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| A Fishing Boat on the Sea of Galilee |
One of the
popular ways that many scholars reject Christianity is to say that Jesus never
claimed to be God. Instead, they say,
the early church “made” him into a god.
Jesus, they say, was a popular rabbi—nothing more. One version of this theory, which is popular
in Israel, is that it was the apostle Paul who turned Jesus into a god. These scholars claim that in the first three
gospels, Jesus never says that he is God.
Only later were these claims “added,” as in the gospel of John, which
was written later than the others.
Cults like
the Jehovah's Witnesses are willing to accept a little more: they accept Jesus as an angel, but not as
God. The Mormons go even further: they accept Jesus as a god, but not as
the one true God. They believe that the
Father and the Son were originally people like us on another planet who became gods.
As you can
see, whether Jesus is really God or not is an important issue. The idea that Jesus is in some mysterious way
the one true God of the universe sets Christianity apart from all the other
religions of the world. As someone once
observed, every other major religion claims that its founder shows the way to
God. Only Christianity claims that its
founder is God.
Those who say
that Christians invented the idea that Jesus is God face a difficult problem: Christianity started among the Jewish people,
and was for many years mostly a Jewish religion. The gospel was first preached only to Jews (“...speaking the Word to no one except to
Jews alone,” Acts 11:19). Gentiles
didn't become a majority in the Church until the 2nd century. By this time, the doctrine of Jesus' divinity
was well established, and continued to be taught by Jewish Christians long
after the Jewish and Gentile branches of the Church split (in the 2nd
century). The divinity of Jesus is
therefore clearly a Jewish Christian teaching.
But of all
the religious groups in the world, the Jews were the least likely to
invent this idea: most of them continue
to resist it today. The Jewish religion
is the most pure form of monotheism the world has ever known. It is this core belief that put them in
opposition to the pagan world around them, and contributed to the destructive
wars that drove them from Israel and scattered them around the world, where
many remain today.
And of all the
different groups within Judaism, the Pharisees are perhaps the last place to
look for the creation of a divine Jesus.
They opposed the idea from the beginning. Yet Paul was a Pharisee, not only before he
accepted Jesus as Messiah, but also afterwards.
As he cried out before the Sanhedrin Council, the highest legislative
council of the Jews, “I am a Pharisee, a
son of Pharisees!” (Acts 23:6). How
could Paul the Pharisee accept the idea that a man was actually God—or to put
the Christian belief more correctly, that God had taken on flesh, and walked
among us?
According to
the New Testament, it wasn't easy. Paul,
known originally as Saul, traveled the region arresting and imprisoning
believers in Jesus (Acts 8:1-3). He started
doing this soon after hearing Stephen's claim to see Jesus standing at the
right hand of God when he spoke before the Sanhedrin Council (“and he said, ‘Look, I see the heavens
opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right of God,’” Acts 7:56). In a Jewish context, this was a claim that
Jesus was God, which was considered a blasphemy by the Council and which caused
them to drag Stephen outside of the city and stone him to death (Acts 7:56-58).
Even Jesus'
disciples were at first resistant to this idea.
Once in Capernaum, when Jesus claimed to be sent from heaven (“I am the living bread that has descended
from heaven...” John 6:51), many of his disciples rejected him and left (“Because of this, many of his disciples went
back and no longer went around with him,” John 6:66). Even after the resurrection, there were some
who doubted (“And when they saw him, they
prostrated before him, but some doubted,” Matt. 28:17). This was just not the kind of teaching that
could easily come from the Jewish people.
Recent scroll
discoveries have shown that in the years just before the time of Jesus, many people
expected the Messiah to have god-like qualities. There are even traces of this in some of the
early rabbinical writings. But the jump
from this to actually being God was a big one. Something almost irresistible had to happen
to convince them that Jesus was God.
It was not
Jesus' miracles: many miracle workers had
appeared in Israel both in ancient history and near to the time of Jesus. Choni the Circle Drawer had appeared just
before the time of Jesus. Every time he
prayed for rain, it rained. But none of
these other miracle workers was ever thought to be God.
It was not
even Jesus' resurrection. Others had
been raised from the dead, like Lazarus, and even ascended into heaven, like
Elijah. The thing that made Jesus unique
was that he alone claimed to be God, a claim that was supported both by his
miracles and the long list of prophecies that he fulfilled. As the blind man healed by Jesus said, “If this man were not from God, he could do
nothing” (John 9:33).
But if
Jesus' claims to be God are so important, why are they missing from the first
three gospels? In fact, they're not
missing. It’s just that they’re presented
in Jewish thought forms that non-Jews—including many scholars—often
misunderstand.
