(Audio)
You, a man, are making yourself God.
Some modern people are unclear on the point, but the Judeans very much understood the claim Jesus made. And Jesus didn't back down on the point or try to clear up confusion as though he didn't intend to be taken in that sense.
Jesus answered them,
“Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, ‘You are gods”‘?
If Scripture could in any meaningful sense refer to a group of authorities as gods perhaps the idea that a man could even more perfectly an intimately bear the identity of God and Son of God was not so far fetched as strict Jewish monotheism might have made it seem.
If it calls them gods to whom the word of God came,
and Scripture cannot be set aside,
can you say that the one
whom the Father has consecrated and sent into the world
blasphemes because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?
Those to whom the word of God came could be called gods only loosely and by analogy. But the word of God himself was truly the Son of God. It is precisely in the coming of the word to us that we ourselves become partakers of the divine nature. In some way, greater than that of those about whom Scripture spoke, but still not in the utterly unique way in which it is true for Christ, we become divinized. Humanity was always meant to have a potential to receive divine life.
I said, “You are gods,
sons of the Most High, all of you;
nevertheless, like men you shall die,
and fall like any prince.
The divine image in which man was created was obscured by the fall, and our capacity to receive the divine life was compromised. We were meant to share life together with God forever but instead were forced to share the fate of, not just any prince, but any man or woman since the fall in the garden of Eden.
Although the fall put a barrier between humanity and what was meant to be our destiny, nevertheless the Scriptures that revealed a future hope could not be set aside. Even the vaguest hints that we might yet attain to something more and greater than the valley of the shadow of death were worth treasuring. Small and seemingly trivial verses still in fact pointed toward the coming of Christ, and, in him, the restoration of the purpose and destiny of mankind in God.
If I do not perform my Father’s works, do not believe me;
but if I perform them, even if you do not believe me,
believe the works, so that you may realize and understand
that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.
Even if we have difficulty with the words of Jesus, his works bear out the truth of his words. In particularly, the resurrection is the unanswerable sign that all that he said and taught was true. If we know a tree by its fruit there is no more worthy tree than the cross, no better fruit than the Holy Spirit which he poured out for us. If he was only going to give us one sign, the sign of Jonah, it was nevertheless enough of a sign to change the entire world forever. Death was not the end for Jesus. Nor need it be the end for anyone. True life is ultimately not something we can have apart from God who is the source of life. But in the resurrection we are brought back online and plugged back in to that source.
Because Jesus came to give us life, and defeated death itself, we can have a confidence that is greater than that of Jeremiah:
But the LORD is with me, like a mighty champion:
my persecutors will stumble, they will not triumph.
We can have a faith even stronger than that of the psalmist:
Praised be the LORD, I exclaim,
and I am safe from my enemies.
No comments:
Post a Comment