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What is the kingdom of God? Part 1: representation and rulership
17 minutes to read The kingdom of God and the kingdom of man started out as the same thing, and Adam’s representation of God is mimicked in the physical world’s representation of spiritual realities.
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Continued from the introduction, describing the two kingdoms through John 3:16
God stands in the divine council;
he holds judgment in the midst of the gods:“How long will you judge unjustly
and lift up the faces of the wicked?
Judge on behalf of the weak and the fatherless;
vindicate the afflicted and the destitute.
Rescue the helpless and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”They neither know nor care—
they stumble in darkness;
all the foundations of the earth are shaken.I, I have said, “You are gods,
sons of the Most High, all of you.
Yet you will die like man,
and you will fall like any other prince.”Rise up, O God—judge the earth,
for you shall inherit all the nations.
John Piper is the first notable evangelical I’ve seen to unambiguously acknowledge what the text of Psalm 82 straightforwardly says: that God is here talking to the ‘gods,’ not to mere humans.
[ John Piper, Putting the Gods in Their Place on Desiring God (1994).] More recently, Doug Wilson makes the same point in his review of Unseen Realm:
Scripture does not teach us that the pagan gods were non-existent. Paul tells us that there were in fact “gods many and lords many” (1 Cor. 8:5–6), and he tells us that genuine demonic forces were involved in idol worship of the pagans (1 Cor. 10:20). [ Douglas Wilson, Book of the Month/October 2016 on Blog & Mablog (October 2016).]
I am encouraged to see evangelical leaders recovering this view, because Psalm 82, accurately read, is a prominent nexus and anchor-point for the biblical theme that undergirds the gospel.
It is a cosmological theme—which is to say that it’s about the ordering and running of the world. It is a geographical theme—which is to say that it’s about the territories or domains into which the world is divided. And it is an evangelical theme—which is to say that it’s about how God is saving a people for himself through the work of the Lord Jesus.
These three ideas—cosmology, geography, and evangelicalism—are drawn together in the Bible into the theme of kingdom, since they reflect the three elements required for any kingdom:
- A king—who is doing the ruling?
- A territory—where is he ruling?
- A people—whom is he ruling over?
I’ve shown from John 3:16 that the gospel is about God’s saving the kingdom of man. Now I’d like to expand on this thesis slightly, so we can see how the features of kingdom fit together in the gospel. Then I’ll spend the rest of this series tracing the threads in Scripture, so we can see the big picture and understand how it works:
The Bible views the spread of the gospel as God’s transforming of Adam’s kingdom, ruled by Satan, into his own kingdom, ruled by Jesus. This new kingdom is a spiritual territory of restored human hearts, no longer separated from God by rebellion, but rather annexed from their previous rulers by God himself to dwell and govern there.
With this thesis established, let’s set about explaining and proving it.
The original kings as the image of God
From the creation of man, we have been defined by our kingship over the world. Genesis 1:26–28 couches our imaging of God in terms of rulership. This is especially clear if we abbreviate each instance of “dominion” with the word “rule” to emphasize the point:
And God said, “Let us make man as our image, and let them rule, rule, rule, rule, rule.” So God created man as his image, male and female, blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and fill the earth, and rule, rule, rule, rule.” Genesis 1:26–28
The term translated “rule” or “have dominion” means to reign—it refers to kingly authority. God is giving man a kingdom on earth in Genesis.
More correctly, God is preparing man for a kingdom in Genesis. This is clear from the presence of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, of which Adam is commanded not to eat. The implication is surely not that he is never to eat it, but that he is not to eat it yet—it must be in God’s time, and not his. It cannot be otherwise, for the knowledge of good and evil is the paradigmatic skillset of a good king. This is clear in Scripture (1 Kings 3:7–10; 2 Samuel 14:17; Hebrews 5:14), and follows naturally from his job description. Rulership requires rightly dividing and ordering; we have seen God demonstrate this already in the wise divisions he made in the world during the first three days of creation, and the order that flowed from these. Adam will be required to emulate not just God’s dominion over the natural world, but also his dominion over the social realm. This means he will be required to judge in God’s stead (cf. Exodus 18). He must therefore, at the appointed time—but not when he decides he wants it—acquire the knowledge of good and evil in order to take up the mantle of command that God made him for.
