Jesus warns in Matthew 7:15-16a, “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them.” Christendom is filled with them. They are false teachers who masquerade as genuine Christian preachers but their messages lack the authenticity of the true gospel and they covertly proclaim a different Jesus than the Jesus of the Holy Bible.
Pseudo Christian organizations such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, LDS (Mormonism), progressive Christianity and propagators of the prosperity gospel fall into this category. On the surface, they all claim to preach Jesus Christ but they discreetly deny what the Bible says about Him in one way or another. And by reinventing Jesus they have in fact created the very false Messiahs that Jesus warned of in Matthew 24:24.
Truth is absolute, it is exclusive and it can be offensive to those who cannot accept it. The divinity of Jesus Christ is a case in point. This truth offended the first century Pharisees and it offends false Christians and other religions today. It is therefore incumbent upon authentic Christians to know how the scriptures irrefutably prove that Jesus the man is God incarnate, in order to defend their faith.
Who is God?
Fundamental to this argument is to determine who God is. The Holy Bible is recognized as God’s word and by extension it is the ultimate authority regarding God, therefore it is to the Bible that we turn to discover His truth.
Isaiah 48:12, boldly proclaims, “Listen to Me, O Jacob, Israel, whom I have called: I am He; I am the first and I am the last.” Here, the Lord conveys His eternal nature as existing before everything was created and after everything passes away.
In Isaiah 44:6, the prophet wrote, “This is what the Lord says – Israel’s King and Redeemer, the Lord Almighty: I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God.” Here again, we are left with no uncertainty that God claims there is only one. One God, one first and one last (see also Isaiah 42:8, and Isaiah 45:21).
Additionally, in Isaiah 43:10b-11, we find, “Before me no God was formed, nor will there be one after Me. I, even I, am the Lord, and apart from Me there is no Savior.” God explicitly declares that He is exclusively the true living God and the only savior of mankind.
These Old Testament passages definitively articulate who God is and that He alone is God. In the New Testament, the apostle John’s writings concur with the prophet Isaiah’s, as one would expect, since God does not lie and He never contradicts Himself.
In Revelation 1:8, John records, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, ‘who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.’” Once again, God depicts Himself as eternal and omnipotent. Moving along to Revelation 4:8, we find four living creatures worshipping God day and night and saying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.”
Later, in Revelation 21:6 John is told, “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.” And also in Revelation 22:13, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” The scripture is consistently and obviously still talking about the one and only living God.
In Revelation 1:17-18, John is told “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last, I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever! Here it is disclosed that the one who is the First and the Last…. died and rose again from the dead. Throughout the previous passages God is depicted as eternal and alone, and here we see these very same godly attributes unequivocally being applied to someone who has resurrected from the grave.
There is more! Revelation 2:8 declares, “To the angel of the church of Smyrna write: These are the words of Him who is the First and the Last, who died and came to life again.” How many firsts and lasts can there be? There can only be one, otherwise there would be one first and one second, and one last and one second last. Similarly, there is only one person who conquered death.
Unlimited Power
The Almighty is omnipotent, limitless, infinite, sovereign and omnipresent therefore, there is no logical reason to believe that he cannot incarnate as the man Jesus Christ. Jesus is God in bodily form. Fully human and fully God. The apostle Paul, who knew the Hebrew scriptures intimately, acknowledged this truth (despite not being able to accept it initially), 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: things 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.”
When we examine Isaiah 48, in verse 13, we find, “My own hand laid the foundations of the earth, my right hand spread out the heavens; when I summon them, they all stand up together,” Furthermore, Isaiah 40:12 proclaims, “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, or with the breadth of His hand marked off the heavens? Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket, or weighed the mountains on the scales and the hills in the balance?”
Our finite minds have trouble comprehending an infinite God, who’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts and whose ways are higher than our ways (Isaiah 55:8-9). Therefore, our Creator took the initiative and bridged the gap between abstract and concrete by manifesting Himself as a human in the man Jesus Christ, the Messiah.
