The Rabbit Hole-- theological deep exploration

Theology
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Mr E

Thanx for the thorough reply. I sincerely appreciate it. I learn so much by listening to the counsel of others. Your thoughts and personal perspective are genuinely appreciated. I apologize in advance for, I admit, is a response that is too long.

Indeed!

You have mentioned Michael Heiser several times recently. I have read Heiser, not his fiction, but his more popular works. I was sorry when he passed. Cancer is a mystery to me. I admit his rhetoric is very convincing. I was impressed with the depth of his scholarship while maintaining a writing style that is accessible to a wide audience. He writes as if you are having a pleasant discussion with an old friend. I admit he is by-far more brilliant and more studied in his specialty than I am. He is a teacher; I am a learner.

Would you say reading the thoughts of brilliant men is your primary path to spiritual scholarship? I’m just wondering if you could share what personal criteria you employed that brought you to accept the conclusions of Mr. Heizer at the rejection of others. I think you may agree that his understanding of the spiritual realm is fairly esoteric, right?

You mentioned again in this last post that “there are few pastor-teacher-preachers” who handle this psalm in their exposition. While I did originally agree that I have never personally “heard” a sermon specifically on this Psalm, I did not intend to imply that I have had no teaching on it. The literature on this psalm is extensive. Just for fun I did a quick search of the sermon databases and found that this Psalm has not really been neglected. If some do shy away from speaking on this Psalm to their Sunday morning congregations, I can imagine a number of reasons why they might do so that are positive.

If you would like to hear some sermons on this Psalm, I’ll include a short list that I came up with. I have not personally listened to (or read the transcript) of all of these, so you are pretty much on your own out there. I think you will find a wide variety of approaches to this specific Psalm from just these sermons.

Sermons on Psalm 82

  • Paul Apple 10/18/2000
  • Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III 1/1/2006
  • Adeolu Akin-Abraham 12/2/2009
  • Don Ruhl 2/12/2013
  • Doug Wilson 1/15/2017
  • Douglas White 3/17/2019
  • David Platt 10/21/2020
  • Scott Kercheville 11/1/2020
  • David Guzik 3/13/2021
  • Garrett Tyson 2/14/2022
  • Christopher Hodsworth 4/12/2022
  • Nick Holden 7/26/2022
  • Paul Tripp 1/8/2024
  • David B. Curtis 1/28/2024
  • Johnathan Parnell 8/11/2024

A quick search for these names and dates shouild bring you to their sermon. This was a quick search; I’m sure there are hundreds more. Do you think so?

You seem to have studied this subject at length; no doubt much more than I have. I hope I’m not asking too much, but if you could, would you please share some of your insight with me on one thing?

In your personal studies, In the John 10 passage you mentioned, what precisely do you think Jesus was helping the Jews to understand when, after His quote, he added: “If He called them gods, to whom the word of God came (and the Scripture cannot be broken)…”? (I can’t remember off the top of my head how Heiser handles this).

Jesus identified the beings that His Father called “elohim” to be the same beings that His listeners knew to be recipients of His Fathers Word. Right? I’m sure sound exegesis of this point pivots on what we think “The Word of God” entails. But, notwithstanding, Jesus said His Father was addressing the ones “to whom the word of God came” when he called them gods as recorded in Psalm 82. What group was Jesus identifying as “the ones to whom the word of God came”? Do you remember if Heiser shows how “the word of God came” to a group of spiritual beings; i.e. “The congregation of the mighty”, which Heiser calls a “divine counsel”? If so, what exactly is implied that the word of God “came” to a divine spiritual counsel? He does NOT say of this group that they are simply ones “over whom the Word of God has authority”, or created beings who “have heard The Word of God”, but they are the ones “to whom The Word of God “sprung up” (Gk:gínomai)” i.e “came into existence” or “began to be”. This I don’t understand how this phrase might apply to a group of powerful spiritual beings; maybe you do? BTW, Paul DOES identify the Jew as “those to whom the Word of God came” when he says :” What advantage then has the Jew, or what is the profit of circumcision? Much in every way! Chiefly because to them were committed the oracles of God.” (Romans 3:1-2). That doesn’t prove that the word of God arose only in them, but I was looking for somewhere in scripture that supports Heiser’s premise and specifically addresses this saying of Jesus. Help please.

