Those Who Represent God/Those to Whom the Word of God Came
Psalm 82
Introduction:
Psalm 82 is one of 12 psalms that are attributed to Asaph. The Asaphite collection consists of Psalms 50 and 73-83.
To aid us in interpreting this unusual psalm, we need to know something of its placement in the Psalter and its interpretive history.
Placement in the Psalter
Psalm 82 is located in Book 3 of the Psalter. Book 3 consists of Psalms 73-89. By and large, Book 3 was written by Asaph and the Sons of Korah. Both the Sons of Korah and Asaph were descendants of Levi and served as the musicians and choirmaster respectively (1 Chron. 6:22, 39; 15:17; 2 Chron. 5:12) (EBC, 5, p. 34). If Book 1 shows the establishment of the Davidic king and Book 2 shows the transfer of the kingdom to Solomon (Book 2 end with a Psalm of Solomon, Psa. 72), Book 3 reveals the absence of a Davidic king. (Transformed by Praise, Futato, pp. 118-121.
At the end of Book 2 all is well. Suddenly, in Book 3 despair descends. Book 3 closes with the darkest of all psalms, Psalm 89. In his collection of songs, Asaph complains of enemies without (Psa. 74,79,80, 81, 83) and enemy within. In Psalms 50, 73, and 82, Asaph complains of the wickedness among the people of God.
In Psalm 82, a time when everything is upside down, nothing makes sense anymore, and the beliefs and actions of people are upside down, Asaph asserts that God, the judge of all the earth, and will right every wrong. He will sit in judgment of the thoughts, imaginations, beliefs, affections, and actions of every human. His judgment will start with His people, and among them, the leadership will be judged most severely. Unlike Psalm 30, where the covenant Name of God was used at least 9 times in 12 verses, Psalm 82 lacks even 1 mention of God’s saving Name.
How will God be known to you? Will you hear Him whisper His intimate saving Name to you through the gospel? Or will He only be known to you as Creator/Ruler of the universe. In the darkest hours, do you have a deep confidence that God is to you, Yahweh, the God of loving-kindness? Or do you have a dread cold fear that God is out to get you, that hope is useless, and misery is your end? Cry out to God for mercy? There is good news. Jesus said, All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out (Jn. 6:37).
Interpretative History
Psalm 82: 1 and 6 refer to “gods” with a lowercase “g.” You can imagine the interpretive genie that this has let out of the bottle. The big interpretive question is, Who are the gods? Basically, 3 views are put forward.
The gods are pagan deities. They are the gods of the nations that surrounded the Israelites. They must give an account to the God of Israel for all their evil activities ( EBC, 5, p. 534).
To be sure, the Israelites were prone to idolatry. However, in the time of Asaph, monotheism was clearly preached in the land. From Genesis 1:1, Scripture clearly attacks any polytheistic belief. Moreover, idolatry was reason that God sent the Israelites into captivity. Why then would a psalm teach what was abhorred by the biblical writers?
The gods are angelic beings. Some hold that the gods are the principalities and powers, a hierarchical order of powers that exert their evil influence among the world of men. Often cited is Daniel’s experience of prayer where God dispatched Gabriel who had to battle these powers to bring God’s answer to Daniel.
While evil is energized by the devil, so much so that Paul would say we battle with not with humans but with the powers, this is clearly not the teaching of this psalm. There is no OT reference calling angelic being elohim (Keil and Delitzsch, 5, p. 401). Verse 7 is conclusive that these gods die like men. Angelic types don’t do that. They will die the second death first in the lake of fire (Ligon Duncan, Psa 82, fpcjackson.org)
The gods are God’s people the Israelites, especially their leaders.
82:1 reads, Elohim has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the elohim he holds judgment.
82:6 reads, I said, You are elohim, sons of the Most High, all of you.
There is much OT precedent for this view. In his dealing with Pharaoh, God said to Moses, You shall be as elohim to him (Ex. 4:16), and I make you as elohim to Pharaoh (Ex. 7:1). Additionally, the rulers or judges in Israel are called elohim in Ex. 21:6; 22:8,9.
That men are called gods reflects the high view of man in Scripture. That God would call men by His Name shows that man is made in God’s image as His vice regent to rule over the earth. In the order of things, man is to act in some sense as God.
