Welcome to Day 2581 of Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom – Theology Thursday – Charlton Heston Had Company – I Dare You Not To Bore Me With The Bible. Wisdom-Trek Podcast Script - Day 2581 Welcome to Wisdom-Trek with Gramps! I am Guthrie Chamberlain, and we are on Day 2581 of our Trek. The Purpose of Wisdom-Trek is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, and to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Today is the 46th lesson in our segment, Theology Thursday. Utilizing excerpts from a book titled: I Dare You Not To Bore Me With The Bible written by Hebrew Bible scholar and professor the late Dr. Michael S Heiser, we will invest a couple of years going through the entire Bible, exploring short Biblical lessons that you may not have received in Bible classes or Church. The Bible is a wonderful book. Its pages reveal the epic story of God’s redemption of humankind and the long, bitter conflict against evil. Yet it’s also a book that seems strange to us. While God’s Word was written for us, it wasn’t written to us. Today’s lesson is: “Charlton Heston Had Company.” When we hear “Moses’ Law,” we think of the story we heard in Sunday school, or the scene from The Ten Commandments where Charlton Heston (a.k.a., Moses) gets the two tablets from God. But what if I told you Moses and God weren’t alone? It may come as a surprise, but the New Testament tells us in three places that the Law was delivered by angels, members of God’s divine council. Here are two of those passages:
- Acts 7:52-53: “Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered, you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it.”
- Hebrews 2:1-2: “Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?”
I was pretty shocked the first time I saw these verses. And I certainly hadn’t heard about them in church. So what passage in the Old Testament were they quoting? That’s the second jolt: There isn’t a clear reference to it—at least not in the Old Testament we use. The New Testament writers didn’t invent the idea, though. They got it from Deuteronomy 33:2-4 in their Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. The Septuagint more clearly connects angels to the Law than the traditional Hebrew text upon which our English translations are based. So they were using a translation. We can understand that. But we’re not done. It gets a bit stranger. The third New Testament passage that talks about the Law and angels is found in Galatians 3:19-20. And this time, it isn’t just a crowd of angels with Moses and God: What, then, was the purpose of the law? It was added because of transgressions until the Seed to whom the promise referred had come. The law was put into effect through angels by a mediator. A mediator, however, does not represent just one party; but God is one. Galatians 3:19 informs us that there was a mediator between God and the angels when the Law was given. Most...