactly are you doing? You are not saying that those human judges now have a kind of being that is equal to the angels or to God himself, or anything else. You're not necessarily saying that they are now part of the spiritual realm, right?
[00:59:34] What you're actually saying is that they are doing a function. They are exercising power and authority in some way. And potentially there could be that connection into the spiritual realm, if you're talking about judges or the elders of Israel who are understood to essentially be part of the earthly mirror of God's divine council, right?
[00:59:54] So you can have some of that connectivity, but essentially what you're doing is you're using a functional term for Elohim and saying they are acting as Elohim and therefore they are. Right? So they're already using a functional definition, but then if you start to look at any of the other places where this gets used, it's like, no, we can't use that, right? We're talking about ontology. We're talking about God who is above all other gods. Yes, absolutely. He is right on ontologically. He is that that's absolutely true.
[01:00:24] Even functionally he is because you know, what, what would it mean to act as a God and exercise power in the highest sense of the term? That's exactly what we mean when we say God, right? When we say the one God, the creator, the one who is eternal, the one who's all powerful, the one who is loving, like all of those things are what we mean when we think of the highest form of exercising what it means to be divine, what it means to be God, like that's it.
[01:00:52] He is the superlative one that does that. So to some extent, you can use the same term to refer to beings that are in no way comparable to God. That are created and therefore deeply incomparable to God that are exercising power or authority in some way over part of creation, whether that's something that God gave to them or something that they have rebelled and tried to take. And of course will fail at, right.
[01:01:18] I think it's really, really helpful to look at in terms of function. And there's a very easy way we can think about this, right? So think about you and me and the president of the United States, right? Is the president of the United States a kind of supreme being that's different than us? No, this is the president the United States is a human being, right? Ontologically the same, right? And yet the president of the United States can do things at a level, can exercise power and authority, a level that neither of us can do.
[01:01:50] So we already have some of these ideas where not only do we have different kinds of beings in our minds, and we might have a hierarchy of those beings because it's like, okay, well, people are, you know, are more intelligent and can do you know, more in terms of, you know, tools and language and inventing things and all of this, then I don't know, say squirrels, right. We already have those kinds of ideas in our heads.
[01:02:13] So it's not a stretch to say, yes, there is the one creator. And then there were other kinds of beings that he created that would kind of be involved in him creating something would they have, they'd have to be something other than himself. Right, really by definition. We also have this idea of even the same kinds of beings can play different roles, can have different levels of authority, can have different levels of power, and they can have that legitimately, or they can have it because they took it. Right.
[01:02:40] I think that's a lot of what we have going on here when we talk about things like the gods of the nations. They are exercising some level of authority or power over the nations, whether it's legitimate or not, and we can go to the scripture to then say, okay, is it legitimate? Right. What do we see in scripture? Right. Doesn't tend to be legitimate. And part of the reason it's not legitimate is because they were accepting worship because they were, were rebellious at that point.
[01:03:07] So I don't know if that helps to kind of maybe draw out that distinction between ontology and function and help us to realize that so much of what we're talking about when we see scripture talking about anything that it refers to as Elohim, that is not the creator, it's really talking about either where that being is in the spiritual realm, or if it's talking about authority or power, that's what it's talking about. It's talking about function.
[01:03:29] Carey Griffel: I find that really helpful. Like, so one of the critiques I was watching was hinging on this term, Elohim, and the idea that, well, humans are called Elohim too. Now, we could talk about whether or not that's true. Interesting to me that a lot of people who will say that will also not like the fact that Samuel is actually Samuel and he's an Elohim and he's a human.
[01:03:57] But anyway, that's another point. One of the critiques I watched, they were really drilling down into, look, the Bible and Psalm 82, God is judging somebody. And who does God judge throughout the whole Bible? Well, it's humans. Humans are judged for not ruling correctly. Humans are judged for not doing things.