This is actually how man images God; how he reflects God. The image of God is kingly. Genesis, both explicitly and implicitly, couches it in terms of representative rule.
Because it is representative, it is also familial. In the ancient Near East, where kings commonly claimed to rule on behalf of—or as—gods (a fact which will make far more sense to you as this series progresses), they used the phrase “image and likeness” to describe their representative rule and supplicant sonship respectively. [For a fuller and more nuanced explication, see the excellent primer in chapter 4 of Peter J. Gentry & Stephen J. Wellum, God’s Kingdom through God’s Covenants: A Concise Biblical Theology (Crossway, August 2015).] Adam is to God as Seth is to Adam—they are made in the likeness of their fathers (Genesis 5:1–3). Adam’s rulership and his sonship are inextricably connected, because the very rulership for which he was made was a continuation of the work that God had begun: in the six days of creation, God sets an example of what wisely ordering the world looks like, and then creates man to carry this work forward and complete it. In other words, Adam was made to do what he saw the Father doing; what the Father gave him to do. He was made not to seek his own will, but the will of the one who sent him into creation; to bear God’s name into the world. And this just is sonship (cf. John 5:19ff; 8:39–44; 17:6)—which is why Luke 3:38 explicitly names Adam as the son of God.
This is the original biblical cosmology. I am not talking physics here—the word cosmology is broader than that. I’m talking about the ordering and running, not just of the natural world, but of the human and also the spiritual world.
Cosmology in the Bible is all about rulership—about who is in charge of whom, and what kinds of judgments they enforce. Do they accurately image God as sons, loyally representing him and continuing his work to bring about shalom—harmony and peace? Or do they act corruptly in pursuit of their own goals, shaking the foundations of the earth (Psalm 82:5)?
In Eden, God established a kingdom, ruled by his son and viceroy Adam, with a people who included all Adam’s descendants, and a territory encompassing the whole earth (Genesis 1:28).
This was the original kingdom of God, and much of the Bible is concerned with tracing its decline, division, reunion, and eventual restoration.
You probably don’t tend to be looking for this theme in Scripture, and so you probably don’t often notice it. But once you know it’s there, and indeed that the Bible presupposes it, you will begin to notice that it’s surprisingly important—as I showed with regard to John 3:16. Kingdom theology is right there on the surface of the text, if we only have the framework within which to express it. The narrative trajectory of the Bible begins with the kingdom of man, and ends with the gospel promise that God will transform it into his own. The whole arc of Scripture is a story about how Adam’s kingdom gets ruined, refused, reclaimed, and finally restored. But to understand exactly how this works, we need to understand just how extensive the idea of imaging is in the Bible. It is not confined to Adam’s rule on God’s behalf.
The created world as the image of the spiritual
If man images God by representing him, the rest of the world also images spiritual realities in various ways. One God created both, and it is no coincidence that when he becomes incarnate, he has a habit of referring to spiritual things by using their physical images. Knowing how the physical world reflects, and is based on, the spiritual realm turns out to be important for understanding a great deal of what Jesus has to say, because he often takes the spiritual meaning of words as their primary meaning—in confusing contrast to every other human being ever. A prominent example is food, which to Jesus first describes partaking of God through faithful service, assimilating his very nature by the joining of the Spirit—and only second refers to ordinary physical eating (John 4:31–35; 6:27–35, 48–58; cf. Matthew 16:11–12). Similarly, water means spirit first, and stuff you drink second—e.g. John 3:5; 4:10–15; 7:37–39.
This is just a simple illustration for the broader concept I want to focus on: that the physical and spiritual realms are linked in unexpected ways. Water is not merely like spirit, but spirit is the original water—what mundane water images or represents. Spirit is the archetype of water. In the same way, we see the tabernacle and temple are constructed according to a heavenly archetype revealed to Moses (Exodus 25:9, 40), where the mercy seat images the throne of God, and the cherub statues image (literally) the heavenly throne-guardians (Exodus 37:7–9; 1 Kings 6:23–29; cf. Isaiah 6:2; Ezekiel 1:22–28; 1 Kings 22:19).