In His Service, with you
KP

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ha ha :rofl: yes, a many-layered post. I’ll try to break it down a little and respond as carefully.

-I have not read Heiser’s novels either. And I like him too, because he isn’t stuffy. I never really thought of him as a brilliant scholar or approached his material that way. Call it my own hubris, but I probably was attracted to him because when I discovered him, only a short time ago, I found his insights to be in common with things I already believed. In my own private study, I would notice odd things that I’d then investigate and in Heiser I found a languages expert who noted— “If it’s weird, it’s important” — that was an instant magnet drawing me to his works.

If by esoteric, you mean— only a few people grasp these concepts, I wholly agree. That’s why many and most of those sermons you googled have little or nothing to do with Jesus’ quoting of that portion of Psalm 82 and virtually none of them even attempt to consider what it was he was pointing at.

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Though the NT Greek ignores it, we can see clearly that Jesus didn’t, because he quotes directly and further makes the point that— you can’t change what scripture actually says. That’s important. Because of this emphasis that Jesus insists upon, you have to carefully consider the text he is quoting.

Jesus references elohim and ben elohim (sons of God) as commonly interpreted, but doing so you completely ignore what elohim actually means within the wider construct of Heiser’s divine council setting and that unseen realm that the Psalm recognizes. It’s not to be understood as generic “God” or even one God, but a conglomerate of spiritual (divine) beings.

With respect to your other questions- Heiser doesn’t dance around the “word of God” as being anything other than the very spirit of God, manifest in a physical being. “The word became flesh” people affirm when they read it in John 1, but ignore it in Genesis 15, or the story of Samuel.

Yet scripture explains the concept clearly and repeatedly. God with us. God in us. We in Him. This unseen and poorly recognized spiritual realm where He dwells in houses not made by men.

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I’m finally back from my travels and able to continue the conversation…

The word of God-- is not a book. You correctly point to “oracles” or actual utterances of God-- the things God said. And how does God speak to us? Well, this takes us a little deeper down the rabbit hole, but God speaks directly at times to certain people through dreams, visions, or otherwise spiritual encounters with God-- himself spirit. It’s communication in the spirit, in and with the spirit of God. I have no trouble interposing “spirit” where ‘the word’ or ‘logos’ is used. The word/oracle/utterance of God comes to people in this way by the spirit. You can consider this differently, but it’s akin to the message of God coming to you via a messenger of God. In spirit, through spirit, by spirit. Call these spiritual messengers- angels if you like-- for that is what they are and they deliver God’s word to men. The word of God came to… fill in the blank. The oracle of God came to…

And these receivers of the word are as vessels, but in pronouncing what the message was, they become spokespersons for God-- aka prophets. Scripture is full of examples.

I really like your reference to “sprung up” concerning the word of God- manifesting (coming into existence) in the same manner as the Genesis account of creation. The Hebrew equivalent of the Greek-ginomai is ‘hayah’—

Now no shrub of the field had yet grown (hayah) on the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground.

It puts the context in perspective as something that ‘becomes’ something that sprouts and grows and manifests. We see the concept employed in John 1 where the word becomes flesh.

With respect to Heiser’s divine council-- it’s not as unfamiliar as one might imagine. Or-- one can imagine this beyond Ps 82. In the heavenly visions revealed to John in his book, we see a divine council mentioned in Chapters 4, 5, 7, 11, and 19.

But way back in the original book of things coming into being-- in Genesis, it is here at the beginning that we read the story of a man being formed from the soil and springing up-- receiving the breath of life (spirit of God) and being placed in the garden of God-- a living being.