I Said, “You are gods…”

We had just come off a steamy trek in the mission field and as we rested in the temporary structure that housed the church which had hosted us, one of us muttered those words. 

“I can do greater things than Jesus. That is what the bible says.” 

Eyebrows were raised, to say the least. Everyone jumped in to silence the young man.

“How dare you?” one of us asked.

For a moment I thought the young man was just being funny. It turned out that he was serious. He had read it from the scriptures.

Indeed, Jesus assures the disciples that they would do greater things than him. “I tell you the solemn truth, the person who believes in me will perform the miraculous deeds that I am doing and will perform greater deeds than these because I am going to the Father” (John 14:12).

If the young man had paid a little more attention to the context of this passage, he would have come to a different conclusion. Jesus here talks about a specific work—not all the works he did during his earthly sojourn. 

Jesus is speaking about the work of Gospel expansion. It is evident in the scriptures that the Apostles’ ministry was greater both in number and territory. While Jesus’ ministry was confined to Jerusalem and the surrounding territories, the work of the disciples after Pentecost ensured that the Gospel reached every corner of the earth. That was in itself miraculous. 

In that sense, their works are greater than Jesus’.

The young man’s problem was exacerbated by Psalm 82 which seems to suggest that we are gods. If we are gods, then we can do greater things than Jesus.

You are gods.

Psalm 82 addresses its subjects as gods. “I have said, you are gods…” (Ps 82:6). One young lady who was convinced that she is a god quoted John 3:6 to defend her position: “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.”

She explained that just as flesh produces flesh, so does God produce god(s). When you use unrelated bible passages to confirm your biases, you can only go far.

So, what is going on in this Psalm?

For starters, this wisdom Psalm is attributed to Asaph. Matthew Henry notes that “it was probably penned primarily for the use of the magistrates of Israel, the great Sanhedrim, and their other elders who were in places of power, and perhaps by David’s direction.” 

The Hebrew word translated as “gods” is אֱלֹהִים (Elohim).  In the Old Testament, Elohim usually describes God in the singular but is also used in the plural to refer to gods or deities (see Gen 35:2,4; Exodus 12:12; Deut 29:18; 32:17). The term is also applied to kings. as Gesenius notes about Ps 82:6.

The writer of this Psalm condemns these earthly rulers for perverting justice. They had sided with the wicked (vs. 2) instead of being just to the weak and fatherless (vs. 3), and rescuing the weak and needy from the hand of the wicked (vs. 4). He then called on God—the Ultimate Judge—to judge, not only these elohims (gods) but also the entire nations of the earth (vs. 8).

Stoning Jesus to the Glory of God

What makes Psalm 82:6 so controversial is that Jesus uses it on the Jews who were ready, stone-in-hand, to kill him. But it also must be noted that we rarely ‘get’ the Jesus of the Gospels.

During the Feast of Dedication on a snowy day, Jesus walks to the Temple and there, the Israelites follow him begging to be assured if he is the Christ. Jesus assures them that it is he and God is his Father. The Jews then pick up stones to kill him for calling himself a Son of God. The dialogue that follows is an interesting one: 

The Jewish leaders replied, “We are not going to stone you for a good deed but for blasphemy, because you, a man, are claiming to be God.”

Jesus answered, “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If those people to whom the word of God came were called ‘gods’ (and the scripture cannot be broken), do you say about the one whom the Father set apart and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’? If I do not perform the deeds of my Father, do not believe me. But if I do them, even if you do not believe me, believe the deeds, so that you may come to know and understand that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” Then they attempted again to seize him, but he escaped their clutches. (John 10:33-39)

Jesus’s point was that in the book of the law, God called Israel’s magistrates ‘sons’ (Psalm 82:6) and therefore it was not blasphemous for him to refer to himself as a Son of God.

We can learn a lot from the wisdom coming from this Psalm, but it’s important to have this at the back of our minds that the Psalm is primarily written for “the use of the magistrates/rulers of Israel…”

Another important thing to note is that passages always have a context. When you strip a passage of its context, then you are going to decide what that passage means instead of having it speak for itself