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Welcome to Day 1476 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomNone Beside Me, and The Only Begotten Son \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 1476 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.
None Beside Me, and The Only Begotten Son\xb7\xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0Segment 18: \u201cNone Beside Me\u201d (Part 3)\xa0Incomparability Claim of Cities
As we continue on the topic of \u201cNone Beside Me,\u201d there is one last thing I want to say about the so-called denial statements. There are other places in the Hebrew Bible where these are used.\xa0That is the same statements in situations or contexts that make it very obvious that denial of existence cannot be in the picture. For instance, in Isaiah 47:1, 8, 10, and Zepheniah 2:13, 15, in these passages respectively, the city of Babylon in the Isaiah reference and the city of Nineveh in the Zephaniah reference both claim, both say, \u201cThere is none beside me.\u201d
Now, are we really going to believe that Babylon and Nineveh respectively actually thought, or wanted us to think, or the writer wanted us to think, that there was no other city than Babylon in existence, there was no other city but Nineveh in existence at the time of Zephaniah? Well, of course not. That would be absurd. There are hundreds and thousands of other cities in existence.
The point of the phrase \u201cthere is none beside me\u201d is very clearly a claim of incomparability. Babylon is boasting, \u201cThere is nobody as good as me. There is nobody like me. No city measures up.\u201d For the Assyrians, that\u2019s how they thought about Nineveh: \u201cNineveh is the best. Nineveh is incomparable.\u201d

Summary
So we have the same phrases used in contexts where, very obviously, a denial of existence just cannot work in any coherent way. That\u2019s how we need to think about the denial phrases. When they are used in passages that seem to, on the one hand, deny the existence of the other elohim, but then you have all these other passages and sometimes even the same passage saying, \u201cNo, the elohim are real, and they are dangerous; they need to be dealt with. They are hostile to God. God is greater than them.\u201d We can\u2019t, on the one hand, affirm that they don\u2019t exist and then have these other ideas (God\u2019s incomparability to them, God\u2019s greatness) mean...