[01:04:18] Okay. Again, they are being judged because they are not fulfilling their function. They're not ruling correctly. Okay, great. I fail to see why the idea, possibly, that humans could be Elohim really defeats anything in this idea. Right? I just don't see how that is a nail in the coffin like they think that it is.
[01:04:44] Oh, humans can be called Elohim, okay, and they're being judged for not ruling. Okay. Are we trying to say that God isn't going to judge rebellious spiritual beings? Is that what you're trying to say?
[01:04:58] Joshua Sherman: Right?
[01:04:58] Carey Griffel: That doesn't make any sense.
[01:05:01] Joshua Sherman: It really doesn't. And you know, if we want to get into examples, It doesn't take us too far to get into Isaiah and in Isaiah 24, where you have God judging the world, one of the things that you have is that on that day, the Lord will punish the host of heaven in heaven and the Kings of the earth on the earth. There you have the punishing of the host of heaven. Why? Well, probably because they did something worthy of punishment. I wonder what that could be. Right?
[01:05:30] Carey Griffel: Because they didn't fulfill their function.
[01:05:33] Joshua Sherman: Yes. And let's back up just a little bit in Isaiah 24, right? So there's some very similar language to what we see in Psalm 82, right? So you have, you know, they walk about in darkness, all the foundations of the earth are shaken. Right? That kind of language in Psalm 82. Okay. Let's see.
[01:05:48] Verse 17, Terror and the pit and the snare are upon you, O inhabitant of the earth. He who flees at the sound of the terror shall fall into the pit and he who climbs out of the pit shall be caught in the snare, for the windows of heaven are opened and the foundations of the earth tremble, the earth is utterly broken. The earth is split apart. The earth is violently shaken. The earth staggers like a drunken man. It sways like a hut. It's transgression lies heavy upon it and it falls and it will not rise again. And on that day, the Lord will punish the host of heaven in heaven and the Kings of the earth on the earth.
[01:06:16] I wonder if perhaps this judgment is something that's actually exercised on multiple levels because we do have the idea of the connecting of heaven and earth. And if that's true, then we can't just discount the heavenly part of that equation because that's not how any of this works.
[01:06:30] Carey Griffel: Right? Like, how do we expect that the people of the ancient near East thought that their gods were interacting with them? It was because their king was their image of their god. It was literal humans doing things. It wasn't the god throwing down the lightning bolts from heaven. It wasn't the god stomping down the stairs and going, All right, I'll deal with this.
[01:06:54] No, it was the gods who were connected with humans. So it was a both and. And, you know, we miss that today. We don't have that context deeply embedded in our heads like they used to have.
[01:07:08] Joshua Sherman: And it gets to the point where, like, if you really want to take the view that to use the word Elohim, you must be denoting ontology of a deep kind.
[01:07:19] What do you do when God says to Moses, I will make you like Elohim to Pharaoh? Right. Now the like obviously means we're talking more in terms of simile. So we're not talking necessarily, you know, literal. So, okay. There's a reason to read that a little bit differently than some of these other things.
[01:07:38] But if you think about it for a sec, you know, what would it mean to make him like God to Pharaoh? Is it talking about, you know, I will make you taller or I will make you ethereal, or I will make you you know, abode in the heavens or anything like that? No. What it's talking about is very much a sense of Pharaoh was understood to be the King of Egypt.
[01:07:57] He was understood to be the image of god for the Egyptians. And in that case, it would have been, the of Re, right. Like it's just like, this is just very, very, very different. And you now have Moses set up in a position of authority over Pharaoh, in a position of power over Pharaoh, showing the supremacy of him over Pharaoh as someone who is truly made in the image of the true God, revealing the true God to Pharaoh. I think that's more what we have there. And that's very much a functional way of looking at it.
[01:08:27] Carey Griffel: . That was a battle of the gods right there. That's what that was, It was Pharaoh as God, and God is like, I'm not coming down there, but Moses, you're going to be my representative. You're going to be handling the situation for me. That's how things worked.
