God Wanted a Family

Lesson 1 — God Wanted a Family

After Michael S. Heiser, What Does God Want? — Chapter 1

Pleasant Springs Church · Tuesday, June 2 at 6 pm

Key Texts: Genesis 1:26–28 • Genesis 2:7 • Job 38:4–7 • Isaiah 63:16; 64:8 • Luke 3:38 • Acts 17:28–29 • Romans 8:14–17

Heiser opens his book with the picture of God most of us start with — not necessarily a hostile God, but a distant one. A creator, a power, an observer somewhere out there. Real, yes; involved, maybe; interested in me? Probably not. As Heiser puts it:

The Bible quietly demolishes this picture from its first page. The God of Scripture is not a detached observer. He is a Father who acts with purpose, makes things in order to enjoy them, and seeks us long before we ever think to seek Him. He is committed to us by His very nature.

How do we know that? Heiser’s answer — the question he says he will ask more than once — is to start with what we already know about ourselves.

Notice how you behave. You don’t do things at random. You brush your teeth on purpose. You go to work because something good is waiting on the other side. You get angry when someone mocks or destroys what you spent yourself making. You are, by nature, a purposeful, self-aware, creative being — not an accident with hands.

Heiser’s point: the opposite of those things would be a psychological anomaly. We are wired this way because we were made in the image of a Maker who is exactly this way — only infinitely more so.

God “does what he does to enjoy what he’s done” (Heiser). He did not create humanity because He lacked something — God is complete in Himself. He created us so that what He made could enjoy Him in return. The things He cares about most are the creatures He made to be like Him — that would be you and me.

Genesis opens with a Father who is already at work. The very first creative act in the Bible is the calling of light out of darkness (Gen. 1:3). By the time the camera lands on people, God has filled the earth with plants, fish, birds, and beasts — spectacular creatures, but none of them able to respond. Plants don’t talk back. A pine tree cannot say thank you. A leopard cannot pray. Family is not made of plants and beasts.

So God makes something new. And the language He chooses tips His hand.

Two Hebrew words are doing the heavy lifting here: tselem (“image,” Greek eikôn) and demuth (“likeness,” Greek homoiôsis). In the ancient Near East, a tselem was the king’s representative statue, placed in a province he did not personally inhabit to declare: this place is mine, and I rule it through this image. Genesis takes that political vocabulary and gives it to every human being.

Here is one of the great surprises of Heiser’s book: the reason God created us was not to fill a hole in His own heart. The Bible tells us God was never alone. Before the earth was made, He had already created a vast company of intelligent beings — the angels, what the Old Testament calls “sons of God.”

The angels were already there at creation — watching, cheering, worshiping. They are repeatedly called b&hat;enê haelohim (“sons of God”) in the Hebrew Bible (Job 1:6; 2:1; Ps. 29:1; 89:6; Deut. 32:8 DSS). The Hebrew word for “sons” can equally be translated “children.” And the phrase “children of God” means one thing in the Bible: family.

Once you see this, the family-language of the Bible stops being a sentimental decoration and starts being the load-bearing structure. From Adam onward, Scripture calls God our Father and humanity His children. It is not poetry. It is biology — the spiritual kind:

Even Paul, preaching to Greek pagans who knew nothing of Genesis, anchors the gospel to this same conviction: every human being on earth is, in the broadest creational sense, the offspring (genos) of God. We were not made by accident, by an indifferent universe, or as cosmic afterthought. We were fathered.

If every person you meet is an imager of God — God’s representative on the earth — three things follow immediately:

The Old Testament called God “Father” in a creational sense — we are all His children because we are all His handiwork. The New Testament takes that further. In Christ, those who once turned away are adopted into the family in a deeper way: not merely creatures of God, but children, with the inheritance and intimacy that word implies.

This is the answer to the modern soul’s loneliest fear. You are not an orphan in a meaningless universe. You were made by a Father, you are wanted by a Father, and through Jesus you are invited back into the Father’s house.

• Michael S. Heiser, What Does God Want?. Blind Spot Press, 2018. (Chapter 1: “God Wanted a Family.”)
• Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Lexham Press, 2015. (Chapters 3–5 on the divine council and the sons of God.)
• Michael S. Heiser, Supernatural: What the Bible Teaches About the Unseen World and Why It Matters. Lexham Press, 2015.
• J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1. Brazos Press, 2005.
• N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. HarperOne, 2008.
• Septuagint Greek text: Rahlfs-Hanhart, Septuaginta. Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft.
• English text: The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Crossway Bibles.