"I Said You Are 'Gods'"

Even aside from the way Genesis says humans have God's image, there are passages in the Bible that describe humans as being pseudo-divine or able to "participate in the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4).  Jesus himself references an Old Testament statement in favor of this when faced with hostility in John 10:31-36, the verse in question being Psalm 82:6.  Ironically, Psalm 82 appears to speak sarcastically of some group of people as if they are "gods," even putting the word in quotation marks to signify that they are not truly God himself, only to say that they will die as mortals despite being figurative sons of God.

This chapter of Psalms is only eight verses long and does not elaborate any further on just how much humans resemble divinity.  Still, Jesus paraphrases this verse in John 10, in which he argues that the "son of God," or Messianic figure, being divine should not be entirely surprising given that all humans are god-like.  If ordinary people are "gods," and if all of God's revelation is valid, Jesus explains, why would certain Jews object to the idea of the Messiah being divine?  Since Psalm 82:6 clearly calls the so-called gods of human societies mortal, Jesus is not saying human rulers are truly divine in that they are uncaused causes or the highest moral authority, but that he is even closer to being God than they are.

The ramifications of how Jesus presents Psalm 82, however, might be unsettling for some Christians who have let themselves think that humans and God must have nothing in common.  Beyond the fact that both humans and God are inescapably bound by logical truths, humans bearing God's image places the two in much closer categories than some might suppose Biblical authors would dare to.  Genesis is only affirming that humans, saved or unsaved, have similarities to God by default.  God's image does not even refer to a moral standing since humans have different moral standings and yet are all human, so it entails basic metaphysical characteristics.

There is still the opportunity for people to become more like God than just having God's image grants by participating in the divine nature as 2 Peter 1 says.  In reconnecting with God at a salvific level, it is thus true that, in at least one sense, we become more like God and thus can be legitimately thought of as becoming little "gods"--just not in the sense of being the uncaused cause or our preferences dictating how others should live.  Moral perfection, reconciliation to God, and an intentional embrace of introspective spirituality in all of its potential scope are not beyond any person who is willing and who does not seek assumptions over truth.

Of course, moral perfection is dismissed by most Christians as something they can never voluntarily align with in this life, but that is the entire point of salvation: that a person will actively turn from evil in all of its forms rather than cling to it in the name of cosmic forgiveness.  Even if someone was truly unintelligent enough to cling to the fallacies of anti-perfectionism after thinking about how there is no sin anyone must commit or how the Bible repeatedly commands people to be perfect, there is still so much more to the way the Bible states humans are or can be like God at the present.  After all, it goes so far as to say that we are "gods" of a lesser sort than the being without which the cosmos and humanity would not even exist.