In this video, Phylicia Masonheimer of Every Woman a Theologian addresses the controversial Gnostic claim that the Old Testament God, Yahweh, is actually Satan. Phylicia delves deep into scripture, showcasing how Jesus affirmatively links himself to the God of the Old Testament. Through insightful analysis, she reveals the theological continuity between the Old and New Testaments, countering the notion of a lesser, evil deity associated with the Jewish God.
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Transcription
Hello friends and welcome back to Verity podcast. I’m phylicia Masonheimer, your host, the founder of Every Woman a Theologian, and we are in the middle of our series on ancient heresies and false teachings related to Christianity. Now I know that there are many of you who are watching some of my videos for the first time or listening to our podcast for the first time, and I just want to say thank you for being here. Even if you disagree or you find my views different than you’ve ever heard before, I am so glad that you’re here and you’re listening.
We at Every Woman A Theologian welcome people from a wide variety of perspectives and denominations who all come in and listen to what we’re sharing. Our dedication as a ministry and my dedication as a teacher is to the historical traditional Christian Orthodox teaching that has been taught from the beginning of the church in Jesus’ ministry carrying forward from the Old Testament teachings that Jesus upheld. And so what you’re going to find here is going to look like that. That. That’s what you’re going to be hearing. I love to study church history. It’s one of my passions, and so that informs a lot of what I’m going to be teaching you theologically. Of course, we all have disagreements.
And if you read the comments on YouTube or social media, you’ll always see those disagreements there. But we’re glad you’re here no matter what, and we will answer your emails that you send in as quickly as we can. If you have a question, you wanna email it in, my email is phylicia@phyliciamasonheimer.com, and my assistant and I go through those emails once a week. So thank you for interacting with us, and let’s get started on our topic for today. Last week, we talked about gnosticism, what it is, kind of how it developed, has it possessed any role in the shaping of Christianity. And I shared with you some academic resources that essentially argue that Gnosticism came after Christianity. It did not precede it. It did not shape Christianity.
It did not shape the idea of a redeemer, a Christ Messiah figure. Instead, Gnosticism kind of adapted Christian teaching and came up with their own, Gnostic Christian belief system. Now, Gnosticism still exists today. And if you look at some of the comments on my videos, you’ll see that there are Gnostics who are commenting and disagreeing, with what I am teaching about Christianity. But if we go back to what the scholars have said, last week, I quoted a Hellenistic scholar, the leading scholar on Hellenistic culture. And he said that did not shape Christianity. It was the other way around. So when we are discussing Gnosticism, you have to remember that, yes, it still exists today.
There is modern Gnosticism, but Gnosticism is also a system of thought that is incredibly vast and incredibly diverse and kind of hard to pin down. And even if you study kind of the basic theology of Gnosticism, it can be very confusing. There’s a lot of different, elements that are pulled from Greek philosophers and then adapted and kind of blended even with Christianity that can make it difficult to understand. But when Gnosticism is blended with Christianity, there are a few fundamentals that you will always see. Number one, the Old Testament God, Yahweh, he is not the one, the original good God, so to speak. He is instead a lesser God, a God of evil who created matter. Remember that matter and the physical in gnosticism is evil whereas the spiritual is good. And we’re trying to we’re seeking testament Jewish God, created matter, and his actions, kind of led to the suffering and the evil that we see today in gnostic thought.
Jesus, however, comes into the world as this expression of the original good God, the one. And so Jesus is kind of this, what you might call a spiritual phantom almost. Like, he’s not physical because he can’t be physical because then he’d be evil. But he is a spiritual reality. He’s manifesting as physical. And he his teachings can set us free from this evil world that Yahweh created. Now a couple of months ago, there was an influencer who’s talking about this theology on social media. I didn’t know who it was but I did, talk about this ideology and how it differs so wildly from the Judeo Christian ethic where bodies are good and creation is good and human beings and their bodies are made in the image of a loving, creative God.
