Fallen: Sons of God by Dr. Tim Chaffey

And I think we're live streaming now too. Okay, let's go. So I'm Terry Kammerzell here on behalf of Creation Fellowship Santee. We love to learn about our creator God and believe the Bible when read properly rules out the possibility of millions or even, or especially billions of years.

We used to meet for 10 years in person at the Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee, California. Then and online. Our goal is to rally the remnant so we can defend our faith. You can see a list of our upcoming speakers by visiting tiny URL .com forward slash CF Santee that's see like creation.

Tonight we're happy to welcome Dr. Tim Chafee. Dr. Chafee is the content manager for the Attractions Division of Answers in Genesis, but he also has his own ministry called Midwest Apologetics. He's earned his Master of Theology degree from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary after successfully defending his thesis on the sons of God and the Nephilim.

And that is the topic of one of his most recent books and also what he's going to be sharing with us tonight. So with that, I'll turn it over to you.

The Sons of God and the Nephilim in Genesis 6

All right. Well, good evening, or if you're watching this on delay. Good morning or good afternoon, whatever it is. I'm happy to be with you today. So thank you for the introduction. And as you said, I work at Answers in Genesis as the content manager and so I do want to give a disclaimer as a ministry, AIG does not take an official position on many of the things that we're going to talk about tonight.

We have more of a non-position position as far as that's our official view on this topic, but our speakers are allowed to talk about their own views as long as we give that little disclaimer that I just did.

So with that out of the way, let me share my screen here and we'll pull up my PowerPoint so you can look at that rather than me. And there we go. Is that working? So let me jump in. Yes, it is. Yeah. Perfect.

Well, it's great to be with you. And what I want to do in this presentation is I know I've got about 45 to 50 minutes to present on this and then do a little bit of time for questions afterwards. This is a nearly 500 page book.

So I'm going to try to condense it down into that 45 minutes. So I'm going to move quickly. Hopefully you can stay with me. And here we go. So the whole topic really comes from just a moment, my slide.

There we go. From a few verses in the Bible, Genesis 6 verses 1 through 4 is the first time we see the word Nephilim. And that's not to be confused with the term sons of God. And what we're going to do in this presentation, we're going to spend the first half talking about the identity of the sons of God.

And then the second half talking about the identity of the Nephilim. There are a lot of people who will conflate those two terms and they're not the same thing. They're not the same entities. So we'll talk about that as we go.

So in Genesis 6 it begins with, and it came to pass or came about when mankind began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them. But the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were beautiful, and they took wives, took for themselves wives from any they chose.

And Yahweh said, My spirit will not remain with man indefinitely in that he is flesh, his days will be 120 years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward, whenever the sons of God went into the daughters of men who bore to them children, they were the mighty men of antiquity, men of renown.

And the other verse that has the word Nephilim in it, it appears twice is Numbers 1333. This is when the spies returned from spying out the promised land and they come back to get their report and they say there also we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim.

And we became like grasshoppers in our own sight and so we became in their sight. And you might be wondering how on earth can somebody write nearly 500 pages on those five verses. I think that was my first thought as well.

In fact, when I was working on my THM thesis I was wondering how can I do 150 pages on this and quickly realized there is much more to it than I imagined at the start. So there's some key terms in that passage we need to look at.

First of all, obviously the sons of God, as I mentioned, that's going to be our focus for the first half here that's the the Hebrew has been a hot as a team. And then the daughters of men, which is the note Adam, Adam, or Adam, the daughters of Adam basically the daughters of men, and then the Nephilim, and then the mighty men that you saw in verse four.

That's the Hebrew word gibbering. So we'll talk about those as we go along here. So there are three primary views throughout church history about who the sons of God are or were. And the first one that was the most popular view in church history has is called the Sethite view.

That is that the sons of God are descendants of Seth, Adam's son Seth and they're talking about in Genesis five it takes you from Adam through Seth all the way down to Noah. So they'll say that the, the sons of God are in that lineage, and they married female descendants in the line of Cain, who are, you know, Cain's line is talked about at the end of chapter four.

The royalty view says that they, the sons of God were either kings, tyrants, judges, people who were in authority, nobility who viewed themselves as divine. And so that's then their offspring could be called sons of God if they're divine than their, their offspring with sons of God and their sin.