Imaging & geography
The reason this is important for us is because the same kind of imaging or representation takes place with geography. What happens in spiritual places is linked to what happens in earthly places.
Deep places
A helpful example of this in the New Testament is the story of Legion and the pigs (Mark 5:1–13; Luke 8:26–33; Matthew 8:28–32). You’ve probably wondered why Jesus let the demons go into the pigs, and why they then rushed into the sea. The answer would probably have been obvious to an ancient reader, which is why the gospel authors don’t explain it: in their world, water was believed to be a natural barrier to spirits. For instance, deceased spirits in ancient lore often had to cross a river, like the Styx, to enter the land of the dead; the water functioned to confine them in their proper domain. Ghosts are even destroyed in some myths by driving them into the sea. [ Jason Robert Combs, A Ghost on the Water? Understanding an Absurdity in Mark 6:49–50, JBL 127, no. 2 (2008), 345–358. This connection takes on special significance when we remember that the Jews believed demons to be spirits of deceased nephilim rather than fallen angels.]
In Luke, Legion begs Jesus not to send him into the abbussou, “abyss.” In Revelation 9:1; 11:7 etc, abbusou is often translated “bottomless pit” and obviously refers to a spiritual place; but it is also the word used in the LXX to translate the “great deep” in places like Genesis 1:2 and 7:11. In Mark’s account, Legion begs Jesus to not drive him out of the chora; most translations render this “country” or “region,” but chora also simply means the land in opposition to the sea (cf. Acts 27:27). Given the seaside location of the encounter, understanding it this way nicely harmonizes Mark with Luke: when Legion says he doesn’t want to be driven out of the land, he is equally saying that he doesn’t want to be driven into the sea—the abyss. So he asks to go into the pigs instead.
Why does Jesus allow this? Because he intends to get rid of Legion for good, and letting him go into the pigs first gives a convenient physical form to what’s going on. His disciples can’t see demons go into the abyss. But they can see the pigs go into the sea. So this gives a physical proof of Jesus’ power not just in expelling the unclean spirits, but also in dealing permanently to them. The physical events image the spiritual events.
Now, this isn’t to say the abyss in the spiritual world is somehow identical with the ocean in the physical world. If it were, then exorcism would be as simple as throwing a demoniac into the water! Indeed, believing that representation is causal is the exact idea behind sympathetic magic, idolatry, and forms of sacramentalism. The Bible isn’t out to establish some kind of “map,” let alone a causal connection, but rather to represent the spiritual realm through the physical world.
High places
By contrast, while the sea represents the abyss where demons are confined, mountains represent a place where earth and heaven meet. They are therefore associated with the presence of gods. In vast numbers of religions, mountains are where gods reside, or where they presence themselves on earth. The transfiguration of Jesus happened on a mountain—probably Mount Hermon (Matthew 17:1–8, Mark 9:2–8, Luke 9:28–36; 2 Peter 1:16–18). In Ugarit, just to the north of Israel, the high god El was thought to meet in the palace of his vice-regent, Baʿal, on Mount Tsaphon. In Greece, the gods met to hold council on Mount Olympus. In Israel, of course, Yahweh presenced himself first on Mount Horeb or Sinai (Exodus 3:1; 19–31), and later in the temple on Mount Zion (Psalm 9:11; 48:1–2; 74:2; 132:13; Joel 2:1; 3:17). The encounter between Elijah and the 450 priests of Baʿal takes place on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18). The Samaritans believed God presenced himself on Mount Gerizim (cf. John 4:20). Altars were routinely built to pagan gods in high places (Deuteronomy 12:2; 1 Kings 12:31–32); and these could include artificial mountains that functioned as stairways to heaven (e.g. 2 Kings 17:9; cf. Genesis 28:12; John 1:51)—this is the idea behind ziggurats, which is what the Tower of Babel would have been given its location and time period (cf. Genesis 11:1–9). [See for example What Was the Importance of Ziggurats in Ancient Mesopotamia? on DailyHistory.org.]
