Welcome to Day 1566 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomSupernatural Intent – Worldview WednesdayWelcome to Wisdom-Trek with Gramps! Wisdom is the final frontier in gaining true knowledge. Our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, seek out discernment and insights, and boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend; this is Gramps; thanks for coming along on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Today is Day 1566 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical Worldview is essential to have a proper perspective on today’s current events. To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must have a proper understanding of God and His Word. This week, we will continue reviewing the book from Dr. Michael S Heiser titled “Supernatural.” The book is an abbreviated version of his more comprehensive book, “The Unseen Realm.” I highly recommend both of these books. Creating a Biblical Worldview based on how the Old and New Testaments connect with God’s overall plan for humanity is essential. This book review will help us understand what the Bible teaches about the unseen world, and why it matters.
Supernatural Intent
In the last chapter, we saw how the Old Testament presents the messiah by hiding him in plain sight. The key to God’s plan to restore Eden and redeem humanity was for the messiah, Jesus, to die on the cross and then rise from the dead.
Only by becoming a man could God ensure that a human king from David’s line would rule over his people without falling into sin and straying spiritually. Only if that king died in the place of his people and rose from the dead could God rightly judge sin and provide salvation all at the same time. Only by the messiah’s death and resurrection would fallen people still have a place in God’s family council, ruling in that renewed Edenic kingdom, as originally planned.
But think about all that required: Jesus had to somehow make sure the supernatural powers of darkness manipulated men to kill him—without understanding what they were doing. As Paul had said to the Corinthians (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+2%3A8andversion=NLT (1 Corinthians 2:8)), But the rulers of this world have not understood it; if they had, they would not have crucified our glorious Lord.
The life and ministry of Jesus may make more sense when viewed against that backdrop. It’s easy for readers of the New Testament, for instance, to get the impression that Jesus’ ministry leading up to the cross was somewhat random. After all, the Gospels don’t always present the same episodes—for example, the birth of Jesus is found in only two of them (Matthew and Luke), and only one mentions the wise men (Matthew 2). Sometimes scenes appear in a slightly different order in different gospels. But those acts of Jesus recorded in the Gospels leading up to the crucifixion—healing the sick, preaching about the kingdom of God, forgiving sinners, confronting hypocrisy‌—were more than the random acts of a traveling wise man who occasionally did miraculous things. There’s more going on in the gospel stories than meets the eye. There’s an essential subtext to what Jesus was doing.
Outwitting Evil
The event that marked the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry was his baptism. It was there that God publicly identified Jesus as his Son (Mark 1:11), and there that John the Baptist identified him in https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+1%3A29andversion=NLT (John 1:29) “Look! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! When we read those words from John, we think immediately about the crucifixion. But John’s disciples weren’t thinking about that. Frankly, no one was. When, close to the end of his ministry—over three years after his baptism—Jesus began to speak of his death, his disciples rejected the idea (Matthew 17:22–23; Mark 9:30–32). The last thing they expected to hear from...