18 September 2023
What's the whole point of all this elohim opposition?
We all agree that any discussion of the divine council of elohim is necessarily tentative, at best. All we have are parables and symbolic language. It's not aimed at answering our questions, but at giving us sufficient knowledge to draw a roadmap that keeps us at peace with God.
Even Wikipedia gets this one thing right: "Satan" is derived from the Hebrew word that refers to a prosecutor, the Left Hand in any ruler's court. It's a role, even a title, but not a proper name as commonly used in English. Part of that symbolic explanation offered in the Old Testament suggests that whoever fills that role for Christians, at least, was previously some personal attendant of Jehovah who was demoted. The cause, insofar as we can grasp it, had to do with this "Covering Cherub" trying to embezzle some of Jehovah's glory for himself. I'm not sure how else I can put that.
On the one hand, the imagery of a sheikh's court would tell us that the Devil is classed with the elohim in terms of privilege, but started off with a different type of role. He's not exactly the same as the others on the divine council, but does some of the same stuff. As told to us, we get the feeling his first assignment in his new role after demotion was to tempt Adam and Eve in the Garden.
This is wholly consistent with the image of a divine sheikh who was trying to demonstrate the justice of His decision. If the Devil is so wonderful and wise, can he figure out how to deal with these people God put in charge of His personal garden? It forced the Devil to operate below his presumed dignity. Indeed, hints in Scripture suggest that he was confined to wherever these creatures lived. He was God's Left Hand only for them and was not allowed to operate outside their space.
Satan performed with zeal, with a kind of perverse vengeance against us, as if venting his anger on God's favorite pets. He succeeded in persuading these two to violate the conditions of their assignment. We were forced into a lower form, just like the Devil was. We were placed into mortal bodies and became a part of the world we were supposed to rule. The natural world has always been mortal, locked within time and space restrictions. The natural world did not fall; we did.
You'll notice that a strong element in what the Hebrew Scriptures can tell us will always include a sort of poetic parallelism. The Devil was demoted to being Satan, and we were demoted to being human. Notice that testing Adam and Eve was his job, something God required of him. It was not an act of rebellion.
The rebellion was in persuading some portion of the divine council to support his contention. Reading between the lines, I tend to believe that the whole thing centers on a dispute with God about how much He should share His glory with them, or perhaps in what way He should share it. I'm guessing that, at the Tower of Babel, some of the elohim took it as an insult when He commanded them to take up guardianship of the nations.
They carried out the task in a smart-aleck fashion, playing at some kind of legalism and abusing their free will. Thus, God fussed at them later for misleading the nations. Then He raised up His own personal nation to show them how it's done. Except, the prophets tell us that the nation God built for Himself was significantly more difficult than any nation the elohim had to deal with. They took the challenge and worked with Satan to keep testing and tempting Israel. They went after Israel with such ardor that they completely abandoned the Covenant.
But God wasn't finished. He had promised to implement an upgrade to the Covenant, and it turned out to be via His Son (AKA, His Word). He had not declared to the elohim the full implications, perhaps as a way to punish their snarky attitudes. His plan was to translate the Covenant from a national law covenant to a spiritual covenant that transcends human identity. It drew us back toward Eden, at least in principle, even while we lived in our fallen form.
Through the New Testament prophets, He again warned how this would all turn out. He knew in advance that the elohim would attack this shift in the Covenant with all the same force they had done with its older form.
What is the nature of their attack? It is to tie our hearts to this fallen existence. Do you understand the primary failure of Israel was getting all wound up in the human material blessings of the Covenant law code, and completely ignoring the spiritual nature of what that code pointed to? Thus, in the Wilderness Temptation, the Devil tried to get Jesus to meet the Jews where they were, on their level. He tried to get Jesus to embrace the False Messianic Expectations: material wealth, miracle powers over Creation, and political domination of all humanity. All they cared about was this world, which God had already planned to wipe away in due time.
The Hebrew culture and Covenant were inherently mystical, focused on the riches of Eternity, and they insisted on ditching that for a bowl of temporal porridge to fill their fleshly bellies. Do you see the parallels in the Old Testament narrative?
Consistently, throughout the whole New Testament, we are called to stop caring so much about this world and our lives here. I'm not sure we can call it any kind of "threat" to the elohim opposition in God's court, but it's definitely critical to them to make us as worldly as possible. If Satan is the chief elohim over this fallen existence, then he would be loath to let us leave his domain. And some portion of the elohim council is cooperating with that agenda by using their position to guide human affairs in favor of preventing men from escaping the cares of this world.
Satan and his allies worked hard to get us kicked out of Eden, and everything they think they have to gain depends on keeping us from going back. They crank up the fear of the Flaming Sword, which is also symbolized by the Cross. We are required to take up our own individual crosses, and our flesh is panicky about avoiding that. Jesus did it; so can we.
The key is otherworldly mysticism. They would really hate for us to be living back in Eternity. We may have no clue why, but it has something to do with the Devil's demotion for grabbing glory.
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