Welcome to Day 1471 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomGod Declares, "There Is None Like Me" – 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 1471 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, on our Worldview Wednesday episode, we will continue with our study based on a course I recently completed taught by Dr. Michael Heiser. Our study is titled “Sons and Daughters of God: The Believer’s Identity, Calling, and Destiny” Throughout this multi-week course, we will demonstrate that, in the Old Testament, “sons of God” and “holy ones” refers to supernatural beings whose Father is God and who work with God to carry out His will and that this divine family was present before humanity. By fully engaging with biblical texts such as Psalm 82; Psalm 89, and Deuteronomy 32:8–9, our study will show that this divine family functions as a template for God’s human family. God desires of humans, as His imagers, to participate in His council. This study addresses issues such as polytheism, the nature of the (little ‘g’) “gods,” and the uniqueness of Yahweh. Within this study, we will apply insights to the New Testament texts and shows how the metaphor of being in God’s family informs our sense of identity and mission as believers.
God Declares, “There Is None Like Me”·      Segment 16: “None Beside Me” (Part 1)IntroductionI think that we’ve established just by our previous week’s study of elohim that having more than one elohim is not polytheism. We still need to entertain one other question: What about verses that say there is none besides the Lord or where God Himself says, “There is none like me,” “There is none besides me,” “Besides me, there is no other,” something like that?
Not Statements of Denial but IncomparabilityThese phrases are typically taken as denial statements—in other words, statements that deny the existence of the other elohim. Now, we’ve seen that this is wrongheaded, because if you strip out the reality of these other entities, then God is ruling over nothing. He is comparatively greater than nothing. Again, it’s entirely foreign to the biblical writer’s mindset. The biblical writer is trying to make the point that these other entities do exist, and they are inherently inferior to the God of Israel; He judges them. They are not just contrived, made-up cartoon characters.
What we have here, in these statements about there being “none besides me,” is they are not statements that deny the existence of other elohim. They are statements about the incomparability of Yahweh, His uniqueness.
Deuteronomy as ExampleNow, by way of example here, I’m going to take us through a little bit of an exercise in the theology of Deuteronomy because Deuteronomy establishes this point that this is about incomparability, not denying existence. There are passages in Deuteronomy that have these so-called denial statements that also, in the same passage, affirm other elohim.
You can’t have those two things without a contradiction. What I’m saying is there is no contradiction because it’s just about being incomparable, not that one entity exists, and the others don’t.
God Fights SomeoneLet’s take a look at Deuteronomy 4:34-35 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+4%3A34-35&version=LEB); we read this,...