Let’s review what we gain from Heiser’s thesis.
As always, it’s not simply his thesis; he brought together a vast body of scholarly work and presented it to church folks who rarely hear anything about it. The huge gulf in scholarship between biblical studies versus divinity studies has been a very big problem for centuries. Church folks never get to hear much from biblical studies, and so anything that bleeds across that solid wall always causes a ruckus. An awful lot of church leaders condemn the biblical studies folks like Heiser when they dare to share their material publicly.
Heiser points out the Three Rebellions. There’s the one in the Garden where the Devil suckers humans into taking sides with him, and thus pulling them under his authority. There is the second rebellion where some of God’s divine staff came down to get more directly involved in human affairs — on Satan’s behalf — and raised up Nephilim. The Nephilim were nasty creatures, sort of demigods who sought to lead humans deeper into a more purposeful rebellion against God. The third rebellion was at the Tower of Babel. God divided the existing nations among the senior staff, which we call the Elohim Council or Divine Council, while He proposed to raise up a nation uniquely His starting from scratch. The council members wasted no time in leading their nations away from divine revelation and into idolatry of themselves.
God raised up Abraham and the line of his firstborn descendants that we call the Nation of Israel. He took them through various experiences, to include the process of revelation at Mount Sinai and the Covenant. God Himself said they were easily the worst people He could have chosen for this mission, but that in itself was part of His argument against Satan and the rebel members of His staff.
At any rate, they quickly perverted His Covenant into self-centered demands. They presumed upon their status as the Chosen and insisted that God had designated them as the only real humans on the planet; all the other nations were just animals that looked like humans. This is a half-truth blown out of proportion, the same kind of mistake Satan made as God’s Chief Bodyguard.
In other words, as a nation, Israel consistently chose the Devil’s agenda over God’s, and kept taking sides with the rebellion. Satan took advantage of his authority, even in its restrictions, and wholly confined himself faithfully to the those restrictions, yet still managed to seduce Israel away from serving God.
God has always kept a faithful remnant within the Hebrew peoples. They are the exceptions that prove the rule. If God had not intervened, the gospel we have today would have remained invisible. The gospel has always been present in the written record of God’s revelation, but has often been missed because it demands humans transcend their mortality. The gospel requires undoing the Fall, and we cannot do it on our own.
This is why the Bible talks about divine election, that God must initiate the redemption process, because humans are incapable of even wanting it, much less understanding it. What makes election so hard to understand is that it’s a divine moral truth that exceeds the constraints of time and space. It includes factors of human choice, yet rests entirely on God’s initiative and authority. It’s the ultimate paradox. The whole point is our dependence on God; Satan wants us to believe in our independence from God.
God decided that, at some point in the process of Israel being hijacked by the Devil, He should intervene to make the gospel as clear as possible without violating His own nature and while keeping to the original purpose of the Covenant. The Covenant offers only so much — it reverses the Fall. Neither the Fall nor the Covenant can change our eternal nature; they are external to Eternity in a certain sense. Nothing in this world can change Eternity. Eternity shapes this world; it’s one way.
God was determined to have a people who lived by His revelation, people who would worship Him alone, in part to prove His point about glory belonging to Him alone. He was not going to do without a people to testify on His behalf. However, He kept secret from Satan and his allies just how He planned to do that. On the one hand, He clearly revealed through prophesies that His covenant would be opened to all humanity, not just Israel. On the other hand, He kept secret His claim on a large portion of humanity as His Elect before all of this drama got started.
His plan was to insert into all nations a body of people who were Elect, who would defy the rebellion and keep the witness of God’s justice alive on the earth. That body of Elect were within Israel, too. While the rebellion focused on seducing nations, God focused on saving individuals to form an empire that ignored human identities. Thus, when Christ died to end the national covenant of Israel, He opened a spiritual covenant to all the Elect hidden throughout the nations.
Heiser notes that a part of the Wilderness Temptations was Satan trying to get Jesus to reveal this secret. Satan could smell something was up, but was ignorant of how it would work. So, he tried to persuade Jesus to keep the old covenant alive and cater to the worldly desires of the Jews. That failed, but it still wasn’t clear to him what God was planning to do.
This is all noted in the New Testament, but most people miss it. They keep reading their human reasoning back into the Scripture. God sprung His surprise on the whole divine staff; Satan and his allies are left scrambling to keep their claim on humanity as deserving oblivion. Their case rests on some things we cannot comprehend, but part of it is keeping people blind to what God is all about.
Don’t get lost chasing the wrong issues. The question is not our place in Eternity; it’s not about what we can or cannot do to be a part of Eternity. The Doctrine of Election is not about us; it’s about God and His agenda. The question for us is what we can do to stay at peace with God, taking His side in the dispute here and now, which means being at war with Satan and his allies.