This is at odds with Gnosticism, and I talked about this. And this influencer was really upset by what I was saying and truly believed that I was deceived by Satan who actually is the Yahweh of the old testament. Yahweh and Satan are the same person. And you’ll see this theology emerge in ancient Gnosticism. It’s especially making a comeback now in modern Gnosticism and kind of Gnostic new age adjacent circles. Remember that there’s not this concise, like, gnostic orthodoxy so much or, you know, even new age orthodoxy or new thought orthodoxy as in there’s a strict set of things that you must believe. They’re much more fluid than that. It’s much more syncretistic.
And in fact, this is very similar to what it was like in the time of ancient Rome because and in ancient Rome, in the time of the early church, so from around when Jesus lived to AD 300, you had a lot of fluidity to the religions of that time. And in fact, Rome at first liked this because as long as you are willing to give credence to the emperor as the God of the world, as long as you’re willing to burn some incense to the emperor, what you believed was fine. Like, you could believe whatever you wanted. And the syncretism of these different mystic religions all around the empire kind of unified the empire in a way that it kind of brought people together because they were all kind of spiritual. Very similar to how we talk about spirituality today in the Western world where people, if you ask them, you know, do you have faith? They might say, well, I’m not religious, but I am a spiritual person, and these are the things that I’m participating in. So Gnosticism is like that. There’s at least in this modern era, you’ll have some people on Reddit maybe who kinda describe, like, the actual core of gnostic thought. But you’re gonna see a lot more people who are dabbling in multiple angles of these ideologies and even blending Christianity with them.
What I want to encourage those of you listening who are devout Orthodox Christians is that this is not new. This is not surprising. This is not a creative new outlet. This is as old as Jesus’ life and ministry. This is 2,000 years old. This manner of kind of mixing together world views and trying to combine Jesus with them. So with this said, what I want to specifically talk about is, did Jesus think that Yahweh was Satan? Did Jesus in his teachings support the idea that the old testament God was evil and that he was rescuing people from him? Because at the core of the combination of the combination of Christianity and gnostic thought is the person of Jesus. We both want him.
We both want to believe him. We both believe he’s some kind of savior, redeemer figure. We both believe that he is someone that we should at least emulate. That we can agree on. So we have to ask the question, is the Jesus that Christians worship the same as the Jesus that gnostics worship by credit of what he affirmed. So did the Jesus that gnostics wants to keep affirm their theology? We’re gonna find out. Let’s talk first a little bit about what gnostics specifically believed about Christ because I think that will be helpful to us. So, in their writings on Christ, they thought that Christ, was sent to Earth by the true God.
Remember, the true God, the one, he didn’t create the earth because that would be creating matter. Creation was done by this lesser God called a demiurge who kind of like mixed in divinity with his creation. And so Christ is sent to Earth to kinda remedy the mess that’s there. And then that’s very close to kind of what Christianity teaches. So, again, like, you’re never gonna see a heresy. You’re never gonna see a false teaching that’s wildly different than the truth. It’s always gonna have some elements of the truth in it. That’s what makes it convincing.
So, the world crucifies Jesus, and then he comes back to life, redeems the world, and anybody who, like, believes Jesus’ teachings, accepts them, internalizes them, achieves gnosis or that higher spiritual knowledge that frees them from this damaged earthly world. So everything with Jesus is kind of rotating around his teachings and what he taught. And his teachings are meant to lead us to this greater knowledge of the true God, not, you know, to lead us into the kind of orthodoxy that a Christian would be arguing for. What we need to do then is ask the question, did Jesus affirm the Old Testament God or did he see himself as someone who needed to fix what the Old Testament God had messed up? In theology, in Christian theology, we call perspectives on Old Testament and New Testament. We often use the word continuity or discontinuity, in terms of the connection between these two. And when someone has a theology of discontinuity, what they essentially teach is that the Old testament, basically all of it, is just donezo. We’re done with it. It’s over.
