Continued from part 1, on representation and rulership

How did Adam’s kingdom get given to Satan? To understand this, we need to start by asking how they both fit into the biblical cosmology in the first place.

The Bible does not explicitly lay out every detail for us; hence we can easily miss this “kingdom theology”—even though the whole arc of redemptive history takes it for granted. It is within the story of the ups and downs of God’s dynasty that each part of the Bible is written.

Because this story is implicit, rather than explicit, you may not have heard it laid out like this before. Maybe you’re thinking that what I’m saying sounds strange, even troubling. If so, I would encourage you to search the scriptures to see if these things are so. There are enough clues across the Bible that we can trace the broad strokes fairly easily when we know what to look for. Let me show you the more important and transparent of them here, and you can consider these in your own time and search out others as well.

Rulership in the spiritual places

To understand how Satan and these other spiritual beings came to be in charge, we first need to understand the overarching cosmology of the Bible. We’ve seen that the kingdom on earth was originally given to Adam. But while he was the first human ruler, he was created to fit into a larger council that included spiritual beings. This is where things get quite strange to our secularized, Western sensibilities, because we discover that the spirit world of the Bible is not as sanitized as we like to imagine.

To see this, we need to know certain religious terms that had particular significance for the original audience of the Bible; a significance that is not obvious to us, because we are so far removed from their thought-world, their zeitgeist. These terms are what you might call religious memes, rather like lamb of God is a kind of meme for us. By meme I don’t mean a picture with a silly caption, but a unit of cultural information, or an idea that everyone within a certain group will be familiar with. There are certain “codewords” that represent religious concepts—as lamb of God does to Christians—that we don’t expect an explanation for; they are just part of our natural religious language; part of the culture of Christianity.

In the same way, ancient Jews had a natural religious language. If we don’t understand these memes or codewords, we’ll miss a lot of the messaging in the Bible—just as someone today would if he didn’t know about the Passover when he heard that Jesus was the lamb of God. These memes were not exclusive to Israel—indeed, the Bible adopts them out of the religious language of the time, just as it adopts any human language of its time. So they were shared with the surrounding nations, and especially with Ugarit (part of Canaan) to the north, because Ugaritic and Hebrew were cognates: they had a common ancestor, and thus many commonalities (somewhat like German and Dutch, or Spanish and Italian).

The Bible does not use these memes in a pagan way, like Israel’s neighbors did. But it does take the codewords and adapt them to the biblical worldview. If we want to decipher the overarching biblical cosmology, we therefore need to know these codewords.

Ancient Near Eastern religious memes

The overarching meme which these codewords describe is typically called the divine council. The divine council was a kind of cosmic bureaucracy: a group of deities, ruled by a high god, who together were in charge of administering the cosmos and deciding what happened on earth. With some variations, this divine assembly appeared in all Mediterranean and ANE religions; it was a standard feature of their cosmologies. [For both scholarly and lay-level introductions to the divine council, see Michael S. Heiser’s website, The Divine Council.] The gods of the divine council were typically referred to as:

• Gods. Obviously.
• Sons of God. This is a very common term, and illustrates the dynastic nature of the divine assembly: it was a family of gods under a supreme regent (whether by adoption or otherwise). An obvious example of this recorded in Scripture itself is Daniel 3:25, 28.
• God’s council/divine council/assembly of the gods. Whereas “sons of God” speaks of the family nature of the assembly, the word “council” gets to the heart of its bureaucratic, cosmological function in governing the world.
• Holy assembly/council of holy ones. Gods are set apart from the world of man and are generally unapproachable by us, which is what holiness means.
• Stars of heaven/morning stars. The idea that stars were divine, or represented divine beings, was a common motif in the ancient world because they were luminous and moved of their own accord; morning stars, of course, were the most luminous—thus the most important.

Now, gods don’t meet just anywhere. There has to be a special place for them to hold council. And there was a clear commonality with regards to the kind of place they would gather to decide the fates of people and nations:

• In a lush garden. This spoke of opulence and beauty, especially in the arid Near East.
• On a holy mountain. This should come as no surprise given what we’ve already seen about the association between deities and mountains or high places, where heaven meets earth.
• At the source of rivers. A plentifully-watered place again spoke to the abundance and luxury that only deities, and their kingly representatives on earth, could afford; and in the Bible this also images the life-giving Spirit of God.
• In the heights of the north. This is a particular Ugaritic term for the meeting place of Baʿal, which crops up in the Bible for polemical reasons.
• In a location adorned with precious stones and paved with sapphire. Naturally, gods will have only the best accommodation.
• Where the supreme god’s throne was. Just as human kings would hold council in their throne-rooms, so divine kings would do the same.

