JESUS
CHRIST-DEITY
We believe in
one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of
one Being with the Father.
Nicene Creed
All divine
names and titles are applied to Him. He is called God, the mighty God, the
great God, God over all; Jehovah; Lord; the Lord of lords and the King of
kings. All divine attributes are ascribed to Him. He is declared to be
omnipresent, omniscient, almighty, and immutable, the same yesterday, today,
and forever. He is set forth as the creator and upholder and ruler of the
universe. All things were created by Him and for Him; and by Him all things
consist. He is the object of worship to all intelligent creatures, even the
highest; all the angels (i.e., all creatures between man and God) are commanded
to prostrate themselves before Him. He is the object of all the religious
sentiments; of reverence, love, faith, and devotion. To Him men and angels are
responsible for their character and conduct. He required that men should honour Him as they honoured the
Father; that they should exercise the same faith in Him that they do in God. He
declares that He and the Father are one; that those who had seen Him had seen
the Father also. He calls all men unto Him; promises to forgive their sins; to
send them the Holy Spirit; to give them rest and peace; to raise them up at the
last day; and to give them eternal life. God is not more, and cannot promise
more, or do more than Christ is said to be, to promise, and to do. He has,
therefore, been the Christian’s God from the beginning, in all ages and in all
places.
Charles
Hodge
Systematic Theology, v. 2, p. 382.
If you do not
believe in the unique deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, you are not a Christian,
whatever else you may be. We are not looking at a good Man only, we are not
interested merely in the greatest Teacher the world has ever seen; we are face
to face with the fact that God, the Eternal Son, has been in this world, and
that He took upon Him human nature and dwelt among us, a Man amongst men –
God-Man. We are face to face with the mystery and the marvel of the Incarnation
and of the Virgin Birth. It is all here, and it shines out in all the fullness
of its amazing glory. “What manner of Man is this?” He is more than Man. That
is the answer – He is also God.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Spiritual
Depression – Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 136,
Used by Permission from Elizabeth Catherwood (daughter).
Depend on it,
my hearer, you never will go to heaven unless you are
prepared to worship Jesus Christ as God.
If Christ is
truly God, His claim to be the only way has to be taken seriously. If on the
other hand, He is merely one more person in a pantheon of pretenders, His
proclamations can easily be pushed aside. That is precisely why the
resurrection is axiomatic to Christianity. Through the resurrection, Christ
demonstrated that He does not stand in a line of peers with Buddha,
Baha'u'llah, Krishna, or any founder of a world religion. They died and are
still dead, but Christ is risen. Ultimately,
resurrection and reincarnation are mutually exclusive because the former is a
historical fact, while the latter is but a Hindu fantasy.
Hank Hanegraaff
Resurrection, W Publishing Group, 2000, p.
128.
Think of it.
In order for God to atone for man's sin, someone had to subject Himself to
death. Yet only one who had unlimited ability to atone for sin could do that,
only a perfect man. He had to have unlimited ability to atone, because He would
be shedding His blood for all humankind. He had to be perfect because God
accepts only unblemished sacrifices. Who could do that? Only
God. And God the Son shed His own blood for us (Acts 20:28).
Josh McDowell and Bart Larson
Jesus, a Biblical Defense of His Deity, Josh
McDowell and Bart Larson, Here's Life Publishers, Inc., p. 90.
If we could
condense all the truths of Christmas into only three words, these would be the
words: "God with us." We tend to focus our attention at Christmas on
the infancy of Christ. The greater truth of the holiday is His deity. More
astonishing than a baby in the manger is the truth that this promised baby is
the omnipotent Creator of the heavens and the earth!
John MacArthur
That Jesus is
Himself God is the heart of the gospel, because apart from His deity He could
not save a single soul. No heresy so corrupts the gospel and robs it of its
power as the teaching that Jesus is not God. Apart from His deity, there is no
gospel and no salvation.
John MacArthur
Taken
from Matthew 8-15, by John MacArthur, Moody Publishers, © 1985, p. 273.
