WWUTT 2580 Q&A Seeing the Unseen Realm, How Dangerous is This Theology

The teachings of Michael Heiser and Doug Van Dorn have become very popular in many churches, and increasingly so, though Heiser has passed away. Are these teachings something that we need to be concerned about when we understand the.

Text?

This is When We Understand The Text, a daily Bible study in the Word of God that we may comprehend with all the saints how wide, how high, and how deep is the love of Christ. Tell all your friends about our ministry at www .wutt .com.

Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky, and greetings, everyone. Let me begin by reading from Psalm 82. God has taken his place in the divine council. In the midst of the gods, he holds judgment. How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked, Selah?

Give justice to the weak and the fatherless. Maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy. Deliver them from the hand of the wicked. They have neither knowledge nor understanding.

They walk about in darkness. All the foundations of the earth are shaken. I said, you are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you. Nevertheless, like men you shall die and fall like any prince. Arise, O God.

And judge the earth, for you shall inherit all the nations. This is the Friday edition of When We Understand the Text, and we take questions from the listeners. You can send those questions to whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com or go to www .wutt .com, click on the contact tab, and you'll find a link there to leave us a voicemail.

You can record a voicemail from your phone or from your computer. I just have one email we're going to be looking at today, and I'm going to use this email to introduce you to my special guest. This is from Alex, who says, Dear Pastor Gabe, there are some things that have been happening in my church, and I'm really asking to see if I should be concerned or not.

It was about a year ago that one of the teachers became very interested in the teachings of Michael Heiser concerning his books on angels and demons. This has since spread to other teachers who listen to Doug Van Dorn and Theocast and Haunted Cosmos and Blurry Creatures.

And now even the pastor is mentioning some of these things in his sermons, though he claims to be Reformed. A lot of what they say about angels and demons, I feel like are the opinions of men. They are relying on outside extra biblical sources, sometimes things that sound like ghost stories.

And I don't see anything about this in my Bible. Is this actually affecting our theology, or is this just some fringe thing? Do you think I have a reason to be concerned, or am I being sensitive about being introduced to something new?

Thank you for your ministry, Alex, I appreciate that email. And to help us answer this question, I am on the line with my good friend, Fred Butler. How are you doing, Fred?

I am doing really well.

First time on the program. But you've been listening for a long time.

Yes, every Friday. I usually just catch the Q &As with you and your wife, unless, of course, you're doing something I'm interested in hearing, and then I'll listen to one or the other, the little short Bible studies, but I have been a listener, golly.

It's got to have been at least as long as you've been doing podcasts, which has been what, almost 10 years or so?

Yeah, about 10 years is how long I've been doing it.

Yeah. Somehow I've got a hold of you doing them and I listen to them all the time. I remember Q &As.

I remember running into you at ShepCon for the first time in 2017. And you had addressed me as the man with the golden pipes.

That was the way you. Oh, yeah, there you go.

Oh, yeah, you do. You should be one of those book readers for Audible or something.

I've tried that. I've actually, I tried doing that. I had a contract with one book for a little while, but then they decided to pass and go on somebody else. I don't know why. Never heard why. But now I don't have time anyway, so it doesn't matter.

Well, Fred, tell us who you are. Like you actually have access to a lot of great Bible teaching, which is why you don't need mine on the regular podcast. Where do you work and what do you do?

I work at Grace to You Radio Ministries in beautiful Santa Clarita, California. We're north of Los Angeles. And I oversee the volunteer ministry. So the volunteers are basically maybe 120 retirees, folks who have retired and still wanted to serve the Lord in some fashion.

And so I inherited this ministry. It was there long before I came around, but basically they come in and they're the ones who package books. And I almost said CDs. We don't do CDs anymore. We used to do tapes.

So I've been there since the tapes.

You've been there since the cassette tape days.

And then we'd have to put the stickers on them and everything. But they would package all of that material. Because if you're on our mailing list, you get a free offer every month. And it's how we raise our donations for our ministry.

And they will come along and they basically take all of the labels I create and then we package this stuff up. So if you've gotten a booklet or any kind of Bible, I think we did LSB hardback, wasn't it a couple of years ago?

Yeah, I got one of those.

