(Ver 1.3)  This is “Part 1” of a series of lessons that I am doing on “Understanding Hard Sayings” found in the Bible.  The Bible is full of many difficult and hard things that we wrestle to wrap our limited human minds around.  God says some things in the Bible that are extremely hard to accept by a lot of people.   Most of the time, Christians read a difficult saying in the Bible and just ignore it, because they do not know how to explain it.  Heaven forbid that we just read a Bible verse and accept it for what it says!  Hardly ever do you hear a preacher teach on any of these hard things found in the Bible and when they do they usually attempt to excuse them or explain them away as something that they do not say.  I do not know if they are afraid of these verses or just do not want to take the chance of offending anyone so they just steer away from all of the controversy.  I could give you many examples of this in the Bible, but I’m going to go into one that is extremely controversial in most religious circles and one that is hardly ever mentioned in any church.  Human reasoning has attempted to say that man is a nobody and a worm of a being.  Many think that man is a being of very low order and importance in the spiritual chain of command or you might call it symbolically, the spiritual food chain.   I have heard many ministers get up and teach how unworthy we are and how we are nothing and that we can do nothing.  Yet the Bible does not seem to indicate this at all.  I would say from what I read that it actually says the opposite. 

Let me start by asking you a question that I have thought of and maybe you have also.  If man was so unimportant and low in the spiritual food chain, why did God have to come to the earth in person to pay for our sins with His own blood and life?  I mean that is an amazing question to consider.  Couldn’t God come up with some other way or plan to fix the sin problem of the human race?  God of course is the “Most High” in the spiritual food chain.  There was and still is no one higher than God and yet He chose to come to the earth in the flesh.  Were there not anyother sinless beings in heaven?  Couldn’t God have sent someone else?   Let me ask you was there anyone else that could have accomplished what God wanted and needed to accomplish with Jesus Christ?  I do not think there was anyone else, but I can’t tell you all of the reasons why in this lesson.

Here is today’s key controversial Bible verse and it is Jesus speaking to the religious leaders in Jerusalem.  Let me tell you what is happening within the context of this verse so that you will understand it a little better.  In this chapter of John, the Jews are speaking with Jesus and they are very upset and angry with Him.  They ask Jesus to tell them plainly if He is the Messiah or not.  Jesus tells them they do not believe the works that He does in his Father’s name so they would not believe if He told them anything else.  They claim that Jesus has just blasphemed against God because He has called Himself the Son of God and they begin to pick up stones to kill Him and this is what Jesus says to them in this chapter 10 of John:

Joh 10:34  Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are Gods?

What do you do with a statement like that?  It is truly a difficult saying to accept.  You can clearly see why it has been so vastly ignored, like it is not in the Bible.  I think most people just think Jesus didn’t know what He was talking about or Jesus must have lied.  Surely He didn’t mean exactly what He said?  How can men be gods?  To hear people preach you would think that we were the lowest of the low.  It would be impossible for most religious people to think of themselves in these terms.  Do you think Jesus would say that again if He was standing in front of you in the flesh and you asked Him to?  I have to admit that I struggled with accepting that statement.  After all Jesus did not say it to me personally, or did He?  You see once I realized that the Bible was written to me personally as a love letter and a guide or handbook for every human, then I looked at this Bible verse a lot differently.   This is probably the greatest challenge most Christians are faced with.  To read a Bible verse and claim it to be true for Me and You!  As long as you read the Bible in an impersonal and indirect way like it was written for someone else and not you, you will never accept what it really says.

Let me briefly focus on the Greek word translated as “gods” in this verse.  Because it is a very important word to understand.  This Greek word G2316 is “theos” and it means “supreme deity”.  It is used in the N.T. over 1000 times and mostly for the name for our “God”.  Why would God use the exact same word to describe us as He uses to describe Himself?  I find that a fascinating question to ponder.  I believe it reveals more than we can possibly imagine.  It is beginning to change my perspective considerably on where man was created on the spiritual food chain, but we will need to research and study in order to find the truth. 

Did you know that Jesus only taught things that He learned in the Old Testament Bible?  Jesus would walk around and teach things that He found from reading the Hebrew books of the Law.  These books were given to them by God and they contained the laws of God.  So once you realize that Jesus only spoke things that He learned in the Old Testament you begin to realize the significance of the Word of God.  Jesus placed a very high priority on what was written in God’s Word.  In this verse in John, Jesus was speaking to the Jewish leaders who knew the law.  Jesus asked them a very simple question and one that could easily be verified.  Jesus asked them “Is it not written in your law?”  You see in this chapter the Jews were accusing Jesus of calling himself the Son of God and they called it blasphemy.  But, Jesus responded to their accusation with a simple verifiable question.  Doesn’t your Law say that you are gods?  In other words God had called them gods a long time before Jesus said He was the Son of God and they ignored it like religious people still do today.   Do you see the parallels found in our churches today?  Do you see the religious patterns still prevalent in the minds of religious people today?   Here is one of the verses that Jesus heard read from their law and Jesus learned this verse in their temple so they could not deny that it was written there:

Psa 82:6  I have said, ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.

