Apologetics Session 30 - Angelology

Thank you so much for this time together, my brothers.

Thank you, Lord, for just the wonderful blessings to have this community here to be able to share ideas and your word there, your truth.

We thank you, Lord, for the new birth and the family there that is having their needs met.

We thank you, Lord, for the church, for our pastor, our deacons, and our elders there.

We pray for everybody, but also we want to recognize that tomorrow is a fairly big day in voting.

We know that your will is going to be done anyway, so we pray, though, that that goes smoothly, that there will not be fights or anything like that.

We know it's going to be a rough one. So we leave this all to you, Lord, in your name, Jesus' name, amen. Amen. Okay.

Okay, last week I spoke just briefly at the beginning of what angelology was about and everything.

I wanted to give just a brief history of what had happened right around the time of the

Reformation when the Roman Catholic Church and Reformed theology really blossomed.

The Roman Catholic Church really embraced angelology.

In some ways they were actually worshipping angels, and the

Reformed theologians were moving away from that. Not that they were moving away totally, but John Calvin was definitely having that as part of his ministry and what have you.

But over the time period, it became less and less and less important of what they were talking about, and mainly because they were talking about the gospel and not really talking about the length and breadth of God's kingdom and what was happening there.

Because of that, it formed a gap, and starting in the beginning of the 19th century, a lot of other religions started popping up under the guise of Christianity and using angelology as their thrust.

So you have basically three different pillars, so to speak, or categories, where you had

Catholicism that was still pushing what was happening with angelology, then you had this middle, and then you had what we were doing in terms of Reformed theology that was really not doing much.

It really wasn't being talked about in church, they really weren't talking about Satan or angels or what their plans were or what their roles were or what have you.

And so what sprouted up was Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, Mormons.

All these different other religious sects started to sprout up in the middle there, and it became, basically it started mainly in South Africa, moved through Africa, and then migrated over to South America, which we know that they're estimating now that over a billion people are

Pentecostal. And with the various different slices and dices of it, where a large majority is baptized by the

Spirit, and then almost making angels like gods.

So we have this paradigm now where we're trying to kind of work our way through, and it's important for us as Reformed believers and in our orthodoxy to really understand the impact of what

God's other kingdom is within our own sphere.

Although we were made in the image of God, angels play a huge role about how this earth is run, and the spiritual battle that's occurring all the time.

And it's not something that is seen, but yet it's something that is seen and felt, if you know what

I mean. You're not seeing the sort of the battle that happens right in front, although there is a lot of documentation and scholarship about demons and all that, but we see it in the way man behaves, we see it in the way things get turned out.

So I want you to keep that in mind as we start going through this, and today

I may be able to get through this, and next week we'll talk about demonology.

I had referenced this before in Colossians 116, for Him, Christ, all things were created that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, where the thrones or dominions or principalities or powers, all things were created through Him or for Him.

The key thing in this is, Paul really talks about the different categories that are happening here in thrones, dominions, principalities and powers.

Those are names of types of angels. Those are names of different things that are happening there.

We went through this last week, where you know, angelology is the study of angels, there are many unbiblical views of angels today, and that's part of the trauma of trying to get past this, where you don't want to dismiss it, but also you don't want to have a hyper focus perseverating on what angelology is all about.

Still others deny the existence of angels entirely, and the biblical understanding of angelology will correct these false beliefs.

The Bible tells us a lot about angels. In fact, there's 108 references to angels in the

Old Testament, and 165 references to angels in the New Testament. So as we get into scripture and we're reading there, we have to understand this is a very important part of what's happening in scripture.

Angels are mentioned in all the books, and they play an important role in the cast of characters that are under God's kingdom there.

In systematic theology, there is a section for that where they're studying, we're studying it, and we'll get to it in a minute, they break it down to demonology and satanology, and the

Westminster larger catechism also answers questions about angels, which

I'll get to in a minute. So here's the reformed position of it. It's very straightforward.

It's by worshiping the Lord is first, executing the Lord's command is second, and they serve the elect.

Their main role of angels, not demons, or satan, is to make sure that they are overseeing and we've, you know, the whole idea about guardian angels, which is almost like fairytale.

No, God assigns angels to individuals to watch over them and his elect there.

John Calvin describes this ministry of angels towards the elect as the heavenly host being assigned to be their servants, to see their salvation.

He went on to say, it is no ordinary pledge of God's love for us that he keeps us busily working for our sake.

From this, there comes an extraordinary confirmation of our faith that our salvation is beyond danger, guarded as it is by such defenses.

God has the best possible consideration for our infirmities and giving us such helpers to resist satan with us and to put forth all the efforts in every way to care for us.

Now, what's interesting about this, and later on we will talk about this, is that one of the roles that angels play is to help us in our temptations, in what is happening to us.

They are overseers on what's happening in our lives. And so, not only do we have the

Holy Spirit inside us, those who are in Christ, but we have this heavenly body that's overseeing us too, to protect us and to help us through these times.

So, the Westminster and larger catechisms, what have God especially decreed concerning angels, and you can read this on your own, but God has an eternal, immutable decree, out of mere love, for the praise of the glorious grace to be manifest in due time, have elected some angels to glory, and in Christ have chosen some men to eternal life and means thereof, according to his sovereign power and unsearchable counsel of his own will, whereby he extendeth and withholdeth favor as he pleatheth, hath passed by or ordained the rest to dishonor and wrath, to be their sins inflicted to the praise and glory of his justice.

