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I’ve been a student of The Bible since I first got saved at 17 years old. What started as me being a baby Christian who liked to just read a passage or two a day turned into me being a mature believer with an addiction so bad I payed $50.00 a month for Logos Bible Software so I could dive into the original languages, have multiple commentaries open, take extensive notes, and….*clears throat*. Well, let’s just say that I’m passionate about studying God’s word. And no matter how shallow or deep I went into, for most of my life, there was one constant; The New International Version (NIV).

Why I Used The New International Version

Like all people who start digging into God’s word, you need to pick a translation. Without a translation, you won’t be able to read it. Unless you go through all the time and effort it takes to learn Hebrew and Greek, of course. But there are soooo many translations, which should I choose? 17-year-old me knew one thing; I would not read The King James Version. The archaic English was off-putting at best and confusing at worst. Even though I was smart enough to know to mentally substitute “thou” for “you” and that some words end with “eth” for seemingly no reason (which caused me to weepeth), it just didn’t feel natural. A modern translation was a must. But that just raised a new question; which modern translation? There are dozens and dozens of them! I did a little Googling and thought the New Living Translation (NLT) would be good for me. After all, it took the thoughts of the biblical authors and translated those as opposed to being word-for-word, which might get confusing if I weren’t familiar with the idioms. For the first time in my life, I read The Bible cover to cover. But after two read throughs, I had this nagging thought; “Translations are comprised by committees of people, people with opinions and beliefs, and given the NLT’s translation philosophy, what if what I’m getting is more interpretation than text? I don’t want other people’s interpretations of the text. I want the text! I’ll form my own interpretations as I read and study!” So the NLT was my main Bible translation for a VERY brief period of my Christian life. My next translation was the NIV (New International Version). I figured that this would be the best translation for me as its translation philosophy is to be a hybrid between more paraphrase-ish translations like the NLT and strict word-for-word translations like the ESV. The NIV tries to be as word-for-word as possible except for those places where the committee suspects that a word-for-word translation would confuse the English reader. When this happens, the NIV opts for a “dynamic equivalent” reading, which is just a fancy way of saying “We got the point across using simpler, more familiar words.”

1 John 2:2 is a perfect illustration of this. Compare how 1 John 2:2 reads in the NIV versus the ESV. Emphasis mine in bold.

NIV – “He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.”

ESV – “He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”

The NIV of 1 John 2:2 and the ESV of 1 John 2:2 read almost identically, word for word. The only difference between these two translations is how they translate the Greek word “ἱλασμός” (hilasmos). The NIV renders it “atoning sacrifice,” while the ESV renders it “propitiation”. The NIV Translation committee went with the translation choice they did because not many of us use the term “propitiation” in our day-to-day conversation.

The NIV seemed like a happy middle ground between something too paraphrase-ish like The New Living Translation and The Living Bible, but not something so strictly word-for-word that it could hinder my goal of trying to understand The Bible, such as the English Standard Version and New Revised Standard Version. The NIV was the main Bible translation I read from, used for study, and quoted from since circa 2011 to the spring of 2025.