The point I’m getting at, of course, is that all of these terms are common both in ancient Near Eastern pagan religions, and in the Bible. That might sound disturbing, but it shouldn’t be. After all, what are the chances that pagan cultures all came up with the same religious ideas out of whole cloth? Isn’t it more probable that they are perversions of actual spiritual realities? And if they are, then certainly the Bible can use the same language to describe those spiritual realities, and correct the parts that pagans distorted.

Let’s now work through some of the places where these terms or concepts appear in the Bible so we can see what the actual spiritual realities are. This will prepare us to understand how they relate to Adam’s kingdom.

God’s first dynasty: the divine council in the Bible

We’ve already seen God call these beings gods in Psalm 82:1, 6. These verses also point us to other key terms. In verse 6, we see indirectly that the persons in question are sons of God: “I said you are gods, sons of the Most High.” And in verse 1 we see God standing in the divine council. The Hebrew here, adat el, is a direct cognate of Ugaratic ʿdtʾilm—the council of El in Canaanite mythology. Obviously there is a polemical slant, since God is judging the gods—but it only functions if the basic premise is the same: that the cosmos is administered by a divine bureaucracy.

Related: Is the divine council henotheistic?

This talk of gods makes a lot of Christians very uneasy, because they think that if there are any other gods, or if we think of these beings as “divine,” then that means polytheism. They therefore oppose divine council theology—sometimes vehemently. This impulse may be well-intentioned, but it amounts to trying to protect the Bible from itself by forcing it into 17th century Enlightenment religious categories. It is a kind of false piety. We need to conform our thinking to Scripture, not vice versa; so we must accept that God himself is quite comfortable using the Hebrew word elohim—“god” or “gods”—to refer to beings other than himself. Elohim didn’t carry the theological baggage in Hebrew that “god” does in English; it was perfectly legitimate to call different kinds of beings elohim without suggesting that they were worthy of worship. Indeed, the witch of Endor, upon summoning Samuel, says, “I see an elohim coming up from the ground” (1 Samuel 28:13); and the New Testament is also comfortable referring to Satan as a god (2 Corinthians 4:4). The word is really about where a being belongs—the spirit world—rather than what a being is. Scripture strongly repudiates the idea that the gods of the divine council are anything like Yahweh; indeed, this is the point of expressions like Deuteronomy 4:35, which claims there is no god besides Yahweh. Compare Zephaniah 2:15, where the same claim is made of cities besides Nineveh; the expression is obviously idiomatic: there is no god besides Yahweh in the sense that no god compares to him. [For more, see Michael S. Heiser, Does Divine Plurality in the Hebrew Bible Demonstrate an Evolution From Polytheism to Monotheism in Israelite Religion?, The meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society (2011).]

That the context of Psalm 82 is rulership should be obvious given the content: the gods are taken to task for judging unjustly and showing partiality; rulers were to judge justly and impartially (Deuteronomy 1:16–17). They have failed to give justice to the weak and the fatherless; rulers were to protect orphans and widows from oppression (Jeremiah 22:2–3). They have not rescued the weak from the hand of the wicked; rulers were to deliver the one who had been seized from the hand of the oppressor (ibid).

The same cosmic bureaucracy is plainly in view in Psalm 89:5–7, which speaks of the assembly/council of the holy ones. The Hebrew terms are different here (qhal/sod qedoshim), but the concept is obviously the same—especially since we see in Psalm 89:6 that they are comprised of the sons of God (Hebrew bene elim, cognate with Ugaritic bn ʾilm). This is a stock motif for divine beings that parallels “sons of the most high” (bene elyon) in Psalm 82:6 (cf. Psalm 29:1). That Psalm 89:5–7 is a parallel to the council of Psalm 82 cannot be seriously doubted on pain of special pleading—and quite obviously it is not a human council, since human councils do not meet in the sky (89:6); nor is there a single human council in charge of all the nations over the whole earth (Psalm 82:5, 8).

