Law this morning, this is when the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind. And he said, who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man. I will question you and you make it known to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know. Or who stretched the line upon it? or on what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Or who shut in the seas with doors when it burst out from the womb, when I made clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed limits for it, and set bars and doors, and said, thus far you shall come and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed. Have you commanded the morning since your days began and caused the dawn to know its place, that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth and the wicked be shaken out of it? It is changed like clay under the seal, and its features stand out like a garment. From the wicked, their light is withheld, and their uplifted arm is broken. Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare if you know all this. Where is the way to the dwelling of light, and where is the place of darkness, that you may take it to its territory, and that you may discern its path to its home? You know, for you were born then, and the number of your days is great. We will see how this one goes. Some of you already know this, but I wrote two sermons last week, because this week was going to be crazy. I get to about Thursday, and I wanted to read over it. Gone. Whole sermon. Gone. So, this is what I came up with, and it's replaced, but it's the same thing, I hope. We'll see how it goes. Now, I think that in Many of your minds, maybe in those dark recesses of your memory, maybe even in the very frontal lobe, you might remember hearing something in the New Testament about Christians being called sons of God. That sound familiar to you? For example, in the Beatitudes, Jesus says, blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. In Galatians, Paul talks about how a person becomes a son of God. He says, in Christ Jesus, you are all sons of God through faith. Faith in who? Jesus Christ. That is, we believe that Jesus is precisely who he said that he is, and one of the great benefits of this is that God adopts you into his family. This in itself is a work of the Holy Spirit of God, as he says in Romans 8, all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. Now there's at least a dozen more passages that talk about similar things, whether it calls us sons of God or children of God, a slightly different word in the Greek, or other variations. But that kind of opens us up to a question, which is why would the New Testament care about such a thing? So, I mean, it's obviously an amazing blessing that God would adopt us into his family, but what does that mean exactly? And what does the, where does the idea come from? And is there anything more to it than that? So one answer lies back in Exodus chapter 22, or chapter four, verse 22, where God commands Moses, he says, you shall say to Pharaoh, thus says the Lord, Israel is my firstborn son. So there's absolutely a connection going on here between the people of Israel and Christians as it relates to this phrase, the sons of God. But we're not ready to fully understand the implications of this. Instead, if we just jumped right into that, you would have a deficient and truncated understanding of this incredibly amazing doctrine of the Bible, and you would not be able to see why I'm leading an entire series of sermons on the cosmic war against the supernatural evil that will conclude in this kind of climactic discussion of the sons of God. In fact, you would be totally left asking, what does being sons of God have anything at all to do with a war of cosmic proportions? So a major clue that will connect us to this human side of the sons of God, to this cosmic war, is found in a passage that ironically, as we'll see here in just a minute, In its parallel in Matthew's gospel, it's actually often used by people to dismiss this very war as it will appear to us in Genesis 6, where we first encounter the sons of God language in the Bible. We're going to get to that soon enough, but here it is in Luke. Luke says they cannot die anymore because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. So did you hear how the language of sons of God is in this verse connected for some strange reason to angels? In fact, the verse identifies the two as being identical. And so this then is what we're going to talk about today. So this is a third sermon in a series of five that's gonna talk about this totally different group of beings from Christians that are also called sons of God. They're not human beings. Recall that in the first sermon a couple of weeks ago, we spent the entire time talking about the nature and doctrine of God. Very important foundation. Using chapter two of our confession of faith as a baseline, it is imperative that you understand who God is so that you can much more easily spot the counterfeits. Week two then discussed the gods, the counterfeits. In the Old Testament, both God and the gods are identified with the same word. The word is Elohim. Now that doesn't mean they're on a scale of being with one another or that the gods are somehow rivals to God. No, God is incomparably God in all of his divine attributes and no one in heaven or on earth shares his divine nature. Nevertheless, real entities are in fact called gods. The first and foremost of these we saw is Satan. He's called the God of this world. And Satan, as we saw, is identified in the New Testament as both Baal and as Zeus. They're the same