For which of them are you going to stone me?

The Jews picked up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, “I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you going to stone me?” The Jews answered him, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God.” Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken— do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?

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Do you ever wonder why Jesus referenced this verse from Psalm 82? Do you think that he was really calling his listeners gods or defending himself to them? Interesting how some take this passage and run with it saying that Jesus was speaking about the divine in all of us. My thinking is that the Lord was turning this verse from Psalms inside out. By using it in a literal way he was pointing to the Jews' proclivity to miss the point of the scripture.

I think that many, in their quest to understand the bible, fall into this same trap. For many years I looked at the bible as a book to be logically, and mostly literally, understood. For sure much of the bible is historical and literal. Yet there is much, especially in Jesus' teaching, that we miss when we interpret it literally. When he quotes from Psalm 82 he points to how the Jews miss the heart of the message by focusing on the legal details.

Help me Lord to read the scripture with my heart and not my head.