Look for
example at Jesus’ teaching about Psalm 110, one of the psalms of David. Jesus was talking to the Pharisees when he
said, “‘What do you think about the
Messiah? Whose son is he?’ They said to him, ‘The son of David’”
(Matt. 22:42). Here they use the word “son” in the Hebrew sense of being a
descendant of someone. And this was an
easy answer: everyone expected the
Messiah to be descended from King David.
In many of the prophets, the Messiah is simply called “David” in the
sense of a new David.
But then “He said to them, ‘Then how does David in
the Spirit call him lord, saying, “The Lord said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right
until I put your enemies under your feet”’” (Matt. 22:43,44). What does this mean? Here Jesus is quoting Psalm 110, which the
Bible says is a psalm of David, in other words, that it was written by
David. And of course, David wrote these
psalms by the Spirit of God, which is why they’re in the Bible. Everybody also already knew that the two lords in
this verse (“the LORD said to my lord,”
Psalm 110:1) referred to God (the first Lord in Hebrew is YHWH) and the Messiah
(the second lord). What the verse means
is that God is going to give complete victory to the Messiah over all his
enemies.
But the
question of Jesus is, if the Messiah (the second “lord”) is going to be a descendant of David, one of his
great-great-great etc. grandchildren, why does he call him “lord”? Usually the younger
one should show respect to the older, not the older to the younger. So Jesus finishes by saying, “If then David calls him lord, how is he his
son?” (Matt. 22:45). If David calls
the Messiah “lord,” how can he be his
descendant? This was a real
puzzler.
Jesus never
answered his own question. But to the
people listening, the answer was obvious.
If David calls the Messiah “lord,”
then the Messiah is greater than David.
But how can anyone be greater than David, the greatest king of Israel—in
fact, so great that David calls him lord?
This teaching was a strong hint that the Messiah is more than an
ordinary human being.
But this is
not the only time that Jesus referred to Psalm 110. He did it again during his hearing before the
Sanhedrin Council, after the high priest asked him under oath: “And
the high priest said to him, ‘I charge you under oath by the living God, that
you say to us if you are the Messiah, the son of God’” (Matt. 26:63). The high priest is demanding a straight
answer from Jesus, and putting him under oath to get it.
But
something that’s confusing to many people is that for the high priest and for
many others at that time, the term “son of God” did not necessarily mean divine
as we think of it today. It can
have that meaning, but not always. The
Bible teaches, for example, that all believers are sons of God. “For
you all are sons of God through faith in Messiah Jesus” (Gal. 3:26). It also calls angels sons of God (“When the morning stars sang together, And
all the sons of God shouted for joy?” Job 38:7). In Hebrew, “son of God” can just mean godly,
or being in a special relationship with God, since there is no other God but
the one true God. And this is probably
the sense in which the high priest meant it: ‘are you the godly Messiah that the Bible
prophesies about,’ since most people at the time did not expect the Messiah to
be God.
“Jesus said to him, 'You said it. But I say to you, from now on you will see
the Son of Man sitting at the right of the Power (in heaven) and coming on the
clouds of heaven” (Matt. 26:64). Jesus
agreed with the high priest’s statement that he was the Messiah, the son of
God. “You
said it” means ‘what you said is correct’ or ‘I agree.’ Yes, he is the godly Messiah of
prophecy.
But then
Jesus went further. He identified
himself with the heavenly lord of Psalm 110:
sitting at the right of the Power, which means sitting with God himself. And then he combines this with Daniel
7:13: “I was seeing in visions of the night, and look!—with the clouds of the
heavens, one like a son of man was coming.
And he came to the Ancient of Days and they brought him near before him.”
Who is this
son of man? It’s not an earthly
man. It’s a heavenly man. The exact expression here is very important, “one like a son of man.” He looked like a man, but he wasn’t a man,
otherwise it would say “a son of man was coming.” But it doesn’t say that. It says “one
like a son of man.” He looked
like a man, but he was also different than an ordinary man. And this “one
like a son of man” came on the clouds to God in heaven.
This doesn’t
have as much punch for us today as it did for them back then. We’re used to the idea that people go up to
God in heaven when they die. But as we
mentioned the other day, this was not the understanding in Jesus’ day. The souls of the dead went to Hades, the
realm of the dead. Even for those who
believed the good side of Hades was in the heavens, as the Church believed,
this was not in the direct presence of God.
Paradise was in a lower heaven than the highest heaven where God the
Father was. The direct revelation of the
Father to us, face to face, will only be after the resurrection. So for this one like a son of man to be
presented before the Father in heaven was an incredibly awesome thing. It implied that he was different than all
other men, that he was divine.
