Reading and summarizing/reviewing The Unseen Battle: Spiritual Warfare, the Three Rebellions, and Christ’s Victory Over Dark Powers by Joel Muddamalle
Chapter 1 – The Garden House of God
How might God build a home, and what would it be like? Muddamalle summarizes what Eden was and the role God gave humanity as its caretakers. Eden was meant as God’s getaway, like a summer cottage, and a setting to meet with His new creations, humans. While we can’t fully undertstand what Eden was like, it was a mix of the natural and supernatural: a sprawling garden atop a mountain, complete with flowing rivers, food, animals, where God and humanity could commune. It was an ideal place to relax and, in a sense, it was the first temple.
Eden was a place like no other, literally, because Eden was tied to a section of land in the Mesopotamian region, cordoned off to the rest of the chaotic world. God gave humanity the task of spreading and safeguarding Eden, and He made the first step of planting a sliver of garden to demonstrate how it’s done: “See what I did? Do the same thing and spread it across the Earth. Make it your own, but remember this is the place where I’ll meet you.” Eden was a unique place in all that God made where the two distinct realms of the supernatural and the natural connect.
Muddamalle draws comparisons between humanity’s role in Eden, and their special status as images of God on Earth, to the concept of sonship in the Ancient Near East (ANE). A ruler would grant his children household privileges and responsibilities by simple dint of their relationship to the ruler, and ANE gods were often thought of having both a divine and human family: a two-family household. He mentions the structure of the pharoah’s household and the Egyptian story of Akhenaten as analogues of this father-child relationship. On the Mesopotamian side, he references the stories of En-lil, Marduk, and Gudea as examples of being-creation and human-divine relationships.
The seriousness with which ANE cultures took the divine-human household concept can’t be overstated, and examining this concept’s details and its implications is the aim of The Unseen Battle. Muddamalle summarizes it thusly in this chapter’s closing paragraph, introducing the reader to the divine council (DC) concept, per Heiser. I’ll quote it here (emphasis mine):
How is it possible that civilizations separated in time and space had similar conceptions of the relationship between the earthly and spiritual realms? If we are willing to entertain—as many people, including most Christians prior to the modern age have—the idea that these are not just myths and religious fables, but clues pointing us to a deeper spiritual reality, the simplest answer is a common origin story. These spiritual beings long to create counterfeit versions because of a deep jealousy rooted in extreme pride. My argument in this book is that the Bible gives us the true story behind the counterfeits, and that at some point, the gods of the nations participated in this household structure, this divine council in which they served the God of the Bible, but eventually went on to create their own counterfeit versions. God had his own two-family household as he resided in Eden, the holy mountain-garden home of God. For most Christians, there is no debate about whether God has a human family. Yet most who are new to this topic are suprised to learn that God also has a cosmic family, one made up of his heavenly host.