Shownotes
Welcome to Day 1471 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
God Declares, "There Is None Like Me" – Worldview Wednesday
Wisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1471 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical Worldview is essential to have a proper perspective on today’s current events. To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must have a proper understanding of God and His Word. This week, on our Worldview Wednesday episode, we will continue with our study based on a course I recently completed taught by Dr. Michael Heiser. Our study is titled “Sons and Daughters of God: The Believer’s Identity, Calling, and Destiny” Throughout this multi-week course, we will demonstrate that, in the Old Testament, “sons of God” and “holy ones” refers to supernatural beings whose Father is God and who work with God to carry out His will and that this divine family was present before humanity. By fully engaging with biblical texts such as Psalm 82; Psalm 89, and Deuteronomy 32:8–9, our study will show that this divine family functions as a template for God’s human family. God desires of humans, as His imagers, to participate in His council. This study addresses issues such as polytheism, the nature of the (little ‘g’) “gods,” and the uniqueness of Yahweh. Within this study, we will apply insights to the New Testament texts and shows how the metaphor of being in God’s family informs our sense of identity and mission as believers.
God Declares, “There Is None Like Me”
· Segment 16: “None Beside Me” (Part 1)
Introduction
I think that we’ve established just by our previous week’s study of elohim that having more than one elohim is not polytheism. We still need to entertain one other question: What about verses that say there is none besides the Lord or where God Himself says, “There is none like me,” “There is none besides me,” “Besides me, there is no other,” something like that?
Not Statements of Denial but Incomparability
These phrases are typically taken as denial statements—in other words, statements that deny the existence of the other elohim. Now, we’ve seen that this is wrongheaded, because if you strip out the reality of these other entities, then God is ruling over nothing. He is comparatively greater than nothing. Again, it’s entirely foreign to the biblical writer’s mindset. The biblical writer is trying to make the point that these other entities do exist, and they are inherently inferior to the God of Israel; He judges them. They are not just contrived, made-up cartoon characters.
What we have here, in these statements about there being “none besides me,” is they are not statements that deny the existence of other elohim. They are statements about the incomparability of Yahweh, His uniqueness.
Deuteronomy as Example
Now, by way of example here, I’m going to take us through a little bit of an exercise in the theology of Deuteronomy because Deuteronomy establishes this point that this is about incomparability, not denying existence. There are passages in Deuteronomy that have these so-called denial statements that also, in the same passage, affirm other elohim.
You can’t have those two things without a contradiction. What I’m saying is there is no contradiction because it’s just about being incomparable, not that one entity exists, and the others don’t.
God Fights Someone
Let’s take a look at Deuteronomy 4:34-35; we read this, “Has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs, by wonders, and by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great deeds of terror, all of which the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes? To you it was shown, that you might know that the Lord is God; there is no other besides him.”
Notice what happens here in this text. Moses is rehearsing for the people what their history has been, and he is pointing out the uniqueness that here you have a God do all these things for you: verse 35, “To you it was shown that you might know that the Lord is God; there is no other besides him.”
You might think, “Oh yeah, well, God did that, and He really didn’t beat any enemies because these other enemies don’t exist because there is no other besides Him. So God really wasn’t fighting anyone.” That’s the conclusion you have to draw, and this is typically how we are taught to think about these things; that this is a statement that the other gods don’t even exist. They, in fact, don’t exist. That sets up a problem, and you have a real contradiction to deal with if you want to take this trajectory, as common as it is.
The Host of Heaven Allotted by Yahweh, Israel His Inheritance
Let’s go back. We’re in Deuteronomy 4; we’re going to go back to Deuteronomy 4:19-20. I’m going to take you through a series of thoughts to show that whoever wrote Deuteronomy 4—let’s say it was Moses—he wasn’t affirming one thing and then denying it a few verses later. We do not have a contradiction here.
So back to Deuteronomy 4:19-20; we read this, “Beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.”
Two things to spot here: we have a reference to the sun and the moon and the stars, the host of heaven, and then this idea that God allotted these things to the other nations, to the peoples under the whole heaven—not to Israel, because Israel was warned against worshiping them, but to the other peoples.
Verse 20 is the other side of that coin: “But the Lord has taken you [Israelites] and brought you out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be a people for his own inheritance, as you are this day.”
So again, we have two sides here: we have the host of heaven that are allotted to the nations (whatever that means), and then we have Israel who was taken out of Egypt to be Yahweh’s own people, His own inheritance.
Israel Forbidden to Worship Other Gods, Which Yahweh Allotted
If we move through Deuteronomy and read Deuteronomy 17:3, we get a little bit more information about this. Deuteronomy 17:3 has this reading that Israel “has gone and served other gods and worshiped them, or the sun, the moon, [or] any of the host of heaven, which I have forbidden.”
You know, the writer is saying, “Don’t do this. Don’t go and serve the other guys, you know, like Israel did. Don’t worship them. Don’t worship the sun, the moon, and any host of heaven.” Now you say, “Well, here, this could just be a reference to idols.” We need to keep tracking through Deuteronomy.
Deuteronomy 29:25-26 picks up this thought. In verse 25, the context is that if Israel gets exiled. It says “because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt, and went and served other gods and worshiped them, gods whom they had not known and whom he had not allotted to them.”
Now, this is the same language of Deuteronomy 4:19-20, same context as well: taking Israel out of Egypt, again, the problem of going and serving other gods and worshiping them—gods that the Lord, Yahweh, had not allotted to His own people, to Israel, because He was their God.