What Changed (Part 1) – A Strong Bias Against The Divine Council Worldview

The Divine Council Worldview, for those who don’t know, is a highly nuanced view of the supernatural that differs from the watered down view that has been popular in evangelical American circles for the past couple of centuries. God’s divine council is his heavenly host of creatures; seraphim, cherubim, ophanim, and angels. Although God is omniscient and does not need a council, ^[1]God does not need anything, as Paul says in Acts 17:24-25, he does have one and in different places in The Bible, He asks for their decisions before doing something (e.g Genesis 1:26-27, Genesis 18:17-18, 1 Kings 22:19-23). In Deuteronomy 32:8-9, we are told that “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the LORD’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.” (ESV) When did God divide the nations? In Genesis 11, at The Tower Of Babel. At the Babel event, God dispersed the nations and alloted to them “The Sons Of God” as their inheritance, and the Sons Of God were the nations inheritance. But Yahweh kept Israel (Jacob) for Himself. There is debate over whether these Sons Of God were already evil when Yahweh appointed them over the nations, or whether they turned corrupt sometime after the fact, ^[2]Under influence of Brian Godawa’s “Chronicles Of The Nephilim” novels, which aren’t just biblical novels but have non-fiction appendices at the end explaining and defending … Continue reading but we know that instead of governing the Gentile nations justly and pointing them back to the one true God, they instead lead the peoples to worship them as gods. Psalm 82 records a divine court scene in which “God has taken His place in the divine council. In the midst of the gods, He holds judgment.” (Psalm 82:1, ESV). The rest of the Psalm records Yahweh’s charges against them (i.e showing partiality to the wicked, refusing to maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute, refusing to recuse the weak and the needy, verses 2-4), and Yahweh’s verdict is “I said, ‘You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.” (Psalm 82:6-7, ESV) The gods are real spiritual entities, and not figments of the heathen imagination as many churches and pastors would lead us to believe. As Deuteronomy 32:17 says “They sacrificed to demons that were no gods, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come recently, whom your fathers had never dreaded.” (ESV) In 1 Corinthians 10:20, the Apostle Paul wrote “No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons.” (ESV) CF. Leviticus 17:7 and Psalm 106:37. This doesn’t mean that The Bible teaches Polytheism, however. As the late biblical scholar Dr. Michael S. Heiser points out, the Hebrew word for God/god is elohim. And Heiser shows a variety of different usages of elohim which show that it did not always refer to Yahweh, the God of Israel. It was used to refer to

•Yahweh, the God of Israel (thousands of times— e.g., Gen 2: 4– 5; Deut 4:35)
•The members of Yahweh’s council (Psa 82:1, 6)
•Gods and goddesses of other nations (Judg 11:24; 1 Kgs 11: 33)
•Demons (Hebrew: shedim— Deut 32:17)
•The deceased Samuel (1 Sam 28:13)
•Angels or the Angel of Yahweh (Gen 35:7) ^[3]Heiser, Michael S.. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (pp. 26-27). Lexham Press. Kindle Edition.

As the opening theme of The Divine Council Worldview Podcast goes, “Careful who you castin’ them pearls to cause elohim could be singular, noun, or plural too.” ^[4]Not sure of the title of the song, but the artist is Zac Davis, and it plays at the beginning of every audio episode of The Divine Council Worldview Podcast, which is a podcast I highly recommend … Continue reading It appears to me that the Hebrew term “elohim” is synonymous with our English word “Spirit”. A Spirit is just an immaterial, unembodied (or disembodied) mind. God is a spirit (John 4:24), but there are also evil spirits (demons), good spirits (angels), and many of us would say that deceased humans in the intermediate state are “spirits”. However, although there are many “spirits” there is only one omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, uncreated, morally perfect spirit (i.e God) who is the Creator of all things other than Himself. The Hebrew word elohim seems to have been used in exactly the same way. Yahweh is an elohim and there are many other elohim, but there is only one omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, uncreated, morally perfect elohim (i.e Yahweh). As Dr. Michael Heiser would say, Yahweh is “species unique”. ^[5]Dr. Michael S. Heiser has used the term “species unique” to describe Yahweh in several of his writings. For citation purposes, you can check out his paper “Are Yahweh and El … Continue reading

