Sermon Tone Analysis

[TITLE SLIDE]

CHILDREN OFTEN ASK, “WHAT WAS THERE BEFORE GOD MADE THE WORLD?”

The answer most adults would give is that God was there.

That’s true, but incomplete.

God had company.

And I’m not talking about the other members of the Trinity.

CHILDREN OFTEN ASK, “WHAT WAS THERE BEFORE GOD MADE THE WORLD?”

The answer most adults would give is that God was there.

That’s true, but incomplete.

God had company.

And I’m not talking about the other members of the Trinity.

[BRING UP KIDS]

God’s First Creation—the divine beings

God and the gods

Discusion about elohim.

The Divine Counsel and the Garden (Paradise/God’s Home Office)

King Ahab story

APPLICATION

Why does God need a counsel anyway?

[QUESTIONS]

God doesn’t need one.

He chooses to use one.

God doesn’t need us.

He chooses to use us.

In the same way, we choose to be used by God or to be used by the gods of this world.

Our tendency is to say that idols today are things like money and success and comfort—and they are.

But, we do well to remember that there are real cosmic powers at work behind those idols—they are not mute idols.

There are powers at work trying to take your attention away from the one true God and savior, Jesus Christ.

We are born into the Kingdom of the gods, not into God’s kingdom.

Who created the world and everything in it?

PODCAST NOTES

[TITLE SLIDE]

ONE

We learned that there is only one God.

If you’ve read the Bible at any length, then you don’t really believe that.

What existed before God created everything?

The Hebrew word God works different than the English word

DEAL with the first commandment

Samual and the mediaum - elohim means disembodied spirit of a person

*** Elohim is a large bucket term for any disembodied being.

The NT tends to differentiate between God (Theos) and gods proper from other spirits daemon and angelos.

What has God created besides this world?

Are there heavenly or spiritual things God created?

Daddy?

Before God made the world, what was there?

If you were to read with no context for who God is, you would read it like, “A spiritual being created…” and eventually walk away with the sentiment, “Wow!

This is a really powerful spiritual being.”

“There is no idol in the world,” — the piece of wood is not a god.

“Even if there are so called gods, and indeed there are...”

The piece of wood is not a deity, but people treat them as such.

But, there are gods and lords in the world.

They are real and under gods authority.

Look up, “So called gods.”

The answer that most parents would give to this question is that God was there.

But, for us there is only one.

Biblical MONOTHEISM is not the idea that there are not other gods.

It is that we don’t worship any other gods like the gods of the nations.

(cf.

atheism in the 1st century.)

TWO

That’s true.

Before the foundations of the world were laid, God was there.

If you went to the ancient Israelite and said do you believe in one God, they would say, ‘Yes,’ but if you went to them and said do you believe in multiple gods, they would say, ‘yes.’

But, that’s an incomplete picture.

Yahweh is the supreme Elohim over the other powers of the universe.

I always understood gods to be gods with an *

THREE

God works through mediators

TAKE TEN!!!

In the Bible we read that God said to Job,

(CSB) — What supports [the earth’s] foundations?

Or who laid its cornerstone while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

(CSB) — What supports its foundations?

Or who laid its cornerstone while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

This is a story about the beginning when God created everything.

The Lord said that while He was creating everything, there were mornings stars who sang and songs of God who shouted for joy.

Who do you think the morning stars and the sons of God are?

PAUSE

Sons of God and Morning Stars are both references to angels and other divine beings.

Obviously sons of God can’t mean humans, because this happened during creation, before humans were made.

[TITLE SLIDE]

It’s not that God was alone when he created the world.

He had a first creation; a divine creation.

And those divine beings watched in awe and wonder as God created all things.

Can you imagine there being absolute nothing?

It would be like being in the darkest part of space with no stars or suns.

Can you imagine how amazing it would be to watch God make the world and the stars and the sun and the moon and all the things that God made on the earth?

These angels and other beings got to see that.

[KIDS BE SEATED AND GET A SPECIAL TREAT FROM MRS.

JAMI]

This is the picture of creation.

God has hosts—or multitudes—of spiritual creatures who live with him in the heavens.

Who are these divine beings though?

Dr. Mike Heiser explains:

We might think of them as angels, but that wouldn’t be quite correct.

The unseen world has a hierarchy, something reflected in such terms as archangel versus angel.

The unseen world has a hierarchy, something reflected in such terms as archangel versus angel.

That hierarchy is sometimes difficult for us to discern in the Old Testament, since we aren’t accustomed to viewing the unseen world like a dynastic household, as an Israelite would have processed certain terms used to describe the hierarchy.

In the ancient Semitic world, sons of God is a phrase used to identify divine beings with higher-level responsibilities or jurisdictions.

The term angel describes an important but still lesser task: delivering messages.