We are not left to speculation as to how to interpret Psalm 82. In John 10, Jesus, himself, identifies who the gods are by quoting 82:6 (Jn. 10:34). The Jews are about to stone Jesus ( 31). The Jews are the leaders among God’s people. Jesus asked them for which good work they would stone him (32).? They said not for good works but for making yourself God we are going to stone you (33). Jesus then quoted Psa. 82:6 (34). He interprets the reference to gods as meaning those to whom the Word of God came, specifically the law. He then argues from the lesser to the greater. If God called them gods, then how much more should the Holy Sent One be called the Son of God. Jesus clearly indicates that the gods of Psalm 82 are God’s people and more specifically the leaders among God’s people.
Jesus didn’t cite this Psalm to His opponents to prove that He is God or merely to get them to lay down their rocks. If that were the case He would have been saying that He is the Son of God in the same sense that they were the sons of God.
The meaning of the Psalm had application to them, and that is what He is driving home. Jesus is defending His Sonship, but he is doing so by pointing out the great privilege, responsibility, and accountability they have to recognize the uniqueness of His relation with the Father. Jesus does this by pointing out that God called them gods to whom the Word of God came (Jn. 10:35). This takes us to Sinai, to the revelatory event of the giving of the Word of God. The giving of the Law was a time of trembling, fear, thunder, lightning, and thick darkness where God was (Ex. 19:16ff; 20:18-21).
If God called them gods to whom the Word came, what should they say of the One Whom the Father set apart and sent, the in-fleshing of the Word of God, especially when they could plainly see the mighty works they Jesus was doing? What Jesus was doing was not shrouded in the deep darkness of Sinai but in the open. Notice that Jesus again refers to Psalm 82 in Jn. 10:38. He was doing works that they might know and understand. Contrast that with 82:5, They have neither knowledge nor understanding….
God’s People are the Representatives of God in the World
Psalm 82 describes a time when people who should know God, who have represented God, and who have acted in the place of God experience the judgment of God.
Interestingly, in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, a group of young Italian soldiers are positioned by a makeshift bridge crossing a river. The Italians are retreating. Every officer that crossed the bridge was taken by these young soldiers questioned and immediately executed for retreating. Hemingway described the young Italians like this:
The questioners had the beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it.
Jesus’ questioners were ready to stone Him as if they, themselves, were not going to be judged by God. They had gotten to the point that everything they did was right simply because they did it. In their minds, God agreed with everything they did. So they in essence invoked the Name of God to justify their doings. They were masters at playing the God card.
God’s People do not Replace God in the World
Humans often forget that they represent rather than replace God with the position and authority they have.
All humans cultures have their own unique understanding of reality. We call this understanding of reality a worldview. Our worldview is shaped around our core beliefs and becomes the basis for our evaluation of all things. The problem with this is that all cultures, core beliefs, and worldviews are tainted by sin.
In Jn. 10 those to whom the Word of God came had encrusted the Word of God with an elaborate system of tradition. Rather than evaluating life, people, beliefs, and behavior by the Word of God, they evaluated these by their tradition. Rather than evaluating tradition by the Word of God, they evaluated the Word of God by their tradition.
The astounding result is so well illustrated in John 10. When their worldview was informed by something other than the Word of God, they lost the foundation for knowledge and understanding. When at last, the Word of God stood before the Jews (in John’s gospel Jesus is the in-fleshing of the Word), they evaluated Him by their own tradition. Paul, at one point, evaluated Christ in such a way (1Cor. 5:16). When he was converted, he saw Christ differently. It is a short to leap from evaluating the Word of God by contemporary culture (in whatever time period) to evaluating God by our core beliefs. This is the subtlety, danger, and essence of idolatry.
Conversion is a deep work of God. Through the gospel, God shatters our core beliefs so that our worldview is informed by the gospel rather than by the culture around us. The gospel stands outside of culture and judges culture. In God’s people, the gospel becomes the core belief that informs their worldview by which they evaluate all things. Now, the gospel colors how I see life, behavior, morality, marriage, education, government, etc.
Because the gospel is alien to every human culture, designations such as to be Russian is to be orthodox or to be Croat is to be Catholic betray syncretism, an encrusting of gospel with culture. Because the gospel is alien to every culture, no one can claim that the broad preaching of the gospel is western imperialism. The gospel is from heaven and demands that every culture, no matter where, repent and believe the good news.
Psalm 82 is a psalm about judgment. It is about God’s judgment on those to whom His word came and who misused their privilege and forfeited eternal gain for temporal peanuts. The message of this psalm is vital to us.