The issue with the NIV is that a good chunk of the biblical passages that teach Divine Council stuff are worded in ways that totally change the meaning of the text or water down their impact. For example, the NIV of Psalm 82 begins like this; “God presides in the great assembly; he renders judgment among the ‘gods’.” Really? Great assembly? Not divine council? Also, notice that it puts “gods” in scare quotes, as if the author isn’t really serious that these are divine beings that Yahweh is judging. As if the Psalmist is being sarcastic. While it may not seem like a big deal (a huge number of celestial beings in Yahweh’s court could accurately be described as a “great assembly”) the problem is that this phrase is also used of faithful human Yahwhists congregating in the temple (see the NIV of Psalm 35:18, Psalm 40:10, Psalm 102:22, Psalm 107:32). This may be part of the reason why people take the ridiculous view that the gods of Psalm 82 are human judges. ^[6]For a refutation of this view see the 8 minute video “Are the Sons of God just Human Judges in Psalm 82?” on Dr. Michael S. Heiser’s YouTube channel, and you can also check out … Continue reading You also have Psalm 82:5 of the NIV saying “The ‘gods’ know nothing, they understand nothing. They walk about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken.” First of all, the ones who have no knowledge or understanding is grammatically left open. The ESV is right to simply leave it as “they”. I personally take it to be referring to the humans who these gods are ruling over. They are in the dark because they don’t know the true God. The Gentile humans are the ones who walk about in darkness (cf. Isaiah 9:1-2, Luke 2:10-11, Luke 2:25-32). Rather than knowing and loving the true God, they worshipped created things, adhered to an inferior religion, had a transactional relationship with their deities in which if they scratched their backs, the gods might possibly scratch theirs, but no guarantees. ^[7]This is what Old Testament scholar John Walton called “The Great Symbiosis” in his book “Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the … Continue reading And since the gods are not omniscient and omnipresent, to even get their attention takes a lot of theatrics, lengthy prayers, and rituals, (cf. 1 Kings 18:26-29, Matthew 6:7-8). ^[8]Knowing how pagans really related to their gods makes Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 6:7-8 100 times more beautiful. The context of this passage is his Sermon On The Mount, and Jesus tells his … Continue reading That said, it could refer to the gods themselves grammatically, but the NIV takes the interpretive ambiguity away and tells you which party you should interpret as the “they” in the ESV’s “They have neither knowledge nor understanding.” And again, the word “gods” is put in scare quotes.

A lot of Christians get spooked by the language of divine plurality, and honestly, I get it. When I first read Dr. Michael S. Heiser’s book “The Unseen Realm: Recovering The Supernatural Worldview Of The Bible”, I was spooked too! “Gods? Plural!? Are you saying The Bible teaches polytheism?! Is God just one member among a pantheon!?” The Divine Council Worldview does not threaten monotheism, if by monotheism we mean that there is one Maximally Great Being, (i.e one Elohim with all the omni attributes and is the Creator of all things) and that this Maximally Great Being is the sole elohim worthy of our worship. Again, look at the usages of elohim in the list above. When we see the word G-O-D, we think of a set of attributes (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, etc.), but that is not how the Hebrew word “elohim” was used. Elohim’s usage, as I said, mirrors more the way our English word “Spirit” is used, because Elohim was used to refer to any inhabitant of the unseen realm from The God of Israel to the departed soul of the prophet Samuel. Even in places where the existence of other gods is admitted, the biblical authors go out of their way to talk about how Yahweh is superior. For example, Exodus 15:11 “Who is like you, O LORD, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?” (ESV) Psalm 77:13 (ESV) “Your way, O God, is holy. What god is great like our God?” or Isaiah 41:21-24 where Yahweh challenges the gods to tell the future to prove that they are gods worth worshipping. Plus, you have all the Omni attributes taught in scripture ^[9]see William Lane Craig’s Defender’s class “Doctrine Of God: Attributes Of God” for both a biblical and philosophical survey of God’s attributes, –> … Continue reading. We should not be spooked to put an s at the end of the word “god”. There will always be one and only one Maximally Great Yahweh. But the NIV translation comittee seems to have been, like a lot of Christians, squeamish with the theological admission of other gods, thus why they render Psalm 82 the way that they do.

In Job 1:6-7 of the NIV, we read “One day the angels came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan s also came with them. The LORD said to Satan, ‘Where have you come from?’ Satan answered the LORD, ‘From roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.'”

