We make frequent mention of the Divine Council worldview on our podcast, and in an early episode, we explained what that is and what it means, but the question still comes up with some regularity from our listeners, so a brief refresher and introduction in easily referenced written form is in order.

The DCW has been widely acknowledged within academia for quite some time, due predominantly to scholarship on 1 Enoch after its discovery among the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 (copies of 1 Enoch had been around among a handful of academics and collectors since the late 19th century, but its significance in 1st-century Jewish and Christian thought wasn’t understood), but also because of a growing series of other related and relatively recent (within the past century or so) archeological and textual discoveries.

While it’s been accepted by academics for many decades, it is only in recent years that the DCW has come into the awareness of laypeople within the Church, thanks to the efforts of the late Dr. Michael Heiser and others, and despite some resistance to it by many who refuse to expand upon or depart from their more familiar traditions.

(And by “accepted by academics,” I don’t mean they are necessarily believers in that worldview themselves — meaning, they all regard it to be objectively true. I just mean that they acknowledge it as the worldview held by the biblical writers and the general culture in which they lived.)

The Divine Council is a major preoccupation within the biblical narrative, and so Christians being largely unaware of it for the past 14 centuries has been a considerable blind spot and hindrance to a correct understanding of the Bible, and of the gospel itself, as well as the mission and purpose of the Church, which is one of our reasons for making it the theme of our podcast.

What is the Divine Council Worldview?

Simply put (and as the name indicates), there is a Divine Council – a council of divine beings, i.e., gods – who rule over humanity.

These “gods” are not self-existent, eternal and uncreated beings, as only God Himself is. Rather, they are created beings. Throughout the Scriptures, they are referred to variously as “gods” (note the lowercase “g”) or “sons of God” (“elohim” and “bene Elohim,” respectively, in Hebrew).

Many of the early Church Fathers referred to them simply as “angels” and – depending on the connotations we attach to that term, that isn’t entirely wrong. Except, the fact that they did so was both a symptom and a furtherance of the Church’s collective gradual departure from the Divine Council worldview that correctly framed the narrative of the Bible. “Angel” just means “messenger,” so it’s more of a job description than a classification of being, and while all angels are elohim, not all elohim are messengers, and so referring to them all simply as “angels” obscures their true nature and roles.

Also, the gods are sometimes referred to in Scripture by another job description: that of “Watchers.” In Daniel 4, King Nebuchadnezzar tells of a terrifying dream he had of his imminent future, which was “by decree of the Watchers, by the decision of the Holy Ones, so that the living may know that the Most High rules the kingdoms of the world and gives them to anyone He chooses.” (v. 17)

There are other DCW-related passages in Daniel, like his own vision in chapter 7 in which he witnesses a scene in heaven in which “thrones were set in place … the court was seated and the books were opened,” with God Himself in the seat of supreme authority, and this heavenly court pronounced sentence upon human empires and their rulers in preparation for a major turning point in history to be discussed in what follows.

There are several other passages in which prophets envision similar scenes in heaven: God is pictured holding court among these “Watchers” and “sons of God” and decisions are made about the affairs of mortals – not by God on His own, but in conference with the gods. There is the prophet Micaiah’s vision in 1 Kings 22, as well as the opening scene of the Book of Job in which “the Accuser/Prosecutor,” i.e., “Satan,” presents himself among the rest of the sons of God and lodges his complaints against Job.

The Twilight of the Gods

One of the most explicit and dramatic of these Divine Council passages is Psalm 82, which I refer to as the “Ragnarök Psalm.”

In it, God presides over the Council and pronounces judgment upon them for their unjust rule of mortals, decreeing a sentence of death upon them: “I said, ‘You are gods, sons of the Most High,’ but you will die like mere mortals; you will fall like every other ruler.”

So, these gods rule by authority delegated by God, but they are hostile and cruel to humanity and God declares them His enemies and condemns them to die.

This naturally raises several questions:

• Why does God rule through a council of lesser, created gods?
• Why would He allow them to continue at all if they abuse their authority?
• Why would He only sentence them to death and not just carry it out then and there?

There is no place in Scripture where these questions are explicitly answered, because they’re never explicitly asked, because the original ancient audience already understood the narrative in these terms and didn’t need it explained. These themes are elusive to us because we don’t read it within the same worldview they had and we come to the Bible with a different set of questions and concerns, many of which it wasn’t written to address. But, if we can accept what we’ve seen plainly in the Scripture so far about the Divine Council (not everybody does) and build on those basic observations, the answers to these questions are implicit in several key passages.

