More about what Jesus, as written in John’s gospel, taught it meant that he is the Son of the Most High God he called the Father, and why the Father called him His beloved Son. It is all about being so much like the Father in behaviour, through what the Father taught him of Himself through the Father’s love for him. It was about letting these teachings form him into the Father’s likeness. It was about staying faithful and true to all this, so much so that the Father is pleased with that outcome enough to call him His Son. For Jesus, as seen in his quoting of Psalm 82, the Father had many over whom He presided who were called gods, who were called sons of the Most High, but they did not live up to it, and so He condemned them to be ultimately doomed to suffer a kind of death like mortal humans. This reflects what Job, Genesis, and other ancient accounts say of sons of God, as a council of such beings, over whom God Himself presides. These sons of God, Psalm 82 says, were doomed because they failed the poor who were in their power to help. They failed in their duty of care. There were ancient Greek philosophers too who pointed out that the gods were not necessarily very virtuous, despite being worshipped by humans. We might consider today how if a god is forgotten and no longer worshipped by humans, they effectively cease from being gods, effectively dying, though they are deemed immortal and unable to literally die. Now Jesus taught how he had learned all his behaviour and saving wisdom from the Father, who is this Most High God in Psalm 82. The Father at the baptism of Jesus had spoken from heaven of Jesus being His beloved Son in whom He is well pleased. At the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain, God spoke again, telling the disciples to therefore listen to Jesus. In the Book of Revelation the revelation given by God to Jesus, written by John, closes with Jesus forever seated with the One on the throne who is clearly this Most High God, the Father. The other beings in heaven are seen as elders and angels surrounding God and Jesus, ‘the Lamb’, and with them the saints redeemed by Jesus by his sacrifice of his own body and blood as this Lamb of God.