This allotment idea referred back to the gods, the host of heaven of the other nations. If we keep going, we hit Deuteronomy 32, and that gives us the key to understanding what this whole allotment language is about. We’ll take a look at Deuteronomy 32:8-9 next, and then bring all this together into how these so-called denial statements actually work.
· Segment 17: “None besides Me” Part 2
Deuteronomy 32:8–9, a Key Passage
Deuteronomy 32:8–9 is a key passage concerning all of this that we’re talking about right now. We’re trying to track through Deuteronomy to understand what is really being talked about when the sun, moon, and stars, the host of heaven, are allotted to the other nations, and Israel is kept for Yahweh’s own people. That is going to produce here, as we consider Deuteronomy 32:8-9, a theology where the other gods are real, and they were assigned to the nations as a punishment by the true God, by Yahweh of Israel.
Other Gods Sent by Yahweh
It’s actually going to be an affirmation that these other gods are real. They were sent; they obeyed the command of God initially to administer other nations, again, as a punishment to those nations, and then things went poorly. The Israelites had to be prevented, or at least warned against, worshiping them instead of Yahweh.
Deuteronomy 32:8-9
Deuteronomy 32:8–9 says this, “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.”
Humanity Allotted to the Sons of God
We’re reading the passage here with the Dead Sea Scrolls, and that’s very important because of what this describes: at the division of the nations, which we know was the Tower of Babel, God punishes humanity for disobedience by splitting them up and assigning them, allotting them, to other sons of God, other divine beings, sons of God.
Here’s the language again from Psalm 82, from Psalm 89, and Job 1-2, which is the same language here. So they are assigned to the other nations and the other nations to them. This goes back to Deuteronomy 4:19-20 where the Israelites are warned against worshiping these other beings because these other beings were allotted to the nations. This verse is crucial for understanding this because it’s really the Old Testament explanation for why the other nations have their own pantheons. What happened?
Dr. Heiser spends a lot of time in the Unseen Realm talking about this and about these two particular verses, and you can read his book for more details. For our purposes here, we are trying to establish that Deuteronomy affirms the existence of other gods, and then we’re going to take that back and ask the obvious question: “Well, then why does it say, “There is none besides me”? What does that mean?” Because we don’t want to have a contradiction here.
In Deuteronomy 32, a few verses later, we read this: “They sacrificed to demons who were not God, to gods [elohim there, plural] whom they had not known, new gods that came lately, whom your fathers did not dread.”
So the Israelites fall victim to idolatry, and the beings that they are worshiping are described as elohim. Now, this particular verse is crucial because Paul actually quotes this verse in the New Testament.
Paul’s Reference to Deuteronomy 32:17
In 1 Corinthians 10:21-22, Paul is discussing sacrificing to idols and eating the meat sacrificed to idols. Paul warns the believers in Corinth in these two verses to avoid all of this, to avoid this meat. Why? Because you have to be careful, because if you partake of it, you enter into fellowship with demons.
Paul believed demons were real. He’s quoting Deuteronomy 32:17 and assigning reality to the shedim, to the other elohim from these other nations that the Israelites fell into idolatry with.
So, let’s put all that together. We have a person under inspiration, the apostle Paul, quoting this passage in Deuteronomy 32, affirming that the elohim here were real; they’re real beings. Paul refers to them as demons. These beings were allotted to the other nations. These elohim assigned to the other nations are called the host of heaven, the sun, moon, and stars in Deuteronomy 4.
Deuteronomy, all through the whole book (chapter 4 all the way to 32), assumes the existence, the reality, of these other gods. But it’s in that same chapter, Deuteronomy 4, where all of this starts, where this thread starts, where we have this phrase that “there is none beside me.”
Yahweh’s Incomparability Negates Contradiction
If such statements like that were to telegraph the idea that these entities don’t really exist, then either Deuteronomy 32 is wrong, or Paul is incorrect, or both. We don’t have that problem though, if we just say, “Look, statements like ‘there is none besides me’ just mean that Yahweh is incomparable. These other elohim exist; they are inferior. They are not like Yahweh. He is species unique.” There is no problem theologically if we take the verse and not just this verse, but the whole statement found in other verses and similar statements found in many places in the Old Testament. If we just take them as statements of incomparability, we don’t have a theological contradiction.[1]
That will finish our study for this week’s Worldview Wednesday. Next week we will continue our study of God’s proclamation “None Besides Me.” We will also consider what is meant by Jesus being the “Only Begotten Son.” Tomorrow we will enjoy our 3-minute Humor nugget that will provide you with a bit of cheer, which will help you to lighten up and live a rich and satisfying life. So encourage your friends and family to join us and then come along with us tomorrow for another day of ‘Wisdom-Trek, Creating a Legacy.’
If you would like to listen to any of our past 1470 treks or read the Wisdom Journal, they are available at Wisdom-Trek.com. I encourage you to subscribe to Wisdom-Trek on your favorite podcast player so that each day’s trek will be downloaded automatically.
Thank you so much for allowing me to be your guide, mentor, and, most of all, your friend as I serve you in through this Wisdom-Trek podcast and journal.
As we take this Trek together, let us always:
- Live Abundantly (Fully)
- Love Unconditionally
- Listen Intentionally
- Learn Continuously
- Lend to others Generously
- Lead with Integrity
- Leave a Living Legacy Each Day
I am Guthrie Chamberlain….reminding you to ’Keep Moving Forward,’ ‘Enjoy your Journey,’ and ‘Create a Great Day…Everyday’! See you Tomorrow!
[1] Heiser, M. S. (2019). Sons and Daughters of God: The Believer’s Identity, Calling, and Destiny. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.