Meaning is that their role is to oversee us. How did God create angels?

And he created angels, spirit, immortal, holy, excelling in knowledge, power, to execute his commandments and to praise his name, yet subject to change.

So, we may not have taken it as serious in our walk.

I think these end times, I think it's something that we should start to look at more, to be educated with, and know that it's part of our sanctification journey to know what

God has for us, including his other heavenly creatures. Michael Heiser, and I mentioned this last time,

Michael Heiser is a scholar who has kind of broken open the whole idea behind how we should be looking at the heavenly realm, the unseen realm, the divine counsel, which we can talk about, we'll talk about later.

And he has done some in -depth search through the scriptures and Dead Sea Scrolls, using the

Hebrew as well as the Greek, to kind of make a chasm between what was being said here in context to what the

Bible is saying now with its translation. And there's a lot of arguments that over here is not quite the same as over here in the sense of understanding what

God was trying to do. And when we look at our walk with the

Lord, obviously there's essentials and then there's non -essentials that we don't have to get hung up with.

One of the things I talked about in terms of hermeneutics or the exegesis of any sort of scripture, it's very, very important when you get into areas like this that you really dig in and do the research, that you're getting the right message of what's going on there.

A lot of things come to mind, Deuteronomy 13 -12, Genesis 6, 1 -4,

Psalms 82, 1 -6, there's a lot that leaves open to interpretation that translation changes the context of what's going on there.

And what Michael Heizer has done is he's tried to go back, and he's caught a lot of flack for this, because in the

Reformed community, they have a tendency to try to block anything that may be monotheistic, although he's not talking about that at all, and that we're, again, we're perseverating on the supernatural and not sticking to what they think that scripture is.

Again, it's something that you have to work through, as Paul says, you have to work through your salvation with it, too, to get to know what's going on there.

And please stop me with any questions there, because there's a lot of information here. I do not know how to explain it,

I cannot tell how it is, but I believe angels have a great deal to do with the business of this world,

Charles Spurgeon, which is pretty spot on in what's going on there. Now, we've had a lot of fallout with things like this, the witch trials, which ended up being radical, and kind of the gossip that ended up taking lives.

That's a typical example of how things can get out of whack, and the Reformed community wanted to stay far away from anything like that.

They didn't want to be warned by anything that's quite like that. So they were trying to keep its own pathways.

And what ended up happening over periods of time, they almost became like isolationists.

And some people, and when I was doing a lot of research on this thing, a lot of the fundamentalist movement was falling into that area.

Okay, but why is it important? Angelology helps us understand how God looks at us. Studying angels helps us understand our role as image -bearers, helps us understand how humankind was made in God's image in Genesis 1 .26,

and just as mankind is to be God's image -bearers on earth, heavenly hosts image God in a spiritual and non -terrestrial world.

And that has a theological importance, to understand where we're fitting there, and when we pass on, and we're in the heavenlies, we will be overseeing the angels.

So there's an important part of our task here, as believers and being in Christ, of what our task is going to be.

The second thing is angelology helps us understand where God wants us. And believers and heavenly hosts are both called children of God.

Now there's a big debate, and as we go through this,

I feel mad, I feel bad for you, because you had to go through this when it came to eschatology in LA.

There's a big debate about sons of gods. And it goes back to, again, it goes back to translation.

Elohim, there's two ways of looking at Elohim, there's God and there's gods. Angels in Elohim in Hebrew, small g, is the angels that God picked as the heavenly host to look over things.

So it goes into this area called the Divine Council, which we'll talk about later on.

But again, that's an area of debate among Reformers of what is real or not.

A lot of Reformers feel that they're talking about God's appointed leaders on this earth.

Hebrew pushes that, no, these are the overseers that God had appointed, angels that are appointed to oversee his creation and what had happened to his creation and the due judgment that's going to happen there.

So angelology helps us understand what God has planned for us. Many hold a boring view of eternal life and when we can just float about in the clouds and exist.

But as I just mentioned before, we will be over the angels when we are up in heaven.

And so it becomes important for us to kind of grasp this, the Bible about this misconception.

And, you know, we don't frolic in clouds. We're going to have a city, we're going to have a kingdom, and we're going to be our

Lord and Savior 24 -7. And we're going to be able to have, not

God's powers, but we'll have different types of powers in terms of understanding what his mandates are going to be.

So the scripture teaches us that, you know, there's hostile spiritual beings that held powers over the nations that will be judged.

It goes back to what I was just saying before about Elohim. And one of the things that we struggle with is that when we're reading scripture and we're trying to figure out, okay, how do we fit by all this?

We have to understand that the engine behind what is happening with us is that God gives us grace.

We have the scripture to give us direction, right? But it's really up to us through the

Holy Spirit to go do what God's will is. Not so with the angels. The angels, they split.

There were people, people I should say, there were angels that were demonic, and then there was angels that were totally dedicated to our

Lord. And so you have a difference here of how the mechanism is going to be working between image bearers that we are and what angels are.

And by the way, I'll have this up for everybody to get, and there's going to be an outline for you to follow too.

So I'll put it on the side. Go ahead. I did have a question on the last slide, the last verse of Genesis about ruling and reigning.

Who are we ruling and reigning over? Like aliens, of course. Well, we're supposed to be ruling over the earth.