The problem here is that “angels” is not technically accurate. The Hebrew that gets translated here is “bene ha elohim” and should be rendered “Sons Of God”. For some reason, the NIV has no problem rendering it this way in Genesis 6:1-4 (the famous Nephilim passage before Noah’s flood), but in Job 1 and 2, bene ha elohim is rendered “angels”. Job 2:1 and 38:7 do the same thing. It isn’t a big deal as here in these passages, we certainly have celestial beings in view. The problem is that the word “angel” (malak in Hebrew, angeloi in Greek) is not the name of a species. As Dr. Michael S. Heiser explains “The Hebrew word malak means ‘messenger.’ It is therefore not surprising that the related noun melā ḵah refers generally to a ‘business journey’ or ‘trade mission’ in the Hebrew Bible. In terms of the word’s form, it is very likely that malak derives from the Semitic verb l k (‘to send’), though this verb is not attested in the Hebrew Bible. This has led some scholars to suspect malak was brought into Biblical Hebrew vocabulary from an external Semitic language. The meaning of ‘messenger’ for Hebrew malak is quite apparent from passages where human messengers are sent to deliver a message (Gen 32:3, 7; Deut 2:26; Neh 6:3; 2 Sam 11:19) or to bring back a message or report (Josh 6:17, 25). Human beings sent from God are also described with malak (prophets: Hag 1:13; 2 Chron 36:15; priests: Mal 2:7). These examples (e.g., priests, those initially sent out without a message to deliver) show us that the primary idea behind the term is not a message but being sent out to serve God. Supernatural spirit beings sent from God are the most frequent referent of the term.” ^[10]Michael S. Heiser. Angels: What the Bible Really Says About God’s Heavenly Host (Kindle Locations 417-425). Lexham Press. Kindle Edition. In popular modern Christianity, we use angels as a catchall term for celestial beings (primarily the good ones), and either pre-fix “fallen” for evil celestial beings or use the term “demons”. Heiser’s works in his various books show that this is a very simplistic angelology and demonology. When people on the internet talk about “biblically accurate angels”, I sometimes am tempted to just post a picture of some random man and say “This is a biblically accurate angel” and then a picture of the freakish wheel monster with eyes all around and say “And this is a biblically accurate ophanim.” Seraphim are mentioned in Isaiah 6:1-7. This is the most detailed and direct account of the seraphim. In the prophet Isaiah’s vision of God enthroned in the temple, he sees seraphim with six wings: two for covering their face, two for covering their feet, and two for flying. They are described as praising God, crying out, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” One of the seraphim also purifies Isaiah’s lips with a hot coal from the altar, an act that cleanses him of his sin. Cherubim are mentioned in passages like Genesis 3:24 in which one guards the way to The Tree Of Life with a flaming sword after Adam and Eve are kicked out of the garden, and Exodus 25:17-22 where God instructs Moses to make two cherubim of hammered gold on the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant. Their wings are to be spread upward, overshadowing the mercy seat. Other passages mentioning cherubim are 1 Kings 6 and 8, Psalm 18:10, 1 Samuel 22:11, and Ezekiel 1 and 10. In the book of Revelation, the cherubim are described as having various animal-like features. The ophanim are what most people mean by “biblically accurate angels” and are famously mentioned in Ezekiel 1:15-21 and Ezekiel 10:9-17. At the end of the day, “angels” is a dynamic equivalent translation, and based on how modern Evangelicals think about angels, it does kind of get the point across well. With the Job passages, a part of me feels like I’m taking the NIV to task for doing what it said it set out to do; make dynamic equivalent translation whenever they feel like the literal word-for-word translation would be confusing, however, (1) one must wonder why they don’t consistently render bene ha elohim this way in Genesis 6:1-4, and (2) the purpose of dynamic equivalence is to clarify things, and I think the NIV’s rendering just contributes to the misconception that all spiritual beings who aren’t God or human are “angels”. For the Job passages in particular, it isn’t the end of the world, but it just isn’t as precise for my liking. (3) This also messes up a cumulative case for the antecedent probability of the Sons Of God in Genesis 6 being divine beings who mated with humans to produce giants, because if you look for “Sons Of God” in your NIV, it’s going to pop up far fewer times than in other translations. ^[11]See my essay “Genesis 6: The Nephilim – Descendents Of Cain, Neanderthals, Ancient Kings, or Angel-Human Hybrids?” for a full exegetical and theological defense of this view.