And Jesus came to basically end all of that and start something completely new. Whereas in the theology of continuity, there is a, basically, a continuous line, like, an an redemption arc, you might call it. Some might say the metanarrative of scripture, so the big picture, from the beginning in the Old Testament all the way to the end in Revelation. And, yes, things changed when Jesus came as the redeemer, but there isn’t this hard stop in between testaments. It’s not like Jesus was doing something so completely different than the Old Testament that, you know, the Old Testament God is evil and the New Testament Jesus is good. But this is essentially what Gnosticism is arguing, often based on struggles with how the Old Testament God behaves in the prophetic books, in the historical narrative books. Then we could go deep into those specific situations, and I’m sure we will in future videos. But for now, I wanna look at how did Jesus perceive the God of the old testament.
So first, Jesus refers to his father often. Right? Is this father the same God of the Old Testament? Well, in John six forty five, this is Jesus quoting the Old Testament, quoting the prophet. So this would be the prophetic books, major and minor, Isaiah, Ezekiel, you know, Jeremiah, all those. He says it is written in the prophets, and they will be taught by God. Everyone who has heard and learned from the father comes to me. Jesus is teaching on how to come to the father, be taught by the father, and he quotes from the prophets which are referring to Yahweh. This is our first verse that I wanna look at. So, you know, the prophets write, they will all be taught by God, and Jesus referring back to that verse says, everyone who has heard and learned from the father, taught by God, learned from the father, he’s creating a parallel there, comes to me.
So Jesus is not only connecting himself with the father, but he’s also connecting the father to the Old Testament God and saying these two are the same. Okay. That’s the first one. Let’s then look, at John sixteen twenty seven. He says, for the father himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God. So is Jesus talking about two different people, or is he talking about one? One guide. Because he’s referring back to God and he’s speaking in a Jewish framework to Jewish people. Their understanding when his audience was primarily Jewish.
Fulfilling, the law and the prophets. He says elsewhere that he did not come to the Gentiles, but to the lost sheep of Israel. So he’s talking to the Israelites. He’s talking to the Jews, and he’s talking to the So he’s talking to the Israelites. He’s talking to the Jews, and he says, I came from God. And the reason later on that he’s crucified is because of this claim that he came from the old testament God. He is the son of the Old Testament God. He is the son of the Old Testament God.
That’s why he was killed because this was considered blasphemy. And what was the text? What was the basis text he was arguing from? The Old Testament. The God of the Old testament. That was the entire framework. So let’s go on to, Luke. We’ve done a lot in John, and there’s more in John, but we’re gonna look at Luke for a second. And you see in one particular situation, one particular situation, we see in Luke four Jesus engaging directly with God’s enemy. Okay? So it says the devil in some, translations.
We call him Satan. And in this passage in Luke four, Jesus is in the wilderness, and he is interacting with Satan. So he is going through these tests, basically, where he is being tempted by Satan before his ministry begins. And Satan says to him, if you are the son of God if you are the son of God, so again, connecting father and God, then command this stone to become bread. And then he takes them over to Jerusalem to the temple and says, if you are the son of God, throw yourself down from here. Each time Jesus refutes him quoting the Old Testament. And this is important, you guys, because if the claim is that the God of the Old Testament is evil, but Jesus continually quotes the Old Testament, continually associates himself with being the son of the God of the old testament. Again, this was the accusation of blasphemy that got him crucified.
Why are we even associating with Jesus? My question would be, genuine question, for the who watch this, those who are who are headed that gnostic direction. If Jesus affirms all these things, how is Jesus not evil? Why keep Jesus if he continually affirms a God that you believe is evil? I think it’s because we innately know that Jesus is the redeemer, and we desperately want to have him in our lives. We know we need him. But, unfortunately, as with all teachings that depart from what Jesus said about himself, we want a Jesus in our image. We want a Jesus that’s comfortable, that doesn’t challenge us, that doesn’t make us actually have to face his teachings and be transformed. And, gosh, he loves us. He loves you. And I think anytime we want to participate in some kind of Jesus adjacent theology, it’s because there’s a part of us that knows that we are in his image.