We did the Doctrines of Grace recently and we are about to start a little study guide that's coming out on Philippians. So if you get that in the mail in a yellow or white envelope, you are getting something my volunteers put together.

So I oversee that ministry and it's great. It's like having a hundred grandparents. I say that all the time. It's really great.

That's awesome.

They take care of me and my family.

So that book, Doctrines of Grace that you mentioned, that was the last book that John MacArthur wrote before he died. So this is a posthumous publication, right?

Yes.

Yeah, that's correct. He taught that material and I would really encourage people to go and find the sermons online. I was able to hear those on a Sunday evening when he taught those the first time. And then really the book of Jude study that he did, they got turned into a commentary.

The last three messages sort of bleed into that Doctrines of Grace, so they're good intros to the series. But yeah, they've been wanting to put this material into print for a while and it's just sort of just the other things would come up and kind of push it aside.

And they started editing it. And when John, what happens is that they create a manuscript and then obviously it goes through Phil and other guys edit it. Phil's the main editor, of course. And then John is the one who comes behind and he reads through everything.

All of this phony idea that he's got ghostwriters and all that.

I've heard all of that.

He would read everything and offer his notes and offer his comments and argue with them in the hallways if he didn't like what was said and explain his position and all of that. So he had his hand on, this was probably the last popular book.

I mean, that we're going to really, you know, a book that's going to kind of go through our ministry that he had his hand on helping to edit and to complete and all that sort of thing. I think the book of Daniel, there's a commentary on Daniel coming and that'll probably be the last commentary I think he helped.

So what was, what would be the difference between this and the Daniel commentary that's already included in the John McCartney set?

Yeah, well, the Daniel commentary they're doing, John didn't preach a whole lot of Old Testament books. He did Genesis up to like chapter 12, I think, which is also some really fabulous sermons. Most of his teaching was in the New Testament.

So all of those books that he preached through, they've been created into manuscripts and reformatted and edited into like readable commentaries. And they wanted to do that for the Old Testament. And obviously, John's not going to be able to do that for us.

But there's, you know, men that have been sort of selected, have been connected to our ministry, to Grace Church for years, seminary professors and Bible college professors and so forth. They're going to have a hand in that.

They've taken, I think, John's, John did preach through Zechariah. That's a, an old John, John MacArthur, Old Testament commentary.

I've got that one.

And then Daniel was the other big book that he preached through. I know he's did some selected Psalms. I don't know how many of those he did. Genesis, of course, and just some other places in the Old Testament, some stuff maybe in First Samuel.

But they're going to try to incorporate that material. The last book that he actually did an exposition on or one that he did an exposition on was Daniel. So that's the one that they chose to like turn into a commentary.

I have all of that in study guide format. So if you have the little study guides from years and years and years ago, they had all of the stuff from Daniel printed. And I somehow was able to collect it all.

I think that's the only one I have a complete set of. But they're going to turn that into like a really nice commentary volume.

Interesting. So we'll still see.

That's forthcoming.

We'll still see some John MacArthur works here in the future.

Yeah, in the future. And then we have thousands upon thousands of sermons that have been touched. I mean, he's preached them and people have probably heard him preach them. But there are series that we could create out of those sermons.

I think that is forthcoming, too. I don't think that we've touched like 50 percent, over 50 percent of what he's preached. The stuff you hear on the radio, a lot of it's re-ran because we have new listeners.

I mean, you have a new Christian, new believers that come along and well, heck, we want them to know and hear about how to raise a godly family.

Yeah, sure.

And so they'll do.

Hey, if J. Vernon McGee is still on the air, we can still keep John MacArthur on the air.

Of course. And he's still going strong. His ministry hasn't really diminished that much. I mean, he's still on several radio stations and everywhere around the world.

I still catch him on. I still catch him weekly on the Reformation Network because I'm listening to him on my way to church Sunday morning. Every Sunday.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And and it's the same that's going on, I'm sure, with R .C. Sproul. A lot of his material is still widely available and you can get it and listen to it. But they want to take a lot of these untouched sermons that John has not has not been turned into series or anything and basically turn them into, you know, turn them in into like a radio thing.