We walk briefly through the psalm and then make some applications.
V1 God convenes His court
In verse 1, God takes His rightful place as the Judge of the judges. If He judges the judge, He also judges everybody else. No one escapes ultimate accountability to God. As recipients of the Word of God, the gods, elohim, acted as God in a certain sense in the world. All authority is derived from God. Therefore, to be an unjust judge is to implicate God in evil. God will defend His Name.
Every judge needs to feel his accountability to God. Those who would lead in the home, church, government, business, institutions, and law must realize that all authority comes from God and implies accountability to God.
V2-4 God indicts unjust judges
God charges, How long will you go on with your unjust judgment. Instead of giving justice to the weak and fatherless, upholding the rights of the afflicted and destitute, and rescuing and delivering (4 imperatives) the weak and needy from the wicked, the accused defended the wicked and enabled them to oppress the powerless.
The argument in this verse is for the indiscriminate rule of law. It’s not as if the rights of the well to do don’t matter. It’s not that the oppression of the rich is called for. We are called to defend those who cannot defend themselves. Bullies generally pick on people who won’t or can’t fight back.
God calls on the powers that be in their pursuit of power, prosperity, wealth, and success to defend, protect, and aid the powerless. Pursue your ambition, but don’t do it at the expense of others. The end does not justify the means. Be a man of principle. Stand for what is right, especially when it will cost you personally.
V5 The cause and effect of injustice in the world
I take they to be the leadership of the people. They do not have knowledge or understanding. It is not that they don’t know God or that knowledge of God is unavailable to them. These are those to whom the Word of God came.
The problem is that they reject knowledge and understanding.
Notice how pervasive their lack of knowledge and understanding is. No objects are mentioned for these nouns. The text does not say, knowledge about God or understanding of God’s law. It simply says, They have neither knowledge nor understanding. When God is rejected as the centerpiece of our worldview, all of our ultimate conclusions are messed up.
Throwing off knowledge, they doomed themselves and those that they led to amble in moral darkness so that God’s order is turned upside down. When a society leaves God, they plunge into moral relativity, and every point of order and normalcy in society is lost.
How does any society presume to think that it can throw off the knowledge of God and maintain an orderly, upright way of life that protects the powerless and ensures the wholesome pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness? If we leave God, from whom will we obtain our liberty?
Vv6-7 God’s judgment on unjust judges
Power and position tend to be corrupting influences in sinful humans. Seemingly, those who represented God in verse 6 thought they themselves were immune to His judgments. Instead of realizing that they represented God and acted for God, they represented themselves and acted as if they were God.
God here reminds them that they will die. It is appointed for man to die once, and after death comes the judgment (Heb. 9:27). Humans have the ability put this fact completely out of mind. The truth is that everybody dies and gives an account to God.
V8 A prayer for justice—the hope of God’s people
The psalmist calls on God to judge the nations. Here is the realization that God’s judgment is the most necessary thing in the world. While we should work for justice in the world, history has proven that there is no end of unjust judges. Our ultimate hope is not in a judicial system, a legislative system, or a system of government. Our hope is in God. In the day that God arises to judge the earth, He will sift the nations and will right every wrong.
Our involvement in the world as God’s representatives should lead us to cry out for Him to Arise and right the wrongs. Listen to the fuller context of Heb 9:27: And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes the judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him (9:27, 28).
Either Christ bore your sin or you will bear it. He is coming to save His own and right all wrongs.
As those who have received the Word of God in gospel, Psalm 86 calls on us to evaluate all things through the lens of that gospel. Our core belief have been transformed and our worldview informed by the gospel.
The danger is that we become lazy and allow the contemporary culture to inform our thinking. We begin to evaluate life, self, the church, and the world by the standards of the world. The gospel stands outside of culture demands that we evaluate and reevaluate life, self, the church, and the world by the gospel. We must be continually reformed by the gospel because forget the gospel.
The gospel compels us to realize that--
As the church, we are the clearest representation of God in the world today. (v1)
We, in some relationship or another, represent God. For example, those in government, a husband to his wife, parents to their children, teachers to students, and the church to the world represent God. This is God’s order for His world. What makes bad government, bad marriages, bad parents, and bad churches so reprehensible to God is that they do not represent Him truthfully.