[01:08:45] Joshua Sherman: You also have God saying, I am going to judge the gods of Egypt. So it's like, okay. And then you can start to ask the question, like, is he basically revealing them to be completely imposters that have no power, or is he revealing them to be usurpers that are trying to make themselves greater than they are? They might still have, you know, power. They might still have, you know, a sense of some authority in the spiritual realm and all of these things, but they're trying to make themselves greater than they are in order to gain worship.
[01:09:12] That does not mean that they are the lowliest of demonic beings that are just pulling the wool over people's eyes. They can still have real power. It just means that they're aggrandizing themselves bigger than they are. And we see this revealed very clearly when you have the battle of the wits, if you will, or the battle of the staffs or the battle of the magicians right?
[01:09:31] Where the magicians of Pharaoh were able to do a number of things that resembled the plagues, There's a point where they couldn't anymore. Right. But at first they were able to go, yeah, I can, you know, I can do frogs or I can do, you know, like they were able to recreate some of those things and you have to ask yourself, Is scripture saying that everybody that was there was just deluded into thinking those magicians did those things, or did they actually do them?
[01:09:57] Whose power were they tapping into to do them? So this isn't just psychological delusion. There's something real and spiritual and powerful going on here. And yet you also very much in scripture have the deep contrast, because they are only able to do certain things up to a certain point, and then they can't anymore.
[01:10:14] And also everything that they are doing is basically just, Hey, we can also do that thing that causes chaos and destruction. Isn't that great? But they couldn't fix the problem. Only God was able to make the chaos and destruction recede. Right. And there, I think we see the difference between the creative power of the almighty eternal God and the kind of power that you see beings wrecking when all they can do is twist and destroy.
[01:10:43] Carey Griffel: Yes. Never go in against Moses when death is on the line.
[01:10:49] Joshua Sherman: Well, and this ties into another way of looking at things that I think is really, really helpful to in the sense that like when you read Athanasius and he starts talking about evil, you can get a very real sense of almost like, it's almost like he's schizophrenic if you come at it with modern definitions.
[01:11:09] Because you go, okay, over here, , he contradicts himself almost. If you bring modern definitions to the table. And when you realize what he's doing and you realize, Oh no, my definitions were just all messed up. And it's a very similar way that we're talking about things here, where instead of taking that ontological definition of things, if we take a functional one, we can see a lot of the differences here where you can say, you know, Yes. When I say the one God, I'm talking ontology and function beyond everything else, beyond everyone else, because he's the creator and he's eternal and all of these things.
[01:11:42] When I'm talking about any other being that I might use the term divine or god to describe, then I'm talking about function, but that function is always inferior to God and that being is created. So it clearly has an inferior ontology to God. It's really not that hard, right?
[01:11:58] With Athanasius, he will say, at the same time, describe things as evil, as really bad, as terrible. And then he'll go on to say things about evil having no substantive existence. And when you read this as a modern person, you can kind of feel like he's, it's, it's almost like he's, you know, like you're atheist. That's like, you know, the Holocaust was really bad. And then you kind of go, well, what do you mean by bad? Because how do you even judge what that is? And they may not even have a way to talk about it. Right. You almost kind of get that same kind of sense if you try to bring modern definitions to what Athanasus is doing.
[01:12:29] When you look at it, you realize what he's actually saying is good comes from God. It is actually something God creates. It is something that God does. It is something that has substantive existence to it. That is part of what he did when he created humanity. And when he created creation, he said it is good. He created us. He said, it is very good. This is part of the substance of reality.
[01:12:50] Whereas evil does not have that substance. It's actually the corruption of things that God created good. So there isn't a sense in which we have dualism where good and evil are equal rivals to each other. No, no, no. There is God. He is good. He created things that are good. Yes, there's this corruption, but then let's take that over time.
