09 July 2023
Heiser published an awful lot of work, in writing and in videos on his YouTube channel. He consistently refers back to his one biggest contribution to the whole discussion of recovering the Hebrew outlook: the image of a divine council of beings God created as part of His reign.
The quickest confirmation of this image is to look at John's Revelation, Chapter 4. The point is not to take this as a literal description, but to establish the image as our best understanding of how God's throne room operates. John pulls an awful lot of imagery from the Old Testament; that much is obvious to anyone. Part of John's goal was clearly helping us to maintain some portion of the Hebrew viewpoint on reality. It was easily the most difficult part of the gospel message to get across to the Gentile Christians of the First Century, and the first thing lost historically.
Today you'll find a large body of Christian leaders asserting that we don't need a Hebrew outlook to understand Jesus. Like Heiser, I cannot imagine tossing the mind of Christ into the trash and still claiming to follow Him. Heiser's main point in everything is that the Western mythology of Christian religion guarantees you will not understand the majority of what the New Testament says.
God is not what western Christianity envisions. In the Hebrew Scripture, God has created a rather substantial community of higher beings to populate His courts. The imagery of Ancient Near Eastern potentates and their highly political administration, with all the intrigue and partisan wrangling, is not a human invention. It mirrors what God has in Heaven. The reason human government looked like that in the Ancient Near East for centuries is because all the human rulers were under some kind of divine authority that guided them. That guidance naturally follows the pattern of what the spiritual beings themselves dealt with.
The oversimplified concept of angels versus demons is false. Since the word "angel" refers to a mere messenger, we cannot afford to use that term to cover all the various non-human beings that populate the spiritual realm. There are governing powers in Heaven that are far above the status of mere messengers. We don't have a good word for them. Paul uses a lot of alternative terms, referring to a half-dozen words variously translated as powers, principalities, lords, rulers, etc. The problem is, it's not always clear when he's referring to human or spiritual powers.
That's because the difference is sometimes not that important. How do you separate the actions of a worldly human ruler from the guidance he receives in his soul from a spiritual being? In the Hebrew mind, making that distinction often misses the point. Human politics is not just the random ambitions of mere humans without any other input. In Paul's mind, the Roman Emperor was influenced by the spiritual powers in Heaven, to whom Jehovah had granted a large measure of free will.
How those beings operate in their human lackeys bears some resemblance to how the Holy Spirit works in us. Characterizing those spirits as "foul" and "dark" doesn't change that. Further, that those rulers were often conscience of that spiritual guidance and assistance is what the Bible refers to as pagan idolatry. Those humans might have been misguided about the nature of the deities they worshiped, but there has always been a very real power that answers from the spiritual realm. That's because God permitted it from the very beginning. That God built things that way is what many western Christians cannot swallow.
Yet, to anyone who isn't already committed to a western Christian mythology, it's readily apparent that this is how the ancient Hebrews viewed things. The Scripture echoes with these basic assumptions.
The pagan deities were classified as "demons" quite correctly (Deuteronomy 32:15-18), but the various words in the Bible translated as "demon" aren't so uniformly negative as is commonly assumed. It refers to a level of power and authority in the spiritual realm, not simply Satan's subordinates. And the image of Satan as uniformly evil is also a childish oversimplification. The Bible portrays him simply as a very high ranking non-human person with a beef against something God decreed. He is otherwise a loyal servant of God.
The nature of Satan's dispute with God makes him a threat to us, not to God. He is our Enemy but has a critical role to play in God's reign in Heaven. It turns out that all those beings standing behind the false pagan deities are not slavish subordinates of the one we call Satan, but have some measure of free will, and are just as politically inclined as humans are. Rather, human political wrangling is a reflection of how the beings operate in the spiritual realm.
Thus, every distinct political entity in the world today has a spiritual being assigned to rule over it from Heaven. There is a great deal of interference between them, playing silly intrigues against each other at times, often using human agents. There are also divine beings in charge of various international political entities. Thus, there is a "demon" in charge of globalism, for example. And the various religions, like Islam, Buddhism, feminism, etc. -- they all have their patron deities. It's a real political mess at their level in the Unseen Realm.
The point we get from Heiser is that God is not completely restraining them. There are limits, but they are all related to God's plans, so far as we can know. The Old Testament paints the picture of God taking His hands off direct management after the Flood. He called His council together at the Tower of Babel and told all those ruling powers to take charge of the resulting dispersion of nations. He was going to reserve for Himself a certain fellow we call "Abraham" and would build a new nation from his descendent.
This brings us to that passage in Psalm 82 over which Heiser makes so much noise. A more accurate translation of that psalm is what got him started down the path he has published. At the Tower of Babel, God called together his council and fussed them out for constantly misleading the humans to act against God's agenda. So, He told them to take charge of the nations and He would raise up His own. Of course, at every turn, God had no problem with exercising His seniority over the others, but the very nature of human free will left Israel open to their constant intrigues.
If we identify the Devil as the leader of God's political opposition, he certainly saw what was coming with the Messiah. The others may not have known it so clearly; they are allies, but not necessarily servants of the Devil. He surely has subordinates, but the divine council in Heaven represents a more mixed and independent lot.
It would appear that God's shift from a national covenant to a spiritual covenant in Christ caught the representative human governments off-guard, likely because it caught their patron deities off-guard. They now have far, far less leverage to interfere with God's plans. It restores God's senior authority in ways they did not expect.
That this is the Hebrew outlook is hard to dispute. Heiser's body of evidence is not easily dismissed, though we can dispute specific items (as I do). But the recognition that the writers of Scripture saw things this way vastly complicates our reading. It's a grown-up narrative that demands a lot of us. The simplistic fairytale mythology of Western Christianity is a sad excuse for avoiding all kinds of critical questions and leaves us with an awful lot of Scripture passages that make no sense at all.
And it leaves us here near the end of a long train of efforts by the rebellious divine council members to derail Christian faith. From this point of view, you can easily understand why it took a couple of centuries to hijack organized Christian religion and turn it into a human political identity, and then multiple conflicting political identities. As long as Christian religion is a matter of politics, and not really a matter of genuine submission to Christ in Heaven ("faith"), then it's quite natural that all the attacks are against that political organization and activity, not against faith itself.
What will mark the End Times is the divine opposition getting their act together and unifying against faith itself. From what we can see, that kind of unity isn't happening. That's in part because we who serve Jehovah haven't gotten our act together. We keep letting this whole thing devolve into yet another political fight that plays into the hands of the opposition. Somewhere out there in our future is a rise of genuine otherworldly Christian faith that will provoke a global response.
That will be the End Times.
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