The Divine Council Part 8: The Resolution
Christ Above All: The Divine Council, the Cross, and the Cosmic Victory
Hello brothers and sisters,
Over the first seven posts in this series, we’ve traveled a long way together. We’ve defined elohim as a category term for divine power and authority (Part 1), watched God judge His corrupt council in Psalm 82 (Part 2), traced how the nations were divided among divine beings in Deuteronomy 32 (Part 3), witnessed the council present at creation (Part 4), confronted the rebellion of the Watchers in Genesis 6 (Part 5), unmasked the spiritual powers behind earthly thrones in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 (Part 6), and mapped the taxonomy of the unseen realm, distinguishing fallen angels from the disembodied demons (Part 7). If you haven’t read those yet, I’d encourage you to start there before continuing.
Get caught up on the Divine Council Series HERE.
Now we come to the end. And everything we’ve explored has been building toward this.
The divine council. The corrupt governors. The fallen Watchers. The imprisoned rebels. The disembodied demons. The nations in darkness under spiritual powers that abandoned their charge. All of it was building toward one moment. The Son of God entering the world He made, taking on flesh, and doing what no angel, no principality, no spiritual power could ever do.
This is the resolution. This is where the story has been going all along.
Let’s dig in.
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The Council and the Incarnation
We need to begin where the New Testament itself begins its argument for Christ’s supremacy: with His superiority over the angelic beings. And it turns out that the author of Hebrews makes that argument using a text that survives, in its full form, only in the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
This is one of the most remarkable examples of the both/and principle in the entire Bible, so I want to walk through it carefully.
In Hebrews 1:6, the author writes:
“But when He again brings the firstborn into the world, He says: ‘Let all the angels of God worship Him.’” (NKJV)
The author is quoting the Old Testament to prove that the Son is worshiped by angels and is therefore superior to them. But where is he quoting from? This exact line, “Let all the angels of God worship Him,” does not appear in the Masoretic Text of the Old Testament. Not in the Psalms. Not anywhere.
So where did the author of Hebrews get it?
He got it from Deuteronomy 32:43. And here is where the textual situation becomes fascinating.
Three Texts, Three Endings
Just as we saw with Deuteronomy 32:8 back in Part 3, the ending of the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32:43 comes down to us in significantly different forms across the manuscript traditions.
The Masoretic Text gives us a short version, just two poetic lines:
“Rejoice, O nations, with His people; for He will avenge the blood of His servants, and render vengeance to His adversaries, and will provide atonement for His land and His people.” (Deuteronomy 32:43, MT/NKJV)
The Septuagint gives us a substantially longer version:
“Rejoice, O heavens, with Him, and let all the sons of God worship Him. Rejoice, O nations, with His people, and let all the angels of God be strengthened in Him. For He will avenge the blood of His sons, and He will take vengeance and repay the enemies with a sentence, and He will repay those who hate; and the Lord will cleanse the land of His people.” (Deuteronomy 32:43, LXX/N.E.T.S.)
The Dead Sea Scrolls (4QDeut^q) preserve a Hebrew text that, while not identical to the LXX, contains the crucial lines the MT lacks:
“Rejoice, O heavens, together with Him, and bow down to Him, all you gods (אלהים, elohim), for He will avenge the blood of His sons...” (Deuteronomy 32:43, 4QDeut^q)
Look at what’s happening. The MT has two lines. The LXX has roughly four. And the Dead Sea Scrolls, in Hebrew, preserve the opening call for the heavens and the divine beings to worship God, exactly the material the MT is missing.
Why the Longer Version Is Original
Here’s the case for the priority of the longer reading, and it follows the same logic we applied in Part 3.
Hebrew poetry is built on parallelism. Lines come in balanced pairs, echoing and reinforcing each other. When you examine the Masoretic version of Deuteronomy 32:43, the poetic structure is truncated and unbalanced. Lines that should have parallel partners stand alone. The rhythm the rest of the Song establishes suddenly breaks.
The longer version, preserved in the LXX and confirmed in Hebrew by the Dead Sea Scrolls, restores the parallelism. The call to the heavens balances the call to the nations. The command for the divine beings to worship balances the command for the angels to be strengthened.