Sacred space
The presence of deity was important to the ancient worldview in another way, which returns us to the concept of kingdom: there was a territorial aspect to it. We see how this cashes out with the story of Naaman in 2 Kings 5. In verse 17, Naaman says:
…please let a load of soil on a pair of mules be given to your servants, for your servant will never again bring a burnt offering and sacrifice to other gods, but only to Yahweh.
Understanding why Naaman does this gets us to a key concept in understanding the kingdom of God itself.
What’s happening here is fundamentally the same as what’s happening in, say, Exodus 3:5 and Joshua 5:15, where God tells Moses and Joshua to take off their sandals because they are standing on holy ground. It is fundamentally the same as what’s happening in Exodus 19, when the Lord says to Moses,
Go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments and be ready for the third day. For on the third day Yahweh will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. And you shall set limits for the people all around, saying, “Take care not to go up into the mountain or touch the edge of it. Whoever touches the mountain shall be put to death. No hand shall touch him, but he shall be stoned or shot; whether beast or man, he shall not live.” When the trumpet sounds a long blast, they shall come up to the mountain. Exodus 19:10–13
It is fundamentally the same thing that is happening in the threefold structure of the temple: the courtyard, the holy place, and the holy-holy place. And it is also fundamentally the same thing that is happening with Israel’s laws about ritual cleanness, and restoring it when a member of the covenant community became ritually impure or defiled.
Certain space is sacred. It is set apart by and for the presence of God. The land of Israel was sacred, because it was God’s land—he dwelt there, in the temple in Jerusalem. It was his living-space, which he graciously shared with his people. So in order to live in the land, you yourself had to be set apart for God by observing the ritual purity laws. And the closer you got to God, the more sacred the ground was. The twice-holy place in the temple, the holy of holies, was so sacred that only one man could enter once per year on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
Naaman knew that Israel was sacred to Yahweh. So he asked for enough dirt to make a mini-Israel in Syria—a small space set aside for Yahweh, where he could be worshiped. In a similar but opposite way, the priests of Dagon refused to step on the threshold of their own temple after Yahweh so conspicuously seized it from their god in 1 Samuel 5:4–5; they didn’t want to risk entering space owned by an enemy deity.
Please do not be alarmed by my use of odd words—Yahweh instead of Lord, Anointed instead of Christ, assembly instead of church, holy ones instead of saints, etc. It is simply because my whole journey of discovery with kingdom theology has made me painfully aware of how the language we use shapes our theology—and our blind spots. Dispensing with “Christianese” in favor of straightforward translations has been important for bringing clarity to connections in Scripture which I had been insensitive to—either due to over-familiarity, or to translation choices that obscured them.
Where cosmology and geography intersect
When we put cosmology and geography together, we start moving in a straight line toward the gospel. This is because the intersection between cosmology and geography is kingdom. Cosmology is about the order and running of the world. Who is ruling? Geography is about the division and features of the world. Where are they are ruling? (We’ll get to the question of the people over whom they are ruling in due course.)
Now that we have a basic grasp of how these elements fit into the Bible, we are faced with a rather intriguing question:
If Israel was the sacred space of Yahweh—if Israel, in other words, was the part of the world ordered and run by the God of the Bible—then…what about the rest of the world?
To start answering this, let’s go back to John. I’ve noted that John views the world (kosmos) not just as humanity in general, but as a kingdom. He explicitly calls it such in Revelation 11:15, and he refers to “the ruler of this world” three times in his gospel (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11).
I don’t think it is too difficult to work out who the “ruler of this world” is. For one thing, John himself elsewhere states that “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19). And in Luke 4, we learn that just before Jesus began his ministry,
the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Luke 4:5–7 par. Matthew 4:8–9.
We see here in very clear terms that the world, the dominion of man, is divided into smaller kingdoms—and that the whole lot has been handed over to Satan.
Some people think Satan is lying on this point—he is, after all, the father of lies. But that doesn’t make sense here, because Jesus could not be tempted by a deal that Satan could not make good on. Satan is offering to let Jesus short-circuit the process of becoming the king over the world. He tempts Jesus with a quick win, where he legitimately gets kingship from Satan without a fight—but the catch is that Satan gets the moral victory. If Satan had no legitimate claim to the kingdoms of the world, there would be no temptation here.
