Is Jesus Really God?

Is Jesus really God?

Yes.

His followers claimed that he was God – even his immediate followers, the ones who knew him or had met him and who wrote about him within a few years of his crucifixion. Sometimes it is claimed that ideas about Jesus’ divinity did not arise until later, hundreds of years later, and that no one really thought of him as God until Christianity developed as a world religion under the influence of the Emperor Constantine in the 4th century. But that view does not withstand even a few minutes’ scrutiny of first century documents.

Here are some quotes from 1st century Christians writing within living memory of Jesus himself.

Hebrews 1:7-8: The writer contrasts the voice of God talking about angels as opposed to his Son Jesus: “In speaking of the angels he says, ‘He makes his angels spirits, and his servants flames of fire.’ But about the Son he says, ‘Your throne, O God, will last for ever and ever.’” In this text, God the Father calls Jesus the Son “God.”

Romans 9:5: The Apostle Paul, writing about the spiritual advantages of the Jews: “To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.” It is a parenthetical note in which Paul identifies Jesus as God, according to the preferred reading of the Greek text.

Titus 2:13: Paul tells Christians to live godly lives “while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.” The grammar of this sentence might be ambiguous in English and refer to two individuals: (1) our great God and (2) Savior Jesus Christ. But again, the best reading of the Greek text is that the phrase “great God and Savior” modifies the name that follows: Jesus Christ. That is, Paul calls Jesus “our great God and Savior.”

John 20:28: The disciple Thomas had heard from the other disciples that Jesus had met with them alive after he had been killed on the cross. Thomas did not believe them. Dead men don’t resurrect. Not even Jesus could do that, in Thomas’ mind. Then Jesus appears to Thomas and invites him to survey the crucifixion wounds in his hands and side. Thomas says to him, “My Lord and my God!”

The next series of references require some background information. In Revelation 19:10, John is tempted to worship an angel. He writes, “At this I fell at his feet to worship him. But he said to me, ‘Don’t do that! I am a fellow servant with you and with your brothers and sisters who hold to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God!’”

John was forbidden to fall before the feet of an angel. You are only supposed to do that to God. But John was a slow learner. Three chapters later he repeats his mistake. Revelation 22:8-9: “And when I had heard and seen these things, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who had been showing them to me. But he said to me, ‘Don’t do that! I am a fellow servant with you and with your fellow prophets and with all who keep the words of this scroll. Worship God!’”

The Biblical commandment is to worship God, only God. The Jews knew that. To worship that which is not God is idolatry, and it is forbidden. When a servant of God, whether human or angelic, finds himself or herself the object of worship, he or she cries out in indignation to put a stop to that blasphemy. “Don’t worship me! Worship God alone!”

For example, in Acts 14, the people of Lystra tried to respond to the ministry of Paul and Barnabas by worshiping them. The people said in verse 11, “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!” And in verse 13 it says that the local priest of Zeus brought oxen to gates of the city in order to slaughter them as a sacrifice to these god-men. Paul and Barnabas responded by tearing their robes in protest, and they cried out in verse 15, “Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men, of like nature with you.”

A similar thing happened to Peter four chapters earlier. In Acts 10 he went to the home of a Roman centurion named Cornelius. Verse 25 and 26 say this, “When Peter entered, Cornelius met him and fell down at his feet and worshiped him. But Peter lifted him up, saying, ‘Stand up; I too am a man.’”

These men - John, Paul, and Peter – who all knew very well that you were not to fall at the feet of a human being or even a mighty angel, and who stopped people who tried to do it to them – all three of them fell at the feet of Jesus. Peter did it in Luke 5:8, Paul did it Acts 9:4, and John did it in Revelation 1:17. That is where John writes, “I fell at his feet as one dead.” Thomas had said, “My Lord and my God” with his words; Peter and Paul and John said it with their posture as well, falling at his feet in an attitude of worship. So did the women who first saw Jesus after his resurrection. Matthew 28:9 says, "They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him." These people who worshiped Jesus were all devout Jews who only worshiped God.

There is much more that could be added to this theme of the followers of Jesus regarding him as God, but for the sake of time we must move on.

Not only did Jesus’ followers claim that he was God; his enemies accused him of claiming to be God.

In John 10:31 it says that some of the Jews picked up stones to stone Jesus. This was the action of a lynch mob. Legally they did not have the authority to put anyone to death, because they were living under Roman rule, and Rome claimed solely for itself the power of capital punishment. That is why Jesus was eventually killed by crucifixion rather than some other method. The Jews never crucified anyone. It was the Romans who executed criminals by crucifying them. But if a lynch mob of Jews wanted to kill somebody on the spot, without a trial, quickly before any Roman authority showed up to stop it, they would pick up rocks and pelt the person with them until he or she died. A couple chapters earlier they had brought to Jesus a woman caught in the act of adultery and provocatively asked him if they should stone her to death.

Why, in John chapter 10, were they planning to kill Jesus on the spur of the moment? Because he had just said, at the end of a speech declaring his role: “I and the Father are one.” They picked up stones to stone him, and Jesus said to them, “I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you going to stone me?” And they said, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God.”

