Pastor Jonah preached Psalm 82. Our status was attacked, our responsibilities distorted, and our relationship severed. The earth and everything in it has been desecrated. Lector: Kristen McGee
Pastor Jonah preached Psalm 82. Our status was attacked, our responsibilities distorted, and our relationship severed. The earth and everything in it has been desecrated.
Lector: Kristen McGee
A few years ago, I received a phone call in between church services. Unusual
Fire trucks and ambulances were outside my house. I flew home.
One of our carbon monoxide detectors went off. Firemen came immediately. Ambulance came immediately. It was scary…especially when we didn’t know what was going on.
As it turns out, the fumes were from me warming up my 30+year old car…
It was a powerful reminder: just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Even if you can’t taste/touch/smell it…it’s still there.
We’ve learned this collectively in the pandemic…can’t see Covid flying around…
So…in our homes, we put in carbon monoxide detectors.
We take precautions with Covid. We do this in so many areas of our lives…but not our faith, have you noticed?
Starting in the early 1900s, Christians in the West really wanted a faith that they could touch and see.
There were competing philosophies getting popular, and Christians really wanted to be right. So…we read the Bible like Westerners wanting to be right.
Unintentionally, most of us have inherited a way of reading the Bible that doesn’t take the things we can’t see very seriously…but that perspective is totally alien to the Bible.
Over the next few weeks, we’re going to talk about what went wrong, why the world is the way it is.
We’re going to talk about this word DESECRATED, the title of our series:
Desecrated: to treat a sacred place or thing with violent disrespect.
We cannot understand what happened if we do not understand what was supposed to happen.
This is why we started last year by talking about God’s design, our series Sacred
And to understand what went wrong, we have to understand the world as the Bible does
The world of the Bible is supernatural, filled with what we can see and what we cannot.
This is stated clearly and repeatedly, but it hits our ears and eyes as weird, so we skip over it. Psalm 82 is a perfect example of this.
God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment
-Psalm 82:1
What’s word about this? God is in the midst of…the gods?!
The word translated God here is the Hebrew word:
Elohim (el-oh-heem)
People often think of G-O-D when they hear this word.
But it’s the same exact word as “gods” at the end of this verse.
Elohim…in the midst of the elohim.
In your bulletin, you’ll find more resources for further study on this
There are at least 5 ways elohim is used in the Old Testament.
Genesis 1, elohim is the Creator God, the God of Israel, the Almighty. G-O-D
There is no one like him. He stands alone as G-O-D, the ruler of everything.
Beneath him, we have this divine council, other places referred to as the Sons of God or Sons of the Most High, like here in Psalm 82:
“You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you”
-Psalm 82:6
It’s used to refer to spiritual rulers of other nations:
You keep whatever your god Chemosh gives you, and we will keep whatever the Lord our God gives us.
-Judges 11:24
Solomon has abandoned me and worshiped Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sidonians; Chemosh, the god of Moab; and Molech, the god of the Ammonites.
-1 Kings 11:33
It’s used in Genesis 35 to refer to an angel, deuteronomy 32 to demons, in 1 Samuel 28:13 to refer to the GHOST of the prophet Samuel.
So, in the Old Testament, you’ll see Elohim used to describe 5 general beings:
Bobby’s Chalk Board ELOHIM slide
We freak out because we just read “God” and “gods”. More than one God?!
No. There is one God, one G-O-D, the godhead, F/S/HS.
Ancient Israel would never have thought there were multiple gods like we think of when we hear that.
Elohim does not refer to a set of attributes
Samuel’s ghost was NOT the same as the Creator G-O-D.
ELOHIM is a place of residence term.
We do this in English, too. HOOSIER.
Does Hoosier mean you’re rich or poor? Black or white? Young or old? No…
Hoosier is a name given to people who live in a certain place. Indiana.
Elohim refers to beings from the spiritual realm.
That’s where they’re from. That’s their domain.
Elohim are disembodied beings, spirits, who live in a place the Bible calls the heavens
Image bearers of God are embodied creatures who live here on earth.
So, the Bible has a supernatural worldview.
There are beings we can see and beings we cannot.
God refers to some of these elohim, like he does here in Ps. 92, as his divine council.
Not every elohim is on this divine council!