But, unfortunately, the deceptiveness of many of these teachings short changes what Jesus actually said about himself. And, really, it’s not fair to Jesus to take what he said, John sixteen twenty seven, John three sixteen, John eight forty two, John one eighteen, John ten thirty six, John thirteen three, where over and over and over and over, he says, the father father is God and I am from the father. And we decide that we’re going to interpret his words differently in a way that’s more comfortable to us. It’s really just not fair. And, honestly, there’s no reason to follow Jesus if he isn’t who he said he was and truly if he’s evil. I don’t think he is. But logically, it does not make sense to bend his words a different direction. So looking at Mark three eleven, the unclean spirit.
So this is when he casts out demons. Cast out demons, they fall down before him and say, you are the son of God. Well, what God? What God are they talking about? Well, how would they recognize him? Now in gnostic theology, they would say that he’s the son of the one, so of the of the good God, not the evil God. But these are evil spirits. So why, you know, what is why are they running from the goodness of Christ? What context do they have for recognizing him? You know, there’s just a lot of questions. And, also, I’m curious too. I don’t have an answer for this, but I’m curious too. Like, if bodies are not essential to gnostic, you know, freedom or a fulfilled life, why is it so bad to be demon possessed? Why is Jesus casting them out of these bodies? Does it matter? Does it affect them? Is it in the way of their gnosis? That’s just a question that I would have, in studying that more.
Another demon in Mark five seven, when he sends him out, he’s the demon responds, what have you to do with me, Jesus, son of the most high God? I adjure you by God. Do not torment me. Now here you’ve got two quotes back to most high God. Now I know that some of you who are watching might be wondering, okay. When the Bible says God, when Jesus says, I’m the son of God, who’s he referring to? Is he actually referring to Yahweh? Because God has multiple names. One of the arguments that might be made by those who disagree with what I’m sharing here is that the word for God in the New Testament when Jesus is using it is not referring to Yahweh but referring to say Elohim. Well, the word that’s used in son of God is the Greek word theos. That’s the word for God means a divinity.
But it’s referring back very specifically to the Hebrew word for God, Elohim. Now, is Elohim the same as Yahweh? Well, yes, it is. If you look in Deuteronomy six four, specifically, this is what said, hear, oh Israel, the lord our God, the Lord is one. Now in this particular verse, it’s here, oh, Israel, Yahweh Elohim Yahweh. The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Here, the names of God are intertwined. Elohim and Yahweh are stated together as the same individual. And this Elohim and when it’s used specifically for God and not just for spirits in general is carried through in the Greek in the form of the word theos.
So what we’re looking at here is, again, Jesus is specifically using a vernacular referring back to the Old Testament and saying, I am the son of Yahweh Elohim Yahweh. I am the son of the lord, our God, the lord who is one. Not just the son, not a lesser creation like Arianism teaches, but the fulfillment, God in flesh. Yes. In flesh, not just in spirit. And this is important because he was identifying with the human existence, making himself nothing, taking on human flesh. As John one says, the word became flesh and dwell among us, and we have seen his glory. And that glory is not a power grabbing, violent God who hates his people.
According to the book of Exodus, God’s glory is his goodness, and that’s why he wants it displayed because God’s goodness then draws people to his love. We could go on into Matthew, go into Matthew sixteen sixteen. Simon Peter says, you are the Christ, Messiah, the son of the living God. Who’s he referring to? The living God of the old testament. Peter was a Jew. He was speaking from the framework of the old testament God. Matthew eight twenty nine. And behold, they cried out.
