Why This Book?
“Jesus never said He was the Son of God,” claimed my
professor. It was the winter of 1966, and I was a freshman at the University of
California, San Diego. I didn’t know any better at the time. Neither did the
young lady in our church who heard exactly the same claim a couple of years ago
in her college religion class.
However, Jesus clearly called Himself the Son of God in John
5:17-30, and He acknowledged that He had said, “I am the Son of God” in John
10:36. Moreover, when Simon Peter said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the
living God,” Jesus replied, “Blessed are you Simon Barjona, because flesh and
blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew
16:16-17). At His Jewish trial, when the high priest asked Jesus, “Are you the
Christ, the Son of the blessed One?” the Lord answered, “I am” (Mark 14:61-62).
Even more outrageous is the notion, popularized by Dan
Brown, that Jesus was not regarded as divine until the Council of Nicea in AD
325. The truth is that both orthodox Christians and those deemed heretics
taught the divinity of Jesus. Even the Gnostics, whom Brown claims to have
read, regarded Jesus as divine. The issue at Nicea was the precise sense in
which Jesus divine. Only the invincibly ignorant will say about such a
well-documented historical fact, “Well, that’s just your opinion.” That popular
retort—I’ve heard it—is a fool’s way of protecting his own ignorance.
Then there are the cultists who go two by two throughout
your neighborhood. They claim that the Bible does not teach the doctrine of the
Trinity. It is true, of course, that the word “Trinity,” never occurs in the
Bible. However, the truths summarized by “Trinity” are clearly taught
throughout the Scriptures.[1]
Perhaps you have attempted to show the visitors at your door John 1:1, which
says that “the Word [Christ] was God.” If you did, they certainly trotted out
their corrupt translation, which says, “the word was a god.”
At this point, many Christians do not know what to say.
Probably neither they, nor the cultists know Greek, so all each side can do is
repeat, “My Bible says….” When cult members go on to insist that Jesus cannot
be God because He said, “My Father is greater than I” (John 14:28), all the
average believer can do is to shut the door in their faces. I deal with these
cult objections to the deity of Christ in Appendix A, but for now I want to
introduce the primary focus of this book.
Our belief in the deity of Christ does not depend on two or
three well-known verses. Jesus constantly said things that would be blasphemous
on the lips of anyone but God. You may have read C. S. Lewis’s famous trilemma
about Christ. After referring to some of the outrageous claims of Jesus, he
concluded,
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 the 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 with any patronizing
nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to
us. He did not intend to (Mere Christianity,
Book ii, chap. 3).
My goal in the following pages is to compare the claims of
Christ with what the Old Testament teaches us about the one, true, and living
God. On page after page of the gospels Jesus applies to Himself privileges and
titles that only God can claim. Since the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and
Luke) frequently receive less emphasis in discussions of Christ’s deity than
the gospel of John does, I will initially focus more attention on their
testimony before turning to the fourth gospel.
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