And so that's kind of going that's they're going through all of that and considering that stuff. So you'll see new things come along here in the years to come. New to us on the listener side, but not the listener side, but stuff that and, you know, and that's the thing you can appreciate about John, if his focus is on teaching the Bible faithfully and verse by verse, he would get into some, you know, current events of the time.

So they've kind of gone through a lot of that stuff. I remember I used to listen to John and he'd be talking about the Beatles or something or something going on in a in a pop culture world in nineteen seventy eight.

And you just happen to know about it. But we've kind of gone through that and try to remove that because but I mean, but the teaching overall is timeless.

Right.

Of course, that people in, you know, that story of those guys in Vietnam, they were able to take sermons from whatever they were, you know, from the Book of Matthew and translate them into Vietnamese and take them to the rice patties and these little speaker boxes.

And they I've heard that people can hear them in a village and they just hear the teaching. So they're not getting, you know, current events and Trump may mania and Democrats screaming at Trump or any of that stuff like that, but they're getting the Bible taught to them.

I mean, well, that's that's what we want to do. That's our that's our mission statement is, you know, one verse at a time, you know, unleashing God's truth one verse at a time. And so, yeah, it's there's a lot of exciting things, I'm sure, that will come around even after we've all passed from this earth.

That grace to you will still be, yeah, still be churning out God's truth.

Yes, and at least that stuff will be available, just like it was with Spurgeon's material. Yeah. And, you know, so we do our best to kind of keep that, you know, going as long as we can, as long as the Lord gives us the ability.

Amen. Well, let's get let's get to the topic at hand. We've actually referenced you on the program before because we would have people that would write in and ask questions about Michael Heiser. And since you just recently did that blog series last year, I've been I've been able to direct people to that and say, well, here's Fred's read through Heiser's stuff.

He's able to answer some of those questions that you're asking. So regarding Michael Heiser and his teaching on the divine counsel on angels and demons, what are some of the things that we need to know about this theology in the way that it's affecting the church today?

I know that's a very broad question.

It is a very broad question, because I was kind of thinking about this when we when you were going to ask me to be thinking, you can talk about this a little bit like, oh, man, I do have on my blog, if you go to my blog, it is hip and thigh.

It's after Judges 15, eight, by the way. OK, in the King James, you go to hip and thigh dot wordpress dot com. I do have a link, what kind of a standalone article that has all the resources I kind of found that could be helpful for people who might be having Heiserians in their Sunday school classes, Heiserians, the Heiser that's good that are there talking about the Nephilim and blurry creatures and Elohim and all that sort of stuff.

But I think the things that really are troubling for me, at least what I have seen, is that he tends to appeal way too heavily to what I would consider to be higher critical scholarship. A lot of it is scholarship that comes from like the ancient Near Eastern context, ancient Near Eastern concepts.

And they he pours too much authority into it as a means in which to understand our Bibles. Yeah, I don't think you need to look at the ancient Near Eastern. I mean, obviously, as Christians, one of the primary hermeneutical principles is you want to know the context, who wrote the Bible, what was his history around him?

Well, that stuff is useful. But what he has done has gone beyond that to where it's like, well, the Bible's got to be reinterpreted according to like how the Egretic texts in their various religious practices understood Baal and El, the pantheon of gods, because he would suggest that the Israelites were sort of mimicking that or borrowing from their cosmology to kind of explain their cosmology.

But no, no, God is a standalone. He reveals himself to his people. And while there might have been other, obviously other religious groups to suggest that Israel is borrowing from them and they're forming their theology and their cosmology, according to the way these various pagan groups form their theology and their cosmology, that's extremely problematic because their gods were sinful and wicked and ungodly and unholy.

They were basically demonic in the way that they would behave themselves and suggest that because the Egretic temple had 70 divine council members around El and Baal as his various is his consort or whatever, that there's 70 divine council members on Yahweh's council.

That's ridiculous. I mean, you're totally contriving that. It's totally made up. Yeah. So let's think of lots. Go ahead. Oh, yeah.

I was just going to say, so let's think about like a glossary of terms here. So what are some things that Heizer will say? What's common to Heizer's teaching that we may need to find for us? So like, for example, who is the divine council?

What does he mean? What does Heizer mean when he talks about angels and demons, where they come from? Right. So let's start. Let's start with the divine council, because this, I know, begins from Psalm 82.

