Dr. Michael S. Heiser Explains The THREE Biblical Rebellions — Two You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

Instead of the nations being divided according to the number of the sons of God, most English translations have the nations being divided according to the children, the sons of Israel, which makes no sense at all. You don’t have to be a textual critic and know that they’re not using the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is the best text. I mean, that’s all true, but even if you don’t know that, it makes no sense because Israel didn’t exist yet.

Israel is not listed in the table of nations because Israel only gets started after Babel with Abraham; it couldn’t be more obvious. But because of this, we’re taught to not see the second rebellion in Genesis 6, and we can’t get to the third one because of these textual issues. So we’re handicapped out of the gate.

You ask why this is important. Well, I’ll tell you why. On the one hand, of course, if you don’t know any of this, you can still understand the gospel. But if you believe this thing that you call the Bible is the word of God, just let that ring in your head: the word of God. If you actually believe that, you might want to understand it better.

If you have this worldview, if you’re an Israelite or a Jew and you have a messianic consciousness about you, you’re expecting the Messiah not just to fix Genesis 3 and the fall, you’re expecting him to reverse all three. And that’s exactly what happens in the New Testament.

What Jesus does, what he says, and where he says and does it in the New Testament—these places have histories. A number of these episodes actually go back to one of these other two rebellions. So for the people of his day, they understood that Jesus is addressing all of this stuff.

He is addressing everything that has ruined the world, that has taken Eden and turned it into anti-Eden: all of the chaos, all the evil, all the depravity, and all the death that comes from these three episodes. Jesus the Messiah is not only aware of all three, but what he does reverses them.

I spend a lot of the book Unseen Realm sketching that out. Unseen Realm has over 2,000 reviews now on Amazon. It’s an academic book that has footnotes, so to sell as many as it has for a book with footnotes is kind of remarkable. That’s what everybody tells me, and I guess I believe them at this point.

Ninety-nine percent of the reviews are just people who care; they’re not scholars or pastors, but just people who like the Bible and have assumed for their whole lives that it should make sense. I’m here waving the flag that it does. The weird stuff in the Bible all has a role to play, and passages intersect and connect with each other.

Unseen Realm goes from Genesis to Revelation where I build the mosaic and matrix for you. It’s not a theory of everything, but a framework, and then these other books drill down in different places on different topics. It’s remarkable, and it’s not just a marketing shtick.

It happened to me when I discovered these things. I remember sitting there thinking that I had to produce a dissertation and had no time to go back and rethink everything, but I couldn’t let it go. It was life-altering, and as a doctoral student, I came to read my Bible again for the first time as a totally different book.

There it was, and I was never able to read my Bible the same way again because once you see it, you can’t unsee it. You don’t need anything I write to hear the gospel, understand it, believe it, and follow Jesus, but you do need what I write if you want to read your Bible and understand how it makes sense.

You will understand what the story really is, how everything connects, and why all this weird stuff is there and how it informs the stuff that is familiar. You’ll be able to understand scripture better and appreciate its depth, richness, and the intelligence of the story.

You get an appreciation for how God looks at people through the lens of how he looks at his heavenly family, too. We were created fit for sacred space. If God wants humans to blend into his supernatural family, by definition, the most normal thing in God’s head to think about people is that they are fit for sacred space and fit to dwell with him.

The most normal thought in the world should be that God wants humans with him; to not have us with him is an aberration. We were created to be his companions, his partners, and his kids. The whole concept of imaging plays into this: the image of God isn’t something put into a human, it’s a status where we are God’s proxy and his partners.

God actually lets the heavenly host participate in decision-making. God chooses to create beings who are like him to participate with him in doing what he wants done and what he enjoys. In 1 Kings 22:19-23, there is a divine council scene where God has decreed it’s time for Ahab to die.

Then he asks the heavenly host who are standing there with him how they are going to do that. God isn’t fishing for information like he’s forgetful; he’s letting them make suggestions and allowing them to participate in how Ahab is going to meet his end.

In Daniel 4, the watcher that appears to Nebuchadnezzar tells him that because he is arrogant, God is going to do something to him, telling him to get used to eating grass and not cutting his hair. This is by decree of the watchers plural, and then a few verses later he says this is by decree of the Most High.