entity. And that means that what some people think is a mere statue, an idol of human imagination, actually represents and houses a fallen heavenly being called Satan. And it also means that what some people think is a pure myth, a fairy tale made up by superstitious crazy people talking about Zeus, is actually the same fallen heavenly being as the enemy we find in the New Testament. And I gave you many different terms for these gods, which are synonyms in the scripture. Among them we looked at principalities, thrones, dominions, and powers. We saw that these gods share two things in common. They're all supernatural entities that belong to the invisible realm of the spirit, and they all share some kind of ruling function. God decreed that they should rule and govern. That's what nearly all of those terms overtly demonstrate, right? Now, one of the most important terms that the Septuagint, that Greek translation of the Old Testament and the New Testament use is a word archon. We translate that as either a ruler or a prince. You'll see both. So one translation in the same verse might say ruler of this world, another one will say the prince of this world. So the god of this age that we looked at a minute ago with Satan is elsewhere called the ruler or the prince of the world. These are synonyms. Now, I want you to think about this question. You know the answer. What is a prince? Well, the prince is a son of a king, right? If God is the king, then this means that anyone who is a son of God would be, by definition, a prince, wouldn't it? And hence, a ruler, because princes rule. In fact, there are other heavenly beings that are called archons besides Satan. Daniel 10 tells us about the prince of the kingdom of Persia who withstood the mighty angel Gabriel for three full weeks. Now this is obviously no human prince because what would it even mean that even a king on earth could possibly detain a mighty angel in the heavenly realm? No. This has to be a supernatural entity. Just a few verses later, we read about his counterpart, the prince of Greece. And in fact, we see at the beginning of chapter 12 that Michael is called the prince of Israel. And everyone knows that Michael is an archangel. All of this, Persia, Greece, Israel. is territorial language of heavenly beings somehow in charge of earthly realms. And in fact, the Jews actually refer to Satan as the Prince of Rome. Now, you will be able to understand this before we're all through today, and it's massively important for understanding the entire theology of the sons of God as human Christians that we will look at in our last week in week five. What it does for now is it helps you link in your mind the gods and the sons of God, because in fact, they're the very same thing. Sons of God is the one synonym that I really left out of last week's discussion on purpose when we talked about the gods, because I know I needed an entire week to deal with it properly. So to do this right, I want us to look today at the 10 or so different places that the Old Testament refers to these sons of God. Now, by sons of God, I mean a technical phrase that was found throughout the ancient Near East. For example, among the Canaanites, their father god figure is named El, and El had a consort named Asherah. And together, it says they spawned 70 sons of God. Now, among these sons are Baal, he's the sky God, and Yam, he's the sea God, and Mot is the underworld God. And believe it or not, these exactly correspond to Zeus and Poseidon and Hades, because the Greeks literally took these ancient Near Eastern gods and incorporated them in a one-to-one direction into their own pantheon. They even have almost exactly the same words between the Canaanite language and the Hebrew language to talk about them. In the Hebrew, in this technical phrase, it's b'nei ha'elohim, or a variation on it, like b'nei elim. Almost the exact same phrases are found among the 70 gods of the Canaanites. Now, we find this technical phrase about eight times, that's it, in the Hebrew Bible. When it talks about, Israel shall be my firstborn son, that's not one of these technical phrases, it's different. So we have about eight of them, and then we have about two more in the Old Testament Greek. So that's where we get our ten from, and that's what we're going to do this morning. We're going to look through these ten references to the sons of God. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go in chronological order of their appearances as it would be found in history, not as they come up in the Bible. And we'll do that at least up to a certain point where it won't matter after that. But we need to do this in order to clearly see just who it is that these sons of God are. So to that end, we will look first at Job 38, 7. And to do it right, we need to look at several verses before it to get the context. So we read it this morning for the law. God comes to Job at the last possible moment before he finally curses God and his anger and his hubris. And God asked Job, where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know. Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk? Or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? A context is always king. A text without a context is a pretext, they teach you in seminary. And all that means is it's easy to take any verse out of context and make it say whatever you want it to say. Here though, we very clearly see that God is speaking about the very earliest moments of creation. Perhaps as early as day one or day two in Genesis one. Now obviously, humans are not made until day six. And yet, here there are beings called stars and sons of God who are watching God create. And therefore, to state the obvious, these sons of God are not human. They can't be. Now that they're also called stars here shows you very clearly that they are heavenly beings. And importantly, some of these Greek manuscripts read angels of God, while others read sons of God. So those two things become synonyms and we are going to see this several more times before we're finished today. Now it should be obvious that if there are heavenly beings called sons of God that this would make them princes of the king. And this gives you your first clue that the princes of Persia and Greece and Rome are, in fact, heavenly, angelic entities. They are sons. Now, they're not sons by natural generation through union of God with some female deity, but they're only sons like Christians are by adoption. Some of these are even rule of territories and of the peoples of the earth. And we will find out how and why this happens soon enough. Now briefly, before we come to the second Sons of God passage, I simply want to mention a very important verse in Genesis 1, verses 26 and 27. You know these verses. Verse 27 says very clearly that God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. So God made humans by himself. And verse 26 says, let us make man in our image. Now scholars often wonder, who is the our? Who's the us? It's popular to say that the our and the us is the Trinity. And I'm actually not opposed to that because clearly the persons of the Trinity were present at this announcement. And yet, so also were the heavenly sons of God. We've just seen that in Job. So there's more going on here. And for this reason, going back to the early church and right on through to today, a line of uninterrupted people have spoken and many have said that the hour actually refers to the angels. Now someone's always quick to ask, are you saying the angels are made in God's image? And they usually ask this rhetorically because everybody knows that only humans are made in God's image. But of course, the Bible actually never says that. So listen to the following quotes. The Targum, the Jewish Targum says, and the Lord said to the angels who ministered before him, who had been created on the second day of creation, let us make man in our image after our likeness. Okay, that's interesting. Thomas Aquinas said the image of God is more perfect in angels than in man because their intellectual nature is more perfect. The great Puritan William Perkins said the inhabitants of the world are reasonable creatures made according to God's own image. They are either angels or men. And more recently, Meredith Klein said in the creative fiat addressed to the heavenly council, let us make man in our image, angels are identified as sharing in the image likeness of God. The lines of likeness connect not only God and man, but God and angels and man and angels. Agreeably, in the reflection of Genesis 126 and in Psalm 8, man's likeness to God is expounded in a comparison of man and angels. This is going to become really important in a couple of weeks. And I'll make sure I bring it back up then. But it's important here to note that the image of God is defined in Genesis 1.26. What is it? Well, if you read the context, the image of God means to rule or have dominion. It's why it says, let them have dominion. To be an image bearer of the king is therefore to have dominion, to rule as his son. and hence Adam will be called God's son. Their authority here is not that of the great king, it's that of a prince, or like a vassal king, a subservient lord who's given direct and immediate authority over a more local region under the sovereign control of Almighty God. And that's where you get these territories, Persia, Greece, Rome, Israel. Now we need to continue. We're going to go to the second chronological place we find the sons of God, and it's mentioned in the wild passage in Genesis 6, 1 through 4. I'm going to read it. It says, When man began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive, and they took as their wives any they chose. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward when the sons of God came into the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown." So sons of God is mentioned twice here. Once in verse 2 and once again in verse 4. Now again, as with the God image stuff, We actually find a controversy in the interpretation of these verses. The popular view of these verses since Chrysostom and Augustine, so 1600 years, has been that the sons of God are children of Seth, while the daughters of men are daughters of Cain. So for them, basically the problem going on here is that Christians married non-Christians. Of course, no one's able to explain how such a union could produce Nephilim, It's a word that the Greek rightly translates as giants. We see Christians marrying Christians a lot these days and I don't see a lot of giants coming out. So all they're left to do then is spiritualize these giants as if they're somehow giants in their own eyes. Very powerful or something like that. Obviously they're not literal giants. Everybody knows that's not true. What's funny is in Augustine when he talks about this, and he basically does that, in the next paragraph he says, and there was a giant that came from Germany who was paraded around the streets of Rome. And I'm like, what are you even doing, you know? So this occurs even as they spiritualize the sons of God and the daughters of men at the same time. But notice something very important here. Technically it doesn't say sons of Seth, does it? It says sons of God. And it most definitely does not say