![[The Good Seed]](../images/thegoodseed.gif)
The True Witness
By Lloyd Ellefson
Greetings in the name of the Lord! "Now the Lord is the Spirit." (2 Cor. 3:17) Nothing can be a substitute for the Lord! The Bible, the law, traditions and preaching cannot replace the Lord! They are not our Lord now. The Holy Spirit has been poured into our hearts, and He is the Spirit of the Son. He is the anointing we have received!
The word Christ means anointing, and if we have received the anointing, it will teach us all things! We do not need the teaching and doctrines of carnal man. We are only to listen to the VOICE OF ONE MAN, and that voice is the VOICE OF THE SON! The authority of that voice goes beyond the letter of the scriptures, beyond any human voice, beyond man's writings and beyond what anyone says. Anything that comes from a different source, and any voice that is not the Son of Man's, will not bring life.
We are not judging between good and evil for they come from the same tree, and both are in the death realm. So no judgment between them is needed. Jesus is the judge between the LIVING and the DEAD. Since we have His Spirit, we are His judgment in the world. Not that we come to judge people, but there is a difference between the children of God and the children of this world. We simply are the judgment because of who we are and what we say.
The kingdom of God is the rule of God; it is the king's domain; it is righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit! The kingdom of God has been a mystery to us. It is also called the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of Christ. These are basically the same because there is only one God and only one true rule. God is light and He knows everything; He has all wisdom and knowledge, and all the treasures of life are in Him! So that which is a mystery to us is not a mystery to God. Since the human heart cannot understand spiritual realities, the kingdom of God remains unknown or mysterious to it. The natural mind keeps us from understanding His rule. Therefore we have to receive the mind of Christ, so we can receive understanding and revelation knowledge. Since the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit, God's revelation knowledge does not help him.
Peter's revelation in Matt. 16 is a prime example of this. He received the revelation that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God, yet it did not profit him. Not long after he had received this revelation, he was accused of having been with Jesus, and he vehemently affirmed, and even swore that he did not know the man! We also know that the words of Jesus, spoken in the Spirit, were so misunderstood that the Jews crucified Him! The disciples fled, and Jesus went to the cross alone! It wasn't until the coming of the Spirit that the teachings of Jesus became meaningful to the disciples. Nor are they always understood by us. Not everything is explained to us in regard to God's dealings with humanity. We know that He can do whatever He pleases by His creative word, and we must accept His way of working by the counsel of His own will.
"Now in those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, `Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.'" (Matt. 3:1-2) Both John the Baptist and Jesus always preceded their message of the kingdom with "repent". This indicates that before anyone can enter the kingdom he has to repent. Repent of what? People have been trying to repent of their sins but have been unable to get rid of them. We need to repent not only of our sins, but of the government we have in our lives through the flesh. The natural man is under the wrong rule. Jesus was talking about repenting of the darkness and sin that rule our lives.
In the Old Testament Elijah loudly proclaimed the need for repentance, and in the New Testament it was John the Baptist. That is why Jesus said that John the Baptist came in the spirit of Elijah to call people to repent. The law had prepared them for repentance, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin. The law was a form of truth and it made sin recognizable, thus making it more sinful. It was really a ministration of death to teach people that they needed Christ. This caused the fields to be ready for harvesting!
Jesus basically preached the same message of repentance that John the Baptist had. "From that time Jesus began to preach and say, `Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.'" (Matt. 4:17) Peter also preached repentance in the first message to the church in Acts 2. The people were touched in their hearts as he spoke, and responded by asking him, "What shall we do?" Peter replied, "Repent, and let each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness (remission) of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." (v.38) Notice the sequence: repentance, forgiveness of sins, then the gift of the Holy Spirit.
"For the promise is for you and your children, and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God shall call to Himself." (v.39) This shows us that we can have some spiritual activity in our life before we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. We can repent and have forgiveness of sins, and be baptized in the name of Jesus without having received the baptism in the Holy Spirit. But until the Holy Spirit comes, we will only live in the natural, because He is our enlightenment.
