Before reading this article, please read the article, “Chiasm in the Scriptures.”
In Genesis 1:26, when God said, “Let Us make man in Our image”…who was God talking to?
Some scholars have theorized that God was talking to other angels. Others have theorized that God was using a “royal we” and was simply talking to Himself out loud.
In Psalm 82, we read, “God stands in the congregation of the mighty ones; He judges among the gods.” Who are these gods?
This is a rather mysterious subject, and it’s made even more mysterious when Jesus Himself quotes this Psalm in John 10:34, “I said, you are gods?” Jesus made it clear that the ones being called “gods” were the ones “to whom the word of God came” – in other words, human beings. But is that the whole story?
In order to properly understand this, we need to understand the meaning of the term “sons of God” in the Scriptures. Let’s read Genesis 6:1-2:
Now it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose.
Here is a likewise mysterious passage. Some fundamentalist scholars have theorized that this refers to fallen angels intermarrying with human women. But is that what’s really going on, here?
Genesis 6:1-2 is actually part of a chiastic structure which looks like this:
- A – Gen. 4:26ff – Then men began to call themselves by the name of the Lord (marginal reading).
- B – Gen. 5 – Genealogy of Seth
- A’ – Gen. 6:1-2 – When the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose.
In other words, the sons of God in Genesis 6:1-2 are the same as the ones calling themselves by the name of the Lord in Genesis 4:26. They’re the descendants of Seth – human beings.
There are other places where the “sons of God” clearly aren’t human beings however, so this isn’t the end of the story. Flip over to Deuteronomy 32:8:
When the Most High divided their inheritance to the nations, when He separated the sons of Adam, He set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God (marginal reading).
Now, at first glance, this is a reference to the seventy descendants of Noah listed in Genesis 10 – one for each Gentile nation. That’s a correct interpretation…but that’s not the ONLY correct interpretation of this passage! Let’s read the very next verse:
For the Lord’s portion is His people; Jacob is the place of His inheritance.
In other words, there are seventy divine sons of God – one for each Gentile nation – PLUS the God of Israel!
We see this more clearly in passages like Daniel 10:13, where the arch-angel Michael is contending with a “prince of Persia” for 21 days. This couldn’t be a human prince, so it must be a supernatural one – the divine son of God over the Gentile nation of Persia! Another good example of this is found in Ezekiel 28, where we read of a human prince of Tyrus, followed by a king of Tyrus who is very obviously not a human being.
Going back to Psalm 82, God has a “divine council” consisting of seventy “sons of God” who are over the Gentile nations. One-third of these are against God, however. Revelation 12:4 hints at this division between the “stars” (angels).
Interestingly enough, Satan himself is one of these divine sons of God (Job 1:6), and he is over specific Gentile nations! Isaiah 14:4 and 12 associate Lucifer (Satan) with the king of Babylon, and Ezekiel 28 describes the king of Tyre as having been in Eden, and as a “covering cherub.”
As an aside, that means that anyone who claims to worship the God of Israel, is worshipping the true God. Even though the Muslims – the descendants of Ishmael and Esau – claim to worship the God of Abraham, they do NOT worship the God of Israel, because they’re not of the nation of Israel. On the other hand, for the various Christian denominations, even if they have different concepts of God (e.g. a Trinity, a unity, the LdS concept of separate personages, etc.), they all worship the same God – the God of Israel.