daughters of Cain. It actually literally says daughters of Adam. And guess who both Seth and Cain were? They're sons of Adam. The language literally is telling you that whoever the sons of God are, they have to be something other than the sons and daughters of Adam. But since we've already looked at Job 38, we now have the ability to know exactly who they are. They are fallen angels, the same entities that were singing for joy before God ever made Adam. Now Francis Schaeffer, that great reformed apologist of the last half of the last century, once said this. He said, more and more, we're finding that mythology in general, though greatly contorted, very often has some historic base. And the interesting thing is that one myth that one finds over and over again in many parts of the world is that somewhere a long time ago, supernatural beings had sexual intercourse with natural women and produced a special breed of people. Well, this is exactly right, and in fact, it is very important that you understand something. Literally, every single Jewish source that we have, and this is at least 17 of them prior to the 2nd century, and every single Christian source that we have prior to the middle of the 4th century, and that's at least 33 different sources spoke with one voice here. They all took the angelic view without exception. This is seen in the Greek Septuagint, which sometimes, again, translates this as angels of God, while some of the manuscripts leave it as sons of God. Exactly zero have any anti-supernatural view. Those did not exist until the rabbis of the second century went on the war path against Christianity and Jesus in particular, because they hated him so much that they literally changed their text revolving around several of our Sons of God passages. And in fact, this is how the Sethite view entered the church, unbeknownst to those who adopted this novelty. There's a rabbi who said from this passage, anyone who calls them Sons of God, let him be anathema. even though the original text said sons of God. So the original view of this was always angels, and this is reflected in Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2 and other New Testament passages, including Luke, where he equates angels with sons of God. Now, ironically, the parallel passage to Luke is found in Matthew 22, And here's the way Matthew puts it. For in the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but they're like angels in heaven. So people go to this verse and they use it to teach. They'll say, look, angels don't marry. See, Matthew said so. And angels cannot have sex. See, it's right there. And angels cannot procreate. Now, for the record, this passage teaches none of those things. First, it says that angels in heaven do not marry. It says nothing about fallen angels on the earth. Second, just because you don't marry, you can still have sex. Plenty of people that you see around you today can show you that by their actions. And third, angels and humans both share an identifying term. We're both called ish, men. Angels are men in the Bible. In fact, if you remember your Sodom story, the human men of that city wanted Lot to bring the angel men out so they could know them. Apparently, they thought it was possible. Also, that story is a recapitulation of Genesis 6. What's so ironic about using Matthew is that Luke literally tells you that angels are sons of God. He equates them. And furthermore, you have to remember that Jesus is talking to the Sadducees, and Sadducees don't even believe that angels exist. So what good would it do for Jesus to make an argument and start talking about creatures that his opponents don't even believe exist? They would just look at each other and start laughing, and then they would kick him out of the temple for his stupidity. But not if Jesus was actually interpreting Genesis 6. One of the few places he could actually go from the scripture that they would accept his teaching. Because they all knew full well what everyone thought of this passage. And in identifying angels as sons of God, Jesus is literally giving them the subtuagent translation, proving to them that their trick question about marriage is just a sham. Now, you all know I've written a book on this, I could talk about it for the rest of my life, but we have to keep going. The third time we discover sons of God chronologically in the Bible is in a passage that takes us to the Tower of Babel story. So now this is found in Deuteronomy 32. Verses seven through nine, and here's what it says. Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations. Ask your father, he will show you. Your elders, they will tell you. When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the people according to the number of the sons of God. But the Lord's portion is his people, Jacob is his allotted inheritance. Now a couple things that I want to point out here. First, notice Sons of God appears at the end of verse 8. So what's the context? So it says God's giving them their inheritance. Second, that inheritance is directly tied to the time when God divided mankind and fixed the borders of the people. Well, that's the Tower of Babel story. And then third, there is a number here. It says, according to the number of the sons of God, that number somehow corresponds to the tower. Now, when you go to Genesis 10 and you start counting all the names of the sons of Noah, you discover that there are 70 total descendants. Do you recognize that number? That's the number of the sons of God in Canaanite theology. And it's the same number here. The Targum actually remembers the tradition. It says, when the Most High gave the world as an inheritance to the peoples who came from the sons of Noah, when he divided the writings and languages among mankind in the generation of the division, at that time, he cast lots on 70 angels, the leaders of nations. So 70 is a number that we will return to. in a couple of weeks, it's intimately tied to this storyline. That's why you need to know this storyline if you're going to know the human Sons of God storyline. Now we need to be made aware of something else going on here. If you were reading, for example, from the New American Standard Bible, you would raise your hand and go, it doesn't say Sons of God, it says Sons of Israel. So guess what? This is now the third time that we've seen something pretty significantly disagreed upon in an interpretation of the verses that we're looking at. This one is actually due to a literal change of the text. Now you cannot have both sons of Israel and sons of God be original. Only one can be original, and one is a change. When we go back to the Dead Sea Scrolls that are written before Jesus was born, you go back to the Septuagint that was translated before Jesus was born, you discover that there is no Israel found in any ancient text. There's only sons of God, or again, sometimes angels of God. So what happened? Here's what happened. A war is what happened. We will see this in our next appearance of the term as well. But essentially, in the second century, the rabbis changed the text. This was deliberate, calculated, and diabolical because it attacked Christianity at a major point that the Christians were using to argue that Jesus is divine. How so? And why? Well, let's look at verse nine. Verse nine says, but the Lord's portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance. So you need to think about this. Not only are the sons of God inheriting nations, so now is the Lord inheriting. He's inheriting. What kind of a person inherits? Sons inherit. Fathers do not inherit things. Sons do. Therefore the Lord, Yahweh, in mine here, is the Son of God. The sons of God inherited their nations. The son of God inherits his nation. It's why Michael is the prince of Israel. It's happening to the nations as a punishment for Babel. They wanted to reach up to the gods. So God says, fine, you can have them. It's an act of grace that the Lord would come to any peoples after this and be their God. And that's verse nine. But guess what? If suddenly sons of God isn't there, and it's rather sons of Israel, then it not only destroys the meaning of verse 8, it also destroys the meaning of verse 9. If Israel was original, then quite frankly, it doesn't even make sense that God inherits Israel. But think back to our Prince of Persia and Prince of Greece and Prince of Rome and Michael. These guys are sons of God and they are ruling over the nations exactly as Deuteronomy 32, 8 and 9 tell you, because God gave them this inheritance. as a punishment for Babel. Now, if this isn't wild enough, we need to go to Psalm 82. The next time, I guess this will be the fifth time that we're gonna look at the sons of God. Here's the ESV of verse one. It says, God has taken his place in the divine council. In the midst of the gods, he holds judgment. So you have two gods here, two Elohim. The first one is God, it's singular. taken with the verb, God has taken his place. The second one is plural, taken with the verb, in the midst of the gods. So God is judging the gods. Now importantly, he's judging them from something called the divine counsel. Now this is rendered literally by the Net Bible. God stands in the assembly of El in the midst of the gods he renders judgment. You remember I said that El is the father god of the Canaanites and that he had 70 sons with Asherah. Well, this father god ruled from a heavenly divine council from Mount Hermon, actually. Exactly the way Zeus rules from Olympus with 11 other gods. A divine council is simply an assembly of heavenly beings who rule over the affair of the cosmos. Now, this sounds completely crazy to many Christians. In fact, some utterly deny its truth. Many will point to something like the New American Standard again as proof, because the New American Standard says something totally different. It says God takes his stand in his own congregation. He judges in the midst of the rulers. To them, this is perfectly normal. Nothing supernatural, nothing to see here. God is ruling over something like the Sanhedrin, and he's getting mad at them for not judging properly. But the problem is, this is not what the original text said. We have many copies of this verse from the days of Jesus and before, and they all read supernaturally. This is identical to the supernatural interpretation of Genesis 6. prior to the 2nd century. In fact, it's not until the 2nd century that we actually find these changes. But suddenly, we find several of them. All very natural in the way that they read. Now, why would that be the case? Go to verse 6. It says, I said you are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you. Sons of the Most High, is one of our technical terms for sons of God. It just replaces Elohim with Elyon, the most high, but it's the same idea. We're gonna come back to this verse next week when we see Jesus mentioning this verse. But for today, it's enough to see that verse one plays directly into another sons of God text. And it's no accident that we have a massive discrepancy here. Why? because the rabbis literally tampered with God's Word. They changed the text precisely again because Christians were using this as part of their great argument to convince Jews that Jesus was God in human flesh. Take away the sense of God being supernatural and you deal a significant blow to the Christians' testimony about Jesus. This psalm isn't about Jews not ruling the world well. It's about heavenly entities that fell into great sin. It's an entire worldview that everyone once knew, but in our culture, dominated by naturalism and materialism and rationalism and evolution, we have forgotten it. And we don't know our history. Now at this point, I want you to go to Psalm 89. We'll go to our sixth time that sons of God appears. because it's a parallel passage to Psalm 82. It also has one of the sons of God references. Let's begin in verse five. We read this for the gospel. Let the heavens praise your wonders, O Lord, your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones. So where are we? Let the heavens. We're in heaven. We're not on earth. And what is here? It's an assembly of holy ones in heaven. And we saw last time that holy ones is one of those synonyms for the gods. Verse six, for who in the skies can be compared to the Lord? Who among the sons of God is like the Lord? If you have your ESV, it says heavenly beings. That's just an interpretation. It literally says sons of God. Now again, we're in the skies, we're not on the ground, and here in verse six, we have the sons of God. So these sons of God are in the skies and in the heavens. And then we read in verse seven, that God is a God greatly to be feared in the counsel of the holy ones. So there you have the divine counsel again. It's a council in the heavens, in the sky. A council comprised of heavenly beings, of the sons of God. And this is exactly what Psalm 82 used to say universally until the rabbis changed it. Fortunately, even though they also changed it here to sons of the mighty, They couldn't get rid of the geographical references, and so this one still reads like a heavenly council of heavenly beings, even in the new American standard, which only uses the rabbi's text. Now there's, what, three more of these to go? Psalm 29 is the last one in the Psalms. We both, so we read this and we sang it. It's a fascinating song. It harkens back to the language of the flood, just like Genesis 6. God sits enthroned over the flood, and importantly, he sits enthroned as king. You see that? He's the king forever. All other creatures are, at best, princes. It's also into a psalm that profoundly recalls Canaanite theology, as there's a storm that's coming right from Baal's mountain to the north, down over Mount Hermon and into the land of Canaan. Any Jew, any Canaanite would have understood the imagery. It's a profound lyric. It declares God's glory over the gods. It is into this context that the first verse says this. Ascribe to the Lord, O sons of God. Again, the ESV says heavenly beings. Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. The psalm literally commands the sons of God to praise him. Praise him as their king because he's superior to them. This is exactly what we find later in the Psalter when it says things like worship him all you gods or praise him all his angels. Praise him, all his hosts. Praise him, sun. Praise him, moon. Praise him, all you shining stars." God's their infinite superior and he's their creator and so they owe him everything and they have to worship him. Let's go to the last two. We've already seen one example from Job. The last two are also found in Job. The book actually begins with the same sons of God that we find later where they're at creation praising God. Just like the Psalms command, listen carefully. Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord and Satan also came among them. And then the thing repeats in verse two. Almost exactly word for word. And what do you notice? Well, so sons of God are coming to present themselves to the Lord with Satan. Now I know many Old Testament scholars like to point out here that Satan is actually the Satan, and it's a function or a role that various entities play in the Bible, and it just means an accuser. And I will point out also that the definite article, the, actually appears most times in the New Testament with Satan, and yet we still call him Satan. Whoever this being actually is, I actually rather like it that we capitalize it here for this reason, because it keeps your mind firmly planted in the supernatural realm, right? When you read that the sons of God come before the Lord with Satan, you're like, okay, Satan's with them, so it's gotta be supernatural entities. I don't know what men would actually be walking with Satan into the throne of God, right? Because that's where they're going. They're going to God. Where's that? In heaven. It's like Isaiah 6 stuff, where the prophet gets a glimpse of the heavenly throne, and Jesus is sitting on it as Yahweh. Now, why would they do this? Well, it's because this is a divine council meeting, and they're deliberating over the affairs of the earth. That's what happens in the story. As this meeting begins, God asks Satan if he has considered his faithful servant Job, and you know the rest of the story. The point is, the whole scene is one of a group of heavenly beings interacting together to decide the fate of Job. However, and going back to our first week again, God is the one in charge here. Many people won't notice this. It's not the devil. God's the one who instigates the whole thing. Hey, Satan, have you considered my servant Job? God has a plan, not only for Job, but for you and I all these centuries later, to learn from Job's story about the problem of evil. The council is not out of God's control. In fact, going back to Psalm 82, the whole point is that God judges these evil sons of God for ruling wickedly, and he punishes them to die like men. That's something that you would not say if he's already talking to men, because that's pretty obvious, right? You're gonna die like a man. Yeah, I know. But if they're heavenly beings, that makes something different. Some of you say, angels don't die. I'm like, have you ever read about Satan being thrown into the lake of fire? I said those are the last two, and technically they are, but there's one more found in the Greek and in the Dead Sea Scrolls that I want to talk about. And this is also found in Deuteronomy 32. I save it till now because it puts a perfect cap on what we've been discussing, but also because it's kind of an eschatological passage, so it kind of fits as the last one to talk about. It deals with the coming judgment. Let's start with the New American Standard. This is Deuteronomy 32, verse 43. Now remember, the New American Standard only uses the Masoretic Rabbinical text for its translation. This is what it says. Rejoice, O nations, with his people, for he will avenge the blood of his servants and will render vengeance upon his adversaries and will atone for his land and his people. And now you read that and you go, well, what does that have to do with the sons of God? And the answer is nothing. Now let's look at the ESV. Rejoice with him, O heavens. Bow down with him, all gods. For he avenges the blood of his children and takes vengeance on his adversaries. He repays those who hate him and cleanses his people's land. See, the ESV is different because it's using the scrolls and the Septuagint. It has heavens instead of nations and gods instead of peoples. Friends, those are massive differences. Do you understand that? The ISV isn't making this up. It's using the scroll to inform its translation because that's what the Dead Sea Scroll says. But I want to continue because we still don't actually see sons of God here. And this is where the Septuagint comes in. Listen to it. Rejoice, you heavens, with him, and let all the angels of God worship him. Rejoice, you Gentiles, with his people, and let all the sons of God strengthen themselves in him, for he will avenge the blood of his sons, and he will render vengeance and recompense justice to his enemies. He will reward them that hate him, and the Lord shall purge the land of his people. The Septuagint is significantly longer. It actually keeps both the rejoicing of heaven and the nations, both the gods and the people of Israel. The difference is that it adds angels as it replaces them with gods, and it adds an entire line about the sons of God who parallel the angels of God. Which means that the verse is actually saying exactly what Psalm 82 says, which is that God is going to judge the sons of God for how they have influenced and infiltrated Israel. This begs a question. What happened? How does a text get so jumbled up, confused, and hopelessly contradictory? And I want to say this because most of the scripture in the Old Testament is not doing this. And yet we've seen it again and again and again today with these passage dealing with the sons of God. The only way I see this happening is from the same tampering with the very same theological texts as we've already been seen with Genesis 6 and Deuteronomy 32, 8 and Psalm 82 and Psalm 89. Scribes don't just change words so radically by mistake. This is not mixing up a lowercase l with a capital I with a Calibri font. These are deliberate changes of words and words actually dropping completely out of the text. Can it possibly be a coincidence that of the less than 1% of all the textual manuscript differences that we have, where over 99.99% of all the scripture matches exactly, that it just so happens that all of these are about the sons of God at the very center of the controversy. No way. And friends, the early church fathers knew this. Justin Martyr lived at the exact time that these changes were taking place of the rabbis. And this is what he told Trifo, the Jew. He said, your rabbis have absolutely expunged many passages out of the Septuagint version, as I would have you to know. Still, I will argue with you, even from those received passages which you still allow, which if your rabbis had understood, be assured they would have expunged them. Irenaeus, who started pastoring at the tail end of these changes, was even more blunt. He said, if the Jews had known that we should have made use of those testimonies that are to be drawn from the scriptures, they never would have hesitated to burn their own scriptures. Wow. Ever heard that? Now up to this point in this brief series on the cosmic war of the sons of God, we've been exploring the profound biblical reality of God versus the gods. Today we finally entered into the battle proper. Sons of God is a term that unveils the battle between the forces of good and evil, both in heaven and on earth. And today we've seen that the heavenly sons of God in the Old Testament are supernatural beings, often called angels, parallel with the gods of the nations, who are tasked with ruling over them. The symbolic number is 70 who govern from a divine council, a heavenly assembly where God presides and delegates authority to these sons to administer the affairs over the 70 nations of Babel. Intriguingly, the 70 sons of God in this council parallel the 70 members of the Jewish Sanhedrin, the earthly council that governed Israel. By the early second century, after many priests and even members of the Sanhedrin Council converted to Christ by faith, the Sanhedrin became increasingly hardened against the gospel, doubling down on their predecessors' own hatred for Jesus in the gospels. This numerical parallel is striking, 70 and 70. Almost as if the heavenly and earthly councils were designed to mirror one another, fathers to sons. In fact, recall that Jesus actually identifies these men in the first century, not as children of their heavenly father, but as children of their father, the devil. Jesus says, you are of your father, the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. That devil is Satan, the god of this world that we looked at last time, whom the Jews identified as that prince of Rome. His power extended now via his relationship to Rome, even to the very temple in Jerusalem, which had been desecrated by Satan when the Romans ransacked and blasphemed and destroyed it. The cosmic conflict is not a theological abstraction. It has real historical consequences. In the second century AD, the Jewish rabbis, driven by their opposition to Christianity, deliberately altered texts like Genesis 6, 1 through 4, Deuteronomy 32, 8, and 43, and Psalm 82, 1, shifting the supernatural sons of God to human interpretations like sons of the nobles or sons of Israel. As the Rabbi Simeon Ben-Yohai declared, cursed are all who call them sons of God. This was a calculated attack on the Christian claim that Jesus is the divine son of God. By de-supernaturalizing these texts, the rabbis sought to undermine the scriptural foundation for Jesus's divinity, effectively turning their religion into a Unitarian framework that obscured the Messiah's identity. And it worked so well that the church unwittingly invited in these very changes into their own interpretations, not realizing that those interpretations that they used to so zealously guard against God against a pantheon and polytheism was actually created to undermine their very faith in the triune God. This battle for the Bible was instigated by none other than Satan himself. The Pharisees, influenced by their diabolical father, rejected Jesus as the son of God, and their successors continued this assault by tampering with the very own scriptures and cursing Christians in their synagogues, even as they would later write from Babylon, that Jesus Christ died for his blasphemous crimes and now sits in hell in boiling excrement forever. You need to see the sons of God for precisely this reason. As I've been reminding you, the enemy of our faith is not flesh and blood, including even these rabbis, let alone the Jewish people. They're all image bearers held captive to Satan and in need of great liberty that comes from the gospel. But rather, it is principalities and powers and heavenly realms, these fallen sons of God, led by Satan, inspiring human agents to launch direct assaults on the gospel. The second century rabbinical changes were a critical battle in this cosmic war. They were aimed at severing the Jewish people from the truth of their own scripture and the hope of their Messiah. The stakes could not be higher. These alterations have shaped Jewish thought for centuries, rendering it profoundly unitarian and resistant to the claims of the gospel. However, not all the sons of God are fallen. Many, maybe even as much as two-thirds, if you can take Revelation 12 literally, remain loyal to the Lord, fighting alongside us in the spiritual battle. These faithful heavenly beings serve God's purposes, aiding his people, and yet we must remain vigilant for the fallen sons of God. The gods of old are real, powerful, ancient, diabolical, pernicious, and clever. They seek to deceive and draw us away from the gospel of Jesus Christ, our only hope of comfort in this world and the next. And sometimes they even do it by making us think that we are upholding orthodox truth when the reality is we're upholding deliberately tampering text meant to destroy our reasons for faith that we have in Jesus Christ. As we conclude, let's fix our eyes on Jesus, the true Son of God, who adopts us into God's family through faith in Him. The cosmic war continues, but the victory is assured in Christ, as we will see next week. So let us stand firm, aware of the enemy's schemes, and proclaim the true myth, the historical, life-transforming truth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God who triumphs over all the powers and principalities. Lord, I ask you would help us to understand what we're looking at today. You don't take the veil off our eyes for this, then we're in big trouble. And I know these texts aren't the heart of the gospel, but very clever because it certainly is around and under and over it. very diabolical changes, and I would pray, Lord, that you would help us to see how important it is that there are heavenly beings called sons of God that are real, and that Jesus' own claims to be the son of God come into that, and that even the status that we have as sons of God, if we don't have this worldview, then we can't possibly understand the glories that you have saved us to. And I look so forward to being able to talk about those things the next couple of weeks. For today, open our eyes to the truth of who these entities are and the battle that we fight, a battle for the very Bible itself, the very word of God. Thank you for preserving the scrolls and the subduagent so that we might be able to compare and see what it was that your word originally told us after men deliberately started to change it in very few places, but at key points because of how much they hated the Jesus who came here even for them. Lord, please turn our hearts towards you now as we come to the Lord's Supper. Help us to think about what Christ, the Son of God, has done for us in dying for our sins, we ask in Jesus' name, amen.