Do You Really Understand What The Bible Is About? – Michael Heiser | Part 2

Video from John 14:6

Do You Really Understand What The Bible Is About? – Michael Heiser | Part 2

"Dr. Heiser explains that Daniel 7, like Psalm 82, presents a real divine council scene: thrones are set in place, the Ancient of Days takes His seat, and a heavenly court convenes to judge and determine the fate of the fourth beast and the empire it represents, showing that God rules through a council of supernatural beings rather than acting in isolation. He then uses Daniel 4 as another example, where a “watcher” or “holy one” speaks to Nebuchadnezzar, emphasizing that the decree is said to come from both the watchers and the Most High, which means these beings are God’s agents who participate in carrying out His decisions without being independent powers. He says this helps explain Psalm 82 as well: the council there is not a group of human leaders, but a gathering of other Elohim under Yahweh’s authority, where God judges them and condemns them for corruption. He then confronts the objection that this framework sounds like polytheism by arguing that the Hebrew word Elohim is a broad term used for several kinds of spiritual beings, not a label for one specific set of divine attributes; it can refer to the God of Israel, members of His heavenly council, the gods of the nations, demons, and even the disembodied spirit of Samuel, which means plural Elohim in Psalm 82 does not imply that all of them are Yahweh or that the Bible is endorsing many equal gods. Instead, Yahweh is unique among Elohim because only He is eternal, Creator, sovereign, omniscient, and omnipotent, while the others are created spiritual beings and therefore not comparable to Him. He also argues that biblical statements like “there is none besides me” are not denials that other gods exist, but claims of incomparable status, much like a city saying it has no rival, not that no other cities exist. From there, he addresses Jesus as the Son of God by explaining that the New Testament’s language of “only Son” means unique and one of a kind, not “only child” in a literal sense, so Jesus is the unique divine Son because He is God incarnate, unlike the other sons of God in the heavenly realm. Finally, Heiser begins transitioning to the Deuteronomy 32 worldview, using Daniel 10 as a bridge, where the prince of Persia and the prince of Greece are supernatural rulers over geopolitical empires, and he says this theology did not originate in Daniel but is rooted in the older biblical worldview that assigns nations to spiritual powers, which he plans to trace back to Deuteronomy 32." from the video introduction

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