According to Deuteronomy 32:8, when God split the nations up at the Tower of Babel, he granted some of the beings of Heaven that he had created to rule over the different nations of the world while he turned his attention to the nation Israel. Had these little-g-gods done their job rightly, they would have established justice over their nations and imaged Yahweh to their people, but that’s not what happened. For example, in Daniel 10, the spiritual beings that reign over Greece and Persia are pictured as warring with the one true God, trying to stop the work he’s doing. And this now seems to be the way of all the little-g-gods, hence why the Bible also refers to them as “demons.” They are not the only kind of demons out there, but they are the most powerful kind.
Therefore, it’s no shock that Job says that God doesn’t trust the holy ones of Heaven or that the false gods will be judged and meet their end. In Psalm 82, God calls the gods into his courtroom and condemns them for how they treat humanity. Though they are supposed to be immortal beings, they will now one day die like men.
And on the flip side of that coin, the Easter resurrection of Jesus is a sign to all Christians that, though they are used to dying, they will instead put on immortality. The old fallen spiritual beings of the heavens—which, throughout the Old Testament are called the “sons of God” because they are a part of God’s heavenly family—will go on to die like men as the new “sons of God” (that is, all Christians, male and female) will replace them and go on to live like heavenly beings.
Christians will then go on to share Christ’s authority in the new heavens and the new earth. Throughout the Bible, angels are seen as working alongside God to construct judgment on humanity, but Paul has the audacity to say that one day it’ll be the humans that will judge angels! Resurrection is coming, and it will flip everything upside down.
The oppressive sons of God of this age will meet their end, and the beatitudal peacemaking sons of God of the age to come will reign as the resurrection conforms us to Jesus both in character and immortality. The resurrection that Christ foreshadows for us is no small deal. Easter effects everything.
Jamin Bradley 