Ask most people today to describe heaven and you’ll get a fairly empty picture. God’s there. And so are some angels, though nobody is quite sure what they do all day. Beyond that, silence.
Now open your Bible at Psalm 82 and read the first line: God has taken His place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods He holds judgement. A council. A summoned meeting. God rises to His feet in a crowded room to pass sentence. And the room is full of beings the psalm is willing to call gods.
If that line unsettles you, you’re in good company. Translators have often softened it and preachers often step around it. But it’s worth sitting with. Psalm 82 opens a window onto a way of seeing reality the biblical writers simply assumed we’d understand—and that modern readers have quietly lost.
What Psalm 82 actually says
The psalm is short and shaped like a courtroom drama. Five movements, each one important.
Psalm 82:1 The court is convened.
Two Hebrew expressions carry the weight of the whole psalm.
- ‘Adat-el—translated “the divine council” or “the assembly of God”. ‘Edah is the ordinary Hebrew word for a congregation called together for business, the same word used of assembled Israel. This isn’t a crowd. It’s a formal session.
- Elohim—the standard Hebrew word for “God” or “gods”. Here’s the difficulty: it appears twice in one verse. God (elohim) stands in the midst of the gods (elohim). Same word, two different parties.
Psalm 82:2–4 The charge is read.
How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? The defendants have failed the weak, the fatherless and the destitute. Whoever they are, they held real authority and abused it.
Psalm 82:5 The verdict on their character.
They neither know nor understand, they walk about in darkness—and then a line that suddenly widens the frame: all the foundations of the earth are shaken. Their failure isn’t a local scandal. It destabilises the world.
Psalm 82:6–7 The sentence.
I said, “You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.” Whatever dignity they had, it doesn’t save them. They will die.
Psalm 82:8 The appeal.
The psalmist cries out: Arise, O God, judge the earth; for you shall inherit all the nations! Remember that last phrase. It unlocks everything else.
Notice the shape of the scene. God doesn’t debate or consult. He convenes, He indicts, He sentences. That detail will matter later.
So who are these “gods”?
Three answers have been given across the centuries, and each deserves a fair hearing.
| Reading | The case for it | The difficulty |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Human judges and rulers of Israel | Exodus 21:6 and 22:8–9 seem to use elohim of Israelite judges, and verses 2–4 read like a rebuke to courtroom officials. Jesus quotes the psalm of those to whom the word of God came. | If they’re already men, why threaten them in verse 7 with dying like men? And council language everywhere else in the Old Testament describes a heavenly gathering. |
| 2. Created spiritual beings set over the nations | Psalm 89:5–7, Job 1:6 and 1 Kings 22:19 all use council language of heaven. Verse 8 looks to God inheriting the nations—which assumes someone else holds them now. | The charges in verses 2–4 concern human courts and human victims, which at first glance fits earthly rulers better. |
| 3. Both together, the unseen powers and the human rulers who serve them | Daniel 10 speaks of a “prince of Persia” standing behind the Persian empire. Paul says the rulers of this age crucified the Lord of glory—and it’s hard to say whether he means men, spirits, or both at once. | We have to keep two levels of reality in mind at the same time: what we see, and what stands behind it. That takes effort—but it’s what the Bible asks of us everywhere. |
The third reading is the strongest, and it’s the one this post commends. It doesn’t force us to choose between the older commentators and the plain sense of the council texts; it honours both. Scripture consistently presents earthly authority as shadowed by an authority above it. When a nation turns cruel, something more than politics has gone wrong.
A word about John 10:34
When Jesus is accused of blasphemy, He quotes Psalm 82:6: Is it not written in your Law, “I said, you are gods”? This is often used to settle the question in favour of human judges, but it doesn’t quite do that. Jesus argues from the lesser to the greater: if Scripture can use elohim of others without blasphemy, the charge against the One whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world collapses. The argument works whichever way Psalm 82 is read. It concerns His identity, not the identity of the defendants.
The council across the rest of Scripture
Psalm 82 doesn’t stand alone. Once we notice the pattern, we find it everywhere.
Deuteronomy 32:8–9: the nations divided
Moses sings: When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the LORD’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.