[01:13:09] What do we get to when we get to the end of the story? We have Revelation. We have, there is no sea, there is no death. There's no tears. Right. We have the end of evil. And so if you look at it from an eternal perspective, from a truly substantive perspective, from what does it mean to be God and be connected to God and to be sustained by God, whichever of those things anyone falls into, because God is God. And so he is himself and we are sustained by God. What does it mean to be those, versus to be something that rebels against God, something that does become corrupted, something that doesn't have, you know, that sense of cohesion to it, like evil is going to stop existing, It's not eternal.
[01:13:50] And so in a very real sense, the good has a sense of deep substance to it and eternality to it because of its connection to God and who he is and his sustaining power, that evil does not because evil will see its own defeat.
[01:14:04] I think there's a very real sense that we can look at this and say the same thing about the gods of the nations. Right. Yes. They exercise power in times and places. Yes, they usurp power in times and places, but there's a very real difference between saying, you know the God of Egypt or the God of Babylon or the God of Canaan did something that was powerful in some way, and comparing that to the God who created everything. Who in the end, right, in the beginning, there was only one God, and then he created. At the end, are there going to be any other beings that we would refer to as gods? Not when we're talking about the gods, the nations, because they were trying to put themselves as rivals to God and they, they will be defeated.
[01:14:46] Right. So I think we can really look at things from that functional perspective and from that eternal perspective versus temporal. And I think that can really help us to understand what's going on in scripture, that there are different layers of talking about some of the same things using some of the same language that can confuse us if we aren't paying attention.
[01:15:04] Carey Griffel: I think that helps to answer the question about those passages in Isaiah that are later on, right? Like Isaiah 41, Isaiah 43, Isaiah 45 that say, there are no gods. That's actually the kind of thing you were talking about is what those passages are saying.
[01:15:23] Joshua Sherman: Yes, they don't they're not the ones that are truly exercising ultimate power Right. You also have, you know, there is no God beside me. Right. So, which is, is a comparability statement. So you have Babylon saying the same kinds of things in scripture where you know, they're being castigated for this, but they would say, you know, Hey, there's no city beside me. It's like, they're not necessarily denying the existence of every other city.
[01:15:46] They're just saying like, I'm the greatest, right. You also have the passage where it says, you know, I am God and before me there was no other, and there will be known none after me. What does that mean exactly? Right? On some level, I think we can look at it and say, like, yes, there's a very clear sense in which that is going to very much rule out the way that something like LDS theology looks at things where and I forgot this earlier on the other episode, but the King Follett sermon is what I was going for, where Joseph Smith talks about it and says The secret of the universe is that God used to be a man and then he did things to become God and we can do the same thing and we've become gods just like him and all of that.
[01:16:19] Like that, I think is ruled out by this kind of passage, but you also have the sense in which what God is saying is there is no God that created me. That ruled the heavens before me, right? And there will be none after me that rules the heavens. I'm it, right? I am eternally in this place. I'm eternally who I am.
[01:16:39] I will eternally rule and act as the Supreme God of heaven that created everything. Right? I think that's more what's going on than this idea that like, you know, nothing, could be even remotely called with this term god because literally scripture refers to things over and over that are created as gods when it's pushing back against the belief of other people.
[01:17:00] Right. So that term can't just be off limits. It has to mean something.
[01:17:04] Carey Griffel: Absolutely. Yeah. And so, you know, that's the danger of cherry picking your data and saying, well, look so clearly in our English Bibles, it says there's no other gods, case closed! Well, I mean, look at all of the other passages, and the fact that you can have this broad terminology and this broad definition of Elohim, which the critics admit when they say that, oh, humans can be Elohim, too, that you can't then assume and fit all of the ontological being of God into that word Elohim, you can't do it. It's not possible. They're not even doing it. They're not being consistent in using that term that way.