Now, this isn’t to say that Satan controls everything single-handedly. Just as human kingdoms are organized with a hierarchy of other rulers beneath the king, so Satan’s kingdom is organized similarly. There are individual spiritual rulers who control specific nations, as the Bible shows in several places:
- In Daniel 10 we learn of the prince (or ruler) of Persia (v. 13), and the prince of Greece (v. 20): these are spiritual beings who are engaged in battle with the spiritual being who visits Daniel—and with Michael, the prince of Israel (Daniel 10:13, 21; 12:1).
- In Ephesians 6:12 we learn that we ourselves are engaged in this battle, not against flesh and blood, but against the “rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (cf. Ephesians 3:10).
- In Psalm 82, as we’ve seen, there is a whole assembly of these spiritual rulers who God calls to account.
- In 1 Corinthians 2:8, Paul observes that “none of the rulers of this age understood” God’s hidden plan of salvation through the gospel—“for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”
These beings are so much in charge of the human world that Paul can speak as if they themselves crucified Jesus. But Satan has authority over them all. Geographically, all the lands of the earth are his. Cosmologically, he is ruling, he is calling the shots. The world is his kingdom. Hence Paul, in 2 Corinthians 4:4, calls him the god of this world/age (cf. Galatians 1:4; Luke 8:12).
On 2 Corinthians 4:4, some commentators demur, interpreting Yahweh as the god of this age; e.g. Donald Hartley argues that there are no semantic parallels for Satan as a god in Paul’s thinking, and that he is instead drawing on Isaiah 6:9–10 where Yahweh is the active agent. [ Donald E. Hartley, 2 Corinthians 4:4: A Case for Yahweh as the ‘God of this Age’, The 57th Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society (November 2005).] But this supposes, in the teeth of the evidence, that Paul cannot also be drawing on other material. The error manifests in several ways: (i) Claiming that there is no precedent for calling Satan the god of this world, when in fact Psalm 82 is excellent precedent when combined with Ephesians 2:2, where Paul is plainly speaking of Satan as the ruler of all spiritual powers; (ii) Discounting the instrumental role in salvific blindness explicitly attributed to Satan by Jesus in Luke 8:12 (par. Mark 4:15; Matthew 13:19) and strongly implied by Paul in Ephesians 2:2; (iii) Ignoring the relationship between moral depravity and intellectual inability, and thus the connotations of Satan’s power as described in places like 1 John 5:19. Given these factors, along with the awkwardness of taking Yahweh as the god of this age when Satan fits the label so aptly and straightforwardly, I stand by the majority of modern exegetes on this point (though little changes if I am wrong).
The sacred space of Israel was the sole exception—God dwelt there and he was in charge. You can probably see how this lends a great deal of import to the first two commandments, and the problem of idolatry: to worship other gods was to effectively overturn Israel’s status as sacred space by rededicating the land to beings who didn’t own it. Hence the punishment of exile. But there’s no need to rabbit-trail on that here, since we live on the other side of the cross; the point is that ever since Jesus said, “It is finished,” and the curtain of the temple was torn in two—and actually, since at least the exile—God has not dwelled in Israel. The covenant that made the land and the people his was abrogated (Hebrews 8:13).
So, does that mean that there’s now no longer any part of the world that isn’t Satan’s?
Yes…and no.
Yes in the sense that, if a kingdom is a human kingdom, it is in Satan’s sights, and may be under a great deal of his control.
But no in the sense that God is doing something about this. He is taking back Satan’s territory for himself since the cross, where he “disarmed these rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15; cf. Ephesians 1:21).
To understand how this works, we first need to understand who Satan and his cronies are, and how they came to be in charge of Adam’s kingdom in the first place…
8 comments
Nick Hardman
Dominic
Psalm 68:18 talks of Christ parading his fallen angelic prisoners into heaven at his ascension, and receiving tribute from them, a cosmic handover of their earthly spoils (material and spiritual, no doubt souls). Psalm 82 then follows with the divine hearing where they are sentenced.
Do you think it’s safe to assume the events follow in sequence?
I assume Satan as likely being among the defendants.