In this verse in Psalms Jesus was taught that the Most High God called men gods.  If Jesus could read and see this verse in the Bible, how is it that the religious leaders of the day did not understand what they had read in their own law?  Did God blaspheme when He called men gods?  This verse further goes on to call all men and women the children of the Most High.  That means they were all called the sons and daughters of God before Jesus said He was the Son of God!  If Adam was created a son of the most High God what does that make Adam?  You see now we are getting into the problem that religious people have with all of these types of verses in the Bible.  If Adam was a son of God that would make Adam an older brother of Jesus in the natural realm.  That causes many people to choke when they hear me say that.  You see I did not say Adam was God or “the Son of God”.  Adam was just a child of the Most High like this verse tells us clearly.  I certainly know how difficult the Bible is to understand and how complex it can get.  I have had people say to me that I am giving you my opinion on what the Bible says.  When someone says that to me, I know they do not know how to read or either they read it, but don’t want to see what it says.  I rarely give you my opinion about anything.  My opinion is not worth a dime to anyone, including to me.  I could care less about my opinion.  I am really only interested in what God’s opinion is and if you are not doing the same, you need to go to some other book and study it.  If you are not interested in learning what the Bible says, you should be reading someone else’s blog. 

I also want to speak of the Hebrew word translated as “gods” in this verse in Psalms.  This word is again a very importan word found in the Bible.  The Hebrew word H430 is the word “elohiym” and it is used over 2000 times in the O.T. for the name of God.  Again we have the same confirmation that God is calling us gods by direct name association.  That places such vast importance upon this subject that I cannot even describe it fully or begin to fully comprehend it all.  Let’s briefly consider some more scripture from the book of Psalms:

Psa 8:4  What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

Here is an interesting question that many people are asking today.  Who am I and why am I here?  This verse asks why is man on this planet?  And why did God have to come in person to visit us in the flesh, by the man called Jesus Christ.  So here is God’s answer to the question of why we are here:

Psa 8:5  For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

Wow, more words religious people choke on.  You see in this verse it has a grossly mistranslated Hebrew word.  The translators were clearly choking on what it said in their minds and changed it to something else they thought was safer.  The Hebrew word translated as “angels” is the same word “‘ĕlôhı̂ym” that is normally translated as a name of God.  This verse in the original Hebrew is calling Adam a little bit lower than the Most High God.  A little bit means a very small peck down the ladder and not a vast expanse of difference.  Man was made a little lower than God and he fell down below the angels when Adam sinned.  This verse says that “Man” was crowned.  To be crowned means to be given “royal authority” and “sovereign authorization” or “power”.  The term to be crowned with glory and honor is very significant and implies many good things were given to man by God.

Psa 8:6  Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet:

These verses are an outstanding conformation for what God said to man in Genesis 1.  Man was given “dominion” over the works of God’s hands.  What were the works of God’s hands?  It was everything that we can see or touch that is around us.  To have “dominion” means to rule over, have authority over, to be in control of and to make decisions for.  It implies that man was to take care of what God had given to us.  It means that we were responsible to guard it and to keep those out that were not suppose to be here.   It means a lot of things.  It is like the United States government has “dominion” over the 50 state country.  It is responsible to take care of it, protect it and defend it.

Psa 136:2  O give thanks unto the God of gods: for his mercy endureth for ever.

Here we have another verse that is often ignored.  Who is the God of gods?  We can easily recognize this to be our Most High God!   However then who are the gods that He is God of?  That  becomes a mystery to many people.  To make us those individuals would never cross the minds of the religious thinkers.  However, I believe God is saying that we are those people called gods.  Again God calls us gods in a remote verse of the Bible that is widely overlooked.

So YOU and I are NOT the Most High God, but yet we were made in His image and likeness and we have His nature.  We do not have His Power or His ability, but yet for our lives we do have control of our own destiny.  You see we do have some power, we have the power to choose right or wrong, we have the power to choose life or death, we have the power to choose between heaven or hell and that is a lot of responsibility that many are taking too lightly.

So if God and Jesus called men and women gods, who am I to argue?  Who are you to say you are not?  I think some day people will stand before God and find out they had more responsibility than they realized to what happened to them.  I believe that God expects more out of us than you can imagine right now.  I don’t know if this will happen before Jesus returns or not for I do know the time we have left on this earth is very short.

It bothers me when people blog and at the end of their blog they ask people a question like what do you think?  When bloggers do this, they imply that what others think matters.  I think that many times people are just trying to encourage comments and I guess that is OK.   However, just as I am not interested in my own opinion, I am not interested in your opinion either.  If you know a Bible verse that would directly contradict anything that I just said, I would be very interested in hearing about it.  I am NOT God and I DO NOT know everything.  So I like to learn new things if they are legit things from the Bible.  If you just struggle with accepting the Words of Jesus, I suggest that you take up your questions and comments with Him and not me, because I was not the one that said it.  God Bless!

If you would like to continue reading in this series about Hard Sayings Explained in the Bible, please continue with “Part 2“.