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Welcome to Day 1471 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomGod Declares, "There Is None Like Me" \u2013 Worldview WednesdayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge.\xa0Welcome 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.\xa0Thank 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.\xa0Creating a Biblical Worldview is essential to have a proper perspective on today\u2019s current events.\xa0To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must have a proper understanding of God and His Word.\xa0This 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 \u201cSons and Daughters of God: The Believer\u2019s Identity, Calling, and Destiny\u201d Throughout this multi-week course, we will demonstrate that, in the Old Testament, \u201csons of God\u201d and \u201choly ones\u201d 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\u20139, our study will show that this divine family functions as a template for God\u2019s 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 \u2018g\u2019) \u201cgods,\u201d 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\u2019s family informs our sense of identity and mission as believers.
God Declares, \u201cThere Is None Like Me\u201d\xb7\xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0Segment 16: \u201cNone Beside Me\u201d (Part 1)IntroductionI think that we\u2019ve established just by our previous week\u2019s study of elohim that having more than one elohim is not polytheism.\xa0We still need to entertain one other question: What about verses that say there is none besides the Lord or where God Himself says, \u201cThere is none like me,\u201d \u201cThere is none besides me,\u201d \u201cBesides me, there is no other,\u201d something like that?
Not Statements of Denial but IncomparabilityThese phrases are typically taken as denial statements\u2014in other words, statements that deny the existence of the other elohim. Now, we\u2019ve 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\u2019s entirely foreign to the biblical writer\u2019s 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 \u201cnone besides me,\u201d is they are not statements that deny the existence of other elohim. They are statements about the incomparability of Yahweh, His uniqueness.
Deuteronomy as ExampleNow, by way of example here, I\u2019m 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\u2019t have those two things without a contradiction. What I\u2019m saying is there is no contradiction because it\u2019s just about being incomparable, not that one entity exists, and the others don\u2019t.
God Fights SomeoneLet\u2019s take a look at Deuteronomy 4:34-35 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+4%3A34-35&version=LEB); we read this,...