Your Bible may carry a footnote here: the traditional Hebrew manuscripts read “sons of Israel”, but the Dead Sea Scrolls and the ancient Greek translation read “sons of God”—and that older reading makes far better sense of verse 9, which contrasts what the nations received with what the LORD kept for Himself. It also explains Babel. Humanity rebelled, was scattered into nations, and those nations were handed over.
Handed over to what? Deuteronomy 4:19 warns Israel not to worship the sun, moon and stars, things that the LORD your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven. This reads less like God appointing governors who later went bad, and more like judicial abandonment—the same movement Paul describes three times in Romans 1: God gave them up. And the same song tells us what those powers became: They sacrificed to demons that were no gods (Deuteronomy 32:17)—a verse Paul takes up in 1 Corinthians 10:20.
1 Kings 22: the council in session
This is the clearest window we are given. Micaiah reports: I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left. God asks who will entice Ahab to his death. A spirit steps forward with a proposal. God authorises it, and it happens exactly as decreed.
Dale Ralph Davis notes the scene is given not to satisfy our curiosity about heavenly procedure but to assure us even a king’s self-chosen ruin runs on God’s timetable. There is real creaturely activity here—and not a moment of genuine uncertainty.
Job 1: the accuser in the room
Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them. A court is convened, an accuser is present, and he can do precisely nothing without permission—granted in stages, and stopped at a boundary God draws Himself.
Christopher Ash puts it memorably: this is a dog on a chain. The same beings appear at creation in Job 38:7, where the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.
The pattern in one glance
Isaiah 6—Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?
Daniel 7:9–10—thrones are set, the court sits, the books are opened.
Zechariah 3—Joshua the high priest stands trial, with Satan at his right hand to accuse.
Jeremiah 23:18 and Amos 3:7—the mark of a true prophet is that he has stood in the LORD’s council.
Revelation 4–5—the throne, the elders, the living creatures, and a scroll only the Lamb can open.
Does this threaten belief in one God?
Honestly, this is the pressure point.
Michael Heiser, who has done most to put this discussion before ordinary readers, answers as follows. The Hebrew word elohim doesn’t describe a set of divine qualities—eternal, almighty, worthy of worship. It describes a realm of existence. It’s a residence term, marking out beings who belong to the unseen world rather than ours.
His evidence is genuinely strong. The word is used of the God of Israel, of the council members in Psalm 82, of the gods of the nations, of demons in Deuteronomy 32:17—and, remarkably, of the departed prophet Samuel, when the medium at En-dor cries out, I see a god coming up out of the earth (1 Samuel 28:13). Nobody thinks Samuel had become a rival deity, so the word cannot be carrying the full weight of divinity in every use. That answer is largely right, and we should say so plainly. Two refinements are worth adding.
- The definition is a little too tidy. Words mean what their use in context makes them mean, and elohim does carry overtones of power in some places. Saying the word points to the realm—where a being lives—not to what a being is like, is a helpful guide—but not a hard rule.
- The real safeguard is elsewhere. What protects the oneness of God isn’t a dictionary definition but the line between Creator and creature. Everything in the unseen realm was made—all things were created through him and for him (Colossians 1:16). Every council member is a creature who will be judged, and Psalm 82:7 says exactly that.
So when Isaiah declares besides me there is no god, he isn’t saying heaven is empty. He’s saying no one else is in His class. Paul holds both halves together in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10: an idol is nothing, there is one God the Father—and yet what pagans sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons. The LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords (Deuteronomy 10:17) isn’t a ranking within a category. It’s the announcement that everything else in that category is created.
The point in one sentence
Belief in one God was never the claim that heaven is unpopulated. It’s the claim that heaven has one throne.
Recovery, not novelty
It’s tempting to treat all this as a recent discovery. It isn’t. The older writers were entirely at ease with a populated heaven.
- John Calvin treats angels as real, personal creatures rather than vague influences—while warning in the same breath against speculating beyond Scripture. That double instinct is the rule for this whole subject.
- John Owen argued the old covenant order was administered through angelic mediation, and that Hebrews 2:5 marks the handover of that administration to the Son.
- Herman Bavinck treated the angelic world as a genuine order of creation with real work to do in providence, while refusing the elaborate medieval hierarchies.
- Meredith Kline is the closest recent forerunner of the current conversation. His “two-register cosmology”—an upper, heavenly register and a lower, earthly one, held together by God’s Glory-presence—anticipates a great deal of what is now presented as new.