And after we go past that, we're supposed to be ruling over the angels. That will be, that's what we'll do.

We're judging angels too. What's that? We're judging angels. Fallen angels.

Fallen angels. Thanks. Yeah, and when we, not the rapture, but when we get to the wife's arm of judgment and we go through that, we'll also see the punishment that's going to happen to all these angels, all these demons.

Because I think of angels, I think of just like good angels, but you're talking about like demon angels too, right? Right. And so the initial title of the slide was the whole, the whole message of what is happening here is about believing loyalty.

There's a constant theme that goes throughout scripture there. God is looking for loyal servants.

That's what he's looking for. Period. End of story. Loyal. And time and time again, when we look through scripture, one of the main lessons we see, especially through the

Israelites, is that they were not loyal. The only way God can do what he is going to do is he created the covenant to them and he doesn't lie and he will stick to the covenant.

But in other nations, and this goes back to the divine counsel of overseeing these other areas, he cast them aside, especially after the

Tower of Apple and what was happening. So he separated the nations, separated the language, sticked with the covenant there and it's about being loyal.

That's really is. And it falls in line also with the angels and the demons. Thanks. So we're sliding a mile.

So Christ created all the angels. You may not have known that.

And the angels were created before the earth was created. There's, again, a debate that happens in Genesis where God says, let us make man, or God says, let's make this, or God says, let's make that.

And the debate is, is he talking to the Trinity? Well, why would he be talking to Trinity?

They all know what each other thinking, saying, whatever. So he's talking to somebody.

And who is he talking to? So it adds credence to this whole other heavenly realm that's out there.

Again, there's another part of the debate that's happening there. So angels were created before the earth was created and was inferred to and all the sons of God sang with joy at the creation of the earth.

So there you have it. The purpose is to glorify God. And they were created as free moral agents.

There's a lot of scholarship in Hebrew where they had a sense of free will and to make decisions on what they were going to do.

They lived positively in a holy atmosphere. They lived in a heavenly environment. And they had great privilege in that.

They dwelt with God and were sons of God in the sense that they were direct creations of God.

But they had limitations. So they had limitations of space and power, authority, intellect, holiness, yet they were incredible in their abilities.

And they answered to God. Does that make sense for everybody?

So, and they had personalities. So they had knowledge of man's prayer and the future events among men as revealed to God.

And Luke, specifically, he talks about that. They had limited knowledge of God's plan, although they were there to help

Jesus if he needed their help. Twenty legions there.

And they were intelligent enough to carry out his wise and his great tasks. So we know that they have directives, although they had decision making on their own.

They perceived the purposes of man on occasion. And there are things that they do not fully understand, such as the redemption and humility of Christ in his incarnation.

So that is a part where, and if you can think of it, if you think of it through our human lens, you can understand part of this is like, well,

God, you created us and we worship you and we love you. Why are you doing, why would you do this for humans?

Like, why, why would that happen? You know, and they don't have the ability, at least through scripture, understanding to understand what the full motive is there.

Now, now, since Christ did come back, now they see the greater plan, but during that process.

Okay. They also have emotion. They responded to God's power and wisdom. They worship

God in a deep sense of awe and humble reverence. Isaiah specifically talks about that with the seraphims.

And then they rejoice when every sinner repents. So every time the

Lord accepts us into his fold, all of the angels cry out in joy.

And they also have will, this free will that was just mentioned before. So God appeals to their wills by commanding them to worship

Christ and Lucifer and his angels that turned into demons, rebuild against God.

And it's when you're reading in Ezekiel and you've seen the reference in Isaiah, it's hard to imagine that, that someone that close to God.

And that one day we're going to be there would reject the creator of everything.

And it's, it's, our minds cannot capture that. It's just not able to go ahead and internalize that and say, okay,

I see the motivation. It just, just doesn't make sense. But with that, he has complete hatred for God and he has complete hatred for his image.

So as images of God, he hates us. Okay, there's, there's three properties that we see in scripture in terms of spirit beings, special appearances, spiritual wings.

That's kind of like the conventional idea of what thinking about them. And scripture doesn't really attribute bodies to angels.

When we, when we're thinking about Genesis in six, one through four, they, the angels or the demons that came down basically took on bodies.

They didn't come in as a form like that to do what they did. Some hold that they have bodies made or refined matter, material different from humans.

Others say a spiritual body. As I mentioned last week, when I had that encounter with my roommate in Boston, that person was real.

So, I mean, he looked like one of us. And Paul mentions that, that you may be around an angel, not even knowing that.

And when the angels came to take a lot out of Sodom, well, Sodomites thought they could be raped.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Most of them appear as men. Yes. Very attractive men.

Right. They sometimes described as men, masculine pronoun and mark.

And when they appear, they generally take a form of a man. And their lifespan, they're not subject to death.

They will finally, the demons will finally meet their end as it's going to be revealed in Revelations.

But as the death that we will encounter, they do not encounter. And their appearance there, they do have a special appearance.

They're normally invisible, but they can appear to the will of God. They come as a dream.

They come as a vision. They'll come to the servants. They can cause mental agitation, emotional agitation.

Mary was one that went through that as the angel was there and explaining what was happening. And they can cause mental and physical weaknesses as the

Roman guard when he was removing the stones, the bright light that was there. Okay.

And behold, in Matthew 28 to 4, behold, there was a great earthquake for an angel of the

Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. And his countenance was like lightning and his clothing as white as snow.

