elohim

Angels

Video Explaining the Biblical Word ‘Elohim’

By Guest Post March 7, 2019

In the second video in the Spiritual Beings Series, TheBibleProject explores the Biblical word, “Elohim”.

Did you know that the biblical word for God is actually a title and not a name? And did you know that this title can refer to other spiritual beings as well as to the creator God? In this video, we explore the biblical terminology for spiritual beings and how this helps us understand what the Bible means when it says that “God is one.”

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Bible

Unseen Realm Video Series — Introduction to Spiritual Beings

By divinecouncil February 15, 2019

By TheBibleProject

This is the first of a video series by The Bible Project illustrating material from biblical scholar Dr. Michael S. Heiser’s Unseen Realm.

In the first pages of the Bible, we’re introduced to God and humans as the main characters. But there’s also a whole cast of spiritual beings who play an important role throughout the Bible, though they’re often in the background. In this video, we begin to explore these beings and how they fit into the unified storyline of the Bible.

Spiritual Beings

If you’ve ever been puzzled about angels, demons, and other spiritual beings in the Bible, you’re not alone! Our modern depictions of these creatures are mostly based on misunderstandings of who they are and how they fit into the overall storyline of the Bible. In this first installment of our Spiritual Beings video series, we’ll introduce the biblical concept of spiritual beings and rediscover their role in the biblical story that leads to Jesus.

Here’s the link to the series Exploring Spiritual Beings.

Bible

The Elohim Are Spiritual Inhabitants

By Terence Gillespie October 31, 2017

An excerpt from the article The Elohim: What (or Who) Are They? by Michael S. Heiser.

The biblical use of elohim is not hard to understand once we know that it isn’t about attributes. What all the figures on the list have in common is that they are inhabitants of the spiritual world. In that realm there is hierarchy.

For example, Yahweh possesses superior attributes with respect to all elohim. But God’s attributes aren’t what makes him an elohim, since inferior beings are members of that same group. The Old Testament writers understood that Yahweh was an elohim—but no other elohim was Yahweh. He was species-unique among all residents of the spiritual world.

This is not to say that an elohim could not interact with the human world. The Bible makes it clear that divine beings can (and did) assume physical human form, and even corporeal flesh, for interaction with people, but that is not their normal estate. Spiritual beings are “spirits” (1 Kgs. 22:19–22; John 4:24; Heb. 1:14; Rev. 1:4). In like manner, humans can be transported to the divine realm (e.g., Isa. 6), but that is not our normal plane of existence. As I explained earlier, the word elohim is a “place of residence” term. It has nothing to do with a specific set of attributes.