Deuteronomy 32:8-9, another famous Divine Council passage, says in the NIV “When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided all mankind, he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel. For the LORD’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance.” According to the number of the sons of Israel, not the sons of God. Now, granted, most English Bibles do not read “according to the number of the sons of God” in Deuteronomy 32:8. Rather, they read “according to the number of the sons of Israel.” So the NIV isn’t alone here, but a good case that ‘Sons of God’ is the correct reading is made from the Dead Sea Scrolls.” ^[12]For a discussion of the Hebrew text and manuscript support for “sons of God,” see Michael S. Heiser, “Deuteronomy 32:8 and the Sons of God,” Bibliotheca Sacra 158 (January-March 2001): … Continue reading As Dr. Heiser wrote “Frankly, you don’t need to know all the technical reasons for why the ‘sons of God’ reading in Deuteronomy 32:8–9 is what the verse originally said. You just need to think a bit about the wrong reading, the ‘sons of Israel.’ Deuteronomy 32:8–9 harks back to events at the Tower of Babel, an event that occurred before the call of Abraham, the father of the nation of Israel. This means that the nations of the earth were divided at Babel before Israel even existed as a people. It would make no sense for God to divide up the nations of the earth ‘according to the number of the sons of Israel’ if there was no Israel.” ^[13]Heiser, Michael S.. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (p. 113). Lexham Press. Kindle Edition.

Finally, let’s talk about Psalm 8. Frankly, the ESV messes this up too, but the NIV reads

“When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
;what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
You have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honor.” (Psalm 8:3-5, NIV)

Biblical scholar Tremper Longman III wrote “The reason why God pays attention to, and cares for, human beings is because of their exalted status within the created order. The NIV translation (a little lower than the angels) represents a failure of nerve and follows the Septuagint, renowned for unnecessarily tempering shocking texts. The Hebrew word rendered angels is ‘ĕlōhîm, more naturally translated ‘God’, as in the NIV footnote (so NRSV). True, ’ĕlōhîm (‘gods’) is sometimes used for what are ‘angels’ (Ps. 82) or ‘demons’ (Exod. 12:12). But here it is much more likely that ‘God’ is intended. Humans are less than God, to be sure, but they are closer to God than anything else in the created order. After all, according to Genesis 1:27, human beings are created in the image of God. That is, more than any other creature, humans reflect and represent God.” ^[14]Tremper Longman III, Psalms: An Introduction and Commentary, ed. David G. Firth, vol. 15–16, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Nottingham, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 2014), 80–81.

Interestingly, while I agree with Longman that the word “elohim” should not be translated “angels”, and the NIV translators had “a failure of nerve”, I also disagree that it should be translated “God”. While grammatically, that is possible, I think other clues suggest the plural “gods”.

For example, it is noteworthy that humans “being made a little lower than the elohim” is mentioned in conjunction with the stars mentioned in the previous verse. “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,” (Psalm 8:3, ESV)

Ancient Near Eastern peoples, the Israelites included, conflated the stars in the sky with the gods of the divine council. This can be seen not only by texts outside The Bible in the Ancient Near East, but even in The Bible itself. For example, In Deuteronomy 4:19, We read “And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.” (ESV). This is referring to Deuteronomy 32:8-9 in which God allotted Sons Of God over the nations to rule them (cf. Genesis 10-11), but these gods lead the nations astray into worshiping them rather than the Creator, and as Psalm 82 teaches, they will be judged for that. Here, in Deuteronomy 4:19, Moses tells the Israelites that the sun, moon, stars, “all the host of heaven” “have been allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.” And not to be drawn away to bowing down and worshiping them. The ancients did not know that stars were giant burning balls of gas millions of miles away from the planet Earth. God accommodated theological truths about Himself and angelic beings to the cosmological understanding of their day.

Other Bible verses that support the idea that in ancient Israelite thinking the stars were divine beings are;

Jeremiah 33:22 – “As the host of heaven cannot be numbered and the sands of the sea cannot be measured, so I will multiply the offspring of David my servant, and the Levitical priests who minister to me.” (ESV)

The “host” is a reference to God’s army of divine beings (or as most evangelicals would call them, “angels”). Cf. Psalm 24:10, Isaiah 47:4, Isaiah 54:5, Jeremiah 10:16, Amos 4:13.

Job 38:6-7 compares the morning stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy using Hebraic parallelism.

