Does the Bible really mean that there are... when it says,
"there are non like Yahweh, the God of Israel, among the gods."
Is it sort of winking at us?
Is it kind of like giving us the little elbow in the side that says,
hey, we know there aren't any other gods.
So we're actually comparing God to beings that don't exist.
But let's do it anyway, because it sounds great.
It sounds like we're magnifying the Lord,
even though we're comparing him to nothing.
Really?
Now, let's think a little bit more about this.
Again, my view is that the text; Psalm 82:1,
Psalm 82, the whole thing means what it says.
God is presiding over a council of elohim. He is excoriating them.
The elohim there are the ones that were put over the nations and Deuteronomy 32.
That's why the psalm ends the way it does
with the psalmist pleading for God to take back the nations as his inheritance,
after he judges these gods.
Because he judges them for their corruption, their injustice.
You hit verse 6, he says, "I said, all of you are elohim,
all of you sons of the Most High, verse 7, but you're going to die like men."
God's gonna judge them.
This is an eschatological judgment. We'll get to it in a moment.
But this is the Psalm. You're corrupt. I'm going to judge you.
You're going to die like men.
And then the psalmist says, "Lord, take back the nations."
It's a coherent end to the problem that emerged from the Babel event.
It's the judgment of the gods of the nations. How did we get gods of the nations?
We got them in the wake of Babel; God's judgment on humanity.
When he divorced humanity, divided them up
and allotted them to these other sons of God.
It's a coherent picture.
It allows the Bible to actually mean what it says in these verses.
I don't know if I'll click out to all of them but Psalm 86:8,
"There is none like you among the gods. Oh, Lord, nor are there any works like yours...
you alone are God. I give thanks to the Lord my God."
Again, does the Bible really mean that there... when it says,
"there are non like Yahweh, the God of Israel, among the gods."
Is it sort of winking at us?
Is it kind of like giving us the little elbow in the side that says,
hey, we know there aren't any other gods.
So we're actually comparing God to beings that don't exist.
But let's do it anyway because it sounds great.
It sounds like we're magnifying the Lord
even though we're comparing him to nothing.
Really? I mean, this is how we're supposed to look at this?
Psalm 95, verse 3; "For the Lord is a great God, and a great king above all gods."
Does that text mean what it says? is Yahweh a king of all gods?
Or is he king over beings that don't exist?
Look, I'm better than beings that don't exist.
What about idols? An idol, again, as the Prophet says an idol is nothing,
you know, it's a piece of wood, a block of stone.
We've talked about the logic of idolatry, that ancient Near Eastern people,
and ancient people in general, would make these objects
and then go through a ritual to animate the object
in the belief that some supernatural being, whose name the object bears,
will come and live in it or attach itself to it.
Again, we did this I think back in the first or second week
when we talked about context, (context and metaphor),
I mean, this was their belief.
Yes, we would call the idol a god. But if you smashed it, you didn't kill the god,
you just made another one and then did the same ritual
and then this entity would come and live in it, and attach itself
so that you could barter with it.
Ancient people distinguished, they both related and distinguished the concept
of spirit beings that they referred to as gods, and objects that they made
that were like little houses or places of attachment, for these entities.
Okay, they actually believe the entities were real. And so did the biblical writers.
That's why the biblical writers are saying,
look, you know, the point isn't that God is greater than a block of stone
because we could say that about ourselves, at least we're alive,
at least we're real.
No, the claim is that Yahweh is God over all gods.
All of them are lesser, inferior, impotent compared to him.