Does the Bible predict or explain pagan gods? How do Greek and Roman deities fit into the ancient Jewish worldview? In this video, Jimmy Akin unpacks this question and discusses leading theories on this matter.
Transcript:
Adam and Eve were the first human beings. How come there was this period of time, or how about all these cultures and people and beliefs that people had that had nothing to do with the Jewish God? What about, you know, like the ancient Greek philosophers not talking about God a lot? Or did they?
Oh, they talked about—they talked about all kinds of gods. They had loads of them. Um, but, uh, in terms of where the idea of pagan gods came from, there’s not a single answer to that question. Now, there are, um, there are various ways of answering it, and some of them are found in the Bible. Like, for example, um, there’s one passage that talks about how people made statues, and then they—of, of, of humans—and then they, uh, began to regard these statues as statues of deities. And that’s how, uh, the idea of, of some pagan gods came about.
But that’s not actually the majority explanation in the Bible. There, the biblical worldview holds that there are—there is more than one spirit up in heaven. I mean, God, he’s the supreme spirit, he’s the creator, he’s the one who made everything. But he’s not the only dude up there.
Um, in the Old Testament, God is depicted as, uh, as being surrounded by a heavenly court. And there are different levels within that court. Some people rank higher in the heavenly court than others. Some people rank lower in the heavenly court than others. The ones that we get to deal with—the angels—that term just means messenger. And if you think about any king’s court, the messengers, they’re like the lowest, you know. They just run—they just run messages from one place to another.
Um, but there are much higher officials in the court. There are also, you know, a king is going to have his army, and he’s going to have his high counselors. He’s going to have a prosecutor. That’s what Satan is. Uh, Satan means, in Hebrew, means—means adversary or prosecutor.
And so we see, uh, in various books of the Old Testament—and it’s also referenced in the New Testament—um, uh, you know, discussions of the heavenly court that surrounds God. And according to Deuteronomy, what happened was, when the nations divided—so this is when they’re starting to separate and become independent nations—God put each nation under a different high-ranking heavenly official.
Um, they’re sometimes referred to as the sons of God. They’re also sometimes referred to as the sarim, sarim being a Hebrew word that means prince or commander. And so God, like, put a different—different heavenly official over each of the nations, but he kept Israel for himself. And he eventually, uh, enlisted Michael, the angel Michael, to, uh, help him in overseeing Israel.
But he put each nation under its own prince or its own son of God. And eventually, those—a lot of those sons of God went bad, and they started opposing God’s plan. We see references to that, for example, in the Book of Daniel, where there are wars in heaven between the, uh, good angels like Michael and Gabriel and the bad angels like the prince of Persia and the prince of Greece.
And this is the biblical explanation—the main biblical explanation—of the origin of the pagan gods. They’re angels that God entrusted the nations to that then went bad and started demanding that people worship them instead of the true God.
Brian, that brings us to the break. I hope that that was helpful to you. Thank you very much for the question. Lots of lines full, but we got lots of time left with Jimmy Akin.