And the guards shook for fear and became like dead men. Now, we know there's a Shekinah glory that's there.

Everybody's familiar with Shekinah, right? So glorified there. That came from Christ when he appeared with Elijah and Moses and the disciples fell down because they couldn't believe what they were seeing.

Something there. I can't, I don't know if this was the same thing, but it was enough to scare the guards there to get out of the way, to move and not do anything.

And we know the political story behind later on what happens with all this. Um, do all angels have wings?

In the scholarship of it, there's not really much in the Hebrew scripture that talks about wings except for seraphims and cherubims that have it.

So Gabriel was called to fly swiftly in Daniel and in John saw an angel of judgment fly in the midst of heaven.

But as far as we know, they can move without any wings or anything like that.

The, the seraphim and the cherubim, that was their role. So that was what they were doing to do what they needed to do for the

Lord, to cover themselves or else they would have, well, you can't really look at the Lord and destroy it.

So what do they enjoy that angels do not enjoy? Okay, there are some angels that do not fully understand, as I mentioned before, about the redemption and humility of Christ in his incarnation.

Incarnation. And Paul references this of 1 Peter 1, 10 through 12.

It's very, very important to understand the full scope of what the free will of angels have and understanding their intellect and their roles of the responsibility to God.

Of this salvation, the prophets have inquired and searched carefully who prophesized of the grace that would come to you, us.

To them, it was revealed that not to themselves, but to us. So already there's a division that's, that's happened over here that God is revealing to us and not to them.

But to us, they were ministering to things which now have been reported to you through those who have preached the gospel to you by the

Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things which the angels desire to look into. So this speaks volumes about the indwelling of the

Holy Spirit in our hearts who is speaking to us all the time. That the

Holy Spirit separated himself from the angels there and indwells our minds and our bodies and is part of us.

It's an incredible thing when you think about it that we have this privilege and opportunity to be in that presence of the

Lord outside of what's happening there in the heavenly host. So I would encourage you to read this up.

So angels do not know what it's like to be born again, and they don't experience redemption.

So again, it's another way of us as image bearers of God, how we're so separated.

And it kind of sets the stage of what's going to happen later on when we meet the Lord in heaven overall.

Okay. Does everybody understand this? Beholding angels never sinned.

Yes. So they don't have to be born again. So the activities of angels in relation to God, in relation to Christ, to the

Epics, and to believers. These eight characteristics that they do in terms of their directives from God is revealing, guiding, providing, protecting, delivering, strengthening, and encouraging.

Agents of answering prayer and attendance upon the righteous dead. So we'll go through this quickly.

We have about 15 more minutes. So in revealing, God uses angels to communicate his will and word to men and sacrifice.

Very clear there. The angels predicted the birth of John the Baptist, came up to explain that.

And there's other areas in scripture where the angels communicated what God's directives were going to be. In guiding, the angels guided

Joseph to take Mary as his wife, the virgin -born Jesus as his own son. Women who come to Jesus' empty tomb were guided by angels.

The angels guided Philip to the Ethiopians while the Holy Spirit appointed the exact person.

And as soon as he was finished, the angels moved him away, took him someplace else. And the angels directed

Cornelius to send for Peter to inform him how to be saved. So it's pretty amazing how angels intercede and help during this time when

God gives them the directive to make the changes of their path. And they also provide, as the administrator of the man's physical needs, such as water to Hagar, or angels providing

Elijah a cake baked on coal and a cruise of water. Um, so they do come down to minister to us.

Richard, do you want to say something? Um, well, I was gonna say one of the first things

Jesus warned about in the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 is do not be deceived.

He didn't, he meant by false teachers, but also angels. Yeah. Look, a false angel calling itself

Gabriel fooled Muhammad. A false angel calling itself Moroni fooled

Joseph Smith. Right. Yeah. So we could be deceived by fallen angels now. Yeah. And next week, we're going to go through that in the demonology part of what it is and why there's a rise of false teachers and who is leading them and what is the influencers behind all that.

Um, and what you're saying is so on point where we don't know, we have, and Jeff talks about this all the time.

We need to go to scripture to find truth. People who go through assumptions, um, it becomes a, this sort of rabbit hole where they never find the bottom of what's, what's going to happen and definitely in terms of their believership.

And so, and we'll talk about this next week in terms of what demons do in terms of deceiving.

That's one of the main things that Satan has them doing for them through false teachers, through false scripture, through false, almost everything.

And just deceiving people by, by not sometimes lying, but just bending the truth just enough to get them off the line.

Um, so, uh, angels are protecting. God sends his angels to shut the lion's mouth while Daniel was in the lion's den.

Um, he's also there. Remember this shattered, the three

Hebrew youth. There was also angel in there, there. And then, um,

Elisha and servant, uh, the angelic army, when Elisha said, open your eyes.

And when God opened the person's eyes, he saw legions of angels out there ready to, to attack.

Um, and then it's also for delivering. Angels open the doors of the prison for the apostles.

And likewise for Peter, an angel caused his change to fall off and the prison's doors are open. Now, as I was doing all this, so many of these things

I read, I just kind of like, let it go. You know, I just like, okay, yeah, that's part of the business of whatever, until I really read what all the things they were doing.

And it's, it's absolutely amazing that all, all the jobs that they do, um, strengthening, encouraging, um, they were trying to strengthen

Christ just before he was being crucified, encouraging the apostles to keep on preaching.

