DAY 137
CHALLENGE
“Jesus is not God. He only claimed to be the Son of God.”
DEFENSE
By claiming to be God’s Son, Jesus claims to be God. His divinity is also indicated by other passages in Scripture.
By nature, Sons are equal to their fathers. When Jesus asserts that he is God’s Son, he indicates his equality to God the Father. The son of a man is a man, and the Son of God is God.
The New Testament explicitly acknowledges this. Jesus opponents tried to kill him “because he not only broke the Sabbath but also called God his Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5:18). Note that John—the inspired author—does not say that Jesus’ opponents thought he made himself equal to God. He says Jesus did this.
In light of this, other texts that speak of Jesus’ divinity also indicate that he was equal with God, not a lesser, created “god.” This is the case when we read: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). It also sheds light on Jesus’ acceptance of Thomas’s worship when the latter declares him “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28).
Paul says that in Jesus “the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily” (Col. 2:9), and he quotes from an early Christian hymn that says, though the preincarnate Jesus “was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:6–7).
Paul directly calls Jesus God when he writes that from the Jewish race, “according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all” (Rom. 9:5), and when he discusses how we should live while awaiting “the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). Peter also declares Jesus God when he speaks of “the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 1:1).
TIP
For a thorough, book-length defense of Jesus’ divinity, see Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity.