Who is Jesus? Is He merely some historical persona that is distant and removed from today’s society or is He something more? Is He only a prophet, just a good teacher, or simply a moral role model? He has been written about more than any other man in the history of men and is easily the most influential man in history.
Jesus is revealed in the pages of the Bible through intertwined confessions and testimonies that span over 1600 years and forty authors. Over 350 Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled in His birth, life, death and resurrection. The biblical Jesus is at times notably humble and conspicuously simple, at other times He is ambiguous and complex, often candid and always unequivocally honest.
In the first chapter of John’s gospel we are given insight into the divine nature and omnipotent characteristics of Jesus Christ. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made.” (John 1:1-3).
The apostle Paul wrote in Colossians 1:15-17, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.”
Jesus preceded the dawn of creation and the genesis of the world. He pre-existed before mankind was conceived and He predestined those who would become His children throughout history. He is the author and finisher of our faith. In his divine foreknowledge He devised the perfect plan of redemption that satisfied the holiness and just nature of God while empathetically addressing the fallen nature of man while discreetly circumventing the spiritual principalities and powers of darkness that would endeavor to impede salvation.
John 17 records Jesus’ prayer on the night He was betrayed. He looked toward heaven and prayed: “Father, the time has come. Glorify Your Son, that Your Son may glorify You. For You granted Him authority over all people that He might give eternal life to all those You have given Him. Now this is eternal life: that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent. I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify Me in your presence with the glory I had with You before the world began.” (John 17:1-5).
As Messiah, Jesus’ divinity and pre-eminence are evident in His words and He articulates that He is one with the Father and He prays that all who believe His message would experience this same unity (John 17:20-23).
Discreet Divinity
It was incumbent upon Jesus to be ambiguous concerning His true identity until the appropriate time in order to preserve His physical life until He could carry out His divine mission. Once the demons knew who Jesus was (Mathew 8-28-29), it became crucial that His strategy remain a secret so the powers of evil could not undermine God’s plan. In 1 Corinthians 2:7-8 Paul discloses why. “No, we speak of God’s secret wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”
In addition to being convoluted regarding His Messiah status so that the spiritual principalities and powers would not know His plan for the atonement of sins, He needed to be evasive with the religious leaders in order to keep them from derailing His mission. If He openly proclaimed Himself as Messiah, the people would have tried to impose upon Him their ideology of a military savior who would overthrow the Romans, thereby supplanting God’s plan for salvation.
Driven by faithfulness to His Father, and with a motive to fulfill prophecy and His mission, it was vital for Jesus to evade the many attempts of the religious establishment to trap Him before His appointed time. Under Jewish laws, execution was to be carried out by stoning and Roman laws forbid execution for crimes related to Jewish religion, which meant the Jews needed to have the Romans execute Him. The Romans needed a scape goat to appease the Jews. And Jesus needed to be the unblemished Lamb, sacrificed for the sins of all people.
As it turned out, the physical enemies of Christ and their spiritual influencers did exactly what God required for the success of His redemptive strategy. They never saw Christ’s resurrection coming and inadvertently were the catalysts that brought about His sacrifice and ultimately the salvation of the world and judgement upon themselves.
At the eleventh hour, Jesus candidly answered the high priest’s question, “’Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed one?’ ‘I am,’ said Jesus, ‘And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.’ The high priest tore his clothes.” At that moment, by referencing Daniel’s prophetic vision (Daniel 7:13), Jesus left no doubt about His divinity and initiated the sequence of events that would lead to the culmination of His earthly mission. With the charge of blasphemy formally laid, there would be no turning back as the final details of His master plan were set in motion, completely blindsiding His adversaries and advancing His atonement and victory over death.
Supreme Authority
The Lord is sovereign (Isaiah 25:8-9), and Jesus is Lord (Romans 10:9). Around 530 BC, Daniel prophesied, “He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language worshipped Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and His kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.” (Daniel 7:14). In Matthew 28:18, Jesus proclaimed, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me.”
Paul wrote of the incomparably great power found in Christ in Ephesians 1:19-23: “That power is like the working of His mighty strength, which He exerted in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under His feet and appointed Him to be head over everything for the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way.”
Additionally, in Philippians 2:9-11, Paul tells us, “Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the Name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow in heaven and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
Jesus said in John 10:17-18, “I lay down my life – only to take it up again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again.” And in doing so, Jesus conquered death and sin and now holds the keys to death and hades (Revelation 1:18).
One day Jesus Christ will judge the living and the dead (2 Timothy 4:1), and scripture tells us that believers will appear before the judgement seat of Christ (2 Corinthians 5:10).
Jesus Is God
The use of El and Elohim in scripture to reference the one true God signifies the plurality of His triune nature through the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The Bible says Jesus is timeless. He is outside of time and in fact, He created time. Hebrews 13:8 teaches us that, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and today and forever.” These are the very same attributes of God and corroborate the testimony given in John 8;58, where Jesus declared, “Before Abraham was, I AM!” His words were intentional and His audience fully understood Him and immediately picked up rocks to stone Him. If Jesus never claimed to be God, He never would have been crucified.
Who is Jesus? Is Christ nothing more than a storybook savior? Just a good moral teacher? Some distant historical personality that lived long ago and impacted humanity once but whose legacy has been diminished by modern culture? Is He just one of many ways to God? Even His disciples had trouble wrapping their minds around the panoptic character of Jesus. In Matthew 16:15, He asks them, “Who do you say I am?”
To proclaim an objective truth, as the Bible does, is to dismiss all other truth claims as falsehoods. Absolute truth is exclusive truth. Acts 4:12 tells us, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.” And in John 14:6 Jesus declared, “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” Furthermore, Colossians 2:9 asserts, “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” Jesus is fully God and fully human.
Christ Himself warned us of false Messiahs. He said, “Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in My name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many” (Matthew 24:4-5). If the Jesus we believe in isn’t the biblical Jesus, He is ultimately something less, and cannot be the same Jesus. If we espouse a different version of Jesus, we then will be worshiping something other than the Jesus who is God incarnate, and thus a different God, which is idolatry.
Don’t allow time to abate the historical Jesus and belie the true Savior of humanity. I implore you to be completely and unashamedly biblical in the Jesus you worship. To embrace the total, unabbreviated, biblical Jesus Christ. Not only the Jesus of the gospels but the Jesus of Genesis and Revelation. Not just the Jesus that saves but the Jesus that judges. The Jesus who created the heavens and the earth and possesses all authority and power. The First and the Last of Revelation 1:18; the Alpha and the Omega of Revelation 22:13; the “one who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.” (Revelation 1:8).
