Little gods? - GBC Bulletin Column #31

A few weeks ago after I preached from John 10 several people asked me “What are verses 34-36 talking about?” The verses read: 

Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came — and Scripture cannot be broken — do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming’, because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?

Is Jesus, or the text that he quotes, seeking to communicate that we share in deity, that we are in fact, demigods of a sort? Several leaders within the dangerously heretical but wildly popular Word of Faith movement would say so: Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, Paul and Jan Crouch, Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer, Benny Hinn, Kenneth Hagin, Morris Cerrullo and many others besides have all made statements along these lines. Biblically though, the answer must be strongly in the negative: “know therefore today, and lay it to your heart, that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other” (Deut. 4:39).

What then is Jesus talking about in John 10:34-36? To understand, we have to go to the passage he is quoting – Psalm 82:6. There, the context makes it plain that he is speaking about mortal men who were specially chosen to enact the divine prerogative of justice in Israel:

Provide justice for the needy and the fatherless;
uphold the rights of the oppressed and the destitute.
Rescue the poor and needy;
save them from the power of the wicked. (Ps. 82:3-4; HCSB)

Even as Moses - who tended to stutter and stammer when speaking - was made “like a god to Pharaoh” (Exodus 7:1) as the one true God’s representative on behalf of his people, so were these judges to be like gods to the nation. In this they failed: “How long will you judge unjustly / and show partiality to the wicked?” the Psalmist asks (Ps. 82:2). For this outrage, “like men you shall die, and fall like any prince. (Ps. 82:6-7).

The Jews were about to stone Jesus for blasphemy, because their approach to Scripture led them to deny his claims to deity. In these verses, Jesus turns Scripture against his adversaries and argues from the lesser to the greater with the “how much more so” kind of structure common among rabbis of the day. If the corrupt judges of Psalm 82 were called “gods” as those who were supposed to represent the one true God, how much more so can “the One the Father set apart and sent into the world” be called God! 

This was printed in the worship bulletin of Grace Baptist Church (Wood Green) on 24 November 2013.