Psalm 82
October 4, 2026 Lord, we are people of your book. Yet we don’t know it very well. Help us realize there is more to the spiritual dimensions of our universe. Give us hearts to study and understand more over time and grace to live with what we don’t understand.
We have been taught about God, and we have a category for you that makes sense to us. We get it that you are intensely concerned for the weak, the orphaned, the poor and the powerless. And in Jesus Christ we learn just how far you will go to identify with the poor and the oppressed. You walk alongside them. Talk to them. Let them touch you. Heal them. Feed them. Restore them to life. And call them back from the grave.
But this idea of Yahweh sharing judgment with multiple other gods in the divine council feels a little less comfortable to us. And sounds inconsistent with what we generally understand and consider Biblically acceptable. Yet here it is in this Psalm.
This divine council sounds like a group of privileged, special disembodied spiritual beings you regarded as those that would carry out your ways. So, what happened? How did they lose their focus? Our feeble questions don’t help us very much, but we still ask them.
At the tower of Babel you divided the languages of the people. From these we subsequently have people groups and nations we still see today. Based on scripture we can speculate about how much of a connection there is between fallen cosmic spirits and their influence on the various people groups. The limited understanding we have is that the invading demonic strongholds of this world are all related to them. Somehow this rule and authority happen at both the cultural level and the individual level.
When we lack understanding of the connection between the subsequent people groups and nations and the oversight of them by spiritual beings, remind us that You are the Most High over all the earth. The nations belong to you. Restore what is broken.
Arise o God, do what you set out to do from ages past making an inheritance of all the nations. Give courage to our global partners C and D recruiting for Bible translation, D and K creating materials for cross cultural ministry, B and T building relations with nationals and teaching students, N and C as they conduct research on language communities.
Let this be our prayer this day.