Um, and then Paul was encouraged by an angel, uh, to predict his safety at sea for his ministry in Rome.

Um, and it's also when, uh, the Holy Spirit told him not to continue and move in another direction.

There was also an angel there to help guide him away from that. Um, and then there was also agents of answered prayer.

So Daniel's prayer for Israel's restoration resulted in Gabriel's swift flight to instruct him for the future, although he was delayed, um, for his fight.

Um, and an angel came to give Daniel strength after he fasted and prayed for three weeks.

And the early church for, prayed for Peter's freedom from the prison, an angel was sent there to release him.

Um, this just, this is just one example. If you think about what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah, and the angels came down there at the gate there to rescue

Lot and his family before Sodom was destroyed. That's just another example of that happening.

And then the activities of an angel, uh, the attendance of, upon the righteous death, that Jesus spoke with the angels carrying

Lazarus' spirit to Abraham's bosom upon his death. And then this one in June 9, where Michael the archangel was disputing with Satan over Moses' body.

Um, and that just gives you two examples of that. All right. And so, um, angel ministered to God's children.

Are they angels not all ministering spirits sent forth to minister for those who will inherit salvation?

The question's there. And we, we have the answers for that. So, now there's, there's dispute about this.

Again, this is another place where, uh, people have debates about hierarchies there.

Um, there's some scholarship behind it, but there's three tiers of hierarchies with angels.

The seraphim, cherubims, and the thrones being the highest. The reason why they say that's the highest, because they're the closest to God.

They're, they're the ones that are right there in his presence all the time. And, um, and their, their reasoning is, is that there's a reason why

God has them there, um, for their purpose. The middle is about dominions and powers and authorities.

Um, they're the ones who are overseers, um, and we'll go through that with the divine counsel.

And the lowest ones that they're saying is the principalities, archangels, and angels.

Um, and those we, we read about all, a lot of times in the, in the Bible with what their different tasks are there.

Again, this is highly debated, um, but it's just interesting to think of it like that. It was, it was there.

Okay. And, um, there's four main views on what are angels there.

The Logos theory is the angels of Yahweh, Lord in caps, is the actual pre -existent

Logos or God, um, who would later be incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ.

So that's, that's the first one. The angelic theory, the second one is the angel of Yahweh is seen as a literal, literal angel, um, a created heavenly being, which is obviously not true.

The interpolation theory, this theory claims that certain passages in the older text of the

Old Testament describes Yahweh in terms of being too anthropomorphic, uh, for the ancient

Israelites, thus redactors added the word angels of before the divine name.

And then the last one is the instrumental theory. This theory asserts that the angel of Yahweh is some sort of manifestation of Yahweh.

This could be understood in terms of the theophany, the revelation of God or a picture of the presence of Yahweh with his people.

So obviously the first one is the one we lean towards the most. And I need to see how much time is because I tried to get through this as quickly as fast.

So divine counsel, and it's funny because I got an email from, uh, from Drew today about the divine, divine counsel.

Yeah. And, um, and Drew was questioning about, um, about Psalms 82.

I'll read it to you and you tell me what you all think, because it's a interesting passage.

Um, and it actually talks about, uh, the kind of the split of the reform orthodoxy versus, uh, what is happening with other religions and also the interpretations that have our translation from the

Bible. So from the ESV, um, from the Psalm of Asaph, it says,

God has taken, this is, uh, verse one, God has taken his place in the divine counsel.

In the presence of the gods, he holds judgment. How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?

Give justice to the weak and the fatherless. Maintain the rights of the afflicted and the destitute.

Rescue the weak and the needy and deliver them from the hands of the wicked. They have neither the knowledge nor understanding.

They walk about in darkness. All the foundations of the earth are shaken. I said, you are

God's son of the most high. All of you, nevertheless, like men, you shall die and fall like any prince.

Arise, O God, judge the earth, for you shall inherit all nations. Now, to me, this is kind of straightforward.

You know, it kind of reveals that, that God is not talking to man directly, um, the fall of his man, but in a lot of reformed circles, they, they take the position is, is that he's talking about the rulers and leaders of the earth and the human beings here that are, that are responsible for what's going on there.

So, um, so this is, again, another area of debate. Um, I, I think it's more straightforward than what it is.

I think that if God's saying, you are God's son of the most high, all of you, nevertheless, like men, that kind of, that kind of changes the way the perspective is there.

Um, you shall die and fall like any prince. So we, we have to kind of delve deeper into this.

Um, a good tool to follow, uh, with this is, um, is the

Logos, uh, software. I mean, it's excellent because you can go ahead and look at the Hebrew, uh, translations on there.

I agree. And what? And Greek. Yeah. And the Greek. Yeah. And it's just very, very good to do that.

So the term, the Divine Council, a term used by Hebrew scholars for the heavenly host, the assembly of divine beings who administer the affairs of the cosmos under Yahweh, the

God of Israel. All ancient Mediterranean cultures have some sort of conception of the

Divine Council, including Israel. However, Israel, Israelite's religion, Divine Council was distinct.

The structure of the Israelites Divine Council has implications for understanding God and the unseen world in biblical theology.

So again, it, is it essential? It all depends.

You know, I think it's something that you need to put into your, your, uh, sanctification toolkit as you're, as you're learning it and, and growing into the scriptures to really understand what, what this means to them in terms of the context of what was happening during the beginning times there.