This psalm is about missions. Why are we to preach the gospel to the world? We represent. That’s why. We can’t say we represent here as if that removes our responsibility to represent everywhere. The issue is not us. It’s God. His Name is at stake.
We are the sons of God. Paul echoed v1 and 6 in 2Cor. 5:20: Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
As those who have received the Word, we plead with the world in God’s behalf to kiss the Son of God who took our judgment. We thus plead with the world because a day is coming in which God will judge the world by Christ Jesus, the One Who died, who became sin that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
If this is not our business in the world, if the weight of this truth is not felt and if it doesn’t guide our doings, we prove that we are just like the generation at Sinai and in Jesus’ day that received the Word of God in vain. If that is the case, we need somebody to preach the gospel to us.
As the church, we must preach the gospel indiscriminately to all peoples. (v2-4)
Obviously, these verses does not mean that we are to take the gospel to the fringe of society and ignore everybody else. Generally, speaking the mainstream gets most of the gospel attention while the fringe is ignored.
From verses 2-4, we are called on to preach the gospel to all peoples. We must give to the world the same Word that God has given to us. Jesus used to psalm to call people to believe in Him.
As the church, we must preach to the poor, the orphan, the sick, the needy, the afflicted, the addict, the homosexual, the disobedient, the criminal, the red, the black, the white, the rich, the poor, the in between. We must leave no hut in some obscure village untouched by the gospel.
When we withhold the Word of God from people because of their color, socio-economic status, position in the world, or location on the globe, we are not acting justly. God has commanded us to preach to all. To omit, neglect, ignore, overlook is as much sin as just plain old not doing it at all.
God has called us to study our culture, our neighborhoods, and every means available and give ourselves to the widest possible gospel proclamation.
With nearly 2 billion people having never been confronted with the gospel, we must seriously look at ourselves. The truth is that in my generation, the Christian world has had enough money to adequately preach the gospel globally. The problem is that God’s people spend more on “Happy Meals” than they give to the global proclamation of the gospel.
I hear some wrestle endlessly about missions. You talk and pray and talk as if you have some all important decision in this matter. It seems to me that for all of our God-centeredness, self-importance keeps raising its head. We are not so important that the cause of God depends on us. The Kingdom of God does not depend on your going to the mission field.
The truth is that God has commanded us to take the gospel to the nations. You can stop praying about whether you should give yourselves to that task. The only question that remains is, Are you going to give yourselves to that task here or somewhere else? If you have the thought that you want to go cross-cultural with the gospel, start going that way today.
If we are not given to the indiscriminate preaching of the Gospel to all peoples, we may need somebody to preach the gospel to us.
As the church, we must apply the gospel to the sins of our society and the cultures of the world. (v5)
We must be clear in our denunciation of the sins that characterize societies and cultures. The gospel is the interpretive principle by which we identify sin in its culture expressions and, thus, offer hope to sinners. Here, at this point, is where the gospel being trans-cultural has the potential to transform all cultures.
We live in a world that has no shortage of sin to point out. The knowledge of God and the understanding it brings have been cast off by world cultures. As a result, the peoples of the world stumble about in moral relativity. The truth has become relative so that there are no absolutes. God’s order for His world has been overthrown.
How this plays out in world cultures has many illustrations—abortion, gay marriage, religions pluralism, genocide, and consumerism. When knowledge and understanding of God are cast off, a culture is powerless to speak to these sins and the irrational arguments of the proponents of debauchery begin to make sense.
A few examples will do. Bill Clinton used to say, I am against abortion, but I’m for choice (I didn’t inhale). We celebrate the massacre of life in our culture, but when Slobadan Melosevich and Generals Maladich and Karadich murder 12,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebranitsa, we charge them with crimes against humanity. Oddly enough when radical Islamic terrorists attack the US, conversions to Islam sore in America and government policy forbids the use of the word terrorism.
The list could go on unfortunately. Why is it that the right to choose, gay rights, and pluralism are becoming doctrines in our society? Could it be because the average Southern Baptist spends more on Happy Meals than he gives to missions? Could it be that the voice crying against societal sins is a faint one in the wilderness?
The average American expectation is that a fabulous career, plenty of money, a nice car and house, and 1.5 kids can all be our and we will never have to study, work, or have any responsibility. Give us a movie, some popcorn, a ballgame, a schedule of leisure that would make the pope tired, and we will sell our souls to the devil.