But, how do we place Jesus seeing Satan fall like lightning? Also, what about the war in heaven where Satan is cast out? What’s the most logical interpretation?
Do you also think Satan and his cronies reside(d) in the celestial heavens (to be shaken along with the earth)?
Nick
Dominic Bnonn Tennant
Hey Nick, I’m skeptical that Psalm 68:18 is speaking of Jesus parading angelic prisoners of war. Contextually, this is referring to Yahweh bringing Israel out of Egypt, and going up to the Promised Land—specifically Mount Zion. It is recalling the bringing of the ark up to Jerusalem (Psalm 47:5; 2 Samuel 6:15)—indeed, the language of “going up” very often refers to this (cf. Psalm 24). It’s not speaking of going into heaven, but rather to the high point of the earth, God’s dwelling-place—as Psalm 68:18b clearly indicates.
I think this is how Paul glosses it Ephesians 4:8. I know Mike Heiser interprets it as taking prisoners, rather than freeing them, but this strikes me as a case of using divine council theology as a hammer—everything starts to look like a nail. Contextually, it makes no sense of Paul’s citation, because the powers and principalities aren’t in view in this part of his discussion, and aren’t relevant to it. He is much more plausibly referring back to Ephesians 2:6.
Either way, it doesn’t make sense to me to connect Psalm 68:18 and Psalm 82, least of all chronologically. Under your interpretation of Psalm 68:18, Jesus has now made the gods captives (and presumably did so at the time of David?); but this is contradicted elsewhere in the OT, and by Paul in several places when he speaks of the gods currently wrestling us for control of the world (2 Corinthians 10:4; Ephesians 6:11–12; 2:2 etc). You could say instead that this refers to the Watchers of Genesis 6 infamy, but then Psalm 82 is not speaking about them.
Moreover, Psalm 82 clearly indicates that the gods are ruling at the time they gather in God’s council to be sentenced. And indeed, they appear to go out again and continue ruling; hence the plea of verse 8.
If you read the rest of this series, you’ll see that I place Psalm 82 as a turning-point in redemptive history: a description of God’s judgment of the then-ruling gods, in preparation for the cross, and for the Last Day. It is, essentially, an assurance of the coming Messianic reign, which is currently being inaugurated.
Dominic Bnonn Tennant
Sorry, I meant to add, I believe Satan falling like lightning was roughly contemporaneous with Jesus’ statement about it. That’s the only way it makes sense to me: the disciples express their wonder at Satan’s footsoldiers being made subject to them, and Jesus explains and confirms that it is because their ruler has been kicked out of authority. The way I read between the lines here, the battle between the disciples and the demons is mimicked in heaven between Michael and Satan’s angels (demons, of course, not being angels!) What’s curious is that it occurs before the cross and the ascension. Possibly it is a preparatory battle—God saying, in effect, that their time has come and he is about to execute their sentence, so there is no more room for them in heaven. They can now watch on earth as he institutes a new authority.
Another option, which is admittedly quite wild, is that Jesus is referring to a future event, after his ascension. He is, after all, the timeless God, so it is not inconceivable that he could “remember” something as past which is yet in the disciples’ future. If Jesus is actually Michael—an identification I think has strong circumstantial evidence for it—then this would make some amount of sense. But as I say, it is a bit wild.
Nick Hardman
Hi Dominic
I’m going to go with R C Sproul on this and say that Psalm 68:18 is referring to “captivity” as the demonicprincipalities that Christ “made a show of…triumphing over” as it says in 1 Corinthians 2:8.
David is simply adopting the same prophetic allegory of Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14, that you’ve pointed out. Couching language in earthly emblems but referring to the evil spiritual authorities behind them as though they were the same things, which they are.
Ezekiel 31 is another major one. It corroborates your analysis of Genesis’ “trees” (unmistakable now) and the dynastic nature of Satan and the sons of God’s antediluvian activities on earth. Ezekiel 31 suggests they suffered a major blow at the flood. Psalm 68 depicts an even deeper blow in that they were dethroned at the ascension of Christ – even though they’re back down here resisting his kingdom (mirrored in how Saul resisted David’s).
