Read: Hebrews 1:1-12
“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing” – so said a wise man to me not that long ago. If there is one thing among many which we may call the ‘main thing’ of Christianity, without which one cannot call oneself a Christian no matter what else one believes, what would it be? Without any real hesitation, the answer is the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ. To be a Christian is to believe that Jesus Christ is nothing and no-one less than God Himself. Now you may think that this is not as important as we are making it out to be – that it is just another bit of theological jargon and an another opportunity for theologians to argue; but without the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus Christ everything in Christianity falls flat on its face – there can be no true knowledge of God, there can be no salvation, there is no Christianity.
Jesus Christ is the Son of God; He is God the Son – the second person of the Trinity. As you know we are working our way through the Shorter Catechism Q&A 6 – “How many persons are there in the Godhead? There are three persons in the Godhead; the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory.” The Son is the second person of the Godhead. He is the same in substance, equal in power and glory with the Father and the Holy Spirit. What I want to do tonight is to prove to you that Jesus Christ is divine thereby laying the key foundation stone for the rest of Christianity.
Bear in mind that there is no doctrine of the Christian faith which has been more attacked over the years and is being attacked today, more violently than the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ. Leaving aside what Judaism and Islam thinks of Jesus, the two greatest challenges to the god-ness of Jesus today come first, from liberal theology – that liberal theology which conceives of Jesus as a good man who the early church deified for their own purposes; and secondly from the cults – Jehovah Witnesses and Mormons, who afford Jesus a special status, but not that of God. It is important then, that as followers of Jesus Christ, we know how to respond when asked why we believe that Jesus Christ is God. There are three broad reasons why we believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.
[A] The Bible Affirms It
The Bible is our centre and our sun – we see by its light and we know by its knowledge. If it affirms something to be true, even if runs against or defies current human understanding, then we must align ourselves by the Bible. Bearing in mind that the Bible was written almost exclusively by Jews – monotheistic Jews who believed in One God and in One God only, we can emphatically state that the divinity of Jesus Christ is taught both in the Old and in the New Testament. We will concentrate more on the New, but just a word about the testimony of the Old to the divinity of Jesus. There are explicit texts, like Psalm 45:6 and 110:1; Isaiah 7:14 and 9:6, 7 which would draw us to the conclusion that the Messiah is to be divine, but we should think of the Old Testament’s witness to Jesus in the same way we think of outcrops of rock in the landscape. The vast majority of the rock is under the ground, covered with other things such as soil and grass, but on occasion you see an outcrop which reveals to you the kind of rock which is under the rest of the landscape. The Old Testament preaches a Divine Messiah in outcrop form – it is rarely explicit, but its always there under the surface. It’s what the Princeton Theologian B.B. Warfield called, “the pervasive implication.”
But by far the chief source for the doctrine of the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ comes from the New Testament. There are four strands of evidence (I’m taking these from Donald MacLeod’s book “A Faith to Live By”):
1. Jesus Christ Possesses Divine Titles – the most common titles of Jesus in the New Testament are “Lord”, “Son of God” and “Son of Man”. Each of these can be shown, by careful Biblical study, to assert His divinity. It is easy to see how ‘Lord’ works in that respect; perhaps also ‘the Son of God’; the ‘Son of Man’ ascription might be thought of as the odd-one out. We find it being used most often in Matthew’s Gospel (a Gospel written to the Jews) and being found on the mouth of Jesus Himself. It hearkens back to the awesome description of the Son of Man found in Daniel 7 – the eternal Messiah who has universal power and dominion. Therefore, of all three titles, it is the most pointed in its reference to the divinity of Jesus. But by far, the clearest divine title used of Christ is “God” Himself. Romans 9:5, speaking of the privileges the Jews enjoyed reads, “theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, forever praised! AMEN”. Again, in Titus 2:13 we read, “the glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ.” Jesus is called “God”.
2. Jesus Christ Possesses Divine Functions – Christ has done and is doing things which only God can do. For example, in Colossians 1:16 we read, “by Him all things were created”. He is the God who, in the beginning, created the heavens and the earth. Again, in Hebrews 1:3 we read of Christ, “sustaining all things by his powerful word.” Not only is He the Creator of the Universe, but also its sustainer. In 2 Timothy 4:1 we read of Jesus Christ as the “Judge of the Living and the Dead”. He is also the Judge of all things. These are functions which belong only to God, and yet they are possessed by Christ. If liberal theology is right, and Jesus is only a man, he has a funny way of showing it!
3. Jesus Christ Possesses Divine Attributes – in the New Testament, the Lord Jesus Christ possesses two attributes which belong only to God. The first is eternity. He says of Himself in John 8:58 – “before Abraham was, I am” – in other words, like God, He is; His name is Yahweh; I am that I am. The second is omnipotence, that is to say He is all powerful. He says of Himself in Revelation 1:8, “’I am the Alpha and the Omega’, says the Lord God, ‘who was, and is and is to come, the Almighty’”. No man can seriously claim to be eternal – from eternity past to eternity future; neither can an angel since they too are created beings. No man and no angel can seriously claim to be omnipotent, for if they were, then they would be God.
