Welcome to Wisdom-Trek with Gramps! I am Guthrie Chamberlain, and we are on Day 2696 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, we continue with the 11th of 16 segments of our Theology Thursday lessons. I will read through the book "Supernatural," written by Hebrew Bible scholar, professor, and mentor Dr. Michael S. Heiser, who has since passed away. Supernatural is a condensed version of his comprehensive book, ‘The Unseen Realm.’ If these readings pique your interest, I would recommend that you read ‘The Unseen Realm.’ Today, we will read through chapter eleven: “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 the line of David 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 really doing. As Paul had said to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 2:6–8), if they really knew what the results were going to be, they never would have crucified the 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 (Matt. 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 important 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 as the one who “takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). 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 own disciples rejected the idea (Matt. 17:22–23; Mark 9:30–32). The last thing they...