Okay. And I'll talk about this next week, again, of how the Divine Council actually has a place, pretty big role in demonology.

And I won't go into all the things here because, Lord help us.

And right now I feel like Matt, because Matt, Matt had the same type of things when he was there. Just read the

Hebrew. Yeah, yeah. Just read the Hebrew. Um, but this gives us, this gives the background of the

Divine Council from the translation and, um, and I, and the controversy of the

Divine Council. And basically when it came there was probably the, from the fear that it would undermine a belief in monotheism.

That's really what was driving a lot of this. And there's examples here of how, um, how the translation changes from the

ESV and RSV and the CEV when you take the Hebrew and you try to put it into that context.

And it can change the way, the delivery of the messages. So, um, so that, that's that there.

Okay. And then, again, I will talk about this next week because we're sort of running out of time here.

But the translations are, are just, uh, they really speak for themselves about what the

Divine Council is about. Okay. And I don't know if I have time to play this little video.

Sure, you got time. You got time? Okay, let me see. All right.

Cut and paste. Yep. Let me see if I can do this. Hold on. Let's see.

And there's my wife. I hope that's your wife. Hey, get this thing over here.

What's that? It didn't look like Ivan. Troublemaker.

Well, guys,

I may have a, yeah. Well, there's no mouse on this thing.

This is a select all. Select all. Sorry, guys.

Maybe it wasn't here. Maybe it has it.

This better be a great video. Oh, just put anything on it.

Yeah, okay. I'll tell you what, guys. I'm not. Worst case, I think I can stream it from my phone right now.

Bring up the thing again. Okay. And you can stream right here?

Yeah. Yeah, you probably have to accept. It's a short video, so.

It's always good to be with my brothers. So now, go to, hit home on the remote.

Or unplug your thing. Okay, go home on the remote.

Home on the remote. This be all edited out.

Is that Android? No. Turn that TV on.

Okay. TV on.

I can see it coming on. There we go.

There we go. Matthew, don't disappoint me. Don't talk about it all the way.

There we go. On the side, the world as we know it.

Right. And the biblical authors are no exception. Yeah, for them, the spiritual realm is a different kind of realm than ours.

And to highlight that difference, the Bible refers to God's space as the sky or the heavens. Because the sky is really different from the land.

It's above and beyond. And up there are shiny bodies that move around. Sorry, maximizing.

Way to go. Move around. I think of these as flaming gas balls. But when the biblical authors looked up, the stars gave them a way to talk and think about spiritual beings.

In the Bible, they're called the sons of God or the rulers and authorities, or even sometimes the divine counsel.

So that sounds really important. What does the divine counsel do? Well, they're introduced in Genesis chapter one, where they're called the host of heaven.

That is the sun, moon, and stars. And there, they're also called signs, meaning that their power and status symbolizes and points to God's power and status.

Yeah, so in Genesis one, God appoints them to rule over the day and night. Exactly. And then later in the

Bible, we're told that they were celebrating God's power and creativity when he created the world.

Like the cheering section of a game. Yeah, right. There are also stories in the Bible where God invites the divine counsel to participate in making a decision.

Like when they help decide how to bring down the corrupt Israelite King Ahab. Or in the book of Job, where they debate

God's policy of rewarding people who do good. So they're like God's staff team. But why does

God need a team? If he's powerful enough to create the whole universe, he could surely rule it without any help.

Well, he doesn't need them. But apparently the God of the Bible wants to share authority with others.

Oh, right. God shares his rule with human partners on earth. And so in the same way, there's a parallel story of God sharing his authority to rule with spiritual partners.

Yes, that is until it all falls apart in a twin rebellion. So you have humans who want to rule on earth on their own terms.

So they start building their own nation using their own definitions of good and evil. You have a famous story of the building of Babylon.

But check this out. When biblical authors like Moses or Isaiah looked back at the origins of Babylon, they saw more than just a human rebellion, but also a spiritual rebellion.

What was the spiritual rebellion? Well, there were members of the divine counsel who, like the humans, didn't want to represent

God's authority anymore. They wanted to be God, and they rebelled. And so these created beings deceived humans into worshiping them instead of the creator.

And so Babylon becomes the biblical image for the combined human and spiritual rebellion.

And so God scatters the people from Babylon into different nations. And in the book of Deuteronomy, Moses says this is when

God also scattered the rebels of the divine counsel with them. So the nations are handed over to spiritual rulers.

Yes. And this is why when the biblical prophets look out at the violent empires of their day, they see two dimensions to all the chaos and injustice.

Human rebels who are being corrupted by the worship of spiritual rebels, the idol gods of money, sex, and military power.

Yeah, when humans give their allegiance to these powers, it leads to a war by commerce. Right. And the best example of this is the story of the

Exodus, where we're told that the Egyptian genocide of the Israelites was inspired by Pharaoh and by the gods of Egypt.

That's really intense. But that's not the end of the story. When God rescued the Israelites from Egypt and its gods, he invited them to become his covenant partners and learn a different way of ruling the world.

And they agree to it. But in the end, they don't honor the partnership. They give their allegiance to other gods, to other gods.

And so this leads to their exile in Babylon, where they become slaves once again to a foreign nation and their spiritual rulers awaiting a new exodus into freedom.

And this is where the story of Jesus picks up. He said he was here to rescue the world and take it back from the rebels.