According to this view is when it says they took wives of whoever they chose. Well, that means they were just going around taking women and adding them to their harems and so the sin here primarily is polygamy.

And then that's part of the judgment, the reason for the flood judgment is has to do with that. The other view, the fallen angel view and this is the oldest view as far as we know, and it's the one that I'm going to be defending tonight is that the sons of God are heavenly beings.

Sometimes people would say angel, you know, we call it the fallen angel view. They're rebellious heavenly beings who left heaven, and they, they had affairs or married women, and their offspring were the Nephilim which is the word that means giants.

Some people think that the fallen angels just possessed, so these demons are possessing men. And so that's kind of an offshoot of that view but that's not really what the text says at all there's no indication of that.

So I don't hold that particular variant of this view but that one's kind of, if you could say it's sort of trying to reach a middle ground but it is not supported by the text. So there is apologetic value in this topic sometimes people say why would you even bother studying this well, part of it is because I want to have a consistent hermeneutic all the way throughout scripture.

You just from Genesis one all the way to the end of Revelation, I think we can take God at his word I don't think that we need to start to allegorize certain passages or come up with strange interpretation that don't really fit the context of the passage I think we can have a consistent hermeneutic.

And it also explains the severity of the judgment of the flood, and the severity of the judgment during the conquest. And I think if we don't have the right view on this topic, sometimes we will miss what's going on in those two passages.

And it demonstrates that mankind had a common history prior to Babel, as we'll see. So let's take a look real quickly at these three primary views of the identity of the sons of God. The first one, the Sethite view, as I mentioned before, you do get some of that discussion contextually so chapter four and chapter five do discuss the descendants of Cain and Seth.

And it, we do know that some of the Sethite men were godly, Enoch and Noah clearly were godly, and we know that some of the Cainites were ungodly like Cain and the last guy in his line named Lamech, the guy who's a polygamist and then he murders a young man, brags about it.

So he clearly was not a great guy. And as I mentioned before, it was a dominant view in church history really from about the fourth century up until about 100 years ago, it was the dominant view. But there are major problems with it, huge textual problems with it, because it's not supported by the text at all.

If we take a look at this passage, you'll see that it says in verse one, it came about when mankind began to multiply in the face of the earth and daughters were born to them. Daughters were born to who?

Well, to man who was multiplying on the face of the earth. In other words, this is a general term for mankind. And it's talking about the daughters of those men. Then verse two, it says the sons of God saw the daughters of men.

Well, who are the daughters of men there? They have to be the same as who the ones in verse one, which is daughters of men in general, not daughters of a certain line of man from, in this case, the Sethi view would say it's the descendants of Cain, but that's not at all what the text says.

It's just telling us men in general. So they have to change the meaning of daughters of men from verse one to verse two. Then if you look in verse three, God says, my spirit will not remain in man indefinitely.

So they go from verse one, mankind is universal. Verse two, it's particular, just this one group. Verse three, you're back to man in general. Then in verse four, when it talks about daughters of men again, you're back to mankind particular, just a certain group of them.

And there's no hermeneutical warrant for changing, you know, who is being identified in each of these passages. But they do it because it fits their view and yet you would never get that if you're just following the rules of grammar.

But where does it ever tell us all the Sethites are godly? Where does it say that everyone in Noah's lineage, you know, going back to Seth, where does it say all of them are godly? Where does it say all the Cainites are ungodly?

The text never tells us those things. And so that those ideas are assumed to be true. There are two people in Cain's line that have the one of God's titles or the EL at the end of their name. We don't know.

I'm not saying that means they were godly, but there does seem to be an acknowledgement of God, at least in that line. Why would we automatically assume they're all ungodly? And why would we assume all the Sethites are godly when we read that?

Because at the end, before the flood comes, there's a bunch of Sethites on the earth. There's a bunch of Cainites. And there's a bunch of other people too, because Adam and Eve had a lot of other sons and daughters.

And so it's not just two lines. And it tells us that pretty much all of mankind was wicked. That would include Sethites as well. So why would we assume that this line stayed godly? And if they were so godly, why do they keep marrying ungodly women?

Of course, that could happen occasionally. But would they continually do this, that they were godly men? And why such a harsh judgment for believer marrying unbeliever? This is something that's happened throughout history, and we don't see God sending a worldwide judgment for that.