What changed between them and us wasn’t the exegesis but the imagination. Modern readers absorbed a quiet naturalism we never consciously chose, tidied the unseen world out of the room, and then found the Bible strange when it kept talking about that room. Recovering the council is not adding to Scripture. It is putting back what we took out.
A council, not a committee
This is where care is needed. A council in a modern office means shared power, proposals, votes, compromise. Nothing of that kind is in view.
- No vote is ever taken. In 1 Kings 22 the outcome is settled before the discussion begins. The spirit’s proposal is authorised, not adopted. Isaiah 40:13–14 closes the door on any other reading: Whom did He consult, and who made Him understand?
- Deliberation is a means, not a cause. God ordains ends and means together, including the acts of creatures who act freely and are fully responsible for them. He’s never the author of their sin.
- Nothing in heaven is contested. Satan in Job 1 has no independent power; he must ask. Two roughly equal forces locked in struggle is the plot of mythology, not the teaching of Scripture.
- Your salvation was never up for discussion. God chose His people in Him before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4), and Paul lists angels and rulers and powers among the things that cannot separate us from His love (Romans 8:38–39). Whatever the council is, it doesn’t deliberate about us.
Christ, the nations, and a seat in the assembly
Now go back to that last line of the psalm: Arise, O God, judge the earth; for you shall inherit all the nations! The nations were divided and handed over; the psalmist prays for them to be taken back. That prayer is answered in a person.
- He isn’t a member of the assembly; He is its Lord. Hebrews 1 asks which angel was ever addressed as Son—and then has the angels worship Him.
- The nations are reclaimed. The Father says to the Son, Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage (Psalm 2:8). At Pentecost the roll call of nations from Babel is read out again in reverse, and the Great Commission sends the church to every one of them.
- The powers are defeated in public, not negotiated with. At the cross God disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them (Colossians 2:15). Christ is seated far above every one of them (Ephesians 1:20–21).
- Ordinary Christians are brought into the room. Hebrews 12:22 says you have already come to Mount Zion, to innumerable angels in festal gathering. Ephesians 3:10 says the church is how God’s wisdom is now made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. And Paul asks the Corinthians, almost casually, Do you not know that we are to judge angels?
That is the astonishing end of the story. The assembly that failed in Psalm 82 is replaced—by redeemed human beings, seated with Christ, judging rightly at last.
Two ditches to avoid
On one side, practical unbelief. We recite the creed and then live as though the unseen world were decoration. The New Testament will not let us; it assumes a real conflict with real enemies.
On the other side, fascination. Whole ministries have been built on mapping demonic territory and prescribing techniques for confronting it. Paul warns against this appetite in Colossians 2:18. Look at the equipment he actually issues in Ephesians 6 and notice how ordinary every item is: truth, righteousness, the gospel of peace, faith, salvation, the word of God and prayer. No formulas. No maps.
What about Michael Heiser himself? His great gift was making English readers notice what the Hebrew actually says, and for that we’re grateful. However, some caution concerning his wider system seems appropriate. He leans heavily on Jewish books written in the years between the Old and New Testaments, letting them shape how he reads the Bible. And at that point he goes further than the evidence allows. Let’s take what he recovers gladly. And test the rest slowly.
The heavens aren’t empty. They never were. And the One who rose to His feet in Psalm 82 to judge a corrupt assembly is the same One who will rise to judge the earth—and He has already begun.
Tough Questions, Honest Answers
On the question, who are ‘the gods’ in Psalm 82, which of the three readings did Michael Heiser hold—and was he right?
Heiser held the second view firmly: the elohim of Psalm 82 are created spiritual beings, not human judges, and he argued the case as strongly as anyone in recent memory. His central reasons were that the council language elsewhere in the Old Testament always describes a heavenly gathering, that verse 7’s threat of dying like men makes no sense if the accused are already men, and that verse 8 assumes the nations currently belong to someone other than the LORD. On the exegesis itself he is very largely right, and readers who’ve only ever heard the “human judges” explanation should feel the weight of what he shows. Where this post differs is small but real: Heiser draws a sharp line between the two readings, while Scripture seems content to hold them together, since Daniel 10 places spiritual princes behind human empires rather than instead of them. So our honest answer: Heiser did correct a genuine flattening in how English readers had come to hear the psalm, and his correction is better received as a widening than as a replacement. He recovered the upper level; he needn’t have ruled out the lower one.
