Audio Transcript
How did one Bible verse disarm a mob? Today we field a really good Bible question from an international listener to the podcast.
“Dear Pastor John, hello to you and thank you for this podcast! My name is Beatrice, and I live in Malaysia. My question for you is about what the Bible means when it says, ‘You are gods.’ It says this in Psalm 82:6, and then Jesus quotes it again in John 10:34” — a verse we read together today in our Bible reading. “Can you explain to me what this means?”
Here’s the situation. In John 10:30, Jesus said, “I and the Father are one.” And now, the Jewish leaders who hear him say this (putting it together with everything else that he’s been saying) infer that he’s blaspheming by making himself equal with God. So, in John 10:31, it says, “The Jews picked up stones again to stone him.”
“Jesus is going to die when he has chosen to die and not a minute sooner.”
Now, that’s a crisis, because the hour for Jesus’s death has not yet come. Jesus is going to die when he has chosen to die and not a minute sooner. “No one takes my life from me. I lay it down of my own accord” (see John 10:18). And so, he has to somehow defuse this critical moment where he is about to be stoned — legally, because the Jews could stone people for blasphemy. He’s got to somehow get out of this situation so that he can make his way in his own time to the kind of death he intends to die.
Deflecting the Threat
So, Jesus is going to deflect this threat in a couple of ways. First, he says, “For which of my good works are you stoning me?” (see John 10:32). And they answer, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God” (John 10:33). In other words, from all the things that Jesus has said, including calling God his Father and saying that he and the Father are one (and by implication, therefore, he’s the unique Son of God), they infer (and they infer rightly) that he’s treating himself as the Son of God in a unique way — only, they call it a blasphemous way.
And now Jesus is going to defuse the situation a second way and make his escape, which is what he does in verse 39: “He escaped from their hands.” How did he do that? He does it by quoting Psalm 82:6 in John 10:34. He says,
“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 that what you’re doing?]” (John 10:34–36)
Who Are the ‘Gods’?
Let’s go back and read Psalm 82:1–7. It starts like this: “God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment” (Psalm 82:1). Now, who are they? These are so-called gods and are angelic beings, which the New Testament calls “principalities and powers in the heavenly places” (see Ephesians 3:10). And God is about to pronounce judgment on them because they are using their authority behind the authorities of the world in order to support injustice rather than justice. So, Psalm 82:2–3 says (this is God talking to that assembly of gods), “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.”
And then, after the indictment which he just gave comes the condemnation from God in Psalm 82:6 (which is what Jesus quotes). It says, “I said, ‘You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men’” — pause there. That means he’s not talking to men; he’s talking to angelic beings. “‘Nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince’” (Psalm 82:7). In other words, even though you have a very exalted status as gods — principalities, powers, angels — you’re going to come crashing down just like human rulers who abuse their authority come crashing down.
So, when Jesus says that God called them gods, he’s not talking about us. This is the answer to Beatrice’s question. In fact, he’s not talking to any ordinary human beings. He’s talking about and to angelic beings who are sometimes called gods in the Old Testament, just like when Satan (you remember) comes before God in Job 1:6. It says, “The sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them.” That’s the sense in which “gods” is being used here, and “sons of God.”
Shrewd Escape Maneuver
The answer to Beatrice’s question is that in this text, both in Psalm 82 and in John 10, we are not called gods. Angelic beings are called gods, and Jesus isn’t going into any elaborate argument here about the meaning of this psalm. He is simply using this text as a shrewd escape maneuver from being about to be stoned. They have just accused him of blasphemy because of calling himself the Son of God, and he deflects the accusation of blasphemy by calling attention to the fact that in the Psalms the very term “sons of God” is used for beings less than God, and nobody accuses the psalmist or God himself of blasphemy — so, back off!
If you think this means (and we might be tempted to think this means) that Jesus is arguing that he is only a godlike angelic being, like those gods, that would be a big mistake. He doesn’t equate himself with those gods in Psalm 82. In fact, he uses very exalted language and says, “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’?” (John 10:36). So, he doesn’t defuse the situation by reducing his claim to deity. He defuses the situation by complicating the term “son of God” for his accusers so that they have to get rocked back on their hermeneutical heels in order to think for a minute about how to handle what he had just said from Psalm 82. And when that happens, he’s gone. John 10:39 says he makes his escape.
So, there are interesting and important things to be learned here in Jesus’s use of Psalm 82, but that we are gods is not one of them.