The one book of Heizer's I know that I read was The Unseen Realm.

And that's the one book that I've read through that I'm most familiar with. OK. And I've looked through his dissertation, which the book came from. The dissertation is a much is much more. It's not as cautious and it's much more liberal friendly in that particular document than he is in Unseen Realm.

He's sort of made Unseen Realm to be more palatable for the evangelical community. But yeah, that's I'm familiar with those two. I'm kind of familiar with his reversing Mount Hermon and some of his angels and demons stuff.

Like, I know that he doesn't believe that Satan was the one that was confronting Job, for instance, that that was a divine council member. Right. Right. And he believes that Asiel and Leviticus 17 was really a goat demon that the Israelites would send a goat out to.

The scapegoat would go to the Asiel in the wilderness, which is an utterly blasphemous concept, if you think about it with any length of time. That's totally a liberal, higher critical approach to understanding ancient Israel's sacrificial systems.

So he's using a lot of like extra biblical sources to understand and define some of these concepts in scripture that may otherwise be a little bit confusing to us. So let me come back to Psalm 82, because right at the start here, we have that reference that Heizer then uses and defines as this divine council.

It seemed to me that that when I read the Unseen Realm, it seemed like he begins with Psalm 82 and then his interpretation of Psalm 82. He reads out into everything else that may mention angels or demons or Satan, as you as you had said, like in Job one and two, or the unclean spirits that Jesus is casting out in the gospels.

So he totally creates a different storyline, how we understand the Bible and its revelation to us because of that.

So Psalm 82, this is the English Standard Version. God has taken his place in the divine council in the midst of the gods. He holds judgment. And then verse six is the one that a lot of people are probably familiar with because of the way that the charismatic preachers would take this and twist it into the little God's doctrine.

But you have in verse six, I said, you are God's sons of the Most High, all of you. Nevertheless, like men, you shall die and fall like any prince. So let me start with this, Fred. Let me ask you this.

So that reading of Psalm 82 -1, and that was from the English Standard Version, is that even the right way that we should translate Psalm 82 -1?

Ah, yes. So if you'll notice there, like, let me read this from the LSB.

All right. The legacy standard.

Here we go.

Legacy standard Bible.

God takes his stand in the congregation of God. He judges in the midst of gods. So that word congregation there is an important word because basically it means congregation or a gathering. It's not taught.

You read it as divine council. It gives me the picture or it'll give the reader the picture that God has this, what would be this big board of directors in the skies, in the heavens, that he consults, that are involved in his decrees and all of that sort of thing.

And that these beings, and we'll talk about Elohim in a minute, but that these beings are somehow on the same level as God. Since that they're Elohims like he is and all this. Now, Grant Heiser will not, you know, he doesn't say that and his fans are probably screaming right now at the podcast that I'm misrepresenting him because it's like, he's not psionatic.

God is the greatest all creature. He's the greatest, you know, uncreated, sovereign, all those orthodox things. I get that. But if you read his material, it's kind of hard for you to get that. But that congregation is just a word that you see frequently throughout the Old Testament where it's talking about God being in the midst of his people, being in the midst of his, you know, Israel.

It's in the book of Exodus, the congregation, and God came down from the mountain. The congregation was gathered. It's just talking about where he comes and where the people are gathered around him. The ESV is a sort of a revision of the RSV.

And the RSV is the one that holds that, that translated that as divine counsel. And the RSV, if I'm remembering correctly, kind of, it was one of the modern translations in the early 20th century that was beginning to kind of incorporate some of this new, new fangled, you know, Old Testament scholarship that was coming up that was basically claiming that, you know, there's a divine counsel of Elohim in the heavens with God and they, you know, rule the earth with him and he's assigned to them roles and functions and all this other stuff.

And so they translated that as divine counsel. That's not a good translation because even if you go to like, say, the King James, they even have the God standeth in the congregation of the mighty judges among gods.

I mean, they translate it, you know, as a standard understanding of that passage, which is, you know, God addressing his people, you know, these individuals that had, he has given his authority to, to be his mouthpiece and to function as his, you know, as his representatives on earth.

That's what you find in the book of Exodus with the, you know, the people who are around the temple complex or around the tabernacle at the time.