Pastor Lydia Kim of Resurrection United Methodist church says “The ‘heavenly hosts’ made famous by English translations of the Bible have two distinct meanings: one is a reference to the stars; the other to God’s celestial armies, presumably of angels.’ * Don’t forget in Biblical times there were no telescopes, and people didn’t think of stars at all in the way we do. One way ancient Hebrews thought of the vast number of stars they saw in the night skies was as mysterious heavenly beings who served God.” ^[15]Lydia Kim, “Stars As Part Of The Heavenly Host”, December 5th 2023, https://resurrection.church/gps-guide/stars-as-one-part-of-the-heavenly-host/ She cites Judges 5:19-21, Psalm 148:3; and Job 38:7. ^[16]See also William Derham, “Astro-theology: or, A demonstration of the being and attributes of God, from a survey of the heavens,” printed by W. and J. Innys, 1721, Jan Irvin, Jordan Maxwell, … Continue reading

In conclusion, the strong Anti-Divine Council Worldview bias in the passage is one reason why I won’t continue to use the NIV as my main translation.

What Changed (Part 2) – Choosing “The Sin Nature” over “The Flesh”.

When talking about human carnality, the Apostle Paul employed a Greek term “sarx”. But whereas the ESV often literally renders it “the flesh”, the NIV more often than not renders it “the sin nature”, except for when sarx literally refers to physical flesh, such as John 1:14 which says “The Word became flesh.” It would extraordinarily bad theology to render that “The Word became the sin nature”, and in any case, this is another example of the NIV translators trying to make something that might be confusing into something more clarifying. Or at least that’s what I thought! In looking up the passages in preparation for a comparison table, I found that the NIV astonishingly renders the term “sarx” as “the flesh” more than I remembered. I recall the NIV using “the sinful nature” a whole bunch of times, but that is turning out not to be the case. I’m not entirely sure what accounts for this as I’ve only ever used the 2011 version. My theories are (1) I’m conflating memories of my own NIV with my Pastor’s NIV. Pastor Miles uses the NIV84 in his sermons. OR (2) I’m suffering from the Mandela effect!

And so, I’m disappointed for the sake of the point I wanted to make here, but I’m happy that the most recent version of the NIV is more accurate and may be less misleading. After an extremely confused Evan Minton Googled around for about 45 minutes, I have found out that of the 2011 revision, the number of times “sinful nature” is used was reduced from over 20 to a handful of places, primarily in Romans 7. Some sources state that only two occurrences remain in the 2011 version:

Romans 7:18: “For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.”

Romans 7:25: “So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.”

This is still a problem though. And here’s why; the NIV is doing the interpretation for you. And it’s an interpretation that I am beginning to find problematic. I need to be careful here, as I’m still not settled on what I think about this “sin nature” concept, however, I feel myself beginning to drift away from my long-held Arminian soteriology and more towards something like Provisionism. What exactly accounts for the badness of human beings? I’ve always been taught that humans are born with this thing called a “sin nature”. What that is and how we get it is never fully explained, but I always thought of it as like a magical evil force that exists in our souls that makes us do bad things, and we must resist it. The Holy Spirit is a magical good force that, when He comes to live inside us, counteracts this magical evil force and helps us to be more good. Adam and Eve somehow acquired this evil nature when they ate from the forbidden tree in Genesis 3, and then they passed on this inherent depravity to all their progeny. However, I have also heard the interpretation that sinfulness is something inherent to our physical bodies, and this is a theory offered as to why Paul calls it “the flesh”.

Don’t get me wrong, I do not think “people are basically good”. In fact, I’ve had to resist misanthropic inclinations in the past because people are so awful! There is something about us that makes sin easy and goodness difficult. I am not questioning whether the human race is “totally depraved” per se, but I am beginning to question whether we’re correctly understanding the nature of our depravity. Is it really due to some magical undefined thing in our souls or some sinful gene of our physical bodies? Or might our sinful tendencies perhaps be accounted for by other explanations? Maybe our sinful inclinations are a bundle of psychological, physiological factors, a bundle of bad habits that need to be replaced by good habits. Bad habits caused by both living in sinful environments as well as a lifetime of making bad decisions and forming those habitual ways of thinking, believing, and responding to certain sinful inclinations. And to what extent do wrong beliefs play a role (see John 8:32)?

As a result of a certain milestone in my sanctification, I began to wonder if this perhaps could be the case. Because The Holy Spirit didn’t really help me in the way I envisioned being helped. I envisioned the Spirit just kind of powering me up and giving me the sheer willpower to resist the evil urges inside of me caused by the sin germs inside me. Instead, I got better through a more therapeutic route! This was a route even a non-Christian could have taken to get better! Then I began to revisit some of those passages that talk about “the flesh” and I noticed something interesting.

