Symbolism of the Cross
As Heiser and a great many other Old Testament scholars make clear, biblical Hebrew is loaded with symbolism.
The classical Hebrew language consisted of just about 800 root words, and everything else they had to say was derived from the various combinations of those words. And the language itself rested on the assumption that some terms and figures of speech had more than one meaning, based on the context. English is the opposite; instead of building with a few roots, it went out and stole words from other languages, building one of the largest vocabularies still in use today.
One of the most common Hebrew multiuse terms is “son”. Given the context of Scripture, it almost never takes on the literal meaning of “male progeny”. It could mean any number of male descendants and relatives generations later, or someone who simply follows some leader, or perhaps just a trainee or disciple. In the case of God, as Heiser hammers over and over, it refers most often to those He commissions for various purposes.
The only reason we don’t have a biblical phrase “sons of Christ” is because it’s trumped by the term “sons of God”.
Heiser likes to emphasize repeatedly that it also refers to a host of non-human beings who serve in God’s court. He prefers to keep it fuzzy enough that he doesn’t try to nail it down using the term “angelic beings” because he considers them in a different class. Instead, he associates them quite often with whatever is behind the mythology of pagan gods. I suppose it depends on what you include in the definition of “angel” and “demon” – as both are clearly the same class of being between them, just having a different orientation.
He also envisions them all having considerable more free will than is commonly taught among evangelicals (his primary audience). It’s not that I have a problem with that, but I think he takes it too far, and almost destroys the meaning of the Wilderness Temptations.
In Chapter 28 of The Unseen Realm, Heiser makes the case that the Messianic Prophecies were fuzzy and quite unclear. The reason he offers is that God couldn’t afford to risk the resistance of some of those ruling spirits and powers, should He have made it more obvious how His Son would accomplish His mission. Thus, Heiser gives the impression that Satan didn’t know what was coming.
But I contend that Satan did know. Indeed, Satan made a concerted effort to derail things in the Wilderness Temptations. The Devil knew what the prophecies were; he had seduced the Jews into becoming so focused on this world that they very nearly forgot about the Unseen Realm and the spiritual nature of Creation.
Our victory over sin in this life is dismissing the cares of this life. We learn this from the Old Testament itself. Death in this life is a reward, but we cannot just commit suicide; that misses the whole point. It leaves us still standing outside of Eden, trying to take shortcuts to get back in. It’s not enough that your mortal body cease functioning and release you into your eternal form. It’s not just the flesh, but the fleshly nature. It’s rooted in something that Adam and Eve had before the Fall. That fleshly nature reflects a fatal flaw that comes with free will. That flaw must be corrected within the individual eternal will. To do that, we each must go through a great deal of work, a purging process that disciplines the fleshly nature first, then we can receive God’s call Home That’s what the Flaming Sword is all about. Whatever part of us that survives this life must be restored to what Adam and Eve were meant to be by sacrificing the part that provoked the Fall in the first place.
It's an act of the will to submit, something that has an eternal effect. That was inherent in the presence of the Flaming Sword at the entrance to Eden. From that awful day when we left the Garden, Satan kept trying to hide the Flaming Sword, to obscure the rather obvious necessity of that self-sacrifice. However, God in His mercy went the extra mile to make it more obvious.
For the Messiah to open the path fully and clearly, it was His commission to lead the way. He was sent to provide the factual event of death on the Cross so that there could be a symbol pointing to something more important, now covered under symbolic references to the Cross. I am convinced the prophecy of Isaiah and a few other “Suffering Servant” passages were more than adequate for a good, spiritually minded Israeli to grasp that the coming Messiah would have to suffer death in order to provide the ransom from this fallen existence.
Satan had used his tricks to convince the Jewish leadership that this world is what it’s all about, and that any “Unseen Realm” was just spooky and unknowable. It’s no surprise this is how the Pharisees viewed things. They had speculated that God would send a Messiah that would provide limitless prosperity (turn stones into bread), answer all their curiosities and give them power over this life (jumping from the Pinnacle of the Temple Plaza), and give them full political conquest over all the Gentiles (the offer to rule the world). It’s the same stuff of all temptations: Lust of the Flesh, Lust of the Eyes and Boastful Pride over Life (in that order).
So, when Jesus came along, He was confronted by this established teaching of False Messianic Expectations. The temptation was to embrace that false path instead of the one Satan knew Jesus had come to walk. Satan didn’t want Jesus to die; he didn’t want anyone taking up the Flaming Sword. The Devil wasn’t caught off guard by that. He knew this was the rather literal Son of God who had full dominion over all Creation and outranked him.
The Cross becomes the new Flaming Sword. Either way, you must use it on your fleshly self, or it does you no good. This is how we identify with the Unseen Kingdom of God.