In Job 1:6–12, we see the sons of God presenting themselves to Yahweh, and there is a kind of courtroom motif to the scene with a prosecutor or accuser—in Hebrew, satan. The question of Job’s loyalty is raised, an argument is given, and resolutions are made—exactly what we should expect in a meeting of the divine council, since its function was to raise issues, debate them, and come to resolutions about them. This happens again in Job 2:1–6.

We also find the divine council in Micah’s vision of 1 Kings 22:19–22 (par. 2 Chronicles 18:18–22):

I saw Yahweh sitting on his throne with all the hosts of heaven standing beside him from his right hand and from his left. And Yahweh said, “Who will entice Ahab so that he will go up and fall at Ramot-Gilead?” Then this one was saying one thing and the other was saying another. Then a spirit came out and stood before Yahweh and said, “I will entice him,” and Yahweh said to him, “How?” He said, “I will go out and I will be a false spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.” And he said, “You shall entice and succeed, go out and do so.” 1 Kings 22:19–22; cf. Daniel 4:17

The setting is a throneroom or a palace; Yahweh is on his throne and there is a heavenly host around him. Again an issue is raised—how to bring about Ahab’s demise—and this time the whole council is involved in the debate. Finally, one solution is accepted by God. The issue is raised, debated, and resolved.

The characters present are here described as the heavenly host—God’s army. It isn’t completely clear whether each and every one is involved in the council; we learn in another divine council scene, Daniel 7, that the heavenly host is beyond reckoning (Daniel 7:10; cf. Psalm 68:17; Hebrews 12:22; Revelation 5:11)—but since spiritual beings need not be constrained by the physical logistics of debate, there’s no clear reason to doubt the involvement of each member. The Bible doesn’t explicitly state whether every member of the heavenly host is also a member of the divine family; and, if so, whether they are all members of the council; and, if so, what the hierarchy looks like. We do know that there are archangels—“angels in charge”—but we don’t know if they are in charge by merit of greater ontological power, by closer familial connection, by mere merit of assignment, or some combination thereof. The descriptions of Satan that we’ll look at in the next part of this series do suggest that some angels are ontologically superior to others, but I am very reluctant to push the imagery too far. All we can say for sure is that the beings designated the “sons of God” are also called archangels, and they have greater authority than the heavenly host in general. This is broadly in line with Ugaritic religion, in which there were two tiers of gods: the sons of El, who ruled certain districts and provinces, and a larger group of lesser gods who acted as messengers and warriors. But how close the correlation is remains unclear.

Prophets as members of the divine council

The passages above are the most obvious divine council “sightings,” but they are far from the only ones. We also see a very similar motif in the commissioning of prophets, and this moves us toward our goal of understanding how Adam and Satan fit into the biblical cosmology:

In the year of the death of Uziyahu the king, I saw the Lord sitting on a high and raised throne, and the hem of his robe was filling the temple. Seraphs were standing above him, each with six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his genitals, and with two he flew. And the one called to the other and said, “Holy, holy, holy is Yahweh of hosts! The whole earth is full of his glory.” And the pivots of the thresholds shook from the sound of those who called, and the temple was filled with smoke.

And I said, “Aiee to me; I am destroyed—for I am a man of unclean lips, and I am living among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the king, Yahweh of armies!” Then one of the seraphs flew to me, and in his hand was a hot coal he had taken from the altar with tongs. And he touched my mouth, and he said, “Look! This has touched your lips and has removed your guilt, and your sin is annulled.”

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “I am here! Send me!” And he said, “Go and say this to my people…” Isaiah 6:1–8

Notice again the divine council elements: there is God’s throne-room with seraphs present (later we’ll see that Satan is a seraph); an issue is raised, either with the seraphs or a further unnamed audience, as indicated by the plural language: “who will go for us?” Isaiah volunteers, and the issue is resolved by commissioning him.