1 John 5:20 teaches us, “We know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know Him who is true. And we are in Him who is true – even in His Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.” False teachers will imply that Jesus is the son but not the Son. However, the Bible clearly teaches that the Son is divine.
In Psalm 2:11-12 David writes, “Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest He become angry and you be destroyed in your way, for His wrath can flare up in a moment. Blessed are all who take refuge in Him.” David uses a capital S for Son in this passage, written nearly a thousand years before Christ.
The mystery of Christ’s divinity challenges us to deeply analyse God’s word. Jesus was spoken of ambiguously in the Old Testament in order to prevent the powers of darkness from understanding God’s plan of salvation (kindly refer to The Biblical Jesus, September, 16, 2023). But He is there, in Isaiah 53 Psalm 2, Proverbs 30 and other revelations.
Proverbs 30:4 says, “Who has gone up to heaven and come down? Who has gathered up the wind in the hollow of His hands? Who has wrapped up the waters in His cloak? Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is His name and the name of His Son?”
Jesus says in John 5:46, “If you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me.” (See Genesis 3:15, Genesis 12:3, Genesis 49:10 and Deuteronomy 18:15). And perhaps the most renowned statement by Jesus regarding his true identity is recorded in John 8:58, where He declares, “I tell you the truth, before Abraham was born, I AM!”
Paul informs us in 1 Timothy 3:16, “Beyond all question, the mystery of godliness is great: He appeared in a body, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, was taken up in glory.”
In John 14:1-3, Jesus predicted that he would ascend back to heaven from where He came from. “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in Me. In My Father’s house there are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with Me that you also may be where I am.”
And in Titus 2:11-13, Paul proclaims, “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope – the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for Himself a people that are His very own, eager to do what is good.”
Paul wrote in 1 Timothy 4:10, “that we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, and especially those who believe.” This declaration is in agreement with Isaiah 43:11 (mentioned earlier). This same savior status is applied to Christ in Acts 4:12, which states, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.” Philippians 2:10-11 also declares this same truth.
Jesus is coming back. And He will gather us and take us to the place He has prepared for us. This is what Christians live for! In Philippians 3:20 we are told, “But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ,” In Romans 10:13, Paul proclaims, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” And 1 John 4:14 declares, “And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent His Son to be the Savior of the world.” Praise be to God!
Jude 1:24 says, “To Him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you before His glorious presence without fault and with great joy – to the only God and Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen!”
It is crucial that believers exercise discernment when they are presented with variants of Jesus that seem distorted when compared with the lucid portrayal of Christ in the Holy Bible. Beware of false teachers such as Charles Taze Russell, Joseph Smith, prosperity gospel preachers or anyone advocating gay marriage or the ordaining of gay pastors. Beware of anyone who diminishes the gospel by taking away from it or adding to it and those who repudiate the authenticity and the authority of the Bible.
Jesus said, “Every plant that My heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. Leave them; they are blind guides. If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:13-14). His comments referenced the Pharisees, however, there have been numerous similarly deplorable misrepresentations of God in Christian history by religious leaders that even include the office of the pope.
When Jesus said, I and the Father are one” (John 10:30), He meant that He and God were so intertwined that there was no way of telling them apart. That He was consubstantial and inseparable from God because He was God. When He told Philip, “Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9), He conveyed to him that anyone who saw Jesus had laid his eyes upon the LORD.
The truth about Jesus is that He is God and anyone who preaches a different Jesus is a false teacher of a counterfeit Christ. There can only be one first and one last. There is only one God and the Bible calls Him Elohim (Genesis 1:1), El Roi (Genesis 16:13), El Shaddai (Genesis 17:1), Yahweh Yireh (Genesis 22:14), Yahweh Rophe (Exodus 15:26), (Psalm 23:1), Prince of Peace (Iasaiah 9:6), ), and Yeshua HaMashiach (Philippians 2:10).
The last word goes to the apostle Paul who declares in Romans 10:9-13, “That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. As the scripture says, ‘Anyone who trusts in Him will never be put to shame.’ For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile – the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on Him, for ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.'”