God has an inner circle in the heavens, beings he gives authority and responsibility to
The council is there when God creates humans in Gen. 1:27, they watched him lay the foundations of the earth in Job 38:7.
God calls upon this divine council, they speak, they witness, they act, they rejoice on God’s behalf.
Here’s how the Dictionary of the Old Testament defines this group:
The term divine council is used by Hebrew and Semitics scholars to refer to the heavenly host, the pantheon of divine beings who administer the affairs of the cosmos.
-Dicitionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings, IVP Academic, p 112
Under the Divine Council are angels, which just means messengers.
God is king, he oversees a divine council of spirit beings in the unseen realm.
if we want to understand what happened in our world, we have to understand their world, too.
Because God’s intention was for the earth to operate like the heavens.
God intended for his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.
This isn’t always obvious to us, because our context is not the context of the Bible
Imagine two thousand years into the future someone came across a newspaper headline that said, “Hoosiers up in arms over basketball officiating.”
Basketball doesn’t exist anymore. Referees don’t exist anymore. ANd Indiana doesn’t exist anymore. That sentence would make no sense to someone 2,000 years from now.
So let’s get some ancient context.
Then the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he placed the man he had made. 9 The Lord God made all sorts of trees grow up from the ground—trees that were beautiful and that produced delicious fruit…A river flowed from the land of Eden, watering the garden and then dividing into four branches.
-Genesis 2:8-9, 11
We read this as a quirky detail, but for them, the imagery was crystal clear
In ancient near-eastern culture, where Judaism was born, most people lived in deserts
Dry, hot, arid…they traveled for food and shelter and water.
If you lived near water, or vegetation, you were very powerful.
Only deities lived in gardens, only kings lived near water.
So here we have GOD creating a garden filled with lush plants, trees, and fruit.
A river flowed into the garden, and branched out into 4 separate rivers.
This is a HUGE river in a vast land called “EDEN”
These verses would have shouted to ancient people “this is where God lives”
This is why later we read in Genesis that God is walking in the Garden. He lives there on earth.
And remember that Eden is a portion of land, not just the garden.
Which is why, in Ezekiel 28, for instance, it will be called the seat of the gods and gods holy mountain. It was high and it was low. Why does that matter?
Because in their culture kings lived down by the water and gods did their business on top of mountains.
Have you ever noticed how many times people meet with God at the top of a mountain?
Moses gets the 10 commandments on a mountain.
Jerusalem, the city of God, is said to be on the heights in Ps. 48
Mt Zion is called the mountain of assembly and on the heights in Isaiah 14.
When the original audience read about Eden, they learned that it was where God would dwell, and it is where he exercise his authority on earth.
it was the seat of his authority, like a county seat today.
Into his own home, into the seat of his authority, God makes a new creature out of the earth. This creature has a body, it is physical, and it is made in his image.
This communicated their value and their responsibility.
They were to be God’s earthly council, acting, speaking, witnessing on his behalf.
So. Here’s the world of the Bible:
God is the ruler of heaven and earth. In heaven, he oversees a divine council of elohim that carry out his will.
On earth, humans were to serve as his earthly council, carrying out his will on earth.
We must become a people who read the people aware of God’s spiritual realm.
Perhaps we need to become a people who slow down when the Bible seems strange
Because if we do not, we will not make sense of why things are the way they are
Something happened here, and something happened there.
The earth and everything in it has been desecrated. A sacred place, this earth and everything in it, has been treated with violent disrespect.
In the next few weeks, we’ll see desecration emerging from within Eden
We’ll see an invasion from the spiritual realm
We’ll see a human attempt to invade the spiritual realm.
We will see the desecration of God’s sacred creation.
But, through it all, we will hear the subtle drum beat of God’s promises.
We’ll hear the promise of restoration, of healing, and wholeness.
And we’ll understand with new wonder the glory of Christ:
Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.
He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation,
16 for through him God created everything
in the heavenly realms and on earth.
He made the things we can see
and the things we can’t see—
such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world.
Everything was created through him and for him.
17 He existed before anything else,
and he holds all creation together.
18 Christ is also the head of the church,
which is his body.
He is the beginning,
supreme over all who rise from the dead.
So he is first in everything.
19 For God in all his fullness
was pleased to live in Christ,
20 and through him God reconciled
everything to himself.
He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth
by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.
-Colossians 1:15-20
Communion