Which rebels, the human ones or the spiritual ones? Exactly. For Jesus, it was all connected.

When he marched into Jerusalem for Passover, he was announcing the ultimate exodus. He was there to confront and overcome all rebel powers and authorities.

And he did it by giving up his life. So this is what the Apostle Paul meant when he said that Jesus disarmed the powers and authorities, triumphed over them by the cross.

Yes, Jesus condemned our evil by allowing the rebels to unleash all their hate and evil on him.

But then he overcame it with the power of his love and resurrection life. And then Jesus told his followers that all authority in heaven and earth now belongs to him.

Now the ultimate human and divine partner. This is really good news. Yeah, and it's why the apostles started inviting everyone to give their allegiance to the risen

Jesus. To discover freedom and a new way to be human. Now while Jesus gained a decisive victory over the rebel powers, he didn't destroy them.

They're still around, causing problems. Yes, and in fact, they are the problem. The apostles said that humanity's real enemy is never another human.

Rather, it's the spiritual powers that animate our cultural idols that inspire hatred, division and violence.

That's when I see people hurting other people. Behind it is the divine counsel gone rogue.

How do you deal with this kind of enemy? Well, the apostle Paul said we can resist by putting on the character traits of Jesus like armor, faithfulness, justice and peace.

And he said that our only weapon is the word of God. That is the biblical story of good news that Jesus has overcome all rebels with the divine power of his life and love.

That is the end of the angelology presentation here.

Next week we're going to be going into demonology and some of the theology that is also propagating demonology.

Believe it or not, there is theology that's behind all that. Does anybody have any questions?

Can you repeat that? Excuse me?

Can you repeat that? Do you have any questions? Do you have any questions? The whole session.

I know. I really felt like you,

Matt. I was trying to run through it as fast as I possibly can and still be cogent to everybody to understand what was going on there.

But I'm going to have an outline for you here to follow, plus the presentation itself, and then some more background in terms of the ranks of angels and some of the debates there.

So that will be, I'll make sure that they have all the links. Yeah, Rod. It's interesting, you know, growing up and just watching church angels, it's always a positive thing.

And yet we know, as believers, that Satan is the god of this world.

Yeah. And people don't understand that concept, what it means, and the fact that Ephesians tells us we don't wrestle against the human being.

So we're not wrestling against the human beings, but wickedness in high places, spiritual wickedness, principalities and powers.

And people don't understand that. And a lot of believers, I don't think, recognize when they're struggling with something that we're struggling.

This is the area we're struggling in. And our power comes from emulating

Christ as Christ went against Satan and came back up three times with the word of God to scatter them.

And even at that point, they would come back later on to go after him again. So we do have a relentless battle, but a battle that was already won by Christ, and we have to get that perpetrated in our minds and really have that peace that passes all understanding to know that he already accomplished that for us.

Absolutely, amen. Yeah, one of the things that when the first class that we had here in apologetics,

I had put the argument out there that you really can pinpoint what the beginning of the problems were.

One is, is that do we believe and accept and there is a sovereign

God? Or do we want to be God? Which is really the beginning point, the start point of us as the image bearers.

That's really the start point. Everything else falls underneath that. And then on top of that, if you kind of look at it that way from us, that happened in Eden, then on top of that, you have this spiritual war that has taken place that they're also having a split in terms of demons versus angels and what

God had done in terms of giving them the will to go ahead and make decisions. It was very convicting when

I was doing the research for me, where I was realizing that so many things, to your point, so many things penetrate what is happening in my life, not only by my decisions, but the influence of what the spiritual world can do with my decision making.

So I felt it was just like, wow, it was eye -opening in that respect.

And something else that has been clarified a lot of times when I'm dealing with therapists and believers is the fact that we have to look back and recognize, we're talking about God's sovereignty, but know that Satan goes before God.

And God says to Satan, have you noticed my servant Job, there's no one more upright or righteous than he is.

And Satan says, well, yeah, you have a hedge around that. God lets it get taken down. Job had everything, loses everything, and what comes out of his mouth?

The Lord gives, the Lord takes away, and lets it be in the name of the Lord. And I sat back when I read that, realizing that that could happen to me or any of us when

I respond with the same heartfelt thing that Job had. I mean, he didn't lose a little bit. He lost everything.

But he recognized the things he had weren't everything. God was everything in his life. And is that true in my life?

I don't know if all you gentlemen here feel about tomorrow, but in one way, it's a political thing.

In another way, when we're looking at it as believers, we're actually seeing like this dark versus light happening.

It's really real in our face, more so than any time in my life where I was with Satan.

It seems like when I was growing up, everything was kind of hidden away or was behind things.

Now everything's out front. Everything's in our faces. And it seems like the dark part of this world is just not afraid anymore.

They're just going to go ahead and put it out there. So the agenda, so to speak, for tomorrow, it may be political, but to me anyway,

I think it's more of a light versus dark to see what's happening. And when you look at it from that context and you're seeing it from that context, you can see the sheep from the goats.

I mean, you can actually see it happening. And Jeff, God bless him. Jeff has been trying to explain that in many ways.

And he's been getting hit in the chin because of it, of trying to explain it. But there is a light and dark here that is really real.

And if you don't understand the concept of that, it's very hard for believers to navigate this world unless you see it for what it is.

