Day 1531 – Divine Rebellions – Worldview Wednesday

Published: Dec. 2, 2020, 8 a.m.

Welcome to Day 1531 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomDivine Rebellions – Worldview WednesdayWisdom - 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 1531 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, we will expand on the past course work as we continue reviewing the book from Dr. Michael S Heiser titled “Supernatural.” The book is an abbreviated version of his more comprehensive book, “The Unseen Realm.” I highly recommend both of these books. Creating a Biblical Worldview based on how the Old and New Testaments connect with God’s overall plan for humanity is essential. This book review will help us understand what the Bible teaches about the unseen world, and why it matters.
Divine Rebellions
I ended week’s Worldview Wednesday episode with the thought that free will in the hands of imperfect beings, whether divine or human, can have disastrous results. That’s an understatement. Some catastrophes in the early chapters of the Bible, all of them involving both humans and supernatural beings, illustrate the point.
Recall that God decided to share his authority with both divine beings in the supernatural realm and human beings on earth. That was the backdrop to God’s statement in https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+1%3A26andversion=NLT (Genesis 1:26), “Let us make humankind in our image,” and the fact that God then created humans in His image. Spiritual beings and humans are imagers of God. We share his authority and represent him as co-rulers.
On the one hand, that was an excellent decision. Free will is part of being like God. We couldn’t be like him if we didn’t have it. Without free will, concepts like love and self-sacrifice die. If you are merely programmed to “love,” there is no decision in it. It isn’t real. Scripted words and acts aren’t genuine. Thinking about this takes me back to the last of the original Star Wars movies, The Return of the Jedi. The spirit of Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke his father, Darth Vader, “is more machine now than man.” Yet, in the end, we find that isn’t true. Vader saves Luke from the emperor at the cost of his own life. Vadar wasn’t just a programmed machine; his decision came from the heart, his humanity—his own free will.
But there’s a dark side to God’s decision. Granting intelligent beings freedom means they can and will make wrong choices or intentionally rebel. That’s guaranteed to happen, since the only truly perfect being is God. He’s the only one he can trust. Free will is why things could, and did, go wrong in Eden.
Trouble in Paradise
Think about the setting in Eden. Adam and Eve aren’t alone. God is there with his council. Eden is the divine/human headquarters for “subduing” the rest of the earth, as instructed in Genesis 1:26–28. Humans were to spread the life of Eden to the rest of the planet. We learn that at least one member of the council isn’t happy with God’s plans.
Just as we saw in Genesis 1, there are hints in Genesis 3 that Eden is home to other divine beings. In https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+3%3A22andversion=NLT (Genesis 3:22), after Adam and Eve have sinned, God says: “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.” That phrase is the same sort of signpost we saw in Genesis 1:26 (“our image”).

We know the main character of Genesis 3, the Serpent, was not a snake. He...