[01:17:51] Joshua Sherman: Well, and scripture gets more specific, right? So, you know, when you have you talk about, you know Yahweh Elohim, you also have Yahweh Olam, right? The one who, God who is eternal, right? There are other terms that scripture will add on to Elohim or add on to the name of God in order to describe exactly who he is and to describe something about God that they want to specifically call out. And sometimes they're calling that out in contrast to another being that lays claim to worship or lays claim to deity from some other, you know, one of Israel's neighbors or from Israel themselves, right? Because they struggled with all of polytheism themselves. Most of their history, they were not actually doing what God commanded them to do.
[01:18:31] Right. So I think it's really important to keep that clear. And I think that can help us a lot as we try to answer these questions.
[01:18:38] Carey Griffel: Well, and the other point I want to make sure we kind of end with here is the idea that Dr. Heiser somehow lampooned the gospel, , as if what he said ruined our gospel message.
[01:18:54] Joshua Sherman: I don't even know where to begin with that.
[01:18:56] Carey Griffel: Right? I just, you know, the idea that Jesus triumphed over these beings, I don't understand how that is lessening the gospel. I can't comprehend how you can get from point A to point B in that thought, because what Jesus did is, He is the victor.
[01:19:18] He is our King. He is the one who triumphed. And He didn't have to do it in a certain way, but He did. He did it on earth. He did it as a human. He did it in the circumstance that he did, and there were reasons for it. And it was a broad, beautiful picture of the gospel.
[01:19:40] It hurts me to think that people think that Dr. Heiser was teaching something that went against the gospel, simply because what I see from his work is he really expanded it beautifully to show this amazing thing that Jesus did, not just in this, you know, idea of forgiveness of sins. That's Amazing. Wonderful. Great. But there's the death thing. There's the defeat of powers of whatever stripe.
[01:20:13] And all of those matter. All of those are things that Jesus did on earth.
[01:20:19] Joshua Sherman: All of those are also things that were pointed to by Christians as they continued in apologetics and in proclaiming the gospel into pagan nations that were around them. Right? So Athanasius in On the Incarnation this is from, I think it's a chapter 31 says this,
[01:20:37] "Those who disbelieve the resurrection bring a strong refutation against themselves. If all the demons and those worshipped by them as gods do not drive out the Christ, whom they claim is dead, but instead Christ proves them all to be dead. For if it is true that the dead can affect nothing, but the Savior affects such great things every day, drawing to piety, Persuading to virtue, teaching about immortality, leading to a desire for heavenly things, revealing the knowledge of the father, inspiring power against death, showing himself to each and purging away the godlessness of idols.
[01:21:10] "Yet the gods and the demons of the faithless can do none of these things, but rather fall dead at the advent of Christ, their show being futile and empty. But by the sign of the cross, all magic ceases. All witchcraft is brought to not. All idols are deserted and abandoned. All irrational desire ceases. Yet everyone is looking up from earth to heaven. Who then would one say is dead?
[01:21:33] Carey Griffel: I think we're going to go ahead and end right there. I don't think there's anything more we could possibly add to the discussion after that. So Joshua, thank you so much for joining me today.
[01:21:46] Joshua Sherman: Oh, you're welcome. It's my pleasure. Very much enjoy coming on here and look forward to continued discussion and to all of the great episodes that you bring us every week.
[01:21:56] Carey Griffel: Thank you. And thank you, everybody, who is listening. I pray that you will all go out and preach the gospel of Jesus, live the gospel of Jesus. Find your body of Christ that you are plugged into, and Act within it. Do things. That is what we are here to do. And so I just encourage you all in that. I thank you all for listening.
[01:22:19] If you want to contact me, you can do so through either Facebook or my website, which is GenesisMarksTheSpot. com. You can leave me questions. You can ask me all kinds of things. And I love to interact with you all. And I want to also thank all of my supporters. Thank you guys. You help keep the lights on and you help me to get all of the resources that I need to do what I do here and to do some other things that I am really excited about, especially as we inch towards that 100 episode mark.
[01:22:51] So please look forward to all of that. Thanks for listening. I wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.
