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The word elohim occurs twice in this short verse. Other than the covenant name, Yahweh, it’s the most common word in the Old Testament for God.
Psalm 82 states that the gods were being condemned as corrupt in their administration of the nations of the earth.
The facts of the Bible are just pieces—bits of scattered data. Our tendency is to impose order, and to do that we apply a filter. But we gain a perspective that is both broader and deeper if we allow ourselves to see the pieces in their own wider context. We need to see the mosaic created by the pieces.
Christian history is not the context of the biblical writers.
The proper context for interpreting the Bible is the context of the biblical writers—the context that produced the Bible.1 Every other context is alien to the biblical writers and, therefore, to the Bible. Yet there is a pervasive tendency in the believing Church to filter the Bible through creeds, confessions, and denominational preferences.
The odds are very high that you’ve never heard that Psalm 82 plays a pivotal role in biblical theology (including New Testament theology).
sons of God (Hebrew: beney elohim)
angel (Hebrew: malʾak)
The original morning stars, the sons of God, saw the beginning of life as we know it—the creation of earth.
People shouldn’t be protected from the Bible. The biblical writers weren’t polytheists.
The word elohim is a “place of residence” term. Our home is the world of embodiment; elohim by nature inhabit the spiritual world.
The biblical use of elohim is not hard to understand once we know that it isn’t about attributes. What all the figures on the list have in common is that they are inhabitants of the spiritual world. In that realm there is hierarchy. For example, Yahweh possesses superior attributes with respect to all elohim. But God’s attributes aren’t what makes him an elohim, since inferior beings are members of that same group.
These “denial statements” do not deny that other elohim exist. Rather, they deny that any elohim compares to Yahweh.
The term literally means “one of a kind” or “unique” without connotation of created origin.
Monogenes~The greek word used for "begotten" when referring to Jesus
The story of the Bible is about God’s will for, and rule of, the realms he has created, visible and invisible, through the imagers he has created, human and nonhuman. This divine agenda is played out in both realms, in deliberate tandem.
Genesis 1:27 tells us clearly that only God himself does the creating.
Defining image bearing as any ability is a flawed approach.
The Hebrew word translated “soul” is nephesh. According to the Bible, animals also possess the nephesh. For example, in Genesis 1:20, when we read that God made swarms of “living creatures,” the Hebrew text underlying “creatures” is nephesh. Genesis 1:30 tells us the “living nephesh” is in animals.
the Old Testament does not distinguish between soul and
Humankind was created as God’s image. If we think of imaging as a verb or function, that translation makes sense.
The image is not an ability we have, but a status. We are God’s representatives on earth. To be human is to image God.
God alone created humankind to function as his administrators on earth. But he has also created the other elohim of the unseen realm. They are also like him. They carry out his will in that realm, acting as his representatives.
Not all the world was Eden.
The distinction helps us see that the original task of humanity was to make the entire Earth like Eden.
the Bible ends with the vision of a new Edenic Earth (Rev 21–22).
Nebuchadnezzar tells Daniel that in the dream he saw a watcher—a term for a divine being (a “holy one”) in this chapter of Daniel (Dan 4:13, 17, 23).
The phrase “heaven is sovereign” is interesting because the Aramaic word translated heaven (shemayin) is plural and is accompanied by a plural verb.
The satan in Job 1–2 is not a villain. He’s doing the job assigned to him by God. The book of Job does not identify the satan in this scene as the serpent of Genesis 3, the figure known in the New Testament as the devil.
Most of the twenty-seven occurrences of saṭan in the Hebrew Bible, however, do indeed have the definite article—including all
The function of the office of the satan is why later Jewish writings began to adopt it as a proper name for the serpent figure from Genesis 3 who brought ruin to Eden.
God never actually said that Job was incorruptible and perfect, only that he was blameless at the time of the council meeting.
Without genuine free will, imagers cannot truly represent God. We saw earlier that the image of God is not an attribute or ability. Rather, it is a status conferred by God on all humans, that of representing God.
The attributes God shared with us are the means to imaging, not the image status itself. Imaging status and our attributes are related but not identical concepts.
We are reflections of a free Being, not a cosmic automaton.
being in the presence of God is no guarantee that free-will beings will never stray or act out of self-will. Only God is perfect. Beings that are lesser than God, whether human or divine, are not perfect.
the only way in which there was no risk involved for God is if you define risk as the threat of harm. God cannot be harmed. But he can be grieved. He is moved by human sin and suffering (Gen 6:6; Isa
we have layers of tradition that filter the Bible in our thinking. It’s time to peel those layers away.
Despite the risk of evil, free will is a wonderful gift. God’s decision was a loving one.
This passage clearly establishes that divine foreknowledge does not necessitate divine predestination.
That which never happens can be foreknown by God, but it is not predestined, since it never happened.
Since foreknowledge doesn’t require predestination, foreknown events that happen may or may not have been predestined.
God can decree something and then leave the means up to the decisions of other free-will agents.
There is no biblical reason to argue that God predestined the fall, though he foreknew it.
God does not need evil as a means to accomplish anything.
evil is the perversion of God’s good gift of free will.
the biblical writers refer to Yahweh as el-elyon (“God Most High”; Gen 14:20, 22).
The Hebrew word translated serpent is nachash.
The curse levied at Adam (Gen 3:17–19) did not supersede God’s mandate to subdue the earth and take dominion. But it did make the task harder.
Watcher, the English translation of Aramaic ʿir,
Daniel 4 is the only biblical passage to specifically use the term watcher to describe the divine “holy ones” of Yahweh’s council.
