Today’s Daily Lesson comes from John chapter 10 verses 33 through 36:
33[They] answered, ‘It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God.’ 34Jesus answered, ‘Is it not written in your law, “I said, you are gods”? 35If those to whom the word of God came were called “gods”—and the scripture cannot be annulled— 36can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world is blaspheming because I said, “I am God’s Son”?
This is an incredible Scripture.
But it may make us uncomfortable. “You are gods.” It does indeed sound blasphemous.
But Paul Tillich said all our language is metaphorical. And something can be metaphorically true while not literally true.
Ask Irie and she will tell you I am not a god!
But the Bible says we are children of God and so gods in some sense.
Imagine what it meant for what the great African American civil rights leader and theologian Howard Thurman called “the disinherited” to hear someone say that they were gods. What a word of empowerment. What a word of protest against the
forces of occupation, oppression, and spiritual diminishment.
Jesus said he was the “son of God”. For those he opposed and who opposed him was a pretext to have him killed.
But, as John said at the outset of the Gospel, “to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” also.
Claim you inheritance, friends. You are children of God, and the word says, “You are gods.”
Be bold to believe and let no one take your dignity away from you.
Ryon Price is Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.
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