Questions raised during the session, with answers drawn from the teaching.
Q: My Bible says “sons of Israel” in Deuteronomy 32:8 — is that wrong?
It reflects a later manuscript tradition rather than the oldest available text. The difference between “sons of God” and “sons of Israel” in Deuteronomy 32:8 comes down to which Hebrew manuscript you are working from. The Masoretic Text — the medieval Hebrew tradition compiled around 1000 AD, which underlies most English Old Testaments — reads “sons of Israel.” The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered at Qumran and dated approximately 1,000 years older, read “sons of God.” The Septuagint — the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures made before the time of Jesus — reads “angels of God.”
Most modern study Bibles include a footnote acknowledging the Dead Sea Scrolls reading. If yours does not, look for a note referencing the Masoretic Text and an alternate reading; it will often be there. When comparing manuscript traditions, older witnesses generally carry more weight, and on this reading the older witnesses are consistent with one another.
Q: Couldn’t “sons of Israel” still make sense? Does it have to be sons of God?
No — not in context. The event described in Deuteronomy 32:8 is the division of the nations at Babel, the only moment in Scripture where God assigned boundaries to all the peoples of the earth. At the time of Babel, Israel did not exist. Abraham had not yet been born. The sons of Israel numbered exactly zero at that moment in history. For God to have divided the nations “according to the number of the sons of Israel” when there were no sons of Israel would mean he divided the nations according to nothing. The “sons of Israel” reading is not just textually weaker — it is logically impossible given the event it is describing.
Q: Why did God put the nations under fallen angels rather than under good ones?
Because he was allowing the consequences of Adam’s choice to play out within the framework of the free will he built into the created order. When Adam surrendered his governing authority, that authority transferred to Satan. Satan now legally held dominion over the earth and over its nations — a claim he stated openly when he offered Jesus “all the authority and splendor” of the kingdoms of the world during the wilderness temptation (Luke 4:6). Jesus did not dispute it. The authority was real.
God does not override his own legal framework. He plays by his own rules — not because he is constrained by them, but because the free-will structure is essential to the outcome he is working toward. To install good angels over the nations in place of the fallen ones would be to circumvent the consequences of human choice, which is precisely the kind of force that would undermine the genuine freedom that makes willing love possible.
Q: Is predestination actually biblical? It seems to conflict with free will.
Romans 8:29 is the key passage: “For those God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son.” The sequence matters. Foreknowledge comes first. God, who exists outside of time and space, sees every choice every creature will ever make from the beginning of creation. He already knows who will choose to come and who will not. Predestination — in this framework — is not God arbitrarily selecting some and rejecting others before they are born. It is God making provision for those he already knows will choose him. The path is prepared in advance for those who will freely walk it.
Far from conflicting with free will, this reading requires free will. God foreknew because there was genuine free choice to foreknow. The cross is the provision made for those who will come — not a mechanism for bypassing choice, but the path that makes genuine choice possible.
Q: Why are the angels in Psalm 82 called “sons of the Most High” if they’ve rebelled — doesn’t that status change when they fall?
It doesn’t — and this is part of what makes the indictment in Psalm 82 so pointed. The angels were created by God. That creative act made them, in a genuine sense, his sons. Rebellion changes their trajectory and their relationship with him, but it does not retroactively undo the fact of their creation. They remain his sons in origin, even as they have rejected what that origin was meant to lead to.
This is actually the basis of God’s judgment against them: you were created for this, you were given authority and dignity as sons of the Most High, and you used it for this. The condemnation is heavier, not lighter, because of who they were. Their very dignity is what makes their rebellion so consequential and their sentence so severe: they will die like the mere men they refused to protect.
The same logic runs through human experience. Created in the image of God, sons and daughters of the Most High — that is what every human being is, regardless of what they do with it. The judgment at the end of the age will be heavier for those who had more light and rejected it.
Q: Do you subscribe to Michael Heiser’s view that God created both angels and humanity to be a united family — different in function but the same in that they were all made to be his sons?
In principle, yes — and Psalm 82 supports it. Both humans and angels are created by God, and therefore both bear the designation “sons of the Most High” in the sense of creatures who carry his image and were designed to exist in relationship with him. The difference is function, not fundamental nature as his creatures.
What is helpful about this framing is what it does with the ending. The New Jerusalem — the new heaven and the new earth — will not be populated only by human beings. The good angels, the ones who did not rebel, are there. God’s kingdom at the end is a unified family: faithful angels and faithful humans together, finally living out the relationship for which both were created. The rebellion of some does not cancel the design for the whole. It only narrows who ends up in the inheritance.
(Michael Heiser’s work, particularly The Unseen Realm, is a valuable scholarly resource for the framework this study is operating within.)
Q: Where can we find the stories about Abraham and his father being an idol maker? Is that in the Bible?
No — not in the canonical text. These stories come from extra-biblical Jewish sources, primarily Jubilees and the Book of Jasher, as well as later rabbinic tradition. They are not part of the 66-book canon and cannot be treated as Scripture. What they represent is the cultural memory and interpretive tradition that surrounded the biblical text in the Jewish world — the kind of background the original audience already carried.
These details are consistent with what the canonical text implies — Abraham left an idol-saturated culture when God called him — but the specific stories about his father’s workshop and Abraham’s own skepticism of the idols are extra-biblical. They can be read with interest and discernment as historical context, in the same way 1 Enoch illuminates the Genesis 6 account, without treating them as authoritative revelation. Searching Jubilees or Jasher directly, or using a search engine to locate the relevant sections, will surface the relevant passages for anyone who wants to explore them.
These questions were raised during the session and are preserved here as a record of what came up in the room. They are a companion to, not a replacement for, the main chapter notes.