I'm not saying that—I'm not trying to make light of the idea of a believer marrying unbeliever, because we know that's not supposed to be done. But again, why such a harsh judgment? And why would the offspring be mighty men of old, men of renown?

Why would they be giants? It doesn't make any sense when believer marries unbeliever. You don't produce giants. And it doesn't explain the existence of the Nephilim post-flood. Because if the Cainites are wiped out in the flood, which they were, because you just have the line of Seth going through, then where do these ones come from if they're descendants—if they're the offspring of the descendants of Cain and Seth?

So the text does not support the Sethite view at all. There's a reason why nobody held that view as far as we know until the 4th century in church history, because it just was something that came along much later.

The royalty view—let's take a look at that real quickly. This one was originally held by some Jewish rabbis at the end of the 1st century, early 2nd century A .D., and then it didn't really come into the church until about the 3rd century.

And it's kind of been the third most popular. It's been gaining popularity a lot in the last hundred years among scholars, but really not among laypeople. So the word elohim—the b 'nei ha-elohim, the sons of God—that word elohim is translated as judges in a few places in some Bibles.

There are about four places where some Bibles will have it that way. There are some kings from the ancient Near East who viewed themselves as divine. Pharaoh was supposed to be a god, and some other cultures viewed their kings that way, although it's not as common as people will lead you to believe.

But it was something that was there. So in that sense, their offspring could be men of renown or maybe sons of God. Nimrod, after the flood, was a king, and he's called a gibbereen, which is that mighty man that we saw in Genesis 6 -4.

So there's some similarities there. And that's about it for the strengths of this view. So what about some of the weaknesses? Well, that term elohim is better understood as a term identifying an inhabitant of the spiritual realm rather than human judges.

In fact, whenever we see that term, it's referring to somebody, someone from that spiritual realm. Of course, about 90 of the time that the term is used, it's referring to the one true God, and we'll look at other entities who are called that in just a moment.

But you have in Exodus 22 that this is during the giving of the law when someone commits a trespass, and it says that the cause of both parties shall come before the judges. So that word is elohim, and that's in the New King James, where it uses that term for judges.

But if you look at the ESV, it says both parties shall come before God, the one whom God condemns. And so the ESV translators believed it made more sense to view that as God, and I would agree because there's many other places in the law where people were supposed to come before Yahweh.

They were to come before God. God was literally in their midst while He was giving them the law, and while they were moving about in the wilderness with the tabernacle, God was there. They could come before Him.

So you see that throughout. If we had more time, I would go into detail on each of these. But I mentioned that 90 of the time it refers to the one true God. There are some instances where it's referring to members of what's called the divine council, which I'll talk briefly about in just a little bit.

I don't have time to get into that in too much detail. It is used of angels, and I'll show you a verse later on that does that. It's also used of false gods or demons, and it's used of the spirit of Samuel that Saul and the medium at Endor call up the night before Saul is killed in battle.

The spirit of Samuel is called an elohim. So it always is referring to somebody or someone from the spiritual realm. The idea of divine kingship. So another weakness of the royalty view is that whole idea of divine kingship is overstated.

There were not that many kings in the ancient Near East who actually viewed themselves as divine. Many of them thought the many cultures believed the concept of kingship was divine, came down from heaven, but not that their kings themselves were divine.

And this is the big one. So this is one of their main arguments, the idea that they took wives from whomever they chose. That sounds really bad in English. It sounds like they were forcing these women into marriage, but that's just the common Hebrew idiom throughout Genesis for marriage.

So we have Abram took Sarah as wife, and later on after Sarah dies, he took Keturah as wife. Isaac took Rebekah as wife, and we know she was a willing bride because she had the opportunity. She was asked, hey, do you want to go with Abraham's servant or not?

And she said she would go. Isaac didn't force her into marriage. So there's no idea of force when you see this phrase that's translated as took wives. And the whole idea, this whole view was not developed until the allegorical hermeneutic became popular among Jewish interpreters at the end of the first century AD, and not until it became popular in the church in the third century AD, and that's when this view took off in both of those places.

If you take a look at the fallen angel view, the view that I believe is the biblical one, when we see that term b 'nai ha-Elohim throughout the Old Testament, it always refers to angelic beings. There are places where we know for a fact it refers to that.

