One of the things that I love about summertime is that it is also baseball season. I love watching baseball. I love following all the stories and stats throughout the season. There is just something relaxing about sitting and watching America’s pastime. One of the first things a viewer notices when watching a game is that every batter has a little different way of swinging the bat. Some stand tall, others bend over. Some start with the bat high, others low. Some take a big step, others no step. There are a lot of different ways to swing a bat. However, every good hitter must get the bat to contact the ball or they can’t get a hit. The batter can do a lot of different things, even some incorrect things in their swing, but they must get the bat to hit the ball. The better and more accurate the contact is, the better the outcome.
Similarly, in Christianity, there are different ways to interpret the Bible leading to different theological beliefs. There are many things that Christians can disagree on and still be a Christian. Even if we are wrong in some of our beliefs, we can still be a Christian. However, just like the batter must contact the ball, there are things that every Christian must believe to be a Christian. The most crucial of those things is one’s belief in who Jesus is and what He did. That’s why this post will examine who the Bible says that Jesus is. The better one understands who Jesus is, the better one will be at living out their Christian faith. That makes the subject matter of this post incredibly crucial.
To start out our discussion of Jesus, we first must flashback to the last post. One of the things discussed there was the doctrine of the Trinity, God is one and exists in three persons. When we think of God, we mainly think of the first person of the Trinity, God the Father. The Father is not first because He existed first, for all the members of the Trinity have existed forever, but because He has the role as the leader of the Trinity. The other members of the Trinity, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, submit to and follow the will of the Father. (Luke 22:42, John 16:13) They are, however, equal members of the Trinity and equally God.
The attacks on this belief have been numerous, especially among liberal Bible scholars of the past 50-100 years. One of the most notable attacks was from a group called the Jesus Seminar. This group of scholars attempted to construct a “true” representation of the historical Jesus. They used the opinions of the members of the group to decide which information was “historical.” Using this method, they denied much of the Biblical Gospel and labeled Jesus as a teacher, but not God. However, the bedrock of the Christian faith is that Jesus is God, not just God-like. If this is not true, then Jesus could not have died for our sin, thereby rendering all of Christianity pointless.
Thankfully, there is substantial Biblical evidence that Jesus is God. Titus and John both directly refer to Jesus as God. (Titus 2:13, John 1) Upon seeing the wounds in Jesus’ body after the resurrection, Thomas calls Him, “My Lord and My God.” (John 20:28)
Paul has much to say about Jesus being God. Paul proclaims that Jesus is God in Philippians 2:6. In this passage, Paul states that Jesus was in the form of God. Jesus has the same essence as God and thus the same physical form before taking on human form during His time on earth. Paul also states that Jesus is equal with God. In multiple places, Paul proclaims Jesus as Lord and exhorts his readers to worship him as God. (Romans 10:9, 13; 2 Timothy 4:18) As a trained Jewish scholar, this would have been utterly blasphemous for Paul to do unless he truly believed that Jesus was God and the Messiah. He would have been completely rejecting his culture and upbringing and figuratively spitting in the face of God. Paul was thoroughly convinced that what he was claiming was true. The same can be said of the other disciples, especially since none received any material gain, only loss, from following Jesus and proclaiming Him God and Savior.
Along with this testimony from people that knew Jesus, is the testimony of Jesus about Himself. Based on what Jesus is recorded in the Gospels to have said, there is no doubt that He believed He was God. He repeatedly referred to himself as the “Son of God” and the “Son of Man.” These are both titles from Old Testament prophecy that refer to God coming to earth as Savior. The Jews of Jesus’ day understood that the use of these titles was a claim to be God and sought to kill Jesus on grounds of being a blasphemer. (John 5:18)
In John 8:58, Jesus says some interesting things about Himself. He states, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” In this statement, Jesus makes two claims. First, that He existed before Abraham, who lived well before Jesus’ earthly birth. Second, the phrase “I am” was not bad grammar on Jesus’ part, but the name that God gave himself in Exodus 3:14. Jesus is using the proper name of God, which a devout Jew didn’t dare to say, to refer to Himself. This was such a clear claim to be God that the Jewish audience immediately grabbed stones to stone Him for blaspheme.
Jesus is also accused of blasphemy in Mark 2. Jesus was in a crowded house doing some teaching when four men ripped through the roof to lower their paralyzed friend in front of Jesus. Rather than just heal the man’s physical condition, Jesus heals the man’s spiritual condition by forgiving his sins. Once again, this immediately throws up a red flag for the Jewish leaders who understand that only God can forgive sin. So, Jesus miraculously hears their thoughts and heals the man’s paralysis to prove to them that He is indeed God.
The passages above are just a few examples of Jesus’ claims to be God. There are many others that could be examined. There is no doubt that He believed He was God and left His audience, and us, with only a few options for what to believe about Him. As C.S. Lewis famously said, Jesus was either liar, lunatic, or Lord. He has left us with no option to just see Him as a good human teacher.
The Bible is clear that Jesus is God and, as stated above, all of Christianity rests on this belief. One cannot be a major league hitter unless one can make contact with the ball and one cannot be a Christian unless one believes in Jesus. That belief starts with confirming that Jesus is God and then expands with the things we will look at in the next post about the life of Jesus.
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