The poetry works.
This is the kind of evidence that textual scholars find compelling. It’s much easier to explain how lines dropped out of the MT (whether by scribal accident or by discomfort with the summons to “all you gods” to worship) than to explain why anyone would invent and insert perfectly balanced Hebrew poetic lines that happen to match the LXX. The longer reading is almost certainly original, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in the twentieth century, dramatically confirmed a reading that for centuries was known only from the Greek.
And notice the substance of what the longer ending says. At the climax of the Song of Moses, God summons the entire divine council, “all you gods,” “all the angels of God,” to bow down and worship. The very beings we’ve been studying throughout this series, the members of the heavenly assembly, are commanded to worship.
What the Author of Hebrews Saw
Now return to Hebrews 1:6. The author quotes “Let all the angels of God worship Him” and applies it to Christ. He is building his entire argument for the Son’s superiority over the angels on a line of Scripture that survives in full only in the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Sit with the implications of that.
An inspired author of the New Testament, writing under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, reached for the Septuagint’s reading of Deuteronomy 32:43 because it contained exactly what the Masoretic tradition had lost. The Spirit who inspired Hebrews evidently regarded that longer reading as the authoritative word of God. And the Dead Sea Scrolls have since vindicated it as ancient Hebrew Scripture, not a late Greek invention.
This is the both/and hermeneutic at its most powerful. It is not that the Septuagint is right and the Masoretic Text is wrong in some global sense. It is that on this verse, the Septuagint preserved something the Masoretic tradition lost, and the New Testament itself confirms which reading carries the weight of inspiration here. The two traditions together give us the fuller picture. Neither alone would have preserved everything.
And the theological payoff is glorious. The command that the divine council once received, “worship God,” is now applied directly to the Son. The Son is not a member of the council who worships. The Son is the one whom the council worships. He stands on the divine side of the line, receiving the adoration that belongs to God alone.
Every Knee: The Three-Tier Cosmos
Paul makes the same point from a different angle in one of the most exalted passages in all his letters:
“Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Philippians 2:9-11, NKJV)
Every knee. In heaven, on earth, and under the earth.
This is the three-tier cosmos of the biblical worldview, and every tier is populated by beings we’ve encountered in this series. “Those in heaven” are the faithful divine council, the angels and the heavenly host. “Those on earth” are humanity, along with any spiritual powers still operating in the earthly realm. “Those under the earth” are the imprisoned rebels, the fallen Watchers held in the deep places, and the dead in Sheol.
Every category of being in the entire cosmos bends the knee to Jesus. The faithful council worships willingly. The rebellious powers are forced to acknowledge what they fought against. The imprisoned Watchers, chained in darkness, confess from their prison that Jesus Christ is Lord. There is not a single being in any tier of creation that stands outside the scope of Christ’s supremacy.
The council that God assembled in the beginning, the council that witnessed creation, the council whose corrupt members He judged in Psalm 82, now bows in its entirety before the incarnate Son.
And there’s a detail here that ties back to the very heart of this series. The name that Paul says was given to Jesus, “the name which is above every name,” is almost certainly the divine name itself, the name of the Lord. When Paul writes that every knee bows and every tongue confesses “that Jesus Christ is Lord,” he is echoing Isaiah 45:23, where the Lord declares: “To Me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall take an oath.” Paul takes a passage where God speaks of universal worship due to Himself alone, and he applies it to Jesus. The Son receives the worship that the God of Israel said belonged to Him alone. This is not a lesser being exalted to a high rank. This is the Son revealed as sharing the very identity and glory of God, before whom the entire council, faithful and fallen alike, must bow.
The Cross as Cosmic Victory
But how did the Son bring the rebellious powers to their knees? Not by force of arms. By the cross.
This is the great paradox at the heart of the Christian faith. The moment that looked like the ultimate defeat of God’s purposes, the Son of God executed as a criminal, was in fact the decisive victory over every corrupt power in the cosmos.
Paul states it with stunning clarity:
“Having disarmed principalities and powers, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it.” (Colossians 2:15, NKJV)
The Greek here is worth examining closely. The word translated “disarmed” is ἀπεκδυσάμενος (apekdysamenos), from a verb meaning to strip off, to disrobe, to divest. Christ stripped the principalities and powers of their weapons and their authority, the way a defeated soldier is stripped of his armor. The corrupt spiritual rulers who held the nations in bondage were divested of their power at the cross.
And then Paul uses a word loaded with imperial imagery: θριαμβεύω (thriambeuō), “triumphing over them.” This word refers specifically to the Roman triumph, the victory parade in which a conquering general marched through the streets of Rome displaying his defeated enemies in chains before a cheering crowd. Paul is saying that at the cross, Christ led the defeated powers in a triumphal procession. What looked like His humiliation was actually their humiliation. The cross was His victory parade.
And here is the exquisite irony at the center of it all. The powers marched themselves into that procession. They put themselves in chains. Because they had no idea what they were doing.
Listen to what Paul says just a few chapters earlier in the same body of correspondence:
“But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew; for had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” (1 Corinthians 2:7-8, NKJV)
“The rulers of this age” (τῶν ἀρχόντων τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου, tōn archontōn tou aiōnos toutou). Now, some read this as a reference to the human authorities, Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas, the Sanhedrin. And they were certainly involved. But the word Paul uses, ἄρχοντες (archontes), “rulers,” is the same root family he uses throughout his letters for the spiritual powers, the ἀρχαί (archai, “principalities”) of Ephesians 6:12 and Colossians 2:15. And the phrase “of this age” points to the spiritual governance of the present world order, the corrupt powers we’ve traced through this entire series.
I’m convinced Paul has the spiritual rulers primarily in view here, working through their human instruments. The powers behind the thrones engineered the crucifixion.
And they had no idea it was a trap.
Regular readers of this Substack will remember that we touched this very passage back in Part 4, when we discussed progressive revelation. Paul speaks of a “hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages,” a wisdom that the original audience of Genesis 1:26 couldn’t fully see because it hadn’t yet been revealed. But look at who else was blind to it: the rulers of this age. The same hidden wisdom that was veiled from Moses’ first hearers was veiled from the spiritual powers. And their blindness was their undoing.
Think about what this means.
The corrupt divine beings who had governed the nations since Babel, who had held humanity in the darkness of idolatry, who had every reason to want the Son of God dead, saw their opportunity when Christ came in weakness and humility. They moved their pieces. They stirred up the crowds. They hardened the hearts of the authorities. They drove the whole machinery of the crucifixion forward, certain they were destroying the one who threatened their dominion.
And in doing so, they accomplished the exact thing that would destroy them.
Had they understood that the cross was not Christ’s defeat but the instrument of their own, “they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” But the wisdom was hidden. God had ordained it before the ages. And the powers walked straight into the trap, disarming themselves in the very act by which they thought they were winning. The public spectacle of Colossians 2:15 was staged, unwittingly, by the very beings who became its exhibits.
There is no deeper irony in all of Scripture. The rulers of this age put the Lord of glory on a cross to secure their reign, and by that cross their reign was broken forever.
Think about what this means in light of everything we’ve studied. The divine beings who rebelled against God’s order, who governed the nations corruptly, who held humanity in the darkness of idolatry and fear, were defeated not by superior cosmic firepower but by the self-giving death of the Son of God. The blood of the Lamb accomplished what no angelic army could. The cross disarmed the powers. And it did so through their own blind hands.
And this connects directly back to Psalm 82, where we began this journey into the council’s corruption. That psalm ends with a prayer: “Arise, O God, judge the earth; for You shall inherit all the nations” (Psalm 82:8). The psalmist cried out for God to take back the nations from their corrupt overseers. The cross is the answer to that prayer. At Calvary, God arose. He judged the powers. And He began to inherit the nations.
Pentecost and the Reclamation of the Nations
Which brings us to how that inheritance is being claimed.
In Part 3, we saw that at the division of the nations (Deuteronomy 32:8-9), humanity was scattered and the peoples were allotted to divine beings, while God kept Israel for Himself. The nations were disinherited, handed over to spiritual powers who then largely corrupted their charge.
At Pentecost, that begins to reverse.
“And there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men, from every nation under heaven... And they were all amazed and marveled, saying to one another, ‘Look, are not all these who speak Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each in our own language in which we were born?’” (Acts 2:5-8, NKJV)
At Babel, the languages were confused and the nations were divided. At Pentecost, the Spirit descends and the disciples proclaim the mighty works of God, and people from every nation hear it in their own tongue. This is not an accident of narration. It is the deliberate reversal of the division. The nations that were scattered and disinherited are beginning to be gathered and reclaimed.
And the mechanism of that reclamation is the Great Commission:
“All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations.” (Matthew 28:18-19, NKJV)
We looked at this passage back in Part 3, but now its full weight can land. “All authority in heaven and on earth” means that the authority once exercised by the corrupt divine governors has been transferred to the risen Christ. The princes of Persia and Greece, the spiritual powers behind the thrones, have been overruled. And the nations they held are now to be discipled, brought back under the direct authority of the God who made them.
Every time the Gospel crosses a cultural threshold, every time a church is planted among a people who have never heard the name of Jesus, the reclamation of Deuteronomy 32 advances. The disinherited nations are coming home. This is the cosmic significance of missions. It is not merely the saving of individual souls, precious as each soul is. It is the retaking of territory that was lost at Babel, the restoration of the nations to their rightful King.
If you found this helpful or enlightening, or even challenging, share it with a friend who needs to hear the deeper truths of the divine council.
What We Are, and What We Are Not
I’ve saved the most important clarification of this entire series for last, because it’s where I diverge most sharply from Michael Heiser, whose work opened this whole conversation for so many of us.
Throughout his writing, Heiser argues that the destiny of believers is to join the divine council, to become elohim ourselves. He speaks of glorified humanity being incorporated into the council as divine beings, of believers “becoming what the sons of God are.” He draws on the language of deification found in some strands of the early church, particularly the Eastern Orthodox concept of theosis, and on texts like Psalm 82:6 (”You are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High”) and 2 Peter 1:4 (”partakers of the divine nature”).
I want to steelman his position fairly, because it is not foolish and it is not made in bad faith.
Heiser’s argument runs like this. Humanity was created to image God and to rule creation under Him. The divine council members were likewise God’s agents in governing the cosmos. In the biblical vision of the end, redeemed humanity is promised that we will reign with Christ, judge angels (1 Corinthians 6:3), and share in the glory of the Son. If glorified believers will judge angels and reign over creation, then, Heiser reasons, we are being elevated into the very role the divine council was created to fill. We become members of God’s family-council, sharing in the divine life.
On this reading, theosis is not arrogant overreach but the fulfillment of what humanity was always meant to be. And he can point to genuine biblical language: we are called “children of God,” we “partake of the divine nature,” we are conformed to the image of the Son.
It’s a serious argument, built from real texts, by a serious scholar.
And I reject it.
Here is why. The entire Bible is built on a distinction that never, at any point, collapses: the distinction between the Creator and the creature. God alone is uncreated. God alone is self-existent. God alone possesses divine nature in Himself. Everything else that exists, angels, humans, the entire council, was made. And the gap between the Maker and the made is not a gap that can be crossed by elevation, glorification, or any process of refinement. It is absolute. It is permanent. It is the most fundamental fact about reality.
When Scripture says we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), it does not mean we acquire the divine nature or become divine beings. It means we are brought into fellowship with God, indwelt by His Spirit, made to share in His holiness and His life through union with Christ. We participate in the divine life the way a branch participates in the life of the vine (John 15). The branch never becomes the vine. It draws its life from the vine while remaining, always, a branch.
And when Scripture promises that we will reign with Christ and even judge angels, it does not promise that we become elohim. It promises that redeemed humans, precisely as humans, are exalted to share in Christ’s rule. We are told we will “reign with Him” (2 Timothy 2:12) and that He has made us “kings and priests to our God, and we shall reign on the earth” (Revelation 5:10). The dignity is staggering. But notice the grammar of grace in these promises: we reign with Him, we are made kings by Him. The authority is always derivative, always granted, always held in union with the One who possesses it in Himself. It is the dignity of the creature raised up by grace, not the creature transformed into deity.
Let me offer an image that has helped me hold this rightly.
There’s an old picture of sanctification drawn from the silversmith’s craft. The silversmith holds the silver in the hottest part of the fire, watching it carefully, because if it stays too long it will be destroyed, and if it comes out too soon it will remain impure. When asked how he knows the silver is fully refined, the silversmith answers: I know it is finished when I can see my own reflection in it.
That is what God is doing with us. He is refining us in the fire until He can see the reflection of His Son in us. But notice what the metaphor tells us. The refined silver reflects the silversmith. It does not become the silversmith. When the work is complete, the silver bears his image with perfect clarity, but it is still silver. It has been purified, transformed, made to shine, but it has not changed its essential nature into something it was never meant to be.
We are being conformed to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29). We will reflect Him perfectly one day, every trace of corruption burned away, His likeness shining out of us without distortion. But we reflect Him. We do not become Him. We do not become elohim. The Creator/creature distinction holds forever, and that is not a limitation to mourn. It is the very ground of worship. For all eternity, we will be creatures gazing upon and reflecting the glory of our Creator, and that is a joy that could never exist if the distinction were erased.
I hold Heiser in genuine respect. But on this point, I believe the whole testimony of Scripture stands against him. We are the redeemed. We are beloved children. We are heirs with Christ. And we are, and always will be, creatures who worship the God who made us.
The God Who Rules the Nations
Let me bring this series full circle, back to where the architecture was laid out, in Deuteronomy 32:8-9.
The Masoretic Text told us that God structured the world around Israel, His covenant people. The Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls told us that He assigned divine beings to oversee the nations while keeping Israel for Himself. Both are true. Both operate at the same time. The covenantal architecture and the cosmic architecture are two dimensions of a single design.
But the story didn’t end at the division. Through Christ, the nations are being reclaimed. Through the church, the Gospel is going to every corner of the earth. The corrupt divine governors who held the peoples in darkness are being displaced by the authority of the risen King, one heart, one family, one people group at a time.
That is the story this series has been telling. It began with a word, elohim, and a council most of us never knew was there. It moved through rebellion and corruption, through Watchers and Nephilim, through the powers behind the thrones and the demons in the dry places. And it arrives here, at the feet of the One before whom every knee in every tier of the cosmos will bow.
The divine council is real. The corruption was real. The cosmic conflict is real. But the victory is more real than all of it. Christ has disarmed the powers. Christ has begun to inherit the nations. Christ is worshiped by the very council that once stood in rebellion. And Christ is refining a people who will reflect His glory forever, not as gods, but as redeemed and beloved creatures with whom God will dwell in the New Creation for all eternity.
The Most High divided the nations. And through His Son, He is gathering them back.
Do not fear. God rules the nations. He always has. And the day is coming when every corrupt power will be a footnote in the story of the King who conquered them at a cross.
Thank you for walking through this series with me. It has been one of the great joys of my writing to explore these things alongside you. Keep studying. Keep comparing the texts. And keep your eyes fixed on the One whom the whole council worships.
May the Lord grant you His peace.
Kevin
What’s Ahead
This series answered where the corrupt powers came from and how Christ conquered them. But it raised a question it never quite finished: what happens to us when we die?
Most of us have been told the answer is simple. You go to heaven, or you go to hell.
But I've come to believe both of those words hide more than they reveal. The Bible's picture of the unseen destinations of the dead is stranger, richer, and far more hopeful than the one we inherited from medieval poets and the duality of Greek Platonism.
In my next series, we'll dig into Sheol and Paradise, the true meaning of Hades and Gehenna, the fire that only Revelation mentions, and why I no longer believe the dead in Christ go straight to heaven.
Bring your Bible. Bring your questions. And prepare to have a few assumptions dismantled.
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