4. Jesus Christ Possesses Divine Prerogatives – it may seem trivial to us, but the most serious line of evidence given in the New Testament as to the divinity of Christ is the way Christians are encouraged to respond to Jesus – ways which would only be appropriate for us if Jesus Christ were truly God. For example, we are to pray to Jesus (John 14:13, 14); we are to have faith in Jesus (John 14:1); we are to witness to Jesus (Acts 1:8) and, most importantly, we are to worship Jesus. The chief example of this is in John 20:28 when Thomas bows down before the risen Jesus and exclaims, “my Lord and my God.” If Jesus were not God, Thomas would be committing idolatry and blasphemy, and yet there is not even a hint of it from Jesus. Perhaps a more forceful example comes in Matthew 21:15, 16 where, upon His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the children are crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David”, to which Jesus, quoting Psalm 8:2 says, “have you never read, ‘Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babes you have ordained praise’?” Never mind Thomas, if Jesus was not God, then He must be the greatest egomaniac to have ever lived.
The Bible is utterly convincing and utterly unanimous in its declaration of the divinity of Jesus Christ. The only way you can make it say otherwise is either to call its reliability into question (like the liberals do) or to twist the translation of the original languages (like the Jehovah Witnesses do with their New World Translation, a Translation one orthodox Christian theologian has called, ‘a schoolboy translation’).
[B] The Church Teaches It
I recently read a news story about a Chilean man who tried to steal $80,000 from his grandmother by dressing his 21 year old girlfriend up as the elderly woman and having her withdraw money from the bank. The plot was foiled when the bank telephoned the grandma to verify her identity. The point is this, that teaching which denies the divinity of Christ does not only go against what the Bible teaches, but is also opposed to what all Christians everywhere have believed – in other words, it goes against the teaching of the Church as expressed in its various statements of faith. These statements of faith are called creeds and were drawn up over many years by the leaders of the church. There are two which I would draw your attention to:
1. The Council of Nicea – the council of Nicea met and issued a creedal statement in AD325 which says of Jesus that He was, “very God of very God, being of one substance with the Father.” The Nicean creed was drawn up to counter the teachings of a theologian called Arius who denied that Christ was divine. There is nothing new under sun, for 21st Century Jehovah Witnesses basically hold to the teachings of Arius who was proclaimed a heretic by the church in 325AD.
2. The Council of Chalcedon – the council of Chalcedon met and issued a creedal statement in AD451 saying, “our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in Manhood; truly God and truly man … God the Word”. The Chalcedonian Creed was drawn up to counter the teachings of groups like the monophysites, who believed that Christ had only one nature – He was not human and divine. Again, there is nothing new under the sun, for the 21st Century Coptic Christians are monophysites – they deny that Christ fully possessed a human nature and a divine nature.
For 2000 years, the Church has taught the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ and has, on the basis of His deity, instructed God’s people to base their lives upon Jesus.
[C] Personal Experience Verifies It
Although we must never start with subjective experience when we are proving that something is true, for it is easy to be deceived by ourselves, others and Satan, but what does the Divinity of Jesus Christ mean for our personal experience of Him? In other words, as we go into work tomorrow, what difference does it make that I am a Christian and not a Jehovah’s Witness? There are literally millions of applications, but I am going to mention just three:
1. We Worship Jesus – one of the earliest mentions of Christians was made by the Roman historian Pliny, who said of them that in their meetings, “they sang hymns to Christ as God.” Christians, from the very earliest times, have worshipped Jesus as God. Now whether that means they used the name of Christ in their praise is another matter, but what it does show that in whatever they were singing, Christ was being worshipped. When they sung the Psalms, Christ was at the forefront of their minds. But we do not only worship God by song, but in our whole lifestyle. Is everything we do a function of the God-ness of Jesus? Do we glorify Him in our eating and our drinking, in our careers choices and in our use of money and gifts? Life is to be lived to worship Jesus.
2. We Witness for Jesus – in Isaiah 43:10 God says, “You are my witnesses … and my servant whom I have chosen”. In Acts 1:8, the ascending Lord Jesus Christ commands His disciples saying, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.” Our first priority is to make disciples of Jesus. If Jesus were not God, such a thing would be blasphemous and idolatrous, but because He is God, we witness to Him by our works and by our words. We want our family, friends and colleagues to become disciples of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
3. We Trust in Jesus – in John 14:1 Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled; trust in God, trust also in me.” Again, if Jesus were not God, such a statement would be a blasphemy, but because He is divine, He deserves to be trusted. If Jesus Christ was not God, then His sacrifice on the Cross achieved nothing for us; but because He was God, His divine blood covers an infinity of sins. Our salvation depends upon the Deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is how important He is. And we are called upon to trust in Him and believe in Him – such is the gate and the house of Christian belief. There is no other way into the Kingdom of God other than by trusting in Jesus Christ, who is Himself God.
According to a 2006 report by the University of Bath, David Beckham shapes the moral values of children. A poll of 150 7-11 year olds considered him a ‘flawed hero’ and deemed his love-life more important than their toys or clothing. Who shapes our moral values, our social values, our religious values and our everything values? A flawed hero or a flawless God who became One with us and died to save us from our sins? By God’s grace, let’s look to no-one but Jesus because “if Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then there is no sacrifice too great for me to make for Him.” AMEN
