Psalm 82 Commentary

Some translations of Psalm 82, including the New International Version I typically look at, put scare quotes around the three instances of the word “gods” in this short psalm.  Sometimes such scare quotes get called air quotes if invoked by a preacher or other public speaker.  If you say, “Well, according to certain ‘experts’ . . .” and you use the index and middle fingers of both hands to make quote marks in the air, you are signaling that you are highly dubious about those so-called “experts.”   Indeed, scare and air quotes usually mean that you believe certain people are in reality anything but experts.

That seems to be the idea for using scare quotes around “gods” in Psalm 82 as well, though it goes without saying the original Hebrew of the psalm has no such marks in that I am not aware that either Hebrew or Greek have things like quote marks or parentheses or brackets and the like.  So this was a translator’s decision and it means that the translator assumes that when the author of Psalm 82 used the word “gods” x3 in this psalm, he did so with a good bit of eye-rolling going on to send the signal that those people to whom he is referring were anything but actual gods.

There are other occasions in the Hebrew Psalter where it does seem as though the author refers to spiritual beings almost as though there actually are other beings out there in the ether who are somewhat god-like.  But in Psalm 82 it does indeed appear that human beings are in view.  The so-called “gods” in this poem are people who fancy themselves to be rather god-like.  They are masters of the universe.  They are large and in charge.  They have power and enough ego to feel like gods and they exercise their power with enough swagger and drama as to mimic a divine being.  And indeed all through history and in the Ancient Near East there were rulers (the Pharaoh of Egypt, for instance, and later the Caesars of the Roman Empire) who were regarded by the people as divine and who felt that way about themselves as well.  We can well remember the inscriptions on coins bearing the Caesar’s image identifying the Caesar as “Deus et Dominus” or “God and Lord” of the Empire.

But they are only divine pretenders as this psalmist knew.  For all we know some of the people the poet might lump into the category of faux “gods” were any number of the kings over Judah and Israel.  But whoever these pretenders are, they reveal the hollowness of any divine pretentions by acting in ways that are the dead opposite of the ways of Israel’s one true God.  God makes it abundantly clear in Scripture that he is on the side of justice.  Most particularly God desires to see justice done for the most vulnerable people in any given society and perennially that means justice for the widow, the orphan, the stranger or immigrant.  Anyone who fits into a social category that is easy to gang up on, oppress, or simply ignore and marginalize will always find a warm spot in God’s divine heart.

But the “gods” that are being considered by this psalmist ignore and even exploit the vulnerable in their societies.  They defend the unjust and show favoritism for the wicked.  And so the psalmist orders these wicked rulers to defend instead the vulnerable and to champion the cause of those on the margins.  But you can sense that the psalmist keenly sees the futility of such pleas.  These would-be “gods” are lost in a darkness of their own making.  All they are capable of is perpetuating their sinful favoring of wicked people even as they otherwise stumble and fall over and over.  And in the end the fact that they are mere mortals and by no means divine beings will come clear enough when they die the same as everybody else in the world.

The only thing left to do at the end of the day is to address in prayer the One who really is the God over all creation and beg him to judge the nations and work the justice for oppressed peoples everywhere that is typically denied them by the rulers of altogether too many nations.  Where else can people of faith turn in the face of so much evil in the world?  Who but God alone can address the messes we see all around us, the cruel injustice that increasingly seems to be the coin of too many realms?

Given the hyper partisan environment in which preaching takes place in many congregations these days, it’s possible that preaching on Psalm 82 will be seen as some political axe grinding by the pastor.  People will wonder who exactly the preacher has in mind when she talks about those who defend the unjust and show partiality to wicked folks.  Many of us have heard from enough pastors in recent years to know that the acoustics in many congregations are pretty attenuated now and people are passing the preacher’s every word through filters that have been installed in their minds by the echo chambers of social media.  So in some places, though certainly not in all places, you might have to preach on something like Psalm 82 at your own risk!

Then again, if the preacher is clearly saying only what the text says and allows others to apply these words as they see fit, then no one should complain about partisanship in the pulpit.  If these words happen to fit any given person or circumstance in any given nation, well, so be it.  There are, of course, other things we preachers can say or some very narrow and specific ways in which we might try to apply something like Psalm 82 that could cross a red line in the pulpit—people who complain about partisan sermons are not always wrong.  Still, the text speaks for itself and the Spirit will do with it as the Spirit sees fit.  At the very least we could hope everyone who is a follower of Jesus would agree that we want God to act in our world and to act to bring about a greater justice for all God’s people in every nation.

Illustration Idea

In his pitch perfect novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe both epitomized and skewered the 1980s and all its wealth-obsessed upwardly mobile yuppies.  As the novel begins, we meet Sherman McCoy, a highly successful Wall Street titan.  And we read this passage: “The Masters of the Universe . . . One fine day in a fit of euphoria, after he had picked up the telephone and taken an order for zero-coupon bonds that had brought him a $50,000 commission, just like that this very phrase had bubbled up into his brain.  On Wall Street he and a few others—how many?—three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that . . .  Masters of the Universe.  There was . . . no limit whatsoever!”

In this life too many people fancy themselves as Masters of the Universe, as being “gods” in their own right.