Right. So this is a psalm of Asaph. So how relevant is that to recognize that Asaph is the author of this? And does that affect Heizer's interpretation of it at all?

I think it does. OK, so and we were talking about this before we started recording and you're like, we got to get this on because I'm kind of doing this little study of Asaph. And when you find when you first discover Asaph, I'm going to flesh this out in a longer article at some point whenever I got time to do this.

But when you first encounter Asaph, he was connected to David back when David was a brand new king. He was the one who sort of led the worship with the other Levites. There's some other, you know, the worship of the people.

So he was involved in putting together, I'm sure, writing psalms and songs and all that sort of thing. But you see his name appear in other points in Israel's history, which would imply that more than likely Asaph was part of a family.

I think I was reading on this last night, actually, at the library down at the church.

Would this be like the sons of Korah?

Yeah, like the sons of Korah and that James Montgomery Boyce was even kind of calling it like this, you know, this guild of, you know, this family that would have been involved in, you know, directing and writing psalms and that sort of thing for the people of Israel.

And of the ones that we have in the Bible, there's 12 of them by Asaph. And there's Psalm 50 that comes right before Psalm 51. But the ones that are the most relevant are Psalm 73 to 82. So you got those psalms there.

And if you look at them.

And 83, 83 is also a psalm of Asaph.

OK, that's correct. OK, so there's 10 of them there. I'm trying to remember my count. Is it 11 or 12 of them that are his thing? Sure. OK. And if you look at those psalms, the ones that have Asaph, you know, go to your Bible app and look up his name.

We can read them. They all seem to have this these reoccurring themes of him crying out to God. Hey, why have you abandoned us? Why does the wicked prosper? That's Psalm 73. Right. Why do they seem to get away with things?

And it just seems like God is not paying attention in Psalm 74, which is really a lament of the destruction of Jerusalem. It talks about the temple being burned down. Well, those were events that happened during the time of the Babylonian captivity or around that time.

And my this is, of course, I'm totally, you know, I'm just I'm just a dude who has my Bible. I'm trying to read it and understand it. So I'm sure there's probably some people that could maybe, you know, give me some different perspectives on this.

OK, but as I'm looking at those psalms, I'm seeing that these more than likely were written around the time of the Babylonian captivity, because a lot of the themes are him rebuking the people like, why did you, you know, forsake God?

Why did you turn away from him? Why are you acting unrighteously? You basically are the ones who are bringing us onto us. We need to repent. It's that's those sort of themes will pop up in those psalms.

And when you come to Psalm 82, the psalm has historically been understood as talking about just human judges. That's who those Elohim are. Right. Men that God has invested his authority into. And the psalm would have been a psalm of him rebuking them for their, you know, for forsaking their duties of obeying the Lord and taking care of the widows.

You notice those themes there about the widows and the orphans and see the justice to.

The fatherless, maintaining the fatherless, the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Yes.

Yes. Those are all things that the prophets talk about before Israel was gone into right captivity.

That's Isaiah chapter one. That's exactly what Isaiah is rebuking Israel for.

Yeah. And he is rebuking these people. And if that's the case, well, the Heizer's understanding of the divine counsel would have been back. What is it? Five, six hundred years before these events took place in Israel's history, which would have been, you know, this ancient Near Eastern matrix where, you know, this divine counsel would have functioned or whatever in these writings in the psalm, as he's claiming.

But if it's not connected to that and it's really more of a psalm that was finds its anchor in the time of the Babylonian captivity in 586, you know, note that time period. Well, a lot of the ancient Near Eastern societies that existed at that time had already been sort of taken over and destroyed and disappeared.

And you had a Syria and Babylon and all of Egypt, Egypt at one point. They all come in. They wipe out these little societies. Israel is the only one that's there because God's taking care of them. Right.

His covenant. Yes. But they would have been they would have disappeared. There would have been any concept of a divine counsel.

Yeah.

Psalm 137 is another one that starts with by the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept. So that's clearly got to be a Babylonian exile psalm, right?

Right. Maybe Jeremiah, I think, you know, would have written that this Asaph guy is not even really he may not have even been in captivity. He might have been one of those guys that was left in the land, you know, the poor people that were left there to kind of, right, you know, take care of the place for the for the Babylonians because they wanted to get some tax money off of the place, you know, and, you know, so he's there in the midst of all this and seeing this ruin and he's writing these psalms, you know, that's and, you know, at some point it's collected into our, you know, collected into the canon and canonized in the psalms as part of their worship.

