John 10:36

(36) Whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world.—Better, Whom the Father sanctified, and sent into the world. The tense refers to the time of His consecration to His Messianic work, and to the Incarnation, which was the commencement of it.

Because I said, I am the Son of God.—He had not said this in express words, but, as we have seen, it is directly implied in John 10:29-30, and the Jews had so understood what He said (John 10:33).

So far, then, the argument is simply a technical one, such as formed the staple of those customary in Rabbinic schools, and based on the letter of the Scriptures. The law (Psalm) applied the term “Elohim” (gods) to men representing God; no word of that Scripture could fail to hold good; how much more, therefore (a minori ad majus), could the term Son of God be applied to Him who was not a man consecrated to any earthly office, but consecrated by God, and sent into the world to represent God to man. (Comp. Note on John 1:18.) Their charge of blasphemy is, on their own principles, without the shadow of foundation. But in these words there is a deeper meaning than this technical one. When we speak of “men representing God,” we are already in thought foreshadowing the central truth of the Incarnation. Priests who offered sacrifices for sins, and kings who ruled God’s people, and prophets who told forth God’s will, were consecrated to their holy office because there was the divine in them which could truly be called “god.” Every holy life was in its degree a type of the Incarnate life of the Son of God. But He was the ideally true Priest sacrificing Himself for the world, the ideally true Prophet declaring God’s will in its fulness, the ideally true King ruling in righteousness. Every holy life was as a ray of the divine glory manifest in human flesh, but all these rays were centred in the nimbus of glory which rested as a crown on the head of Jesus Christ.