Again, demons talking to him. What have you to do with us, oh son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time? All of these passages point to the connection between father and God. The father is the same as God. Together, Jesus has made a connection to this God of the Old Testament. One thing to know is that when you see the word lord in English in the New Testament, that Greek is pulling from the Hebrew Yahweh. So let’s look at some examples of Jesus using this word referring back to Hebrew Yahweh. Luke ten twenty seven, he’s quoting the Old Testament, and Jesus says, you shall love the Lord Yahweh your God Elohim with all your heart and soul and strength and all your mind. So all your intellect, which is so important to gnostics, all your strength, all your effort, all your soul, all your heart, your emotions, your psyche, all of this is to be bent with love to Yahweh, and Jesus is the one who said that.
So we can’t splice us apart. We can’t say that Jesus was undoing the old testament God without living in a real state of cognitive dissonance. We have other instances where we see Jesus saying, lord your God, quoting Yahweh in the Old Testament. Mark twelve twenty nine. Hear, oh, Israel, the lord our God. The lord is one. Matthew twenty two thirty seven. You shall love the lord your God with all your heart.
Luke twenty thirty seven. He specifically talks about Moses. He says that but that the dead are raised even Moses showed in the passage about the burning bush where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not a God of the dead, but of the living. So here Jesus is explicitly quoting the Old Testament, not just quoting it, but he’s also using it as an example of how God operates, how New Testament God operates, how the true father operates. And the example he uses is Yahweh speaking to Moses. So Jesus taught on the Old Testament God as the Yahweh of the Old Testament. And if we want to reject that, we have to reject Jesus completely.
It’s not intellectually, historically, or logically honest to take Jesus’ words, which have over 6,000 manuscript manuscript evidences to support them. That’s more than anything we have on the Caesars and Alexander the Great. We have that much evidence for the gospel writings, the New Testament writings that are showing us that this is what he said. We have the evidence. It is dishonest to say that Jesus was trying to undo what the God of the old testament was doing. Jesus supported, fulfilled, and was partnered with and was, in essence, the God of the old testament. And so our choice here is that we must either accept that Jesus was fulfilling what the God of the Old Testament began, that he was united with him, is him, or we have to completely abandon Jesus as part of our theological framework, particularly in gnostic thought. There can be no combination if you want to believe that the Yahweh of the Old Testament is evil.
Now I wanna just share one last thing as we wrap up this episode, and it’s this. One of this the passages that are cited Testament, to say that Yahweh and Satan are the same person is found in two passages in first Chronicles twenty one and second Samuel 24. And this is a passage where David takes a census. King David of Israel takes a census. King David of Israel takes a census of the people. And here is what it says in first Chronicles 21. Then Satan stood against Israel and incited David to number Israel. So David said to Joab and the commanders of the army, go number Israel from Beersheba to Dan and bring me a report that I may know their number.
But when we jump over to second Samuel 24, it says, again, the anger of the lord was kindled against Israel and he, the lord, incited David against them saying, go number Israel and Judah. Passages that’s often pointed to by modern gnostics to say, Satan and the lord are the same. Now, I’m gonna share with you some amazing academic work from Doctor Michael Heiser. You might be familiar with him from the book, The Unseen Realm but he was an incredible scholar on Mesopotamian and Sumerian culture and language. He understood Hebrew just amazing. Incredible man. He passed away just a couple years ago. And this article is going to kind of break this down for you.
But one of the things that’s important to understand about the role and concept of Satan in the Bible is that Satan is not a proper name. We use it that way. Over the course of church history, we have adapted the language to say Satan as a capital s individual, and there is a spiritual enemy. We see this in Genesis three. But in Hebrew, the word Satan means adversary, and it’s not used as a proper noun. It’s used as a regular noun. So it would be the Satan, the Satan, the adversary. Now I’m gonna read to you, what Michael Heizer says about this.
And so I’m gonna share with you kind of an example he uses from another place in scripture where the Satan appears as an adversary. So typically, there would be an article. So the, an article, the, the, Satan. Okay? In this passage, when we look at first Chronicles 21, there isn’t an article. It just says then Satan, then adversary stood against Israel. So what’s going on here? Here’s what Heizer says, quote, the only other place in the Old Testament where Satan lacks the definite article, the, and the term is used of a divine figure is numbers twenty two twenty two two where we read that the angel of Yahweh, the angel of the Lord, which is often seen as a Christophany and appearance of Christ in the Old Testament, stood in the way of Balaam and his donkey as an adversary, Satan. So it says the angel of the Lord opposes Balaam as a Satan, k, as a noun. The angel was opposing Balaam.
