This is John from the Bible Project. We've been going through a series on this podcast about the complex identity of God in the Bible.

If you've been following along, you've heard us talk about how the word for God in the Bible is the word Elohim.

And how the God of the Bible isn't the only character referred to as an Elohim. In fact, there's many spiritual beings in the Bible referred to as Elohim.

Most human cultures or most of human history have had a gradient view of reality. Namely, there are different grades of powerful beings in the universe.

And so, at the top is usually a particular deity or a handful of them, but then there's deities all the way down. So this is the world in which the Bible comes into existence.

And in this world, the gods are always fighting to prove who's the top dog. You can climb the ranks of the God pile, as it were. So if you're a smart person, you'd give respect to as many gods as you dare.

But the biblical authors, they don't buy this.

Ultimately, where the biblical authors are going is what he calls a binary view. Their fundamental view is there's Yahweh, the chief Elohim, then everything else.

Or as the first commandment says, have no other gods before me. In the biblical view, the creator God of the universe is in a class of his own.

Yahweh is transcendent, unique, above all, totally different than all other reality.

But if God's totally different than everything we can understand, then God would be a no-oval. Impossible to relate to, but strangely.

At the same time, they believe that that God is personal, no-oval, involved in human history. He's utterly unique and other, but he is also at the same time completely involved in his story as interwoven with the story of this world.

Theologians talk about this paradox as God's transcendence and his eminence. He's both unreachably far away and at the same time, intimately close by.

And so, what does this look like practically? How can a transcendent being enter our story? In the next few episodes, we're going to explore that question.

We're going to look at a few ways that God interacts with the world. The first and most common way this happens is what we'll look at in this episode, that God relates to us through other humans.

The majority of times in the whole Bible, old and New Testament, when God appears and interacts with people, it's through mediators, priests, prophets, kings, that kind of thing.

When God does this, we get a glimpse of what it means to be truly human, what it means to be made in the image of God.

There are going to be particular human characters, that God is going to use and act through in very unique ways.

So much so that it's hard to tell if it's the human acting or God acting, and Moses is actually the first character.

Thanks for joining us. Here we go.

So we're going to talk in this hour about Yahweh, how he relates to the world, the created world.

And before we get into that, let's begin here. This would be a good summary then.

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