So there’s a symbiotic relationship where God, with his heavenly host, has mapped out together what’s going to happen. In Revelation 2 and 3, Jesus quotes a messianic psalm about us, saying that to him that overcomes, he will put him over the nations.

Who’s over the nations now? The gods, the Elohim he appointed, who became corrupt. After they’re destroyed and dealt with at the second coming on the day of the Lord, guess who takes their place? Believers. This is why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6:3, “Don’t you know that you’re going to judge angels?”

Jesus shares his messianic rule and quotes Psalm 2 about you and me, saying he will give the one who overcomes the morning star—which is a messianic concept of rule—to rule with him on his throne. If you’re going to balk at God letting lesser beings participate with him in the Old Testament, then start cutting Revelation 2 and 3 out of your Bible, too.

Nobody wants to do that because that sounds great, but it has an Old Testament context. God is going to get what he wants, and what he has always wanted is to have children who participate with him to enjoy who he is and what he does. He doesn’t need them to help him do things.

If you look up “holy ones” in the Old Testament, overwhelmingly—like 9.5 to 10 out of 10 times—”holy ones” is a title given to the members of the heavenly host and supernatural beings. In the New Testament, there isn’t a single instance of “holy ones” used for supernatural beings; it is used to describe believers.

Your English Bibles use “saints,” which is a terrible translation. It’s hagioi, the Greek equivalent for holy ones. The whole reason Paul and other writers use this vocabulary is so that you think about where you’ve seen that term before—back in the Old Testament regarding God’s heavenly family.

Now we’re described the same way. This is why the New Testament describes us as already having been partakers of the divine nature in 2 Peter 1:4, why we’re being transformed moment by moment into the image of his Son, why we’re co-rulers, and why we’re the temple of God where God dwells.

Believers ultimately are the reconstituted family council of God. In Hebrews 2, Jesus introduces his brothers and sisters to God, and he introduces God to them in the congregation, which is in the council. The cloud of witnesses isn’t just the people in Hebrews 11; if you keep reading in Hebrews 12, it’s the innumerable angels and the festival gathering of those enrolled in heaven.

The divine council worldview matters for us getting God’s perspective on what he wants us to be and what his plans are from the very beginning. This is not a new plan. God never gives up on the original plan even though it blows up because of rebellion. That’s the cost of making supernatural beings and human beings like himself.

He shares his attributes, one of which is freedom. God knows that we’re going to fail and rebel because we aren’t him; we’re like him, but we’re not him, and we’re not perfect in our nature like he is. The Trinity is not going to expand because the members of the Trinity are eternal and had no beginning, whereas we are derivative and contingent.

God is willing to create a world in which failure and rebellion can happen rather than not have us at all. Think about that: God is willing to do this, yet we think God doesn’t have to suffer and that we’re the ones who have to suffer evil. Really? God sees every evil act of every person at every moment.

You don’t, so don’t compare what you experience as evil with what God sees because you’re going to lose that comparison real quickly. But God is still willing to experience that, and that is suffering on his part. It grieves him, but he would rather go through that than not have you at all.

We don’t even get to think in these modes unless we realize the tight relationship there is not just in the Old Testament, but through the whole Bible. Trace the threads from Genesis to Revelation, or else you’re not prompted to think about what God’s doing in new ways or in the depth that you could.

All I’m trying to do is show this. The dirty little secret of Unseen Realm is that Mike never had an original thought; all I do is take peer-reviewed scholarship. Everything we’ve talked about is just Bible 101 for academic work, but it never filters down to the church.

If you’re a Christian who loves scripture or feels like there’s got to be more to it, there’s a fair factor as to why this isn’t taught. Have you ever heard what we just talked about in church? It’s just Bible. What we get in church—and I hate to put it this way because pastors have one of the toughest jobs in the world—can be limited.

I’m not down on pastors and I’m not fit to be one because I don’t have the patience for it; a good pastor takes a special person. But at the end of the day, too many sermons on too many weeks are really just stories that we heard in junior church and Sunday school with adult illustrations, or it’s a self-help 20 minutes. Pastors are generally underprepared to do it, which is why I write the stuff I do and run the podcast to help them with content.

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