Jesus Is God
Who is Jesus?
Today we’ll see that Jesus is God, next week we’ll see that Jesus is human, and then for three weeks we’ll consider how Jesus is prophet, priest, and king. These sermons will be somewhat different than usual, as we’ll be jumping around the Bible instead of mainly focusing on one passage.
Some of what we’ll cover may feel abstract or impractical, but let’s remember what the first question of the WSC teaches us, that our ultimate purpose is to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” As wonderful as it will be in heaven and the New Creation to enjoy one another and the tasks God will give us there, the best thing about eternity will be the joyful contemplation of God in and through Christ.
As we consider the divinity of Christ, let’s start with a basic overview of what the Bible teaches about God.
God Is One. God Is Three.
According to the Bible God is one but God is also three — he is a trinity. There is one and only one God, but this one God is also three persons.
Already this morning we have heard that in the baptism of Sawyer — for Jesus commanded his church to baptize his disciples in the one name of the Father and of the Son and of the Spirit.
Of course this idea that God can be one in one sense and three in another sense is deeply mysterious; many have scoffed at the idea of the Trinity as hopelessly contradictory. But a contradictory untruth is not the same thing as a mysterious truth. We are finite human creatures who will never ever be able to even come close to knowing God fully, since he is not just a bigger version of us, but an infinitely greater and different reality than us.
In its first four centuries the church worked very hard through many controversies in order to best explain what the Bible says about God’s threeness and oneness and how these relate to the person of Jesus. The language they landed on was this — God is one in essence — in “whatness” — but three in person: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All three persons are fully the one God.
When we say that God is three “persons” we do not mean that they are three personalities, or three minds, or three gods, or three names, or three angles, or three pieces, or three updates. This language of “persons” is a way of recognizing that the Father, Son, and Spirit are distinct without being divided. Each of the three persons has a unique, individual, and eternal existence in relationship to the other two.
There was never a time when the one God was not three persons-in-relation. All three are equally and eternally God, all fully sharing in God’s “whatness”: his glory, power, beauty, infinity, majesty, knowledge, holiness, righteousness, and love. But the three persons really are distinct, with their own personal properties: the Father is the one who is eternally unbegotten, the Son is the one who is eternally begotten, the Spirit is the one who is eternally proceeding from the Father through the Son.
Listen to how Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck describes God’s threefold relationality: “God is no abstract, fixed, monadic, solitary substance, but a plenitude of life. It is his nature to be generative and fruitful…Those who deny this fecund productivity fail to take seriously the fact that God is an infinite fullness of blessed life.”
This is how we can explain the way the Bible talks about the one true God, and yet at the same time what it means when it describes Jesus as the one who has always been the Son of God.
Listen to how Jesus is described in John 1. John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” “The Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John describes Jesus as simultaneously with God at the creation of the universe, but also as God.
Or down in verse 14: “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” — the eternal Son took on human flesh and came to live with us — “and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.” The Word is the glorious Son who is God, and with God, and from the Father. John says something similar in verse 18: “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side; he has made him known.”
Jesus is the eternal Son now enfleshed, the only God who reveals the unseeable God because he is the one who has always been at the Father’s side. The Father is God. The Word is God. And yet the Father is distinct from the Son since the Son eternally is with and eternally coming from him.
The Incarnation of the Son
First, let’s consider his identity as the incarnate Son.
HIS IDENTITY
Jesus is the eternal Son, the second Person of the Trinity, now become and forever remaining human, while remaining fully divine. He was not a man who had a particularly powerful experience of God, or a man who came to recognize that we are all God, he’s not even a man who became divine. The current #1 selling book about Jesus on Amazon, by Richard Rohr, sets the historical Jesus against the universal Christ, defining “Christ” as “a name for . . . every ‘thing’ in the universe.”
No — the Bible shows us that Jesus is one person, in two natures: fully and truly possessing our human nature, and fully and truly possessing God’s divine nature.