Job 38 .7, when the morning stars sing together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. This is while God is creating things, and he's asking Job, where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth, when I did this?

And then he says this in verse 7. People weren't there. It obviously is not referring to human beings because people weren't made yet. Earlier in Job, in chapter 1, it says there was a day when the sons of God, the b 'nai ha-Elohim, came to present themselves before the Lord and Satan also came among them.

Job 2 .1 says almost the identical thing. So there's a time where these entities are presenting themselves before God and Satan comes along with them. And when God asks Satan where he has been, he's like, well, I'm from the earth.

I've been doing this. It sounds like they're not actually technically on the earth at that point. It's a setting in the spiritual realm, at least that's what it seems to be. In Deuteronomy 32 .8. So you have another instance of this word in some Bibles.

So this one, I'll try to cover this quickly. And it says when, it's talking about Babel. Moses is, this is kind of his farewell speech. And he's telling the people to ask your fathers and they'll tell you, and he says, when the Most High divided their inheritance to the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, again, this is at Babel, he set the boundaries of the people according to the number of, now in a lot of our Bibles, it will say according to the number of the sons of Israel, the B 'nai Yisrael.

That is what is found in the Masoretic text. Now, and then it goes on and says, but the Lord's portion is his people. Jacob is the place of his inheritance. So it's a little strange to say sons of Israel, but God's portion is his people.

Jacob is the place of his inheritance. Contextually, that doesn't seem to fit very well. The Dead Sea Scrolls, we have found two fragments of Deuteronomy 32 .8 and one of them clearly says B 'nai Elohim.

The other one says B 'nai El and then the letter is rubbed out. We don't know why it was there. But there's enough room for it to be Elohim, just like the other one that we found. The Septuagint, the LXX, has always said the hui oe feu, the angels of God, is what they have there.

So is it God? Is it sons of God or sons of Israel? Well, sons of God is the one that makes sense contextually. As I mentioned before, the context has to do with the division of the nations at Babel. Israel didn't exist at that time.

And there were 70 people groups that scattered from Babel, as I'll show you. Whereas Israel had 12 sons. So that doesn't, it doesn't fit. Contextually, it doesn't fit the rest of scripture. But there's another word or another term that is identical to B 'nai Elohim, and that is the Aramaic term Bar Elohim.

And that appears in the book of Daniel. About half of Daniel is written in Aramaic, including chapter 3. And so this is when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are thrown into the fiery furnace. Nebuchadnezzar said, Look, I see four men loose and walking about in the midst of the fire without harm, and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.

Now some of our Bibles will say the son of God. It's just the Aramaic term is Bar Elohim. It may very well have been the pre-incarnate Christ in there with them. I've got no theological problem with that.

Because I don't know how Nebuchadnezzar would know who that is. What he's saying is, I see a divine being. And he calls it Bar Elohim. And you look three verses later, he uses a different word. Look what he says.

Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who has sent his angel and delivered his servants who put their trust in him. So there, the Bar Elohim is equated with an angel, which is the equivalent.

Bar Elohim is the same as B 'nai Elohim. And then in the New Testament, we also have passages that speak of this event. In 2 Peter 2, it says,. For God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them to hell.

Or the Greek word there used is Tartarosos. And that's the only time that word is used in the New Testament. It's the place in Greek mythology where the Titans were locked away by Zeus. And it's their concept of hell.

And it says,. Committed them to pits of darkness reserved for judgment, and did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness. With seven others when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly.

So it puts this sin of angels in the context of Noah. In 1 Peter 3 .18,. For Christ died also for our sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that he might bring us to God. Having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which he also went and made proclamation to the spirits now in prison, who once were disobedient when the patience of God was waiting in the days of Noah.

So there are spirits who are now in prison who were disobedient in Noah's day. If you hold the fallen angel view of Genesis 6, this makes perfect sense. But if you hold to some other view, then you have to do some strange interpretation of this passage.

Including some people will say, well, it was talking about Christ preaching through Noah at that time. But that's not what this passage says. Then Jude 5 and 6, Jude says,. Now I desire to remind you that the Lord, after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe and the angels who did not keep their own domain.

Abandoned their proper abode, he has kept an eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day. Again, you have New Testament passages that make perfect sense in light of the fallen angel view.