And I think that's one of the biggest challenges for believers now is that if the churches aren't speaking truth, how can we have a clear understanding of what is happening in the world and my decision making that's taking place will end up being influenced not just by the

Holy Spirit, but also by this dark place. And so it is, Rod, to your point, it's a constant battle.

It's a constant battle. We have to open our eyes. Yeah, Tim. With that concept in mind, even within the political realms, there are doctrines of demons that are being done within the political realm that winds up influencing the church in amazingly negative ways.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I think that's probably the biggest challenge. Well, I had mentioned a couple times when

I was teaching was the church gets so focused on the world that they forget that the biggest problem we have is our church.

You know, we're not focusing on our church. We're focusing on the world. And it is probably the biggest challenge that we're having.

I had mentioned before about Jeff's two books, which I think are excellent when it brings down the argument of what's happening in World Free Church and the

Blood Red Church. And there really are case studies that he has within those contexts of understanding that there is almost everything is a light and dark to what's happening there.

And churches refuse to recognize that part. And he's not afraid to call out people on what's going on there.

And it's something that we need to be very vigilant about, almost obstinate about it, because there's no compromise.

There's never going to be a compromise. There's going to be this battle where we're going to end up rolling over, which we have rolled over.

We would have gotten to this place if we hadn't rolled over. And it wasn't purposeful.

It was under this false guise that to be a Christian, you had to be nice.

And being nice allowed the door to be opened just a little bit. And that's all you need.

The door to be opened a little bit. You don't have to be a legalist. You don't have to be a fundamentalist of that genre.

But you need to recognize that something is awry. Something is going wrong. Something is not scripturally sound.

And to have the strength and the boldness to go ahead and call it out for what it is.

My own anecdotal story about this is when I was in school in Princeton Theological Seminary where I saw it years ago.

And at first, I could not understand it. My second year there, I finally realized something is fundamentally wrong.

Because in my own Christian mind, I'm saying, well, aren't they believing in the same

Jesus that I'm there for? And it took a while for me to get around to the fact that no, they're not.

No, their agenda is completely different. And I really struggled with it.

I really, really struggled with it. There were times where trying to even just bring the argument and debate there.

And we're talking about very, very smart, intellectually brilliant people that were my colleagues there and having these arguments, debates.

And the one common thread that ended up happening was I was the odd one out. I wasn't the person that was driving the conversation to truth.

They were developing their own subjective truth, not the objective truth of what Scripture talks about. And so I was the one that was out.

And I realized then, and I think that we as brothers need to realize that you can't be quiet about it.

You have to say something about it. You don't have to be mean about it, but you have to be truthful about it. And you have to be bold about it.

And you cannot be quiet about it. And it happened to me in school and seminary.

I know that Matt's seen it over with his kids in his school. It's happening in the politics.

It's happening in the churches. It's happening in every segment of our lives. And so when we don't give enough respect to the spiritual world that's driving a lot of what the agenda is, because basically their whole idea is that let's keep on kicking the can down the road because we don't want the

Lord to come and then have the Great White Throne of Judgment and then we're going to get out of here. Their best thing is to kick the can down the road that we're not going to have believership.

And it becomes important for us to go ahead and speak about truth. And we do it in a loving way, but in a forceful way too.

That we need to go ahead and defend our faith. This is how the whole class started. This is what Apologize is about, that you have the equipment and the boldness to go ahead and really defend yourself.

Jeff does it every Thursday. He goes to Princeton. He goes to my neck of the woods down there and he talks to people.

And he's calling it evangelizing, but he's spending his whole time debating the students there on the faith that he has in Jesus Christ.

And they need to hear it from that perspective. So it becomes important for us to go ahead and do that.

I can't stress it enough. The Lord put us here for a purpose to go ahead and do that.

We don't have to be jerks about it, but we have to defend the faith. Do you have anybody else?

The one thing I admire is the pastor in Canada who went to jail.

And John McArthur, who's standing very firm in the faith and back in Christ all the time.

He gets attacked constantly, but he's right there in front taking a stand for what's true. And everything's starting to be revealed now, especially with the pandemic.

It's starting to all come out and we'll probably learn more and more in the next coming months. My wife just told me today, you know, she works for Penn Medicine and there's a class action lawsuit now against Penn Medicine for the vaccine.

So it's all starting to come to surface. To be honest, I didn't think that was ever going to happen to Penn Medicine, considering how much influence they had.

So hopefully things will continue to change. In the end, God does win. He does control all things.

He is sovereign over all of us. And so it's going to be to his glory.

But we're going to go through a little bit of pain to get there. That's one thing Rod said. What would happen if what happened to Joe happened to him?

My answer is we would trust in God's sovereignty. You know, we take it all away, enter this world with nothing,

I'll leave with nothing. Exactly. That's the only thing we have. I'll leave with Jesus. So anybody else have anything to say?

Okay, so next week, like I said, next week we're going to talk about demonology, and then some of the rogue religions that are promoting some of the demonologies there, which is surprising to me.

Phil, could you close us out for a minute? Dear Lord, we just thank you for revealing yourself to us in greater ways.

Lord, we thank you for Ivan's preparation, Lord. And God, we just humble ourselves before you.

We pray that you would use us as your ambassadors and as your ministers on the search to the lost and dying who need to hear your gospel,

Lord. We just pray that everything we learn here, Lord, will just equip us to carry out the task of the great commission that you called us to,

Lord. And we just give you this evening, and we ask for traveling mercies home, and just ask for a blessing on each one's family here.