We see the incarnation of the eternal Son already in Luke 1, which I read earlier, where the angel Gabriel announces the virgin birth of Jesus to Mary. Luke has already made sure we understand that the Son became Jesus in a particular time and place — he names the village of Nazareth in verse 26, and earlier, in v 5, he’d named for us the local ruler in power at the time. This is no abstract myth, but an announcement of historical events that really happened, about how God really did enter into our world.
In verse 31 Gabriel tells her that her child will be named “Jesus,” which means “YHWH saves.” Even in his name we already see that he is the God who saves.
Back in Luke 1 verse 32 Jesus is described as “the Son of the Most High,” a reference to his eternal sonship as the second person of the Trinity. In 1:35 we hear this: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you, therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.”
You see here all three persons of the Trinity united in the mystery of the incarnation — Mary overshadowed by the power of the Most High, the Father; by his Holy Spirit coming upon her; so that the child conceived in her womb apart from any human father will be uniquely holy, as the Son of God. He really is human…but at the same time this one person really is divine…he is the eternal Son of God who has now become the son of Mary.
You see this too a bit further down in Luke 1, when Mary goes to visit her elderly cousin Elizabeth, who herself is miraculously pregnant with John the Baptist. When the pregnant Mary walks in, baby John joyfully jumps in his womb. In verse 43 she calls Mary the “mother of my Lord,” acknowledging that Jesus is the Lord, the one God Yahweh, but then in verse 45 Elizabeth refers to the message Mary received “from the Lord.” The Father who sent the angel to Mary is the Lord, but the human baby in her womb is also the Lord.
Once again, you see this way down in verse 76 where Zechariah describes his son John as the “prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord - [Jesus] - to prepare his ways.”
But we don’t only see this in the early chapters of the Gospels — all through the New Testament we see these amazing claims about Jesus that he really is God. These are particularly striking because they are made by devout Jews, who of course were staunchly monotheistic.
In Romans 9:5 Paul describes Jesus as “the Christ, who is God overall, blessed forever.”
In Colossians 2:9 we hear that “in [Jesus] the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily,” and in Hebrews 1:3 that Jesus is “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.”
Jesus also made claims of divinity about himself. In John 8:58 Jesus spoke of his eternal pre-existence when he said “before Abraham was, I am,” echoing God’s description of himself to Moses in Exodus 3 as YHWH, “I am who I am.”
In John 10:30 Jesus claims that “I and the Father are one,” and then his fellow Jews try to kill him for blasphemy because they realize he’s claiming to be God.
And, last example, at the end of Matthew 26, at Jesus’s trial before the Jewish leadership, he remains silent until they ask him under oath if he’s “the Christ, the Son of God.” Jesus says yes, then quotes from Daniel 7, affirming that he is the “Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.” The leaders scream in rage: “He has uttered blasphemy!”, since he openly claims to be this divine Son of Man sharing in God's rule over the world.
HIS ACTIONS
First, Jesus reveals God. We already heard in John 1:18 how Jesus has come as God from the Father’s side to “make God known.” In John 14:9 Jesus says that “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” In Hebrews 1:2–3 says this: “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son,” or more literally, “spoken to us in-Son.”
Jesus is the climactic and final revelation to creation and humanity of who God is and what he does. By the words, actions, emotions, desires, and character of Jesus, we clearly though not exhaustively see what God is truly like.
Jesus reveals God not only through his words and character but also through his miracles. His miracles. Now it’s important to understand that Jesus didn’t do miracles merely because he was God — as if he was setting aside his humanity every once in a while to do some cool God-tricks with his God-superpowers.
Instead, everything he did and does he is doing as one person — as a man who relies on the Holy Spirit, though a man who is also divine. The miracles reveal to us who he is, and what his kingdom is like.