Scripture
clearly proclaims Jesus as being God. Long before His birth it was divinely
predicted that He would be called Immanuel, which means “God with us,” (Matt. 1:23;
cf. Isa. 7:14). He was called by many divine names, such as “the Holy and
Righteous One,” (Acts 3:14). It declares that to know Jesus is to know God the
Father (John 8:19; 14:7), to hate Him is to hate the Father (15:23), and to
believe in Him is to believe in the Father (Matt. 10:40; John 12:44; 14:1). It
affirms that to see Him is to see the Father (John 14:9), to honor Him is to
honor the Father (5:23), and to receive Him is to receive the Father (Mark
9:37). It proclaims that Jesus is omnipotent (Matt. 28:18), omnipresent (Matt.
28:20), changeless (Heb. 13:8), creator of the world (John 1:3), able to
forgive sin (Mark 2:5-10) and is to be worshiped as God (Phil. 2:9-11; cf.
Matt. 28:9, Heb 1:6).
John
MacArthur
Matthew 24-28, Moody, 1989, p. 232.
The good news
is that in the face of Jesus Christ we see the very face of God, the One who
has decided to be with us and for us in spite of our sin.
Kevin VanHoozer
This We Believe, John Armstrong and John
Woodbridge, ed. Zondervan, 2000, p. 75.
He is the
King of kings, the radiance of His glory, the Lord of the spaceless,
fabulous, infinite universe, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, unspeakable
holy, dwelling in light, unapproachable, changeless…and yet He condescended to
be enclosed in lowly human flesh, to be born a despised Judean, in a filthy
stable, in the womb of a simple Israeli woman and without fanfare or pomp.
Author Unknown
Among the
Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God… Now
let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say
that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd
about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of god.
God, in their language, meant the Being outside the
world Who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when
you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply,
the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.
Author Unknown
Christian Theology in Plain Language, p. 99.
Athanasius,
early bishop of Alexandria, stoutly opposed the teachings of Arius, who
declared that Christ was not the eternal Son of God, but a subordinate being.
Hounded through five exiles, he was finally summoned before emperor Theodosius,
who demanded he cease his opposition to Arius. The emperor reproved him and
asked, “Do you not realize that all the world is against
you?” Athanasius quickly answered, “Then I am against all the
world.”
Author Unknown
A man who was
merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral
teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is
a poached egg – or else the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either
this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You
can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you
can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any
patronizing nonsense about his being a great moral teacher. He has not left
that open to us. He did not intend to.
C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity, MacMillan
Publishing, p. 56.
When
the Bible says that Christ is God, it does not ask us to forget a single thing
that it has said about the stupendous majesty of God. No, it asks us to
remember every one of those things in order that we may apply them all to Jesus
Christ.
J. Gresham Machen
The Christian Faith in the Modern
World, 1936.
They that
deny Christ to be God, must greatly wrest, or else deny the Scripture to be the
Word of God.
Thomas Watson
The Trinity.
Jesus Christ,
the condescension of divinity, and the exaltation of humanity.
Phillips Brooks
We must
either worship Christ as God or despise or pity Him as man.
John Gerstner
The
significant thing is this: not one recognized religious leader in the history
of the world has ever laid claim to being God – except Jesus. Moses did not.
Paul was horrified when people tried to worship him. Muhammad insisted that he
was merely a prophet of Allah. Buddha did not even believe in the existence of
a personal God, and Confucius was skeptical. Zoroaster was a worshiper, but he
was not worshiped. We repeat – of the recognized religious leaders of all time,
Jesus of Nazareth – and Jesus of Nazareth alone – claimed to be eternal God.
John H. Gerstner
Theology for Everyman, Moody, 1965, Chapter 4.
The exclusive
claim of Christianity about Christ is not centered on our belief that Jesus was
right about God. It is centered on our claim that God was fully present in
Christ to reconcile the world to Himself (2 Cor. 5:18). It is the theological
claim about Jesus (that He is God) that makes the spiritual claims of Jesus
potent. Jesus' words are right because those words are God's words (Jn.
14:10b). Jesus’ “way” is not superior because it promotes a higher ethic or
because it champions values that resonate with our spiritual sensitivities.
Jesus' way is true because in Him we find God drawing us to Himself.
Gary
Burge
John, Zondervan, 2000, p. 408, www.zondervan.org.