Why is There a Divine Council?

Some commentators point to Genesis 1:14-19 as the first appearance of the Divine Council in Scripture: on the Fourth Day of creation when God placed the sun, moon and stars in the heavens to “rule over the day and night and to separate light from darkness.” In the ancient world, the gods were identified with the stars and planets and were conceived of as looking down upon mortals, and so this is understood by some to be the first glimpse of the Council.

I have some reservations about that reading. I lean toward the reading that God’s initial appointment of gods as “Watchers” over humanity was the result of the Fall of Man. There wasn’t just one “Fall of Man,” though, but three.

In the earliest chapters of Genesis, Man was given authority as God’s image-bearer to work the sacred space of the Garden of Eden, which was essentially a temple, and his mission was to expand it as he multiplied and filled the earth and subdued it, ruling over the rest of creation and transforming it from an untamed, chaotic wilderness into a sacred paradise in which God dwelled with Man.  

That mission was cut short very early by Man’s expulsion from the Garden for giving in to the temptation of the serpent, who was, on the one hand, one of the wild animals Man had named and been given authority to rule over, but on the other, a divine being (because even ancient, prescientific people understood just as well as we do that snakes don’t talk). The Woman was tempted by this divine being to “become like God” by eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and enticing the Man to do the same, so God condemned them and their descendants to death as they were banished from His Presence and from access to the Tree of Life.

The book of Genesis doesn’t mention the Divine Council per se (unless we count Day Four), but it does mention “the sons of God” in Genesis 6, which recounts the next major rebellion of humanity against God, leading to the Flood.

This episode mirrors the first rebellion in that, in the Garden, it was the Woman who as tempted by the divine being to become like one of them (the ironic deception being that we already were destined for that, if only the Serpent had been denied), while in Genesis 6, it was the divine beings who were tempted by women to become like mortals.

The aforementioned Book of Enoch expands on this episode by recounting that these sons of God descended upon Mount Hermon – a 7,000-foot-tall mountain cluster north of Israel, which was a major landmark and sacred site to ancient people of the region because it was understood to be a midway point between heaven and earth, and so the gods were believed to dwell there. It was the ancient Near Eastern equivalent to Mount Olympus, and the Book of Enoch, in recounting this episode, explains why.

The sons of God are called “Watchers” in 1 Enoch, presumably for their role of watching over humanity – which is the same term used for the gods of the Divine Council in the Book of Daniel. Presumably, God appointed them to the task after Man’s rebellion in the Garden.

In watching humanity, the sons of God were enticed by the beauty of women, and 200 of them descended upon Mount Hermon and – knowing it would be a brazen act of rebellion against God’s order of creation – all agreed to take human women in sexual union, come what may. Their offspring were superhuman demigods and monsters called “Nephilim,” who roamed the earth, menacing and, often, even eating humanity, while humans idolized and admired them for their prowess as warriors. And, the Watchers gave humanity forbidden, occult knowledge of magic and warfare and metallurgy for making weapons, among other technologies, as well as instructing women in the arts of seduction and prolonging youth and beauty for the sake of sexual power, at the cost of their fertility (sound familiar?).

All of this led to the further corruption of humanity, resulting in the Flood. Humanity and the Nephilim were wiped out, save for Noah and his family, and the Watchers were condemned and imprisoned in the Abyss to await final sentence at Judgment Day.

(This is a topic to expand upon in an article of its own, but it’s worth noting the parallels between the Watchers’ imprisonment and that of the Titans of Greek myth being overthrown by the Olympian gods and imprisoned in Tartarus. There are plenty more parallels where that came from between this narrative and pagan mythology worldwide.)

After Noah and his family repopulated the earth and their descendants’ families grew into nations, humanity gathered to undertake the third major rebellion against God, as Genesis 11 reports: they collectively defied God’s reiterated command to “be fruitful and increase in number, multiply on the earth and increase upon it” by gathering to settle in one place, where they attempted to build a tower to heaven. If we likewise consider the Tower of Babel episode within the cultural and historic context of the ancient Near East, their objective was not, as is commonly supposed by modern lay readers, to create a way for humans to get into heaven, but the opposite: to create a sacred space to receive visitors from heaven. The Tower is acknowledged by modern scholars to have been a ziggurat, which was a sort of man-made sacred mountain upon which the gods were believed to descend.

It was an attempt to repeat (pre)history: they wanted the Watchers to return. The very same corruption that moved God to grieve over the wickedness of humanity, and for which He wiped out human civilization, they wanted to reinstate.

In the first two rebellions, humanity was tempted and seduced by divine beings.

In the third, humanity deliberately sought out those divine beings to invite the corruption.

God’s response was to confuse their language and scatter them, but also – to disinherit them. Humanity wanted the favor of the Watchers, so God gave them over to their own devices.

But, He didn’t leave it at that.

As is recounted in the “Song of Moses” of Deuteronomy 32:

“Remember the days of old; consider the years long past; ask your father, and he will inform you, your elders, and they will tell you. When the Most High apportioned the nations, when He divided mankind, He fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God; YHWH’s own portion was His people, Jacob His allotted share.” (vs. 7-9)

God disinherited humanity and gave them over to the rule of the gods whose favor they sought, but then He elected one man to become His own nation and through whom to redeem the rest.

This is the basic worldview that frames the rest of the Bible and that was taken for granted by the Israelites and Jews and the surrounding nations and cultures: each nation had its god and each god had his territory and nation to rule over.

This is why, when Naaman the Syrian resolved to worship only the God of Israel, he requested “as much earth as a pair of mules can carry” so that he could worship God outside of Israel (2 Kings 5:17). To worship the God of Israel, he needed to take a portion of Israel with him.

Also, a couple centuries later when the Assyrians conquered Israel and imported other conquered peoples to replace the Israelites they’d deported, the king of Assyria ordered his men, “Have one of the priests you took captive from Samaria go back to live there and teach the people what the god of the land requires.” (2 Kings 17:27)

(The next paragraph reports that those people brought all their hometown gods with them and worshiped them alongside YHWH, in the depraved manner of those gods’ demands, which is why Samaritans were so maligned and stigmatized even up to the time of Jesus.)

The War in Heaven

I don’t know at what point the events of Psalm 82 occurred – when God decreed the death sentence for the gods of the Divine Council because of their corruption.

But, the implication is that all of the child sacrifice and ritual sex and sodomy and other outrages and depravities entailed within pagan worship were the result of the gods’ influence. Apparently, the sin of the first generation of Watchers was also a temptation succumbed to by their successors, as each god had his own “requirements of worship,” and apparently, some of those requirements resulted in the proliferation of more Nephilim after the Flood, which is why Moses and Joshua and the Israelites up until the time of David had so many giants to slay in their campaign to settle the Promised Land.

And, we know that by the time of Daniel and the Babylonian Exile, there was full-scale war between the gods of the nations and the sons of God loyal to their Father. In Daniel 10, he recounts having received a vision concerning a “great war” that put him into a deep depression, but then a divine being appeared to him who was so immensely powerful and awesome that Daniel was rendered catatonic with terror. This being – this terrifying otherworldly being – said he had tried to reach Daniel when he first had the vision three weeks earlier, but was detained by the apparently even more terrifying and powerful “Prince of Persia,” and only managed to elude him with the aid of the chief prince Michael (i.e., the archangel), who had apparently been put in charge of Israel as a result of God divorcing them as His people and sending them into exile for their apostasies (Ezekiel 10). The angel then lamented that he would soon have to return to the fight, and that “the Prince of Greece” would then enter the fray (the Grecian/Macedonian Empire led by Alexander conquered and overtook the Persian Empire, which was in power at the time of Daniel’s vision).

So, that’s the worldview of the Bible: there is only one true, eternal, transcendent God who created the universe and to Whom worship is due, but there are gods beneath Him who rule the nations. At least, that’s what is established in the Old Testament and where it leaves off.

These gods rule with God’s delegated authority in a Divine Council, but they are not of one mind and purpose, and they are not unanimously good. They are not on God’s side, nor humanity’s. They are evil and hate humanity and revel in our corruption.

This is the state of affairs that explains why the world is the way it is – because it’s what humanity chose.

The Rise of Man

Humanity chose it, but why does God continue to choose it?

Why does God tolerate, not only the existence of evil, but its continued rule over the nations?

That’s another question never explicitly addressed in the Bible, but the answers aren’t hard to infer from what we read of the Divine Council in the New Testament.  

“Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in the cross,” Paul wrote of Christ (Colossians 2:15).

The “powers and authorities,” of course, are the gods of the Divine Council. These are the same beings to whom Paul referred when he wrote to the Ephesians, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” (6:12)

By his death on the cross, Jesus not only stripped them of their power, but humiliated and defeated them.

Revelation 12 speaks of the Devil’s defeat in the war in heaven: “For the Accuser of our brothers, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down. They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.”

“Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death – that is, the Devil – and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death,” reads Hebrews 2:14-15.

Christ’s death breaks their power because their power is in their accusations against humanity, because their accusations are true: we are guilty and our guilt is what gives them their authority to rule over the nations, because our guilt makes us their hostages. God pronounced a death sentence upon the Watchers for their corruption, but we have the same sentence against us and God would be unjust to carry out that sentence against them but to spare humanity. When the “Twilight of the Gods” occurs, their death will mean the death of all who belong to them.

So, the short answer to why God continues to tolerate the wicked rule of the Divine Council is that He loves humanity too much to destroy us along with them. His justice would be satisfied if He simply destroyed the gods and all of humanity with them, but His love for humanity prevents that. In the cross of Christ, God’s love and His justice are simultaneously satisfied.

Because he himself had no sin but paid the penalty of sin on behalf of all humanity, Jesus conquered the gods and nullified their claim against humanity. It was that triumph over evil that the prophet Daniel saw in his vision after the condemnation of the four beasts:

“In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was One like a Son of Man, coming on the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into His presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power. All nations and people of every nation worshiped him; his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and his dominion is one that will never end.”  

Through the Messiah, humanity has been elevated above the gods of the Divine Council, as Jesus himself sits in that seat of supreme authority, and so anyone who is in Christ is likewise exalted in status. Our sentence has already been carried out and the gods’ case against us has been rendered moot, and now we who are in Christ are destined for adoption as the new sons of God, as Romans 8 explains.

It could even be argued that Daniel’s vision and the scene described by Asaph in Psalm 82 — of God taking His place in the Divine Council and condemning the gods to death — were both visions of the exact same event: Jesus taking his seat of authority was that death sentence upon the gods: with their hostages freed, their doom is ensured.

But, that sentence has yet to be carried out. Take note again of what Paul wrote to the believers in Ephesus: our struggle against the gods is still ongoing. It’s not over. The final outcome of the war in heaven has been decided, but the war rages on, and it’s in the hands of the Church now.

One of the most vital and important lessons that comes out of the Divine Council worldview is that our choices matter: God made us in His own image and gave us authority over creation. The choices we make have real, incalculable stakes, and they are binding. God holds us to them. When humanity chose to enslave ourselves to the will of lesser gods, that choice determined the course of history – not just for humanity, but the entire universe. Our choices cannot simply be undone, and the consequences are costly. It took the death of the Son of God to reckon with that choice.  

Because of his death and resurrection, though, humanity is offered a new choice:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” said Jesus before his ascension. “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

The spiritual forces of darkness in the heavenly realms no longer have their rightful authority, but they still have the nations’ obedience.

It is the Church’s mission to – first and foremost – be God’s kingdom on earth, exhibiting His nature, acting as Christ’s vessel and vehicle on earth, the instrument through whom his Spirit is embodied. In so doing, we advance His kingdom, like Adam was intended to expand the Garden of Eden to transform the untamed wilderness of creation into Paradise. We do that by extending the choice to the nations between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness.

“And this gospel of the kingdom must be preached to all nations, and then the end will come,” said Jesus (Matthew 24:14).

Regarding that victory, Paul wrote, “Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” (1 Corinthians 15:24-25)

Contrary to appearances and widespread misconception, the Church, then, is not a mere religious institution or social organization – a setting for weddings and funerals and baby dedications and a place merely for learning values and sermons about “how to be a good person” or “live the good life” or “how to get into heaven.”

Rather, it is a military organization – it is the most important military organization that has ever existed, to fight and win the only War that has ever really mattered, and of which all other wars and conflicts and struggles are only a chapter.

The Church and what we do – the choices we make, what we bind or loose on earth – are how Christ destroys the dominion, authority and power of the Divine Council.