Here’s another example of prophetic commissioning where it is not so obvious:

And the word of Yahweh came to me, saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you came out from the womb I consecrated you; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” Then I said, “Ah, Lord Yahweh! Look, I do not know how to speak, for I am a youth.” But Yahweh said to me, “You must not say, ‘I am a youth,’ for to whomever I send you, you will go, and whatever I command you, you will speak. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you,” declares Yahweh. Then Yahweh stretched out his hand and he touched my mouth, and he said to me, “Look, I have put my words in your mouth.” Jeremiah 1:4–9

Related: Overt christology in the Old Testament: the Word of Yahweh

Now, this doesn’t look like divine council imagery, but there are clues here that we can piece together by looking elsewhere in Jeremiah. The first thing to notice is that the Word of Yahweh is a physical presence whom Jeremiah addresses as Yahweh. The Word comes to him, not as a voice in his ear like we tend to assume, but as a person who touches Jeremiah, and to whom Jeremiah speaks, addressing him as Yahweh himself. The same kind of thing happens with Abram in Genesis 15:1–5: the Word comes to him in a vision (v. 1) and takes him outside (v. 5). It happens again in 1 Samuel 3: the Word of Yahweh is said to come in visions (v. 1), and stands near Samuel’s bed (v. 10); and in verse 21 we read that, “Yahweh appeared again at Shiloh, for Yahweh revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the Word of Yahweh.”

The point is that the Word, and Yahweh, are the same person; and this person appears in embodied form. We should expect this given John 1:1—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John gets his theology from the Hebrew scriptures.

In case you’re wondering what all this has to do with the divine council, let’s now look at chapter 23 of Jeremiah:

Thus says Yahweh of hosts, “You must not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you. They are deluding you with visions of their mind, they do not speak from the mouth of Yahweh. They are continually saying to those who disregard the word of Yahweh, ‘Peace it will be to you,’ and to each one who walks in the stubbornness of his heart they say, ‘Calamity will not come upon you.’ For who has stood in the council of Yahweh, that he has seen and heard his Word? Who has listened attentively to his Word and heard it? Jeremiah 23:16–18

We find here—quite explicitly if you don’t just skip over the language—that prophets are commissioned by God when they stand in his council and see his Word. The Word of Yahweh stands with them in the council of Yahweh.

Put another way, when the Word comes to prophets, they are brought into the royal courtroom, amidst the divine council. This isn’t always stated explicitly, but turns out to have happened “behind the scenes,” as comparing Jeremiah 1 and 23 illustrates. Given the Hebrew penchant for omitting details that were taken for granted, it’s a safe bet that any time God reveals himself to man, his divine council is with him. That’s just the way the whole process works.

Lest this seem like too sweeping a bet to simply make on the basis of one example, here is further evidence: did you know that the divine council was involved in the giving of the law to Moses? If my bet is correct, we should expect it, since Moses was a prophet—the prophet; but it certainly isn’t stated in Exodus, is it?

Indeed not; in Exodus we have only a hint that the divine council is present:

And Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy from the elders of Israel went up [Mount Sinai]. And they saw the God of Israel, and what was under his feet was like sapphire tile work and like the very heavens for clearness. And toward the leaders of the Israelites he did not stretch out his hand, and they beheld God, and they ate, and they drank. Exodus 24:9–11

Notice the interesting detail about what is under God’s feet in this vexingly brief glimpse of a physical encounter with Yahweh: something like sapphire tile work. This is another hallmark of the meeting place of the divine council; Baʿal’s palace was paved with sapphire; so this is a hint that the divine council is present—though it isn’t explicitly stated. However, knowing that Hebrew high-context discourse leaves out details that readers would take for granted, we are warranted in predicting that the divine council was present. This is exactly what we find in Deuteronomy 33:2, which explicitly recollects the giving of the law at Sinai:

Yahweh came from Sinai, and he dawned upon them from Seir; he shone forth from Mount Paran, and he came with a myriad holy ones—at his right hand a fiery law for them. Deuteronomy 33:2

Who are the holy ones? Well, Psalm 89:5 describes them as a council. This is why Paul says in Galatians 3:19 that the law was “put in place through angels,” and Stephen says in Acts 7:53 that the Jews “received the law as delivered by angels,” and Hebrews 2:2 says it was a “message declared by angels.” It was just taken for granted by the Jews—as so obvious as to not require stating.

In the same way, it was taken as obvious that a prophet was someone who had been brought into God’s presence, had seen the Word of Yahweh, and had by implication participated in the divine council. This is, according to Jeremiah 23:22, the defining feature of prophetic calling. How do you know if someone is a true prophet, continuing the office of Moses? By whether he has been in the presence of the Word of Yahweh. And where the Word was, typically so was his divine council.