But if you hold a different view, suddenly these passages are very difficult to interpret. There are other strengths. It's by far the earliest view by all extant Jewish and Christian writers. Until the rise of the allegorical interpretation, as I mentioned before, it's the view in the Septuagint.

The term B 'nai Elohim is translated as W 'yoi Theyu, the sons of God. And or at times, sometimes just as Angelos, so angels. And you have apocryphal books like First Enoch, which Jude quotes from. I'm not arguing that Enoch belongs in scripture, but Jude does quote from it.

And he that book is all about this. It's like it's an expansion of Genesis 6, 1 through 4 is essentially what First Enoch is. And Jude quotes it and knew his readers were aware of it. Book of Jubilees has this view, Genesis Apocryphon, 2nd Baruch, Judas, which is in the Roman Catholic Bible.

That's part of the Apocrypha that was added back in 1546. And then you also have the earliest Christian writers. I'm not going to go through each of these. They're all detailed in my book, along with the quotation.

But just for the sake of time, I'm going to just put those up on the screen. It really wasn't until the 300s that people started to take a different view within the church. So let's take a look at some objections to this.

The primary one is people will say, well, Jesus said angels can't do that. Matthew 22, 30, for in the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given a marriage, but are like angels of God in heaven. Well, Jesus spoke of the angels in heaven.

He didn't say anything about the angels who left heaven, who left their proper abode is what Jude talks about. He may have been speaking of what ought to be true rather than what has happened. But he didn't say anything about the angels who left.

He wasn't saying that what they can or can't do. He was just saying what they don't do. He said in this passage, angels are not capable of doing this. He said the angels in heaven don't do it. And people will say, well, aren't we sons of God?

Because that term translates, so bene Elohim, that's translated sons of God. And in the New Testament, aren't we called sons of God? Yes, but there's something kind of interesting when you look at it.

Nearly every single time that term appears, it's in the future tense. It's something that we will be or something that positionally we are right now. It's not going to be fully realized until the resurrection.

As you'll see here in a little bit, Jesus, a peacemaker, shall be called sons of God. And Romans 8 talks about how the world is, the creation is groaning and longing for the revealing of the sons of God.

Romans 8, for as many as led by the spirit of God, these are sons of God. And so these are the two right here that are not in future tense, but the rest of them are. For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.

But look at what happens in Luke chapter 20. So this is the parallel passage to Matthew 22, the one that people will use to say Jesus said angels can't do this. Well, the same setup, and this is how Luke records it for us.

Jesus answered and said to them, So when we are resurrected, when we receive our glorified body, then we are sons of God and we are equal to angels. He's not saying that we become angels, and I'm not arguing that.

But it's almost as if there's a subtle nod right here to that view that, you know, sons of God are angelic. Or at least are spiritual beings that are controlled by the spirit, if you will. Another objection to this view.

Some people say that demons cannot materialize. And so how could they possibly perform this action? How could they marry women? How could they impregnate them? Hank Hanegraaff says if that were the case, we lose all epistemic warrant for the resurrection.

And he's just, what he's arguing is that demons could fake the resurrection. And then we have no reason to believe that Jesus actually rose. But demons can only go as far as God allows. If God says, no, you're not going to fake this, they can't do it.

In fact, humans can only go as far as God allows. God is in control. And if he's not going to permit them to fake a miracle, they're not going to be able to do it. And besides, scripture tells us Jesus rose.

We know that he did. In Luke 24, 39, sometimes people will point to that and say, you know, Jesus said, A spirit doesn't have flesh and bones as you see that I have. And they're assuming that in this passage that Jesus is talking about, it has to be something like an angel, except that's not really what he's saying.

Because that word pneuma, which is translated spirit, can be breath, wind, the Holy Spirit, angels, human spirit, ghosts. They need that to be angel. And then they apply that and say, see, angels can't take on human form, except for that argument proves too much, because we know angels did take human form.

And you have the passage in Genesis 18, where the two angels come with the Lord and they meet with Abraham and they eat and drink with him. And then they go on and they grab Lot and pull him out of the city of Sodom.

Hebrews 13 tells us not to forget to entertain strangers, for by doing so, some have unwittingly entertained angels. So angels apparently can take human form. Did Satan materialize when he was tempting Jesus?

