03 September 2023
The addition of Dr. Michael Heiser's teaching into my repertoire did not change my previous teaching significantly. The Bible does say that God keeps a divine council, with both senior and junior members, beings who are far above angels, and certainly above humans. This is consistent with Jehovah's own self characterization as an Ancient Near Eastern nomad sheikh. But the court of this Divine Sheikh of Heaven has more than just a council. We've already discussed His Son, for example.
The Son and Heir is His Right Hand. I still believe that there is at least one major character called His Left Hand. It's not a part of western mythology, but rulers in the Ancient Near East typically had a special role reserved for someone near the rank of his own heir who managed to offend him in some critical issue. However, the offender's noble status prevents simply putting him in jail. Instead, that high ranking prince or noble was compelled to surrender all other interests for the task of keeping the ruler's prison.
Lesser beings who offended the ruler were handed over to this high jailer as his slaves. The primary income of the jailer was whatever he could make off the backs of his prisoners, using them as he pleased. The terms of this use were set by the ruler who sentenced these prisoners; the jailer dared not transgress those limits, or he would risk losing his noble status. It was part of his own punishment.
Further, he was obliged to seek out any other malcontents in the ruler's court. It was a primary duty, and it included prosecution of these opposing characters. Indeed, in many sheikhdoms, he also was empowered to engage in espionage to tempt councilors to betray their allegiance, so that he could then bring them before the ruler. If he won his case, this was another powerful ranking "slave" he could milk for whatever profit he could make from this man's personal property and position.
We see hints of this lore in action when Scripture refers to characters named "Satan" -- a name meaning "the accuser" or "the adversary" (in court). Keep in mind: this is a role, a title, not a personal name. To this day, the Bible offers no personal identification of anyone but Jehovah and His Son; all other characters are almost certainly titles. We can debate whether the angel Gabriel is an actual name, and perhaps Michael is, but the entire divine council is otherwise obscure to us.
By now you recognize that whoever "the Devil" is in the New Testament, it is a role, not a name. And his role is the Left Hand of God, placed in this role because of some offense we cannot comprehend. We get hints about it when God refers to the saga behind someone named Lucifer (Isaiah 14), but only as a type, not as a person. Heiser notes that the same goes for the divine councilor behind Tyre's king (Ezekiel 28), and perhaps one other. These members of the elohim class were of a type: They all transgressed their assigned roles in God's court. They were taken down from their high and honored positions and given the role of the Left Hand.
The Left Hand is confined to fallen human space, not permitted to sit in God's court on a regular basis. Thus, whoever occupies that position is the "Prince of the Power of the Air" -- sort of like saying restricted to wherever people are breathing as a necessity for life.
Whoever we are talking about, he was a high noble in terms of God's court. The person holding this role for the time of Adam and Eve was recognized as an elohim who had tremendous power and authority and would not be expected to lie to them. Heiser notes as much in Chapter 11 of Unseen Realm. This is a classic example of the scene where the Left Hand (already in trouble with Jehovah and demoted) chose as his target Adam and Eve for the temptation (espionage) and prosecution natural to his duties. The penalty for their betrayal of God's terms of service in Eden included a debt to be worked off as slaves of the Left Hand.
Of course, the New Testament makes clear that we could never possibly pay that debt. It had to be paid by His Son.
Heiser published another book titled Demons: What the Bible Really Says about the Powers of Darkness. You can get a copy here. Oddly enough, it's also in Chapter 11 of this other book where he discusses some important ideas about the Fall. Heiser makes much of how Colossians 2:8-15 discusses this scenario in light of Deuteronomy 32. He talks about how the divine council of elohim were stripped of something they previously held, but lost when Christ rose from the grave.
In other words, the old order of things changed forever after the Cross. This is not news to me. But Heiser being who he was and writing the way he did almost misses the point, if you ask me. I've been teaching for decades that at the Cross, the old order of things passed, most especially for Israel. It was the end of national identity for the Covenant. Jesus refers to it as the New Covenant in His Blood, a shift from the Old Covenant of national identity.
We as Gentiles are no longer left hanging where we were before. Previously, the only way to enter the Covenant was to either embrace Moses and become Israeli, or embrace Noah and become vassals of Israel. Whichever elohim was over our nation of natural birth could continue to exercise their authority over us unless we took one of those two paths to depart their domain.
But in Christ, we can depart their domain without having to join some other nation. We can become a part of God's own nation of the New Israel, a nation rooted in Heaven itself, not on this earth. This isn't different from what Heiser writes; it's just a lot simpler. In that chapter of Demons, he goes on an on about breaking the elohim authority, but the point is that the Ancient Near Eastern customs and expectations of how authority is exercised is not a strong part of his background.
From time to time in the history of the Ancient Near East, rulers have declared the end of various noble houses, or changed the way power was distributed between the various human powers. Remember Joseph, and how he elevated Pharaoh's authority by taking advantage of the famine? During that particular dynasty, Egypt went from a very weak Pharaoh struggling to coordinate a very decentralized power structure to a very powerful central authority because of this.
And this is where we get the symbolism of returning to Eden. In the Garden, before the Fall, we were under Jehovah's direct rule. After the Fall, there was a period of transition, until at the Tower of Babel, all humanity was parceled out to the various members of the divine council. They were broken up into nations and assigned to one or another of His elohim. God then raised up His own human nation via Abraham and the Patriarchs, building it from scratch. It broke down over the centuries until His own nation defied Him. Still, He kept in place the rules of assigned national identity until His Son came to reform the whole mess.
After the Cross, every human on the earth has the option to join the Heavenly nation, departing their human national identity by which the elohim retain their authority over us. This is not as easy as most "Christians" believe, but not as hard as the Judaizers want us to believe. Jews are still stuck in the old universe, unless they catch a glimpse of what Paul actually taught about the New Order of Things (AKA, the New Covenant).
The elohim continue to exercise authority over anyone who doesn't renounce their national identity to follow Christ. That's part of the Covenant now. Thus, the former opposition of the elohim is still an issue, but only regarding humans who don't embrace the Covenant of Christ. What they lost in Colossians 2:15 was the default power to keep their human slaves. Christ sets them free, but only if they follow Him to the Cross and crucify the fleshly identity they held under the elohim.
Comments
Fun and Prophet
The existence of "the Council," underscores to me that reality is at all levels relational. It also helps with a childish idea of "Why doesn't God just snap a finger and change this-or-that?"
The framework you describe is helpful in personal discipline. I'd rather not wander, in terms of attention or investigation, outside the protected and patrolled grounds of the Household -- as most anyone who out of curiosity has ventured, with weird consequences, into inadvertent exposure, would probably agree.
That is, your conversation about this is not just metaphysically interesting. It feeds the proper awe of Larger Issues, i. e. the fear of the Lord,
i. e. practical wisdom.
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