The situation changes slightly with the New Testament prophets—the apostles—because they lived in the presence of the incarnate Word, who by nature did not have his angelic council present. Yet they nonetheless were commissioned by him, and this is why even in the case of Saul, he is inducted into the apostolic ranks through a vision of Jesus (Acts 9:3–6.)

Ezekiel has an even more impressive encounter with Yahweh in the divine court, which in that instance is a kind of “mobile throneroom.” Again there are seraphs around the throne—this time called cherubs; throne-guardians—(Ezekiel 1:4–15), and again there is the element of sapphire (Ezekiel 1:26). That seraphs and cherubs are basically the same creatures should be clear from Revelation 4:6–9, where the living creatures before the throne are obviously a composite of the seraphs in Isaiah 6:1–4 and the cherubs in Ezekiel 1 and 10. This will become clearer in the next installment, when we see that the Bible describes Satan as both a seraph and a cherub.

There are more subtle examples which further link prophetic calling with being in the presence of God. For instance, according to Hebrew tradition, Enoch was a major prophet; Jude 1:14 refers to him prophesying. Why did the Jews think this, given that none of his prophecies are recorded in Scripture? Genesis 5 gives us a clue:

When Enoch had lived sixty-five years, he fathered Methusalah. And Enoch walked with God after he fathered Methusalah three hundred years, and fathered other sons and daughters. And all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. And Enoch walked with God, and he was no more, for God took him. Genesis 5:21–24

Now, we have an idiom—a meme even—in the modern Western church. We talk about our “Christian walk;” thus, when we read the expression “Enoch walked with God,” we import this meme into it and interpret it as, “Enoch lived in a godly way.” But that isn’t what it means absent this Western expression—as becomes obvious if we switch the characters in the phrase:

Peter walked with Jesus.

What do you imagine now? You see, Enoch was a prophet because he walked in the physical presence of God, and was, it seems, taken up physically into heaven by God (cf. Hebrews 11:5).

This leads us finally to Adam, because we know that he, too, lived in the physical presence of God. Genesis 3:8 says that he “heard the sound of Yahweh God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” In fact, the Bible explicitly calls Adam out as the first human member of the divine council—moreover, it does so in a way that clarifies what happened in Eden, and how everything went, as it were, to hell…

Continued in part 3: what happened in Eden

 17 comments

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With regard to 2 Cor. 4:4, have you considered Hartley’s explanation?:
https://rdtwot.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/2cor-44.pdf

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

Thanks for the link; I’ll take a look. On the face of it, even though I agree that God primarily hardens and blinds in Scripture, I find Hartley’s interpretation implausible for the reasons I’ve already given.

That said, nothing much rides on this question in terms of the accuracy of my overall thesis. I actually find the term “god of this age” is primarily useful for talking to Christians who are skittish about the phrase “gods” in Psalm 82 etc.

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

Having now (mostly) read Hartley’s paper, I think he makes good points but his argument suffers from a couple of fatal flaws:

Firstly, he posits a false dichotomy between congenital and transformational hardness. But while he nods to Romans 1, he misses the point that Paul clearly sees both in view there. Because people are congenitally hard, and refuse to honor and worship God, God then gives them over to this hardness in a way that is quite evidently transformational, since it results in transformed passions (Rom 1:26) and transformed minds (Rom 1:28). But his thesis seems to rest quite heavily on the congenital view.

Secondly, he supposes that Paul, in drawing on Isaiah 6, is not also drawing on other material. This error manifests in several ways: (i) He claims there is no precedent for calling Satan the god of this world, but in fact Psalm 82 is excellent precedent when combined with other places that Paul speaks of Satan as the guy in charge; (ii) he ignores the instrumental role in salvific blindness that Jesus explicitly charges Satan with in Luke 8:12 (par Mark 4:15; Matthew 13:19); (iii) he ignores the relationship between moral depravity and intellectual blindness, and thus doesn’t appreciate what the power of Satan in places like 1 John 5:19 must therefore encompass.

Given these factors, and especially given how awkward it is to translate “god of this age” as Yahweh when it is so apt and straightforward to translate it as Satan, I stand by the majority of modern exegetes on this point :)

Jeremiah

If “the word is really about where a being belongs—the spirit world—rather than what a being is” then wouldn’t a better English translation be something akin to ‘spirits’ rather than ‘gods’, given the baggage that ‘gods’ has in English?