This wasn’t the only time that happened. John chapter 5 records another instance of the same thing. They thought he had committed a violation of the commandment concerning Sabbath rest. He responded by saying that he was doing the work that his Father did. He said, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.” Then verse 18 says, “For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.” So his enemies saw that he was claiming to be God.

On another occasion people grumbled about what they perceived to be an implicit claim to be God on Jesus’ part. In Mark 2 Jesus says to a paralyzed man whom he has just met for the first time, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” The text continues, “Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, ‘Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?’”

They were right. They were making the point that only God could do what Jesus was claiming to do – forgive all of a person’s sins. Please understand an important distinction. If I commit an offense against you, and I come to you and apologize, you might be gracious to me and forgive me. Or if you sin against me, and if I’m trying to be a good Christian, I’ll forgive you. But suppose somebody knocks you on the head with a crowbar and steals your wallet. You tell me about it, as you recover from your concussion on a hospital bed, and I say, “Oh, I’ve forgiven the man who did that to you.” Wouldn’t you find that odd? Wouldn’t you think, “Who do you think you are, forgiving my assailant like that? You don’t have the right to forgive him!” And you would be exactly right. Only God has the right to do that. Only God, as the One Against Whom all sins are committed, has the judicial standing to forgive all of a person’s sins. We can only forgive the sins that are committed against us.

The people who felt that Jesus was claiming to be God when he told this man his sins were forgiven had a good point. That was in fact a fair accusation.

Jesus’ friends said that he was God. Jesus’ enemies said that he claimed to be God. What about Jesus himself?

I noted a few minutes ago that when people fell at the feet of Peter and Paul and Barnabas and a mighty angel, they all said, “Don’t do that! Get up.” But when Peter and Thomas and Paul and Mary Magdalene fell down at the feet of Jesus, he accepted it. He did not tell them to stop that nonsense because he was unworthy of such worship. When Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God,” Jesus did not tear his clothes in protest. He did not say that was blasphemy. Instead he said, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29).

What a way to respond to someone who has just called you God! Jesus accepted the designation. And he pronounced blessed all who believed the same.

The night before Jesus was crucified, one of his disciples, Philip, said to him, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” And Jesus said, “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:8-9).

Then there is the amazing thing Jesus said about himself in John chapter 8. In John 8 Jesus’ opponents made a reference to their ancestor, Father Abraham, who had lived 2,000 years earlier. They taunted Jesus, saying, “Do you think you are greater than our Father Abraham?” And Jesus replied, “Before Abraham was born, I am.” Jesus was not merely claiming to be older than Abraham. He was taking unto himself the designation “I Am”, which is the personal name that God gave to Moses to identify himself to the Israelites as their one true God. God gave that name, sometimes known as Jehovah, or Yahveh. And down through the years Jewish people so revered that name that they were afraid to say it out loud or even write it down for fear of blaspheming the name by accident. Jesus was not only unafraid to say it – he called himself that. By now you can guess what happened next. They picked up stones to kill him. But he slipped away. It was not yet his time to die. That would have to be done on a cross, eventually.

Is Jesus really God? His friends said it, his enemies accused him of saying it, and he said it himself, both directly and by implication, many times.

But is it true? Is Jesus really God?

For me at least, there is a preliminary question worth exploring that many people have asked in one way or another. And that is, “How does that question even make sense? How can a human being, any human being, truly be God?”

Let me make a devil’s-advocate case for this being a nonsensical question. First of all, define God. Well, traditionally, God is the Ultimate Being, the Creator of all things visible and invisible. He is eternal, existing outside of time. He is spiritual, existing outside of space and matter. In fact, time and space and matter are all things that he created, so he is not subject to them; he is not contained in any of those things. He is omnipresent, present at each point in his creation without being a part of it. He is omniscient, knowing all things. He is omnipotent, all powerful. And Jesus does not seem to be any of those things that define God.

Was he omnipotent? He was so weak he could not even carry his own cross. He fell down under the burden of the crossbeam, and someone else had to carry it. Was he omniscient? Did he know everything? He himself said he did not know the day of his return. Was he omnipresent? No, clearly not. When Mary and Joseph left him behind in Jerusalem at the age of 12, they had to come back and look for him, because he couldn’t be both in Jerusalem and with them on the road to Nazareth at the same time. He was not omnipresent. Was he a spirit? No. In fact, when his disciples saw him once after his crucifixion and thought they were seeing a ghost, he said to them in Luke 24:39: “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” Jesus had said to a Samaritan woman in John 4, “God is a spirit,” but then here in Luke 24 he said, “I am not a spirit; I’m flesh and blood.”

So, if God is defined as an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, eternal spirit, how can a weak, limited, flesh-and-blood human being living on earth in the first century be God? Don’t his obvious characteristics contradict what we believe to be the characteristics of God?

And with Jesus the problem is compounded because he did things like pray to God the Father. If he was God, then who in the world was he talking to when he prayed? Was he talking to himself? When he cried out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was he really saying, “Myself, Myself, why have I forsaken me?” How could he be God?

