Jesus Christ is God

The eminent British professor and scholar C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come away with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Jesus Christ is Lord because He is God.

While on the earth Jesus did exactly what was apparently the impossible thing He said He would do. He taught on numerous occasions that He would be killed, buried for three days, and would rise from the dead. Obviously, if Jesus did not rise from the dead what He said was a lie and He was justly crucified for blasphemy.

However, since He was raised from the dead what He declared was not blasphemy because He truly was God. He was claiming that He was Yahweh, the LORD God, Jehovah, and the great I AM.

In John 8:56-58 Jesus said to a group of hostile listeners, “Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing My day; he saw it and was glad.” The aggressive religious leaders replied, “You are not yet fifty years old, and you have seen Abraham?” Obviously, they misunderstood. You will recall that Abraham lived 2000 years before Christ came in the flesh. These Jewish leaders asked a relevant question! Jesus replied, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I AM” (v. 58).

Jesus is the absolute, timeless existence, eternal, independent, self-sustained, eternally present, eternally pre-existent One. "Before Abraham was, I am." The Word of God was, is, and ever will be. Jesus is truly eternal. He is God.

His listeners knew what He was saying and they picked up stones to kill Him.

These words of Jesus have eternal significance for us today. Jesus said, “I am from above; you are of this world; I am not of this world. I said therefore to you, that you shall die in your sins; for unless you believe that I AM, you shall die in your sins” (Jn.8:24).

Those are serious words. Where you spend eternity depends upon how you respond to what Christ is saying. Again, Jesus said, “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he, and I do nothing on My own initiative, but I speak these things as the Father taught Me” (v. 28).

Jesus demands a positive response on our part, “If you abide in my word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (vv. 31-32).

Do you want to be free? “Free” in this passage is a synonym for salvation and eternal life.

This is why the apostle Peter stated the only option: “There is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men, by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

Jesus is the only way to heaven; He is the truth of God; He is the very embodiment of God’s kind of life. “No one comes to the Father, but through Me” (Jn. 4:6). There is no other way to get to heaven and spend eternity with the LORD God.

The Lord Jesus Christ claimed to be God. It is imperative that we take Him seriously. The only adequate response to Him is to “fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.”

“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved.”

God has Spoken!

The LORD God has not left us in the dark groping for answers to our eternal destiny and relationship with him. He has clearly revealed himself and his eternal purposes for his creation.

Man was created for fellowship with a loving God, but sin interrupted it. However, God in grace and mercy demonstrated his love for us by sending his Son to go to the cross and die for our sins so that our relationship with him could be restored. There is no other name under heaven whereby we can be saved (Acts 4:12; John 14:6).

How do we know these facts to be true? Simply because God has spoken! Hebrews 1:1 says, “After God spoke long ago in various portions and in various ways to our ancestors through the prophets” (NET). Yes, the LORD God spoke, not just once, but “in many portions and in many ways.” His revelation to man did not come in one big package, but bit-by-bit, so man could comprehend it. God progressively revealed himself throughout the Old Testament preparing man for his full, compete and perfect revelation of himself in his Son.

In the opening chapters of Genesis God spoke revealing his eternal purpose for his creation. After man sinned God came seeking to save and spoke to Adam and Eve with words of judgment and hope. Salvation by grace was promised in Genesis 3:15. The Bible tells us clearly, “The wages of sin is death,” but God reached down to man with saving grace even in the garden.

Moreover, God spoke to the Jewish patriarchs, and by the prophets. He did not speak just once, but over and over again by means of promises, types, symbols, commandments, precepts, warnings, judgments, exhortations, etc.

God has not been silent down through the ages. God has spoken out of the heights of his majesty and glory and revealed himself. The central message of his revelation is that he is a holy, yet a loving God, who wants us to love him in return and live in fellowship with him.

“Beautiful is the night in which the moon and the stars of prophecy and types are shining; but when the sun arises then we forget the hours of watchfulness and expectancy, and in the clear and joyous light of day there is revealed to us the reality and substance of the eternal and heavenly sanctuary,” writes A. Saphir.

God spoke through his prophets and we have his message recorded in the Old Testament.

Moreover, the God who spoke “long ago in various portions and in various ways to our ancestors through the prophets, in these last days he has spoken to us in a son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he created the world” (vv. 1-2 NET).

Jesus Christ is God in the flesh. The Son of God, has fully revealed to us what God is like. God has no further revelation to make. You do not need the Book of Mormon or the Koran, or other books of the cults. Jesus Christ is the final and complete spokesman for Deity. God has spoken. The written revelation is now complete. It was finished with the book of Revelation in the New Testament in the first century A.D. The cannon of Holy Scripture is closed. Jesus Christ is the center of all God’s counsels.

God has spoken. God has spoken in his Son and in so doing has fully expressed himself. He has left nothing in reserve. The cults and pagan religions cannot add anything new to God’s full revelation of himself in Christ. All that we know, or can know, or need to know of God is what he has revealed of himself through his Word.

“The whole revelation and manifestation of God is now in Christ; he alone reveals the Father’s heart. . . he himself was and is God’s message. All that God has to say to us is in his Son: all his thoughts, counsels, promises, gifts, are to be found in the Lord Jesus. Take the perfect life of Christ, his deportment, his ways; that is God ‘speaking’—revealing himself—to us. Take his miracles, revealing his tender compassion, displaying his mighty power; they are God ‘speaking’ to us. Take his death, commending to us the love of God, in that while we were yet sinners, he died for us; that is God ‘speaking’ to us. Take his resurrection, triumphing over the grave, vanquishing him who had the power of death, coming forth as the ‘first fruits of them that slept’—the earnest of the harvest to follow; that is God ‘speaking’ to us” (A. W. Pink).

Jesus Christ brings us into a living contact with the LORD God, the One true and only God, for there is no other. Jesus brings him to dwell in our heart, as he dwells in God’s heart.

“Heavenly truth is nowhere spoken but by the voice of Christ, nor heard but by the power of Christ, living in the hearer. . . . The external words of Christ . . . prepare us for, and point us to, the inner speaking in the heart by the Holy Spirit, which alone is life and power,” writes Andrew Murray.

The Son of man came to “seek and save that which was lost.” That was God “manifest in the flesh,” God revealing himself in his Son. That was God speaking to us. What will you do with Jesus Christ? Where will you spend eternity? What will you do with what God has said to you in his Son?