When Jesus
combined this with Psalm 110, it meant that the place where the Messiah was
sitting to the right of God was in heaven!
Now this was also something incredible, because to sit with God in
heaven meant to rule with God in heaven!
But only God can rule from heaven!
Right! So this, too, meant that
the Messiah was God!
This is why,
when Jesus said this, “Then the high priest
tore his clothes, saying, ‘He blasphemed!
What need do we still have of witnesses?
Look, you have now heard blasphemy’” (Matt. 26:65). Blasphemy is a very serious sin. The custom when you heard blasphemy was to
rip your clothes. It was just as if you
heard that somebody died. Because the
penalty for blasphemy was death.
But what did
Jesus say that was a blasphemy? He said
that he himself, the Messiah, was equal to God, which meant he was God. To their minds, for a man to claim this
insulted the holiness and the majesty of God, and so it was a blasphemy. But notice also that this is the only
way in which Jesus’ words could be taken as a blasphemy. They clearly understood that he was claiming
to be God.
Another
example is Luke 5, where Jesus healed the paralytic. We spoke about this the other day. The crowd listening to Jesus was so big, the friends
of the sick man had to dig a hole in the roof to let him down before
Jesus. Most of us overlook what Jesus then
said to the man, "Your sins are
forgiven" (Luke 5:20). But the
Jewish leaders had a strong reaction: They
called his words blasphemy (“Who is this
that speaks blasphemies? Who is able to
forgive sins but God alone?” Luke 5:21).
Why were they so upset about this?
According to Jewish thinking there were two kinds of sins: sins against your fellow man, and sins
against God. For Jesus to say that all
the man’s sins were forgiven included sins committed against God, which according
to the rabbis could only be forgiven by God himself.
They did not
misunderstand Jesus. Rather he pressed the point, saying, "'But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on the earth
to forgive sins,' he said to the paralytic, 'I say to you, get up, pick up your
mat, and go to your home" (Luke 5:24).
In a Jewish context, for the Son of Man to have the authority to forgive
sins can only mean one thing: that the
Son of Man is God!
Even Jesus'
use of the title "Son of Man"
points to his divinity. I’ve heard many
teach that the title Son of Man refers to Jesus’ humanity. But this is incorrect. For Jesus’ disciples, the “Son of Man”
referred to the "one like a son of
man" coming on the clouds of heaven in Daniel 7:13. This is something that no ordinary human can
do.
It was not just
the miracle that amazed the people (“And
they were all seized with amazement and were glorifying God and were filled
with fear, saying, ‘We have seen remarkable things today!’” Luke 5:26). It was Jesus' claim to be God—a claim
supported by the miracle that followed!
When Jesus
went to preach in his home town of Nazareth, the people were at first happy to
listen to him (“And all were bearing
witness of him and were wondering at the gracious words that were going out
from his mouth, and they were saying, ‘Isn’t this the son of Joseph?’” Luke
4:22). They were hoping to see miracles
like he had done in Capernaum (“And he
said to them, ‘No doubt you will say to me this proverb, “Physician, heal
yourself”; do things as great as we have heard took place in Capernaum here in
your hometown, too,’” Luke 4:23). But
by the end of his message, they were ready to kill him. Why?
On the
surface, there's nothing unusual about Jesus' sermon (“But in truth I say to you, there were many widows in the days of
Elijah in Israel, when heaven was shut up for three years and six months, as a
great famine was on all the land; and Elijah was sent to none of them, but only
to a widow woman in Zarephath of Sidon,” Luke 4:25,26). He simply said that in the time of Elijah,
many widows in Israel weren’t helped by the prophet, but only a Gentile woman
in Sidon.
He also said
that in the time of Elisha many lepers in Israel were not healed (“And there were many lepers in Israel in the
time of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the
Syrian,” Luke 4:27). Only a
foreigner, Naaman was healed. What’s so
bad about that? What did he say that
upset them so much?
His
listeners were very familiar with the stories of the prophets Elijah and Elisha. Much of their ministry had taken place in the
countryside around them. So they knew
that the reason no miracles had taken place in those days was because
the nation had fallen into idolatry, led by King Ahab and his Phoenician wife,
Jezebel. And because of this, they
immediately understood Jesus' deeper meaning:
that the reason he did so few miracles in Nazareth was
because of their hardness of heart toward God.
He was comparing them to the generation of Jezebel!
By saying
this, Jesus was in effect judging the hearts of the people. This was very serious. Because they believed that only God had the
right to judge people’s hearts. For
Jesus to judge them like this was a claim that he was equal to God. As even the New Testament teaches, "There is one lawgiver and judge that
is able to save and to destroy: but who
are you that judges his neighbor?" (James 4:12). Only God has the right to judge. But since the people of Nazareth did not
accept that Jesus was God, to them his words were a blasphemy, worthy of
death. That's why they marched him out
of town to throw him off the cliff (“and
having got up, they threw him out of the city and led him to the edge of the
mountain on which the city was built so that they might throw him down from a
cliff,” Luke 4:29). They understood very
clearly that he was claiming to be God.
The same is
true of the other times Jesus pronounced judgment: "Woe
to you, Chorazin, woe to you, Bethsaida:
for if the deeds of power that took place in you had taken place in Tyre
and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I say to you, it will be more bearable in
the day of judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you" (Matt.
11:21,22). Chorazin and Bethsaida were
small Jewish villages, but they had not repented when they saw the miracles of Jesus. So it will be better in the day of judgment
for Tyre and Sidon, two big, pagan cities.
Jesus doesn't speak here using the typical formulas of the Old Testament
prophets. He does not say, “Thus says
the LORD.” Rather, he says "I say to you," relying on
none other than his own authority. Here
too, Jesus claims to be God.
The ultimate
expression of this claim is in Matthew 25:31, where Jesus describes the coming
of the Messiah, seated on his "throne
of glory." (“But when the Son of Man comes in his glory,
and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his throne of glory.”) This is not just a “glorious throne,” as some
translate it, but a “throne of glory,” which
in the original language implies a throne of heavenly glory.
This idea of
a heavenly throne for the Messiah was familiar to Jesus’ disciples from Psalm
89:36,37. Here the Messiah is described
as "a faithful witness in the cloud."
(The structure in Hebrew, known as a
chiasm, tells us not that the moon will be a faithful witness, as sometimes translated,
but the Messiah himself.)
“His seed will
be forever,
And his throne as the sun before me
As the moon it will be established forever
And (he will be)
a faithful witness in the cloud [ba’shakhaq].”
Where is this
Messianic throne? Many translate it “in
the sky.” But the Hebrew word used here,
ba’shakhaq, means “in the cloud.” The throne of the Messiah will be in the
cloud, just as Jesus says in Matt. 24:30: “and
they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and
great glory.”
In Matthew
25, the Son of Man judges in his own name and by his own authority (“Then he will also say to those on his left,
'Go away from me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire that is prepared
for the devil and his angels,” Matt. 25:41). There is no “Thus says the Lord.” What does he say instead? “Go
away from me.” And the
judgment he pronounces condemns the wicked to eternal judgment—to Gehenna (the “eternal fire”). This is a power only God has. For Jesus to claim it is a claim to be
God.
Perhaps the
most dramatic of these claims took place on the Sea of Galilee, after the
disciples had been struggling all night in their boat against a strong westerly
wind. Though Jesus had been left behind
on the shore, he now suddenly appeared, walking on the water (“But the boat was already many hundreds of meters
away from the land, battered by the waves; for the wind was contrary. And in
the fourth watch of the night he came to them, walking on the sea,” Matt.
14:24,25).
Mark adds
the detail that "he intended to pass
by them" (Mark 6:48). Why is
this important? It’s a hint to Job 9,
which says, speaking of God: "who alone stretches out the heavens
and treads on the heights of the sea…. See, he passes by me, and I do not see; and
he goes by, and I do not discern him" (Job 9:8,11). What does this mean? The only one who walks on the sea is
God. If Jesus is walking on the sea, he
is God.
When the
disciples cry out in fear, Jesus turns to talk with them (“But immediately he spoke to them, saying, ‘Take courage, I am; don't
be afraid,” Matt. 14:27). He didn’t say
"it is I" as usually translated (in English, also in Chinese); but as
Matthew, Mark, and Luke all agree in the original Greek, "I am." This is
not a mistake: it's a deliberate hint to
the personal name of God revealed to Moses: “And God said to Moses, ‘I am that I am.’ And he said, ‘This is what you will say to
the sons of Israel, “I am sent me to you”’” (Ex. 3:14). Here God reveals himself as the great “I
am.” When Jesus says that he is the “I
am,” he is claiming to be God.
How did the
disciples react to all of this? They bowed
down to him, a word in Greek that means to prostrate yourself, face to the
ground (“But those in the boat bowed down
to him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God,’” Matt. 14:33). It was not only Jesus' miracle that impressed
them; it was his claim to be God backed up by the miracles of walking on the
sea and calming the wind. This is what
made them fall down in worship. They may
not have understood how God could become a man.
But they saw the result with their own eyes.
By the way,
they did not then and never could, as Jews, have believed that Jesus was a god
different than the one true God. For
them, there was only one God, so it could only be that one true God that
somehow stood before them in human flesh.
For this manifestation of God they had a name, "the Son of God" (or as John clarifies the expression, “the only begotten Son” of God, in John
3:16); for it was clear that the world went on, the stars continued to shine,
and God in heaven continued to rule the universe as he always had before. God had not left heaven to appear before
them. But he sent an "extension"
or "manifestation" of himself: his Word, his arm, his face, his
glory, his likeness, his salvation—whichever of the many Biblical names you
would like to use for this incredible phenomenon; a personal manifestation of
God's presence sent to earth to speak directly to us. That personal manifestation, in the flesh, is
Jesus.
Many people,
when they hear that Jesus is the “son” of God, think this means that he is a
different person, a different being than the Father, like a human father and
son are two different beings. But this
implies that there are two gods, not one God, an idea that the Bible rejects.
In fact,
sonship has a very different and specific meaning in its original Jewish
context and in the Hebrew language. Being
a “son of” someone often implies that you share the same character. For example, Job 41:34 mentions the “sons of pride.” This just means people who are proud. They share the character of pride. It doesn’t mean that “pride” is their
physical father. It’s talking about resemblance
rather than physical descent. When the
Bible calls someone a “son of the devil,”
as in Acts 13:10, this doesn’t mean he is physically a son of the devil, but
that he shares the character of the devil.
You could also say that he shares the spirit of the devil. But this doesn’t mean he is a child by birth. It only means that Satan has planted thoughts
and ideas in his mind that he has accepted, and so has become like the
devil.
Jesus speaks
in Matt. 8:12 and 13:38 of the “sons of
the kingdom.” These are not
descendants of the kingdom. It just means
that they are people who will participate in the kingdom of God. They have the character and nature of the people
who are in God’s kingdom. This is also
true in Luke 20:36, when Jesus mentions “sons
of God” and “sons of the
resurrection.” These are people who
share the character of God and who will rise in the resurrection of the
righteous. Luke 20:34 mentions: “the
sons of this age.” John 12:36 mentions
“sons of light.” And there are many others.
All these
expressions refer to character, not birth.
In the same way, when Jesus is called the Son of God, this does not mean
that he is an offspring in the ordinary physical meaning of that word. He is not a child in the sense of being a
separate and distinct being from God the Father. Rather, he is a part of the one true God, an
extension of God to us: the arm of God. But this spiritual extension or part of God
shares the Father’s character and nature.
That’s why he is called the Son of God.
Not because he is a separate being, but because he is an accurate image
or representation of the Father to us.
As it says
in Heb. 1:3: “Who being the radiance of the glory (of the Father) and a
representation of his nature...” Jesus
is the radiance of God’s glory, just like the light of the sun that we see is a
radiance of the sun. And just as this
radiance of the sun is what brings us an image of the sun, in the same way,
Jesus is the image that we can see of the Father. But this radiance is not of a different nature
than the sun; it’s part of what the sun itself is: it’s an extension of the sun to us. And that’s what Jesus is to us of the Father.
As it says
in Col. 1:15: “who is the image of the invisible God,
firstborn of all creation.” Jesus is
the image of the Father sent to us. In
him, we see the Father. By the way, the “firstborn of all creation” here does
not mean that Jesus was the first thing made in the Creation, as this is
sometimes misunderstood. In Jewish
society at the time, the firstborn son was the heir of his father, he inherited
most of the father’s estate. For Jesus
to be the firstborn means that he is the heir of all creation, that he is in
authority with the Father over all creation.
Exactly how
Jesus, who was a real man, could also be God is a mystery the Bible does not
explain. Yet it does say, over and over
again, that he is God, as he himself clearly claimed in so many
different ways. Whether people believe it
or not is a different question. But to
say that he never claimed to be God, as many do, is clearly false. This is not a belief that the disciples would
have made up for themselves. As
believing Jews, it was quite difficult for them to accept. But they did finally believe it, because the
claims of Jesus were backed up by his miracles, and by his fulfilling prophecy,
over and over again.
I don’t
claim to know how God became a man. But
if God is real, why wouldn't he come to visit?
Not in the full revelation of his power, of course. That would destroy us (Ex. 33:20); but in the
appearance of a man to lead us back to himself.
The disciples saw him with their own eyes, and were convinced by what
they saw and heard (1 John 1:1-3). What
about you? Do you accept Jesus' claim to
be God?