His first miracle, in John 2, was to turn water into wine at a wedding, revealing to us that he really is the God who joyfully created the universe and sustains it in all its life and abundance. We see the same thing in his miraculous feeding of the 5000 by turning a bit of bread and fish into an enormously satisfying feast — the only miracle described by all four Gospel accounts.
Or the story about Jesus stilling the storm on the Sea of Galilee after falling asleep in the boat, such as in Mark 4:35ff. After calming the wind and waves, the disciples respond by fearfully questioning his identity: “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
So, then, this is not really a story about how God is with us in the storms of life, even though that’s true…it’s about the identity of Jesus. The point of the miracle is to show that he is the God who rules over his entire creation, even its chaos and misery.
But his authority goes far beyond the physical world. Jesus repeatedly battles and defeats demons, rescuing the vulnerable from their oppression. When Jesus confronts these demons they immediately confess his divinity, such as in Mark 1:24: “I know who you are — the Holy One of God!”. The exorcisms of Jesus show us that he is the God who rules both the material and the spiritual worlds.
Jesus also rules over sin and all its consequences. Because he is God he has the authority to totally and finally forgive sin. You see this in his healing of the paralytic, Mark 2, where before dealing with the man’s paralysis he first says, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” The religious leaders angrily respond in 2:7, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” They are right that only God can ultimately forgive sins, but they refuse to see that Jesus is this one forgiving God.
The ultimate basis of God’s forgiveness is Jesus’s greatest action as the God-man — his death and resurrection, the very reason he took on human flesh. The cross and empty tomb show us more than anything else that Jesus is the God who rules, saves, and forgives.
1 Peter 3:18 tells us that Jesus died on the cross, as “the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.” Who is worthy to reconcile us to God but God himself? And how could he reconcile humans to God unless he were himself truly human? Jesus’s death was of infinite worth and power because of the infinite majesty of his person as the God-man.
And because he was truly divine, he could not stay dead in the tomb. Acts 2:24 tells us that “it was not possible for him to be held by [death].” Why? Because he is the living God, the eternal Son anointed with God’s Holy Spirit as his king over creation.
And because he is in himself eternal life, he can give us eternal life. John 6:51: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.” And because he lives forever, and we now live in union with him by faith, he will never and can never abandon us. John 14:18-19: “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you…Because I live, you also will live.”
Application
Because Jesus is God, we should revere Jesus. Let’s not treat him as a buddy or a boyfriend, as a therapist or a consultant, as a genie or a co-pilot. He is God himself. So let’s worship and listen to him and obey him with reverence, with humility, with awe, recognizing that I and my desires are nothing, and he and his desires are everything.
Because Jesus is God, we should strive to know God in and through him. Many people think that the God of the Old Testament is mean and the God of the New Testament is nice. But Jesus is the one God of the entire Bible, of the entire universe, of all eternity. In him we do see God’s fearsome anger against sin and selfishness, against hypocrisy and apathy, against death and Satan.
But we also see in Jesus God’s marvelous merciful, compassionate, grace toward anyone who will receive it. And we see God’s wrath and love come together most clearly on the cross. So let’s seek to know God in Christ, and let’s especially seek to know Christ through the cross.Because Jesus is God, we should expect mercy. The eternal Father loves the eternal Son in the eternal Spirit. So, if now by faith we are united to the Son through the Spirit, how could God not also love and bless and secure us, not only now, but forever?
If we are in the beloved Son of the Father by the Spirit, how could God ever do his adopted and beloved children any wrong? Shouldn’t we trust him even when we suffer, even when we don’t understand what he’s up to?The God who can never deny his own love for himself can never deny his people, since in the Son we too are now secure in the love of the Father. Jesus is God, and so we can and should expect God’s mercy.
Timothy Fox is the Senior Pastor of Christ the King Presbyterian Church in Austin, TX. He also serves as an Assistant Professor of New Testament at Knox Theological Seminary. He holds a PhD in New Testament from the University of St. Andrews. He is a member of the St. Anselm Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