"And Jesus was going about in all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people." (Matt. 4:23) Jesus proclaimed the good news of the kingdom - for gospel means good news. He did not say it was the good news of forgiveness of sins, the good news of the cross, or the good news of heaven. He said, "It's the good news of the kingdom." So the good news is that God is willing to rule us! However, we have to repent or turn from the things that formerly ruled our lives.
This may be different from what we were previously taught. We may have been taught that we need to repent of our sins. This takes us back to the law, struggling to see what sin is. The law gives us a guilt-complex, so we repent and receive forgiveness. But then we fail again, feel guilty, repent, receive forgiveness, and feel good until our conscience bothers us again. A bad conscience brings estrangement from God! Finally we become discouraged, and figure that our release from this "sin-and-forgiveness syndrome" can only come when He comes back some day to put everything in order. We erroneously think that He will deal with sin and with the evil doers at that time. Friends, the good news of the kingdom is that His rule is for NOW! The Apostolic church never preached going to heaven! People have substituted going to heaven for Christ. Christ IS our life, He IS our righteousness, He IS our wisdom, He IS our redemption! Actually, we have to be in Christ to be redeemed, because Christ is the Redeemer!
"And Jesus was going about all the cities and the villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom..." (Matt. 9:35) Israel had quite a history of failures! They had more bad kings than good ones. They kept reverting to idolatry, repenting, and then getting into deeper sins. Finally they were taken captive into Babylon. When Jesus came, Israel was in a mess. They were in bondage to the Romans; they were actually slaves of the Roman government. As God's people, they were to be under His rule, and that would have kept them from having these problems. The inherent victory of God's rule was not displayed in Israel. The good news of the kingdom meant that the time had come for God to rule them!
Jesus came to a people who were living under the law. Their consciousness of sin was greater than anyone else's, because their written law had given them a consciousness of sin. "Through the law is the knowledge of sin, and through the law sin abounds."
"And proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness. And seeing the multitudes, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and downcast like sheep without a shepherd. Then He said to His disciples, `The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.'" (Matt. 9:35b-37) Harvest time comes when the grain is mature. Jesus was speaking of harvesting the law. The fruit of the law is repentance. The law is to show that man's righteousness cannot attain to God's standard of righteousness, thus causing people to repent from the law. By preaching repentance, John the Baptist was preparing the way for the Lord. Since Jesus is the way, repentance must take place before we can have access to the way!
Jesus said, "But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness; and all these things (these necessary things people are praying for) shall be added to you." (Matt. 6:33) He also said that we should not worry about what to wear, etc. The lilies of the field don't struggle and worry, yet our heavenly Father clothes them beautifuly! If we seek God's rule first, these things will be added to our lives.
But human nature wants to see the proof of something before it will accept it. Thomas exemplified this when he said he wouldn't believe Jesus had been resurrected unless he saw in His hands the imprint of the nails, etc. Jesus obliged him and let him see what he wanted to see. But then He said, "Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed." (Jn. 20:29) If that is the only way you are going to see this, fine. But when the Holy Spirit comes it is an entirely different ball game, because now we live by the faith of the Son of God!
The following scripture is a double witness, another testimony of the need to live by the faith of the Son of God. "But He answered and said, `It is written, "Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.'" (Matt. 4:4) Man lives by God's Word. Man does not live because he has a life of his own. He can't live by the commandments nor by anything that comes out of himself. You understand that the Word of God is the seed of God that produces the Son of God - which is the consciousness that comes to us when the Spirit witnesses to our spirit that we are the children of God. We really have to live by God's Word!
We live and move and have our being in God, as Paul said in Acts 17:28. This does not mean that we automatically have a consciousness of God. We have a self-consciousness. We have a consciousness of ME, and everything centers around that ME. We think that ME is being saved, cleansed, and going to heaven some day. But that is not the way it is, because that ME is the old or Adamic man who has been crucified with Christ. We need to be resurrected into a new man or a new image of God, so that we can participate in the redemptive process of God. Food and drink are for the physical body, but life is from God and it is sustained only by the Word of God!
As long as you think that the scriptures are the Word of God, you have never really heard the voice of God. The people who lived at the time Jesus was on earth had never heard God because they could not hear spiritually. They didn't hear Christ, because "His words are spirit and they are life". They had never seen God's form, nor had they ever heard His voice. (Jn. 5:37) Those who hear the voice of the Son of God will live. (v.25) Christ is a life-giving Spirit, and we have to hear His word to receive life.