How should Christians evaluate Michael Heiser’s wider work?
Read him with gratitude and with discernment. His central contribution is sound and valuable: the Old Testament really does describe a heavenly assembly, English translations have often obscured it, and recovering that has enriched many readers. The caution concerns method. He gives literature written between the Old and New Testaments a large role in setting the meaning of the biblical text, where the older and safer approach is to let Scripture interpret Scripture and treat the surrounding literature as background rather than as a key. Some of his conclusions—on Genesis 6, on the geography of judgement, on how much cosmic detail we can recover—are held with more confidence than the evidence seems to back him.
Does “Let us make man in our image” in Genesis 1:26 refer to the divine council or to the Trinity?
Both explanations have been held by careful readers, and they need not be rivals. Some take the plural as God speaking within Himself, an early hint of the Trinity, and this reading has a long and honourable history. Others take it as God addressing His heavenly court, since that is what the plural means elsewhere in Scripture, as in Isaiah 6:8. The decisive detail is verse 27: So God created man in his own image—singular, and no creature shares in the making. If the council is being addressed, they are witnesses to the act, not partners in it. The safest conclusion is that Genesis 1:26 is consistent with the Trinity without being a proof of it, and that the doctrine rests on far firmer ground elsewhere.
Is the divine council idea borrowed from Canaanite mythology?
The similarity is real and should not be denied. Texts from ancient Ugarit describe an assembly of the god El with his divine sons, and the vocabulary overlaps with the Old Testament. But shared vocabulary is not shared belief. Israel used the language of its neighbours in order to overturn what the neighbours believed by it. In the Ugaritic texts El presides over gods who scheme, quarrel and can be outmanoeuvred; in Psalm 82 the assembly is put on trial and sentenced to death by the only God who cannot die. Borrowing a courtroom vocabulary to announce that the defendants are creatures awaiting judgment is not syncretism. It is polemic.
Are the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 the same beings as the divine council?
The phrase is the same, and in Job 1:6 and 38:7 it clearly means heavenly beings, which is a strong argument for reading Genesis 6 the same way. Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 both speak of angels who abandoned their proper place and are now held in chains, and both connect that judgment with the flood generation. The main objection is our Lord’s statement that angels in heaven do not marry (Matthew 22:30)—though that describes obedient angels in heaven, not rebels who left it. Others take the sons of God as the godly line of Seth intermarrying with the line of Cain, which fits the flow of Genesis 4 and 5 well. The heavenly reading has the stronger lexical case; the Sethite reading has the stronger contextual case; and a Christian may hold either without compromising anything essential.
Does Satan still have access to the heavenly court, as he does in Job 1?
Something decisive changed at the cross. Jesus said, I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven (Luke 10:18), and now will the ruler of this world be cast out (John 12:31). Revelation 12 describes war in heaven and the accuser thrown down, no longer able to press his case before God. He remains active and dangerous on earth—Peter’s prowling lion is not a toothless image—but his function as prosecutor is finished. This is why Romans 8:33 asks who shall bring any charge against God’s elect and finds no one left to answer.
Are guardian angels part of the divine council?
The Bible teaches that angels serve believers—ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation (Hebrews 1:14)—so angelic care is not in doubt. Whether each Christian has one assigned angel is much less certain. Matthew 18:10 speaks of the angels of little ones who always see the Father’s face, and Acts 12:15 records the believers assuming Peter had an angel, though Luke reports their assumption without endorsing it. The evidence is suggestive rather than conclusive. The pastoral point stands regardless: you are watched over by beings of great power who serve the God who loves you, and your comfort rests on His care rather than on the details of the arrangement.
Related Reads
- Are We Little Gods? The Truth About Psalm 82:6 and John 10:34
- Who Were the Nephilim in the Bible? Genesis 6 Explained
- Jude 9: Why Do Michael and Satan Dispute Over Moses’ Body?
- Kinds of Spirits in the Bible—How Many Are There?
- Are Angels Real? Reformed Views on the Spirit Messengers
- Spiritual Warfare: A Believer’s Guide to Complete Battle Armour
- Shouldn’t the Book of Enoch Be In the Bible? Why Isn’t It?