It seems that we throw an unnecessary cognitive barrier in the argument by translating a word that – as you say – is really about where a being belongs, with an English word couched in divinity.

Basically, what is gained by calling them ‘gods’? To answer “because the Hebrew calls them ‘gods'” would be to beg the question, since the question is about whether “elohim” is best translated as ‘gods’ in the context of the English language with its specific baggage.

ie, the word ‘gods’ has a certain meaning in English; proper translation doesn’t critique the target audience for not using a term in the way the translator would like, but chooses a word in the target language that already has the proper connotations. Otherwise you have to explain to your audience that your use of the word doesn’t actually have the baggage that they naturally associate with it, at which point they might rightly ask why you didn’t just choose a word without said baggage in the first place.

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

Hey Jeremiah, it’s great to have your input on this series, as it is one where I have really felt an extra weight in terms of its ramifications for the gospel itself, and I want to be absolutely confident about it. Getting critical input from smart folks like you is really helpful.

The translation of elohim is something I’ve considered, but I think “god” is still the best word we have. Here’s why:

1. Hebrew, like English, already has a word that means spirit. The semantic range is broader (I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, of course), but to the best of my knowledge it doesn’t really overlap with elohim. It’s not that they can’t have the same referent; it’s just that they aren’t used in the same way.
2. Although the Bible is clear in repudiating worship of other elohim, the fact remains that the word is associated with worship. This is not so for “spirit,” but obviously is so for “god.” This alone makes “god” the better translation—and really the only viable one unless I’m missing another English word that would serve a similar purpose.
3. Translating elohim as “spirit” would actually result in much greater angst on the part of English-speaking Bible readers than the relatively minor issue of realigning their thinking on the word “god” (which, in my experience, is actually not a big deal for most thoughtful Christians). Imagine what Psalm 82, for example, would look like with this translation policy:
   

   Spirit stands in the council of God; among the spirits he renders judgment…

   I think most Christians would have way more problem with that, than with the current translation.

4. Finally, what do you do when you get to the New Testament? You’re going to have this huge discrepancy between elohim and theos which will be very confusing and inconsistent. I don’t think it is legitimate to translate 2 Corinthians 4:4, for instance, as referring to the “spirit of this world,” right?

Jeremiah

I wasn’t saying that ‘spirit’ was necessarily the best rendition, I just used it as a suggestion for a line of thinking, hence “something akin to ‘spirits.’” I can’t think of a word in English that walks a line between ‘spirit’ and ‘gods’ in the way you describe ‘elohim’ as doing.

Granted, even if we went with ‘spirits’, that isn’t to say that it should be translated that way in every instance, but merely that it is part of elohim’s lexical range in English.

(And sure, Hebrew has ruach, but that’s often more of an animating force (hence the overlap with ‘breath’) and so wouldn’t have the same connotations as what has been suggested.)

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

True enough. I try to avoid translating a donor word with multiple receptor words. But I know others aren’t so idealistic, or just have different philosophies ;)

Rick W.

Hey Bnonn,

Have you listened or read any of Dr. Michael Heiser’s stuff on this? I recently discovered him and what he says seems to make sense but, I haven’t come down on it on way or another yet. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.

I just discovered your blog btw, through the Last Jedi review. :) It was excellent! I plan on read more of your entries.

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

Hey Rick, thanks for your kind words. I am indeed familiar with Mike’s work; it has been very helpful to me. The Unseen Realm is well worth reading. I do have some qualms about it, but most are ironically unrelated to the divine council material. You may find my constructive criticism series useful.

Trent

Hi Bnonn,
I find the divine council fascinating however, I am unsure what to make of the idea of a bureaucracy that God delegates to. How is that reconciled with the fact that God is all powerful and doesn’t need it?

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

Hey Trent, it’s interesting—this seems to be a common line of thinking. I’ve encountered it not merely as a question, but as a forceful objection; e.g., this from a Reformed pastor once:

There is only one God and he is eternal, almighty and
self-existent. He does not need help to rule the nations.

What’s puzzling is how illogical this is. There’s obviously an intuited argument behind it, but how does it actually go? How do we connect the one stated premise to the conclusion so that we get a valid syllogism?