Galatians 5:16-24 (ESV) says “But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”

Outbursts of anger? Yeah, sadly, I’m all too familiar with those. Strife? Divisions? Yeah. I’ve sinfully been at odds with people before. Idolatry? Well, not in the ANE sense but maybe I have been guilty of worshipping the evangelical “god of self”. Drunkenness? Wait a second. Hold the phone. Drunkenness isn’t the result of something inherent to my person. To get drunk, I have to purposefully seek out alcoholic beverages and put them into my body. That’s not the result of some evil thing inside of me, that’s the result of choosing to drink one too many beers! Ok, well, maybe alcoholISM is what is in view here. Well, again, if one has chosen to be a teetotaler like myself, one will not only never get drunk, but one will never struggle with alcoholism. So how is drunkenness the result of a sinful nature? I’ve also never had an orgy and I’ve never practiced sorcery. And yet all these things are said to be a result of “the flesh”.

Moreover, have you ever wondered why different people struggle with different sins? Why is it that we don’t all have anger issues? Why is it that the Buddhist monk who doesn’t have The Holy Spirit in him is better at controlling his temper than I am? Why is it that some struggle with same sex attraction and I don’t? Why is it that some people have struggles with not being envious of what others have, while I am content with my possessions and status in life? Why is it that I am practically addicted to Bible study while others struggle to make themselves read one or two passages a day? What I wouldn’t give to be as stoic as that pagan monk when people did things to anger me! What I wouldn’t give to be able to say “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” to people who are literally or proverbially crucifying me rather than calling down curses upon them! If we all had the same sinful nature which we inherited from the same two people, wouldn’t one expect us to all struggle with exactly the same sins? We should all struggle with our temper, we should all struggle with same sex attraction, we should all struggle with jealousy, we should all struggle to stay away from idols, we should all struggle to trust in God in the midst of life’s storms, and yet we don’t! We all struggle with sinful behaviors of some kind, but they differ from person to person.

I want to reiterate that I have not officially forfeited the idea of “The sin nature”, but I have discovered biblical and logical grounds to doubt it. I don’t doubt that human beings are awful, but maybe the explanation(s) for why we are awful are different than the reasons we’ve been taught? This is something I need to research more before I take an official stance. In any case, I would prefer a Bible translation not tell me we fight against “The sin nature”. Tell me to war against “The flesh” and leave it up to me to figure out what Paul meant by that phrase.

Conclusion

And so, this is why I’ve switched Bible translations. I still think it’s a fine translation, and I would never discourage anyone from using it. In fact, I especially recommend it for people new to The Bible, as I once was. When it comes to translations, you’ll find that they all sound a lot alike. That’s what makes KJV Onlyism so idiotic. You aren’t getting radically different renderings of God’s word the vast majority of the time. However, here and there, you will have the translators making certain choices, and some of those choices might be good, and others might not be so good. But I keep finding more and more not-so-good choices in the NIV that the ESV just isn’t plagued by. But even the ESV isn’t perfect. I don’t think The Serpent’s words in Genesis 3 should be “You will be like God” but rather “You will be like the gods”. (Genesis 3:5). There is a whole theological argument I could make here, but I don’t think Eve and Adam were wanting to become Maximally Great Beings. ^[17]For a whole discussion on this, see The Divine Council Worldview Podcast, EP007: Digging Around the Garden of Eden | The Divine Council Worldview Podcast around 57 minutes in. They wanted to be like the other Elohim populating the sacred space that was Eden. And again, I could go off on a whole tangent here regarding the resurrection body, theosis, and how the tree was actually something God wanted them to eat from, just in His timing, not their own. But I am sure I will find more translation choices in the ESV to disagree with. At the end of the day, it’s a translation. The only text that is really what God chose to be in the text (verbal plenary inspiration) was what we find in the Hebrew and Greek originals. If you have software like Logos, then you have resources to look into the original languages (Lexicons, concordances, commentaries). But if you don’t have access to that, the next best thing is to look at multiple translations. The website, Bible Hub, is great for doing multi-translation comparison of verses.