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Transcript 113A — On Our Being "Sons of God" [Ps 82:6]
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: I have a question about Psalm 82:6. Quite frequently people say that we're all children of God, and that we're all saved as a result. And Psalm 82:6 kind of verifies that. But I can't find in the New Testament where it says that we're given the right to be called children of God, and that's often applied to when you are saved.
HC: When we read Psalm 82, where it says in verse 6, "I say you are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you," we cannot isolate that from the rest of the Bible. This is a statement that is true in a sense. Now let's examine the rest of the Bible and see why it's true.
We go back to Genesis 1, and we discover there that we are created in the image of God. We discover that we are a son of God in that sense. When you look at Luke 3, and you see the genealogy of Jesus, it goes right back to Adam, who was called a son of God. And so because we are created by God, in the image of God, we are called gods, or sons of the Most High.
But the Psalm goes on in the next verse, "Nevertheless you shall die like men and fall as one man, oh princes." That fact, that we have been created sons of God, has been severely strained. We actually have rebelled against God and have been estranged from Him, so that Jesus declared of the Pharisees, "Ye are of your father, the devil." You are sons of Satan, in other words. This is the condition that we finally come to, because we are unsaved.
Now when we are born again, we are reintegrated into the family of God. The curse of sin is taken out of our life, and we again are as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. We have become sons of God. We read in Romans 8:14: "For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God."
So you see, while man, by virtue of the fact that he is created as part of the human race, in the original sense he was a son of God, he was created in the image of God, his relationship to God has been severely changed, so that effectively he has become a son of Satan. And he can only become a son of God in the true sense of the word by becoming born again, by being saved.