As the evaluative lens through which we see the world, the gospel enables us to identify sin and proclaim liberty to sin’s captives. What makes abortion, gay marriage, divorce, moral relativism and pluralism wrong? These sins don’t represent. They in no way provide an analogy of the gospel. Gay union does not represent Christ and the church. The gospel is life not death. Abortion is the bad news of death. Common law marriages don’t represent the covenant love Christ has for His church.
When we address the sins of world cultures, two dangers are present. First, we are prone to take up social causes as if they are the gospel. So we feed, clothe, heal, shelter, and defend the poor, fatherless, afflicted, and needy in the world. But by leaving off the gospel, we offer no ultimate hope to humanity. Our churches become little more than social activist organizations.
Although, occasionally, we should get arrested in moral protest, we are not an activist church that has rallied around an anti-abortion platform, yet we want to be clear that abortion is sin. We want to be clear to our judges that you cannot uphold abortion law and escape the judgment of God. You cannot be an abortion provider and escape judgment.
Another danger is that we ignore cultural sins and just preach Jesus. People have come to think of the gospel as a fairytale that helps inoculate us to an inevitable unhappy ending to an otherwise happy life. As a result the popular thought is to view the gospel in terms of life insurance and getting your ticket punched.
We have had several generations walk the isle, pray the prayer, and experience no change of life. The distinction between the church and the world is gone. Those who claim to know Jesus participate in every kind of sin. Divorcing couples argue over who gets the church. The church feels powerless to answer the issues.
The gospel is the only message of the church. Rightly preached, it exposes, condemns, and offers freedom from the dominion of sin. John the Baptist was clear in his preaching to Herod, It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife. Repent. The gospel challenges us at the level of our core beliefs. It transforms our worldview. The disordered, upside down sins of our society that throw off the knowledge of God are challenged by the gospel.
The gospel addresses not only sin but also the cure. I want to be clear that Christ Jesus died to justify the ungodly. If you have acted as God in taking the lives of unborn children, hope for you is in Christ. It could be that you have left you mate? Christ in His commitment to you can show you how to love someone else. If you have sexual addictions, you must realize that your desires will never be satisfied until they meet Jesus. In you fruitless quest for pleasure, you are looking for God.
As the church, we must label and cry out against the sins of our age. We must be equally clear that only Christ takes away sin, and He does take it away.
If we ignore or participate in the sins of our society, if we are not clear about the power of the gospel to transform lives, we need somebody to preach the gospel to us.
As living members of the church, we must realize we will die one day and so will everybody else. (vv6-7)
Whatever we are going to do, we need to be about it. Time is passing. Death brings to us and to our mission a sense of urgency. We do not have forever. Don Wilton used to say Jesus telling the disciples that He would make them fishers of men that the word Jesus used denoted a live catch. We must catch men while they are alive. We must catch them while we are alive too.
We are going to leave whatever it is we are to the next generation. Let them learn from us that we followed hard after God and that God expects no less of them. Teach them that they are to suffer for the Name.
As those who have received the Word of God, we must realize that we have accountability to God. We must faithfully serve as stewards of the grace of God. If we don’t live in the light of our accountability, we may need somebody to preach the gospel to us.
As the church, we must pray for God’s justice to prevail globally (v8).
We do not pray for God to judge the nations because we think that we have nothing to answer for in the matter. Yet, when you are in the fight, you come to see that the most necessary thing in the all the world is the judgment of God.
If there is no judgment, there is no salvation. Some people reject the idea of a God who judges. Those are people who live in verse 5. If you would just think about it briefly, you would realize that if there is any hope for anybody, God must right all wrongs.
As the church, we must find ourselves so in the thick of the battle for gospel advance in world that we cry out for God to judge the nations. There are moments in history when we need to pray for the overthrow of evil.
In the world today, there is a satanic stronghold that has blocked the flow of the gospel to 1/3 of the world’s peoples. We must plead with God to overthrow those evils. That is part of our mission. If God does not overthrow evil men, we must plead for Him to judge the nations.
If we are not in the thick of the battle to the point that we are crying out for justice, we may need somebody to preach the gospel to us.
Conclusion:
As we come to the Lord’s Table, we are brought again to the realization that we are to view the world through this event—the redeeming work of Jesus. In closest communion with Christ, we are enabled to take the gospel as a treasure to the world. We are reminded at the Lord’s Table that Jesus is with us in that task to the end.