Saul, who later was called Paul, had an amazing experience with Christ when he was on the way to Damascus. He described it in this way: "But since I could not see because of the brightness of that light, I was led by the hand by those who were with me, and came into Damascus. And a certain Ananias, a man who was devout by the standard of the law, and well spoken of by all the Jews who lived there, came to me, and standing near said to me, `Brother Saul, receive your sight!' And at that very time I looked up at him." (Acts 22:11-13) Paul did not volunteer himself and his services to Christ; he did not make a decision to give his life to Him. Actually God doesn't need your life and He doesn't want it. Neither does He want mine. None of us know what life is; all we know is how we are expressing that life. Paul was conscripted! He was called and chosen by God!
"And he said, `The God of our fathers has appointed you to know His will, and to see the Righteous One, and to hear an utterance from His mouth'...to open their (the Gentile's) eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the dominion of Satan to God, in order that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who have been sanctified by faith in Me." (Acts 22:14; 26:18) Paul was appointed by God to know God's will and to open the eyes of the Gentiles! To know His will he would have to hear God. He heard the teaching of the Holy Spirit, and could therefore teach about the Holy Spirit, the coming of the Spirit, the gifts of the Spirit and the way the Spirit edifies the church. We know that the Gentiles and the Jewish people were in darkness because they could not hear God. So everyone who is not in Christ is in darkness! Everyone needs to be illumined; everyone needs to receive spiritual edification! Natural edification is darkness.
In Gal. 2:20 Paul wrote, "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me." The faith we have is the same faith the early Christians had in God. It's the faith that is in Christ. Christ means ANOINTING, so we have the faith that is in the anointing. This faith comes to us by hearing that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. This word - whether it comes in the Son or in the Spirit - brings us the faith that we live in.
"How then shall they call upon Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher?" (Rom. 10:14) How are they going to hear and believe in Jesus Christ? Even if they manage to get a Bible and read it aloud, the message remains letter to them. "And how shall they preach unless they are sent? Just as it is written, `How beautiful are the feet of those who bring glad tidings of good things!'" (v.15) Hearing the word implies hearing God's message to us. "He who has ears, let him hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches!"
The scriptures are a wonderful testimony, but we have to come to Christ to receive life! In John 5:39-40 Jesus said that the Jews supposed there was life in the scriptures, so they refused to come to Him to receive life. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life! God sent His Son, and we know that He is a life-giving Spirit. (2 Cor. 3:17; 1 Cor. 15:45) His words are spirit and are life! In order to live in the faith of the Son of God we have to hear the voice of the Spirit - the voice of God!
Our repentance is not to Christ but to God, because God is the great rule that even ruled Christ. Jesus said, "The Father has sent Me...I cannot do anything of Myself...the works I do are of My Father...No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day." He is saying that no man can come to Him of his own volition. Evangelists may tell people to come to Jesus, but something has to happen in our hearts before we can come to Christ! The Father first has to draw us! "No one can come to Me, unless the FATHER who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, `And they shall all be taught of God.' Every one who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me." (Jn. 6:44-45) That means that people have to be taught by the Father before He gives them to Christ!
How does God teach us? He has given us the law! God speaks into the law, and the law causes man to repent! Repentance from the old Adamic man will cause us to embrace the Christ, for He is our redemption from that man. If we don't want to repent, but want to serve God in our own way by keeping the law, keeping the Sabbath, living morally, etc., God is not going to stop us. But He will not give us to Christ. Those who come to Christ in a different way will remain in their old natural thinking. Those who are given to Christ by God will grow in their faith; they won't turn back and they won't take on a different name. They won't accept all the natural ideas about Jesus still having a natural body, sitting up in heaven and coming back physically some day to deal with sin. They won't think the holy city is made of natural stones, surrounded by walls and having gates for entering. They won't think the temple is going to be rebuilt, and that natural Israel will begin to produce fruit.
Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of all the law and the prophets! It is very important to see that it is all fulfilled IN HIM and that we are IN HIM! Let's consider what it means to be in Him. It's impossible to get into someone physically! We can only get into Christ or an anointing in a spiritual sense. When Jesus explained who He was, He did not talk about His natural parentage. He said, "I am the truth, the way and the life." This life has nothing to do with the physical body! We have to get away from our natural understanding and thinking about spiritual truth. So to be taken into Him we have to be taken into spiritual truth, into His way of understanding and thinking spiritually, and experience His life in God!
"`But there are some of you who do not believe.' For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe, and who it was that would betray Him. And He was saying, `For this reason I have said to you, that no one can come to Me, unless it has been granted him from the Father.'" (John 6:64-65) Jesus knew that every man that came to Him in repentance through the law had been taught by the Father, and was given to Him by the Father! Repentance through the law means that the law has taught us that our own righteousness can never reach God's standard of perfection.
The reason we have so many doctrines, denominations, divisions, so many falling away from God, so many being excited about God yet continuing in their worldly ways, is because they have not come to Christ in the right way. The things of this world choke them; instead of accepting the words of God spiritually, they revert to their former way of only accepting them in their natural minds. Instead of recognizing that Christ is their perfection, they claim to be perfect, saying, "I am one with God, I am the I am." A lot of these ideas are cropping up, and not all of them come from unchurched people. They are coming through people who have left the church and confess things that merely come out of their natural thinking. They are so far out in their thinking that they cannot experience what they confess.
I would like to make a point here. I do not believe that we should brag on who we are in Christ. I do not think it is profitable for us to go around saying we are the sons of God, or that we are one with God, or that we are of the I AM that appeared to Moses at the burning bush. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life...I am the resurrection ...Before Abraham was born, I AM." But He never said that He was God, nor that He was THE I AM. He always recognized the fact that the Father was greater. He said, "The Father sent Me...the Father is greater than I." When He was asked, He did say that He was the Son of God, but it seems that He was very reluctant to confess that He was the Christ as well as things concerning His sonship, until He was asked directly, "Are you the Christ?" He answered by saying, "What you say is true."
I would like to apply John 5:31-32 to the many things I am hearing today. Jesus said, "If I alone bear witness of Myself, My testimony is not true. There is another who bears witness of Me; and I know that the testimony which He bears of Me is true." In other words, He was not sent to bear witness of Himself; He was to bear witness of His Father who is in heaven! His representation of the Father was so perfect that He could say, "He who has seen Me, has seen the Father." (Jn. 14:9b) His purpose in coming was to represent the Father and not Himself. Therefore He said, "If I bear witness of Myself, My witness is not true." He did not come to boast about Himself. He was here to reveal the Father! By admitting that God was His Father, He was also saying that He was His Son. But He did not advertise Himself!
"All things have been handed over to Me by My Father; and no one knows the Son, except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father, except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him." (Matt. 11:27) This is a unique and exclusive relationship between the Father and Son! No one can know the Father nor the Son unless He is revealed to him. This leads us to believe that the Father has to reveal the Son before anyone can know who He is. He has given us the Holy Spirit to disclose the Son to us. (Jn. 16:13-15) Nobody knows the Father except the Son, and nobody knows the Son except the Father. It is the Son who reveals the Father.
The Holy Spirit brings us the knowledge that we are sons of God. "The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God." (Rom. 8:16) This information has to be given us by the Holy Spirit - otherwise this knowledge will not help us. The natural mind cannot understand this, so it cannot convey this knowledge to us. Therefore it is useless to tell people that we are sons of God or that they are sons of God; each individual has to receive this knowledge from the Spirit! The Holy Spirit leads us into all truth. He does not speak on His own initiative, but what He hears He will speak. The Holy Spirit passes on to us the words spoken by the Father and the Son. This is how the Father reveals the Son to us, and the Spirit reveals sonship to the sons - and then the sons reveal the Father.
Jesus said, "In that day you shall know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you." Even though the Father and the Son have made their abode with us, we don't call ourselves the Father or the Son. Since the Father, Son and Holy Spirit only testify of one another, so we should not testify of ourselves, but of God. God has made us partakers of His life, but we are not the SOURCE of that life!