1. God is all-powerful and does not need help to rule the nations
2. ???
3. Therefore, there is no divine council

The silliness of this objection becomes apparent when you plug in literally any other secondary form of rulership that God has created. For instance:

4. God is all-powerful and does not need help to rule the nations
5. ???
6. Therefore, there are no human rulers

Or:

7. God is all-powerful and does not need help to rule nature
8. ???
9. Therefore, there is no natural causality

Etc etc. Obviously we could make up all kinds of funny examples, but the point is serious: where does this intuition come from that because God doesn’t need something, he therefore doesn’t decree it? He doesn’t need prayer to know our desires; yet he commands us to pray. He doesn’t need evangelism to expand his kingdom; yet he commands us to evangelize. He doesn’t even need already-existing people to turn into sons (Matthew 3:9); yet he uses them all the same. If he uses human institutions and authority so pervasively, why should we expect the opposite of him with regard to angelic institutions and authority?

If I had to hazard a guess in answer to my own question, I’d say it has something to do with a particular understanding of angels themselves. For example, the pastor I mentioned earlier also made this comment in the course of his objections to the divine council:

[Angels] are not made in God’s image, and Scripture nowhere says they have a conscience.

The only thing more surprising than how obviously wrong this is, is how wildly pervasive it is in the church. Somehow, even otherwise-well-educated Christian thinkers manage to interpret “made a little lower than the angels” as “made way, way higher than the angels, which are really just spirit-based automatons.” When you have a view like this of angels, such that they are not even moral agents (i.e., persons), the idea of a divine council obviously seems absurd. But one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens; in fact, it is this view of angels which is absurd!

HTH,
Bnonn

kim

Hi there! Thank you for your work here, and the way it is presented – so helpful!

Question: If Satan was a member of the Divine Council, and he was present in the garden engaging with Adam, was he already evil?

Or is he only “shrewd” in the garden with Adam (but not evil), and becomes “evil’ after he is cursed? Does thatmake sense?

Kim

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

Hi Kim, I think it’s clear in Genesis that Satan intends to use his shrewdness against Adam and Eve, to get them executed. That’s pretty evil…

Melissa Taylor

Totally off subject, I am curious as to why the ram’s horns logo. The satanic church uses the ram as a symbol of Baphomet.

No I don’t think you are a satan worshiper… I know it has to do with the word gore in your tagline… but maybe a bull’s horns would work as well?

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

It’s a ram because I’m still one of God’s sheep. Every biblical symbol has been appropriated by the occult, because symbolism is powerful. If I used a bull, someone would point out the connection to Baal. Etc etc…

Melissa Taylor

Yeah… maybe you have a point. (Pun Not intended)

Back to the subject…
Did God hand over the nations of mankind only to the fallen “gods”? Since only 1/3 fell with satan that would mean 2/3 didn’t.
Why couldn’t some of the “good gods” have been given rule? Could it have been that the fallen ones were the ones showing themselves to man, involving themselves on earth, thus incurring man’s worship while the unfallen were obeying God and not doing that?

I keep thinking of C.S. Lewis’ sci fi trilogy where the “gods/rulers/eldil” of the other planets were not permitted to interfere with the ruler of “the silent planet”. With this (new to me) spotlight on the divine council it seems that maybe both Tolkien (The Silmarillion) and Lewis were more aware of it, or accepting of it than many modern Westerners? I know Lewis at least has posited (can’t remember which book) that what might look like Christianity copying other religions/myths is in reality the opposite… “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.” The truths of Judaism/Christianity are the explanations or root causes of much mythology … those lingering whispers that have handed down smoky distorted glimpses of Olympus, the Valkyrie , the hideous animal gods of Egypt, now suddenly come into focus as much less fantastic and ridiculous than we thought, but probably more malicious!

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

It comes down to what Babel represents.

If Babel is a disinheritance, as a judgment for mankind’s relentless pursuit of other gods, then it makes sense that God would put them under the very gods they were pursuing.

He gives them over to what they desire. We know that’s how he works from Romans 1.

But the gods they are pursuing aren’t going to be loyal to Yahweh. The loyal sons of God would repudiate such worship.

That doesn’t mean that all the gods of the nations are equally wicked, or have identical motives. But it does suggest that they are all under Yahweh’s judgment for being disloyal and rebellious.