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The Bible connects the activities of supernatural beings with our lives and destinies.
There’s something about the human condition that longs for something beyond human experience—something divine.
The original Hebrew word translated “gods” is elohim.
For the Bible, any disembodied being whose home address is the spirit world is an elohim.
The word angel is basically a job description. Angels deliver messages to people.
Not only are we like God in some way, but we are also like the divine beings of his council.
The image of God isn’t an ability given to us by God, like intelligence. We can lose abilities, but we cannot lose the status of being God’s imager.
Eden was where heaven and earth intersected. God and his council members occupied the same space as humanity.
We are a glimpse either of life with God or of a life without God. There’s no middle ground.
The Serpent’s offspring is anyone who stands against God’s plan, just as he did.
the battle between good and evil, the long war against God and his people. It’s a war fought on battlegrounds in two realms: the seen and the unseen.
Foreknowledge doesn’t require predestination.
When we sin, we need to own our sin. We sin because we choose
Rather than make the world like Eden—to spread the knowledge and rule of God everywhere—the people wanted to bring God down at one spot.
Israel didn’t exist at the time of the Tower of Babel. God only called Abraham after Babel (Gen. 12). “Sons of Israel” can’t be right. “Sons of God” is the terminology found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest manuscripts of the Bible. The ESV has it right.
That means believers, the body of Christ, are the new people of God, a new Israel.
and now—the world was unholy ground. Hence Paul’s command to expel an unrepentant believer back into the world, the domain of Satan. To be expelled from the church was to be put back into unholy territory. That was where sin belonged.
We aren’t authorized to confront principalities and powers directly. There’s no spiritual gift to that effect handed down to us by the apostles.
God always has a good reason for suffering.
He wanted Israel to be set apart from other people, distinguishable to everyone as his own family.
As God is completely distinct from all other gods and everything earthly, so God’s people needed to be distinct from other people.
Personal failure is not the same as trading Jesus for another god—and God can tell the difference.
Without an Israel, we would have no destiny. And that’s precisely why the gods and their followers would try again to erase Israel.
For Israel, that was a truth that had to be reinforced at all times. Otherwise, God might be thought of as ordinary.
The biblical word for the idea of God’s unique otherness is holiness. It means “to be set apart” or “to be distinct.”
His realm is supernatural. Our realm is terrestrial. The earthly space he occupies is made sacred and otherworldly by his presence. The space we occupy is ordinary. God is the polar opposite of ordinary.
Human life was more sacred than animal life because humans were created in God’s image
But human life was in peril in the presence of a holy God. Sacrifices reminded them that God had power over life and death—and God wanted to show them mercy.
The Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), held every year and described in Leviticus 16, included a fascinating object lesson to remind people about holy and unholy ground.
God is still other. His holiness requires that we be purified to enter his presence. For us, that’s accomplished by believing in what Jesus did on the cross.
Since God indwells believers today through his Spirit, each church—each gathering of believers—is holy ground.
We must never, not for a moment, forget who we are in Christ—and what that means to the world.
To the Israelites, the giant clan bloodlines were demonic, having been produced by rebellious, fallen divine beings. They could not coexist with a demonic heritage.
The Israelites decided they’d done well enough and disobeyed God’s command to drive out the other nations. But partial obedience is disobedience.
Everything was in plain sight, yet undetectable without hindsight.
The first step to restoring Eden was to provide a means for humanity to escape the curse of death.
Jesus initially called twelve disciples. The number isn’t accidental. It corresponds to the twelve tribes of Israel.
In essence, in that passage in Matthew 16, Jesus goes to the Devil’s front door and challenges his claim. Jesus wanted to provoke Satan. Why? Because it was time for Jesus to die to propel God’s secret plan into motion.
Our lives are not as pivotal as his, but each of us, like the disciples, has a true role to fulfill. We need to live as if we believe that. Believers brought into God’s family council are brought in to be not observers but participants (Col. 1:13).
Salvation is about believing loyalty—trusting what Jesus did to defeat Satan’s claim and turning from all other gods and the belief systems of which they are a part.
“Where is the presence of God right now?” While God is everywhere, he specifically dwells within each believer.
“Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there in the midst of them” (Matt. 18:20 LEB). But viewed in the context of the Old Testament idea of sacred space, that statement means that wherever believers gather, the spiritual ground they occupy is sanctified amid the powers of darkness.
Every body of believers was holy ground, no place for unrepentant sin.
Believers were to remove unrepentant believers from the church (1 Cor. 5:9–13).
For it is better to suffer for doing good, if God wills it, than for doing evil.
In essence, baptism was a loyalty oath and a message to the demonic powers (as well as any people present) of just whose side you were on in the spiritual war.
Israelites and the believers of Jesus’ day felt an ever-present need to be different from unbelievers. The goal wasn’t to be deliberately odd so unbelievers would hope to avoid contact. Israel was to be a “kingdom of priests” and “a holy nation”
what we do in our churches should elevate God and Jesus.
When a church talks only about the love of God without pointing out the irony of that love when placed against God’s other character traits, believers will take that love for granted. It might sound cheap, for instance, to people unaware of God’s holiness.
Your life now is not about earning your place in God’s family. That cannot be earned. It’s a gift. Your life now is showing appreciation for your adoption, enjoying it, and getting others to share it with you.