Many Christians think the proper way of testifying is to say, "I'm saved, sanctified, and filled with the Holy Spirit." According to the Bible, this is not the prescribed method of testifying. If you are asked, you confess it because you need to confess it, but you don't go around bragging about it, etc. It is ludicrous for us to say that we are the Father, for we are not the source of our life! Nor are we the I AM! People will never understand that we are sons unless the Father tells them. All our efforts at telling them are useless. Our business is to preach the Father - and then the Father reveals our sonship.
"See how great a love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God; and such we are." (1 Jn. 3:1) Only a father has the right to call a child his son. In Gal. 4:6 it says, "And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, `Abba! Father!'" The Spirit of His Son is sent to us by the Father. As He is sent to us, so He is also sent to others! The message of the good news is that God is ruling in His kingdom! The good news is that God is beginning to rule us!
The Father is the source of everything. The Father chooses the bride for His Son and presents her to Him! That is how we become the bride of Christ, and that is how Christ can reproduce Himself through us! We are called to be witnesses. Jesus Christ is the faithful and true witness! (Rev. 1:5;3:14) He is the One to whom God initially reveals everything, and He is the Mediator from God to man!
Everything Jesus did on earth He did as the Son of Man. Let's look at the following verses. "The Son of Man came down from heaven...the Son of Man was given into the hands of men...the Son of Man will be crucified, and the third day the Son of Man will be raised up...and then the Son of Man will come again." The Son of Man is the NEW MAN! He is not the Adamic man; He is the man who was anointed, and preached the gospel of redemption. He was in the image of God and was raised from the dead. He did everything as the Son of Man! He went to heaven and sent His Spirit into us! The Spirit of the Son operates in us the same way that He did in Christ. He enlightens us and we become witnesses of these things. We are the corporate body of Christ on this earth - the corporate body of the Son of Man.
"For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." (1 Tim. 2:5) The natural man is the soulish man, and he does not have the ability to hear the Spirit. (1 Cor. 2:14) The Greek word PSUCHIKOS pertains to the soul, so it should be translated SOULISH instead of NATURAL. Some translations render it thus - also in 1 Cor. 15:44,46. The soulish man does not receive the things of the Spirit; they are meaningless to him. The Spirit does not mediate between God and the soulish man, because that man does not have the faculty to receive the words of the Spirit.
We cannot be witnesses of spiritual realities unless we are in the new man, and the Spirit has begun to teach us. Then we become a tabernacle of witness, witnessing of God. We no longer witness to our ego for it is dead, and our new life is hidden with Christ in God. It is hidden from people. The physical is a sanctuary for the Spirit, and through the physical we can mediate to the human nature.
The expression, "the Lord and His Christ" is used three times in the New Testament. "Against the Lord, and against His Christ...The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ...the kingdom of our God and the authority of His Christ have come..." (Acts 4:26; Rev. 11:15;12:10) We are anointed of the Lord; we are the Lord's anointed ones. The anointed ones form the body of Christ, and have received the true testimony of who the Father is.
We must remember that Jesus was rejected when He manifested the right testimony of God. Because of the Jew's ignorance and rebellion they had Him crucified! Since they had their own idea of God, the revelation of God in Jesus Christ was not accepted by them. To receive revelation from God it is essential that we have received the baptism in the Holy Spirit of God, because He is now our teacher. Jesus is called the Apostle and High Priest of our confession. (Heb. 3:1) In other words, He is our authority and source of everything we say. It all comes through Him.
In typology, only the high priest could go all the way into the holiest place in the tabernacle. Nobody else - no other priest and no common man - was allowed to enter. They were limited to their own defined areas of work. In order for the high priest to enter, he had to take the blood of the sacrifice with him. The blood represents the soul, and it had to go with him into the holiest. It is through the soul of Jesus Christ - through His spiritual understanding, His union with and knowledge of God the Father in the Spirit - that a ministry has been given to us.
The natural man does not have the ability to conceive the things of the Spirit. They remain meaningless to him, so he can't preach about them. Even though he talks about the Spirit, reads about Spirit, believes God is a Spirit, he doesn't have any concept of what spirit is. Sometimes even those who can hear the Spirit do not fully understand what the Spirit is saying, so it has to be put on the shelf (as the saying goes) until God gives greater understanding.
Heb. 7 contains a dissertation on the new priesthood and the new law. If the old Levitical priesthood had been flawless, there wouldn't have been a need for a new one. But it was only able to change man's behavior to a certain extent; it was unable to change man himself! Offerings and sacrifices had to be repeated year after year. The Levitical priests got their office by being descendants of Aaron, who was of the tribe of Levi, and they all ministered the same thing. So a new priesthood and a new law were needed in order to perfect us.
Our new priesthood necessitates a new law. "For when the priesthood is changed, of necessity there takes place a change of law also." (Heb. 7:12) We now have a ministry that ministers a new law, and this law is the law of the Spirit of life that is in Christ Jesus! It has nothing to do with the law of sin and death and mortality. It is the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. He became the High Priest of this law, not according to the Levitical order but according to the order of Melchizedek! Melchizedek was the priest to whom Abraham paid tithes. The scriptures do not give him any natural genealogy; it is said of him that he has no father and no mother, i.e. no natural genealogy. So Christ spiritually fulfills the order of Melchizedek. It ministers an endless life! Wow!
We are no longer to preach the things that belong to human nature and its attainments - of its good and evil, its corruption and decay, its immorality, etc. We are to preach the immortality of the Spirit of Christ who has come in us; we are to know that God is our Father and that we are His sons. We are to be witnesses of what Christ has done and who God is! I would warn you to be wary of those who advertise themselves and their attainments; also those who brag on being SONS. Actually sonship is not ours as long as we are in the law. In most English translations, sonship is called adoption, but that is an unhappy choice of words. In modern usage adoption means leaving one family and entering another. In the Concordant "adoption" it is translated as "the spirit of sonship". (Rom. 8:15) In Gal. 4:5 it is translated as, "that we may be getting the place of a son". Because of man's natural thinking, people think the Gentiles have to become part of the Jewish family, but this is not true. We are made one new man in Christ! (Eph. 2:15) Jesus took the circumcision and the uncircumcision and He put both into the new man! They are now one new humanity, or one new image of God!
Redemption is not for the natural man! That old Adamic man was crucified with Christ! We are to reckon ourselves as being dead - and we are dead, for that life was crucified with Christ. Our true life is hidden with Christ in God. Since our life is hidden with Christ in God, no natural human being can see it. So it won't do us any good to brag about who we are and how we have advanced in our Christian life. Saying that we have progressed from the sinner stage to the Son of Man stage, to being the Son of God, and right into God Himself, so that we now declare ourselves to be the I AM, does not mean that this is the case. The important thing is who God says we are!
In 1 Cor. 8:5-6 it states, "For even if there are so-called gods...yet for us there is but one God." Then in John 10:34-36 Jesus said, "Has it not been written in your law, `I said, you are gods'? If He called them gods, to whom the word of God came (and the scripture cannot be broken), do you say of Him, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, `You are blaspheming,' because I said, `I am the Son of God'?" Many people think this literally means that we are gods - that God has little baby gods. But Jesus said, "Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one God." (Mark 12:29) In Psalm 82:5-6 it says, "They do not know nor do they understand; they walk about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken. I said, `You are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.'" Now he didn't say sons (even though some translations read SONS) - He said CHILDREN. Then the Psalmist continues, "`Nevertheless you will die like men, and fall like any one of the princes.' Arise, 0 God, judge the earth! For it is Thou who dost inherit all the nations." He said, "I have said, `You are gods, and you shall die like men'. And you don't know anything, you walk in darkness. If we think we are the source of everything, we walk in darkness.
Jesus never referred to His Father in the plural form. Just as we can only have one father physically, so we can only have one Father spiritually. Jesus emphasized this when He told the children of Israel that they were children of Abraham only according to the flesh, but Abraham wasn't really their father. If they were Abraham's children, they would do the deeds of Abraham. (John 8:37-41)
Let's go back to Ps. 82:1, "God takes His stand in His own congregation; He judges in the midst of the rulers (gods - KJV)." We do not take this personally, and think that we are little gods - that God birthed more gods when we were born. There is only one God, and there is no other God! God judges among the rulers. Humanity has many so-called gods, but none of them are the true God. The Lord our God is one God - and there is only ONE!
Well consider what I say, and may the Lord give you understanding. Amen.