It doesn't come right out and tell us that, but he takes him up to the top of the temple. It does seem as if that's what's going on there. And then the demonic plagues that are described in Revelation 9 sure seem like they're taking physical form.

But we know that angels can do that. So some arguments just kind of prove too much, because then they would, if true, make the Bible contradict itself. I think sometimes we underestimate our enemy. The Bible tells us in 2 Thessalonians 2, 9, and of course there's different views on eschatology and everything, but look what it says.

The coming of the lawless one, many people interpret that to be the Antichrist, is according to the working of Satan with all power, signs, and lying wonders. So he's going to have the ability to do some pretty amazing, incredible things.

Of course, they're going to be to deceive people, but still going to be capable of doing some pretty, what are going to appear to be miraculous things. Some people say if the angels did the sin, well, that's an unfair judgment.

The flood is an unfair judgment on mankind. But the people were complicit as well. The Bible tells us that all flesh had corrupted its way. The Bible tells us that the thought of men's heart was evil continually.

And the women who married the sons of God were complicit as well. They were wicked. So the whole world was wicked. God says to Noah, I've seen that you alone are righteous before me in this generation.

So it's not an unfair judgment on mankind. Mankind was wicked and deserved that judgment. Some people would say, well, it's impossible because angels can't create life. Well, that may be true, but we're not talking about creating life.

We're talking about procreating, which is the same thing that human beings do. And I've got two kids. I can't create life, but I do have two kids. But what about Pharaoh's magicians? What happened there?

When Pharaoh's magicians threw down his rod, it becomes a serpent. Then it tells us that Pharaoh's magicians did the same thing with their enchantments or through their dark arts. They threw down their rods and they became serpents.

Now, I know some people try to reinterpret that and say, well, they had charmed these snakes to be really rigid. And when they threw them on the floor, they started writhing. But that's not what the text says.

In fact, they were able to turn the water into blood as well. So they were able to do some miraculous signs, but they couldn't do all of them. So I mentioned the divine counsel a little while ago. And I do need to move quickly through this because I want to get to the Nephilim.

But in Psalm 82, this is where the phrase comes from. It tells us that God has taken his place in the divine counsel. This is from the ESV. In the midst of the gods, he holds judgment. So the first word there, Elohim, has taken a stand in the council of El.

In the midst of the Elohim, he holds judgment. So you have Elohim used a couple of times there. And obviously, one is in charge, and he's in the midst of all the rest of them. So here's a question to think about.

In our theological systems, we talk about being, as Christians, we're monotheistic. Meaning we believe in one God who is triune. And so Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And that's true, depending on what we mean by gods.

Because the Bible mentions many other gods. But there's one all-powerful, eternal God. Also, you could talk about it being monolatry. Only one God may be worshipped. But ultimately, what it really is, there's one Yahweh and many Elohim.

And if that's hard for us to think about in English, just think of the term Lord. Because we use that as a title for God as well. But we also know in England, there's the House of Commons, the House of Lords.

So it's just a title of respect. So I'll show you real quickly here. There are other entities called gods in Scripture. Now, oftentimes we'll say, well, they're false gods. And yes, in the sense that they're not the one true creator, eternal God.

But the Bible still calls them gods. And we can say lowercase g, that's fine. Angels are called that in Psalm 8 .5. Members of the Divine Council, which I just talked about in Psalm 82. Demons are called that in Deuteronomy 32 .17.

And I think we'll look at each of these verses real quickly here. And the Spirit of Samuel. So in the beginning, God, Elohim, created the heavens and the earth. There we see that referring to the one true God.

In Psalm 8 .5, here's referring to the angels. You have made them a little lower than the Elohim. And you crowned him with honor and glory, or glory and honor. Now, some Bibles, like the New American Standard, will translate that verse as, you have made them a little lower than God.

The problem with that is, in Hebrews, it quotes this passage, and it says, you have made them a little lower than the angels. So we have the New Testament divinely inspired commentary on Psalm 8. We know how that should be interpreted.

Deuteronomy 32 .17, they sacrifice to demons, not to God. To gods, Elohim, they did not know. To new gods, new arrivals your fathers did not fear. So their demons are called Elohim. And in 1 Samuel 28, this is where it says, do not be afraid, what did you see?