Refer also Ephesians 4:8-11
8 Therefore it says, “When he ascended on high he led a host of captives and he gave gifts to men.” 9(In saying, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth? 10 He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.)
The “ascension” in Psalm 68 then is clearly Christ’s supernatural ascension. Although here he gave “gifts” whereas in Psalm 68 he received them. The double meaning is intentional and consistent with what I imagine was some kind of epic cosmic handover. The conquered sons of God pay their tribute to Christ their conqueror, and he distributes the spoils of victory. Also go back to verse 15 which indicts the “many peaked mountain of Bashan”. As we’ve identified, these are demonic dominions that match up to their earthly proxies. There’s also the wider eschatological tone of other Psalms like 110: “The Lord says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”
From these pieces I think there is a reasonable sequence of events leading from Psalm 68-82. The sons of God are brought before the divine council of God, judged, and despoiled. Since the sentence is future tense, they will die like men, I tend to feel that this is when they are thrown down to earth “like lightning”, with their access to the 3rd heaven revoked. Did Satan mount his war in heaven then? It’s plausible (I think the angels of Genesis 6 are special category demons still in imprisoned in the abyss, and perhaps become the “locusts” from Revelation 9. The subject of Ezekiel 31 reads like it is Satan, but it could Abaddon/Apollyon, not sure).
Blessings
Nick
Nick
Although this guy makes a compelling case that Christ is Apollyon/Abaddon, king over the angels of the bottomless pit https://angelofthebottomlesspit.wordpress.com/
Nick
I quite like this view, it’s certainly consistent with him having supreme dominion and “filling all things” (Eph 4:10). Magnifies my picture of Christ.
Dominic Bnonn Tennant
I don’t have a problem with that, but who do you (or Sproul) take the earthly captives to be in Psalm 68:18? Contextually they would appear to be Israel, anachronistically characterized as captives due to the connection made to Sinai: God led the captive Israelites out of Egypt, up to Sinai, and then all the way—as it were—to the sanctuary of Zion (“Sinai is in the sanctuary”). But I don’t think Israel is an earthly emblem of the evil spiritual authorities, do you?
Again, speaking to how you integrate this with Ephesians 4:8–11:– this is a very convoluted and opaque interpretation given that the sons of God are irrelevant to the context, and Paul is straightforwardly referring back to what he canvassed in Ephesians 2:6–8: that God “raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Anointed Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Anointed Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God…”
I’m not saying Psalm 68:18 doesn’t foreshadow the Ascension. But I don’t think you can push it as far as you’re trying to push it. I think you’re suffering from Hammer Syndrome. Not everything in Scripture is a divine council nail.
Erm, I don’t recall giving any analysis of Genesis’ trees. Are you perhaps thinking of Mike Heiser, and his Ezekiel series on the Naked Bible Podcast?
Even if Psalm 68 means what you think it means, you’re having to mix things up quite considerably to create any kind of chronology. You have said that Psalm 68 is an earthly representation of Jesus leading the sons of God captive into the council at his Ascension. That being the case, Psalm 68 is a prophecy of the far future relative to David; whereas Psalm 82 appears to be a vision of a council meeting which Asaph was present at. This would place Psalm 82 well before Psalm 68. Moreover, the language of Psalm 82 suggests that the unjust judging of the gods is an ongoing action; they are not captives, but will continue to judge the nations—hence the plea of verse 8. We know from Job that wicked sons of God had access to the divine council without having to be brought in as captives.
That doesn’t square with how Scripture speaks of death. The sentence is straightforwardly the same as that envisioned by 1 Enoch and Revelation: the lake of fire, which is the second (for humans—first for angels) death. Being thrown down to earth isn’t death in any meaningful sense; it is simply the result of the change in rulership. They’re fired.
I believe this is a view that originates with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. However, it’s certainly a plausible understanding from a cursory reading of his argument. I’d want to study it in more detail before I committed, but the prima facie case is strong, and makes better sense of both the redemptive-historical angle (especially in light of the destroyer in Exodus 11–12 who is certainly Jesus), and the second temple background (I don’t think any demon named Abaddon or Apollyon is known in second temple literature—Abaddon especially is always synonymous with Sheol, or some part thereof).