The Christian answer to such questions as I have raised here is two-fold. First, God is a complex God. He is one God, but he is not reducible to a naked singularity. God exists, and always has existed, as a Trinity, a complex Godhead of three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

We get indications of this plural nature of God back in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures written hundreds of years before Jesus was born. Even in the beginning, in the book of Genesis, at the creation of mankind, God says, “Let us make man in our image.” Us? Our image? Where did that come from? Don’t you mean “me and my image”? No, even then, the eternal conversation was going on between what we call the persons of the Godhead.

We also get these indications of God’s plural nature in the Old Testament where you have appearances of a messenger of the Lord who is also the Lord. There is a weird ambiguity in the language describing these events, and it can be confusing to us, but it is unmistakably right there on the page in Genesis 16 with Hagar, Genesis 22 with Abraham, Exodus 3 with Moses, and Judges 6 with Gideon. In each of these events, an individual visitor is specified as an angel of the Lord, or a messenger of the Lord, and then as the text continues it becomes clear that it is the Lord himself who has been speaking to Hagar, Abraham, Moses and Gideon. Somehow the messenger of the Lord is also the Lord. Make of it what you will.

That leads to the second part of the answer Christianity gives to the question “How can it make sense that Jesus is God?” Well first of all, God is complex, he exists not as a simple unity but as a 3-fold complexity. Jesus then is one of those Persons of the Trinity, just as God the Father and God the Spirit are the other Persons of that Trinity. Second, one of the Persons of the Trinity, whom John called the Word, the Logos, has taken on human flesh. One of the Persons of the Triune God has taken human form - yes, with its limitations and weaknesses, its confinement in time and space and matter, and even mortality. The word for that is “incarnation” - the taking on of human form. The Apostle Paul in Philippians 2 describes this event as an emptying. He writes that though Jesus was equal with God, he emptied himself, and took the form of a servant in the likeness of man. (Philippians 2:6-7).

In Jesus, God became a man, and in that state willingly relinquished the independent use of some of those defining attributes of God that we mentioned. As John puts it, “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” (John 1:14).

Why did he do that?

One reason was to make God known to us - to help us to see in human form what God is like. John opens his gospel by saying, “In the beginning was the Word [Jesus]. And the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Again, there is that Trinitarian language. Jesus was with God and he was God. He was the messenger of God and the message of God and he was God. And then a few verses later, verse 18, it says, “No one has ever seen God.” That is, no one has ever seen God the Father. That makes sense. Of course you can’t see him – he’s a spirit, and spirits do not emit or reflect photons. But, the verse continues, “the only God, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.” That is, Jesus, who is God, has made God the Father known. If you have trouble getting a grasp on what God is like, look at Jesus. Jesus reveals God the Father. As we mentioned earlier, Jesus told Philip, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” To know Jesus is to know God.

So Jesus became a man to show us what God is like.

But that is not the only reason. There is another reason that will take your breath away and knock you flat on your face if you understand it and believe it. Though he was God, he took on human form so that he could render to you the ultimate service – death on your behalf, a bloody death on the cross in order to save your sinful soul. As God he could not die. He’s immortal. But as a man he could die, and did. In Matthew 20:28 he explained it this way. He said, “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Unfortunately we don’t have a good word in English to translate the Greek that is rendered as “ransom.” I think for us a “ransom” is the bag of money you give to the villains who kidnapped your loved one. But here it is the price of a slave. The amount that must given in order for a slave to acquire his or her freedom. It’s the wage price. The Bible says that the wages of sin is death, and Jesus said “I’m here to pay the wages. Only my death will suffice to pay the wages and cancel the sin debt and set you free.”

Yes, Jesus is God. He is God in human form. He took on human form in order to show us what God is like, and in showing us what God is like he manifested God’s inconceivable love in offering up his life in order to save human beings who had rebelled against him and held him in contempt.

I would like to answer one last question. Is there any of knowing that this is true about Jesus? Yes, there is. But you may not like it.

In John 7:17 Jesus said, “If anyone is willing to do God’s will, he will know whether my teaching is from God or whether I am speaking of my own authority.”

If you are willing to do God’s will, then you will know for sure the identity of Jesus and the source of his teaching. That will require repentance on your part. It does for all of us, there are no exceptions. We may have different things to repent of, but none of us can skirt along without it. I’m just glad that Jesus put it the way he did in that verse. He did not say, “If anyone does God’s will, he will know…” I don’t always do God’s will, and I would fail on that score. Nor does he say, “If anyone is able to do God’s will.” I am often unable. But he says, “If anyone is willing to do God’s will.” The question for us is, “Are you willing?” Do you really want that? Do you want to be holy more than anything else? Do you want to be a humble and penitent person who is being remade in the image of the God who loves you? If you are willing, then there will come a time when you are not wrestling with the question, “Is Jesus really God?” Because you will know.

Let us pray.

Father God, I thank you that God your Son has made you known to us, revealed your character to us, and made manifest to us a love beyond all reckoning, that he should become one of us in order to die on our behalf that we might be forever reconciled to you, against whom we have committed every sin. May God your Holy Spirit make this truth known, felt, and believed by all who hear this message. Grant to unworthy sinners the gift of repentance whereby they might become joyfully assured that Jesus is God and Savior. Amen.