He was a divinely appointed adversary. This connection between the word Satan and the angel of Yahweh is crucial to understanding the discrepancy between first Chronicles twenty one and second Samuel 24. In both accounts, the Chronicles twenty one and second Samuel 24. In both accounts, the angel is present as the one who dispenses God’s judgment upon David. First Chronicles twenty one and second Samuel twenty four fifteen through 16. Since gGd and the angel of the lord were frequently identified with each other in the old testament, see Exodus three, Judges six, Old Testament (see Exodus three, Judges six), the best solution seems to be that we don’t have Satan, God’s cosmic enemy, in the Chronicles passage. Rather, we have two writers both referring to God, one using Yahweh and the other referring to Yahweh in human form, the angel of the lord in another adversarial role. So it’s the angel of the lord, and he is opposing Israel through David.
Why would he do this? Why would he oppose Israel through David? Here’s why. Both accounts say Yahweh was angry. He’s angry with with, David and with Israel. So Yahweh chose to use David as his instrument of judgment. This is a quote from Heizer. As his instrument of judgment against the nation much in the same way he had used Pharaoh centuries before. And as Pharaoh was still accountable for his actions, so was David. End quote.
Now in the case of Pharaoh, if you look at the Hebrew words that are used for the hardening of his heart, the first three or four times it says, and pharaoh hardened his heart. And then the second three or four times, it says, and God hardened pharaoh’s heart. Many people read this and they think like, well, God’s not being fair, but God’s being completely fair because the two Hebrew words for hardened are different. The first three, four instances, when Pharaoh was hardening his heart, it means to raise up one’s ego, to elevate oneself, to act in pride. And then the second three or four times when God hardens his heart, it is a handing over. Just like Romans one says, God will hand someone over to their own actions. CS Lewis says that God will give people what they want and if they don’t want him, that’s what he will give them and so in this passage, what is happening is the angel of the lord is acting acting as the Satan, the adversary against the people of Israel through David, and David was a willing participant to judge them for their sin. Now some people are bothered by this.
Why is God judging people? Because he’s a just God. Anyone who has ever witnessed great evil knows that evil must be judged. We want evil to be held accountable and oftentimes, we forget that when we read passages in the Bible. It’s like we think that everybody in the Bible was just perfectly good and innocent and never committed any sin. We think we should just let them off. These people were killing children, passing them through the fire, burning them, sacrificing them. They were sexually promiscuous. They were practicing, you know, damaging sexual practices that were not to the advantage of the women among them, the children among them.
These are just a few of the things that were happening when Israel went down the path of corruption. And yet we stand back from the Old Testament. We say God shouldn’t judge them. That’s mean. Yahweh is cruel. He’s unfair. And yet when you look at the context of what is happening and you understand the love that God has for the weak, the oppressed, and those in need, then you see that God’s justice and his desire to protect the innocent is always the driver behind his judgment. So when you see the angel of the Lord acting as an adversary to Israel, you can know that he has done it out of love for those who were in need.
And that is exactly what Jesus does when we get to the New Testament. He offers himself to anyone who will call upon his name. But those who choose to oppose him reap the judgment that is their due. For those of you who are watching this, I know this is a lot. But I hope that as you come away from this video, you at least are willing to listen, have been willing to listen to the other side. Jesus is a God of justice and love. He’s not a safe God. He’s not a God that you can mold to your own shape, your own liking.
He had a lot to say about where he came from, what he was here to do, and he fully supported and fulfilled the role of Yahweh in the Old Testament. If you don’t like Yahweh, you won’t like Jesus. I hope we’ll see you next time on Verity Podcast.