I’ve been asked several times to build out my mythology a little farther. The Doctrine of Election is no myth. It was not understood in the Old Testament, but it was also not foreign to it.
Heiser’s Unseen Realm series lays out with good authority how the Hebrew intellectual traditions viewed the Elohim Council, and some hints of the nature of the dispute that got Lucifer relieved of his duties as God’s Covering Cherub. Collecting all the hints together, we see that Lucifer was the Chief Bodyguard (the nearest term we have for his position). At some point, he became corrupt enough to keep for himself some of the glory due God.
There was a dispute over whether the Devil was justified; we would say he filed an appeal with the Elohim Council. On the one hand, he got confined to a special realm created just for him. It was the Elohim Council God referred to when He said, “let Us” do this or that. Together, they created a special prison for Lucifer. However, based on the rules of how God operates, it seems Lucifer still retains some authority and ranking. This was visible in the narrative of the Fall. Further, he managed to cultivate some allies on God’s Elohim Council.
As part of this dispute with God, Heiser speculates that Lucifer objected to how God made humans and how He chose to handle them. It seems that Lucifer was incensed that we were granted such high privileges and such a generous situation so close to God. Something about that question makes it part of the original case of Jehovah v. Lucifer. At any rate, the Devil gains the title of “Satan” by how he seduced the humans into accepting his path for them. His position is wholly adversarial against us, and that’s what that title means. Humans were shifted from their eternal form and confined to a form Satan could manage. It includes the confinement of the space-time continuum and all that means in Hebrew mythos.
As we move forward in time, we see that God at some point parceled out the nations to His satraps on the Elohim Council at the Tower of Babel. Heiser points out how this is not just speculation, but clearly an image in the Old Testament itself. Later, God upbraids them for doing such a poor job of managing the nations, having misled the humans by presenting themselves as deities, rather in concert with the Devil’s contention that they deserve some worship and glory for themselves.
So, within this ongoing dispute with Lucifer and his allies on the Elohim Council, God sets out to build His own nation from scratch to show them how it’s done. That would be Israel, of course. But there is a secret in this plan. First, God establishes the broad principle of covenant. This principle includes a way of protecting His interests in His nation, and limiting interference from His erstwhile competitors on the Elohim Council. Something in this arrangement contributes to His proof, His argument against the Devil and his allies.
But there was a secret hidden in this whole covenant thing. Paul refers to this several times as the “mystery of the gospel”. God had planned all along to send a Messiah to clarify the covenant, but the Messiah came to open the Covenant to everyone, not just His own nation. You see, the whole covenant thing didn’t work as a human government; that much was clear from the history of Israel. Too many of the people involved refused to operate in faith. As Jesus explained to Nicodemas, the Covenant presumes the necessity of spiritual birth, and it wasn’t happening to the whole nation.
The Covenant Nation of Israel was a controlled experiment of sorts, a showcase of something we cannot comprehend fully. The Covenant appeared on the surface to be doable for fallen humans, but God’s Chosen Nation was easily the most cantankerous people ever born. Any other nation would have been far more compliant, but God was trying to prove something. From within this difficult nation He would bring a Messiah, His own Son.
God had planned all along to simply give faith to a certain portion of the human race, those whom He had elected from the beginning, even before Satan was placed in confinement. The secret was that the Elect would come from every nation, not just His own nation of Israel. God would initiate a new reign under His Son, the Messiah He had promised at the Fall. And the basis for identity in this Messianic “nation” would be divine election. God states clearly in the Bible that He will eventually win this dispute by humiliating His opponents.
That much is given via scholarship in the Scripture. There’s more, but that’s enough outline to explain the rest of my speculations.
My point here is that the underlying model of our humanity is two-fold. There is this fallen shell in which we exist, and it is tied to the Devil’s realm. But there is a separate entity that is eternal, and it belongs in Eden. What is so hard to swallow is that some majority of those living in the Fallen Realm lack an eternal component. It will never be there; they belong to this realm. The Elect are not superior; we are no different on the fleshly level. It’s all the same flesh and fleshly nature. Flesh is Satan’s property as part of his realm.
One does not become Damned (someone with no eternal component) because of something they do to lose their eternal nature. They never had it in the first place. They are merely flesh, period.
The Damned will cease to exist when this world is dissolved. We will shed that part of us and continue to exist in our eternal form. It is this eternal nature that separates us from the others. That eternal nature is capable of having its say in our internal processes. Without it, no human can accept the message about Eternity. We might be able to offer enough clinical data to make it intellectually plausible, but no one is going to actually buy into it wholly because they don’t have the necessary minimum prerequisites.
The interaction between the Elect and the Damned is critical to God’s proof. So, the means by which we spread the gospel are informational, but it is much more. The data is just the carrier for the living truth. The only people out there capable of receiving the message are people with an eternal nature already existing inside of them. They will recognize the hidden truth in what we share. It is not a human decision on any level; it is entirely a divine miracle. We don’t persuade people to accept Christ. We cannot. God doesn’t work that way. We can only awaken their elect nature if it’s already there, and it simply is not there for the majority.
While we get some mileage out of various verbal transmissions, the most powerful message is how we live. The Elect are known to Satan, and are experiencing hassles in life that generally don’t afflict the spiritually dead people around them. How we live in the face of that kind of pressure is a signal they cannot ignore. There comes a point in the life of each Elect when God will use our testimony to awaken the call.
This is why we admonish each other to walk in the power of faith before speaking. Show it first, then explain it when appropriate.