But it's like and I can't totally be certain about that. I mean, the thing that really kind of connects it to me, if you read Psalm 74, the imagery there is clearly talking about the Babylonian captivity and the Babylonians coming in and absolutely decimating land and destroying it and taking everybody.

It talks about people being killed and, you know, the sanctuary being burned and all that. That that only happened when they came in and took over the country. Right. And took them into captivity. So, yeah, it's just that if that's the case, it's I don't think his views of the divine counsel hold much water after that.

It doesn't really. It's like, OK, well, right there, that's kind of a big problem if that's what. You know, if you're claiming that this is some sort of pantheon of gods that existed with the Lord and his divine counsel that he gave over to the, you know, during the time of the Tower of Babel incident.

Well, then that's I mean, that's far removed if this is really written around. You know, the time of the Babylonian captivity, that's almost half of a millennium. Yeah, sure. I don't you know, I don't think we really appreciate the time.

I mean, we read the Bible and you're reading, you know, a couple of books. We don't know. There's like 300 years of past.

Yeah, right. It's not set in chronological order.

So, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, where it's like volumes that are going to go year by year of all the events. I mean, right.

Even Jeremiah. Yeah. Even Jeremiah jumps around.

So and Isaiah is the same way, too, where he's 52 years, you know, this one king. So a lot of this stuff was written, you know, during these long periods of time, you know, between these various kings and the reigns and then when they would fail or whatever it might be, just.

Yeah, I just don't I don't anyway, that to me was kind of like, yeah, I don't see his his position really, you know, right there, that sort of just wrecked his position, in my opinion. That's what if that's if that's the ace, if if Asaph is writing his psalms during the Babylonian captivity, well, right there, you've got some questions about the legitimacy of his view.

Right. So like in verse six, where it says, I said, you are God's sons of the most high. Heizer will take that expression, sons of God. And I think he almost always translates it as angels. Isn't that right?

Right.

Right. So his view of Elohim. And I kind of agree with what he's saying. I mean, I think he's correct on his definition. Elohim, when you see that term, for the most part, it's going to talk about it's a term of residency.

Obviously, Elohim live in the spiritual realm. They can come in and out of our physical realm.

So Elohim is the Hebrew word that gets translated for God as God.

So that's why you will have like the Elohim will also be used for pagan gods. Well, obviously, those are. I mean, it's a whole different discussion about his views of of monolatry and monotheism and those sort of things.

But you also have, like, for example, Samuel, remember the witch of Indore? She says, hey, I see this God coming up from the well, obviously, it's the spirit of of Samuel coming up. Yeah. And I personally believe that was the real spirit of Samuel, because it was a moment when God is judging Saul and is for is basically cutting him off, bringing final judgment and is basically affirming David as being the new king after this battle with the Philistines.

So there's at any rate, there's a couple of different translations or interpretations of that.

Some will think that that was another view that a demon that was right that was impersonating him, that sort of thing. But the Elohim there would have been a ghost.

Right.

So, you know, you think about it. I think I wrote this in my articles is talking about, like, if you're thinking about it in Star Wars terms, you know, Anakin and the Force goes Yoda.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, right. Of course, goes, you know, but that's the idea. But however, the key thing that we always got to remember is that with words like this and there's and I appreciate D .A. Carson bringing this out in his book on exegetical fallacies, I think is the name of it.

OK.

Words oftentimes are going to be understood in the context, right?

Yeah.

I mean, if you talk about gay and, you know, there's your grandma talked about being gay and happy. Well, I mean, obviously, that's not what we understand gay and I'm saying that.

Yeah, sure.

There's going to be a context. And so with Elohim, that word is also used in other places to speak about authority. And and in many cases, it's translated as judges. So if you go to Exodus in certain places, I think in Exodus 22, 28 and Exodus 22, it'll talk about there being judges.

But it's translated from this this word Elohim or word Elohim is used in there and used interchangeably. Well, it's just talking about individuals who have been given a certain kind of authority by the Lord.

They speak on his behalf.