Today, we field a really good Bible question from an international listener to the podcast. "Dear Pastor John, hello 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.' Says this in Psalm 82, verse 6, and then Jesus quotes it again in John 10, verse 34.

Can you explain to me what this means?" Here's the situation. In John 10, Jesus has just said in verse 30, "I and the Father are one." 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 verse 31, it says, "The Jews picked up stones to stone him." Now that's a crisis because the hour for Jesus' 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. And so he has to somehow defuse this critical moment where he's 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.

So Jesus is going to deflect this threat in a couple ways. First, he says, "For which of my good works are you stoning me?" And they answer, "It's not for your good works that we're stoning you, but for blasphemy, because you being a man make yourself God." 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. 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 the 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'?" So what's he doing? Let's go back and read Psalm 82.

It starts like this, "God has taken his place in the divine assembly. In the midst of the gods he holds judgment." 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. 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 verse 2 of the Psalm says, "How long will you judge unjustly?" 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 verse 6, which is one Jesus quotes, and he says, "I said, 'You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you, nevertheless, like men.'" Now, 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." 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 come crashing down who abuse their authority. 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 the first chapter of Job, it says, "The sons of God came to present themselves to God, among whom was Satan." That's the sense in which "gods" is being used here, and "sons of God." So 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'?" So he doesn't diffuse the situation by reducing his claim to deity.

He diffuses 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.

Verse 39 says he makes his escape. So there are interesting and important things to be learned here in Jesus' use of Psalm 82, but that we are gods is not one of them. Yeah. Thank you for that clarity, Pastor John, and thank you for listening. And a special thank you to our international listeners around the globe who tune in.

We are humbled that you listen and send us questions of your own. Thank you. And if you want new episodes to this podcast delivered to you, subscribe to Ask Pastor John in your favorite podcast app, in Spotify, or by subscribing to DG's YouTube channel to find other episodes in our archive or to submit a question to us from anywhere in the world.

Do that online at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Well how do we battle imposter syndrome? Yes, imposter syndrome, the feeling that all my success is a fraud, that we're fakers, especially at work. This is no small question in the lives of many, and Pastor John is going to address it on the other side of the weekend, imposter syndrome, coming up on Monday.

I'm Tony Rehnke, and we'll see you then. 1 Page PAGE of NUMPAGES www.verbalink.com Page PAGE of NUMPAGES www.verbalink.com Page PAGE of NUMPAGES www.verbalink.com