Hey guys! Just continuing on with these questions. In life, I'm juggling clients at the gym, managing my high-maintenance but wonderful asthmatic/allergy cats, working on the rough draft of my second book, and celebrating this beautiful fall weather.
This next question is more of a claim made during a conversation I was having:
Jesus never called Himself God.
My reply (the shortest so far!) is below:
Respectfully, yes, He did.
Jesus did call Himself God, but in different words.
In Exodus, God calls Himself the I AM. His name
(Yahweh/YHWH) was so reverent, they’d say Addonai or “the LORD” because they
didn’t even want to risk mispronouncing His name. Blasphemy was punished by
immediate death.
During Jesus’s ministry, He calls Himself the I AM: “Before
Abraham was, I AM.”
In John, He says, “I and the Father are one.” And in the
same book, when He is speaking with the Samaritan woman at the well, she says
“I know that the Messiah is coming,” and He says, “I, the one who is speaking
to you, I am he.”
In Luke, when the Pharisees tell Jesus to tell those worshipping
Him to stop, He tells them that if they stopped, then the rocks would cry out
instead (harking back to Pslam 19 and Genesis where it says all of God’s
creation sings of His glory).
When John the Baptists asks if He is the Messiah, He says in
Luke 7, “Go and report to John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive
sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are
raised up, the poor have the gospel preached to them. Blessed is he who does
not take offense at Me.” This harkens back to where it is prophesied that this
would happen back in Isaiah.
In John and elsewhere in Matthew and others, Jesus repeatedly tells His disciples about things that will happen to the Son of Man and what must happen to the Son of Man, while simultaneously, in the same breath or paragraph or exchange, mention what is to happen to Him. I.E., the first communion as a radical teaching, He says “this is My body, this is My blood,” and then promptly says, “Unless you eat and drink of the Son of Man…” Explanation as to how this means He is claiming to be God: To the ancient Near Eastern Jews, the Son of Man was a title of God, and is used to predict the coming of the Messiah; it is Messianic language (Daniel, Isaiah, Micah, among others), and Jesus likened Himself to the Son of Man many times throughout His ministry.
Furthermore, in John, He directly likened Himself to being the Son of God, which was a direct claim to deity, in addition to the examples above, and others not listed. We can be assured of this claim because not only of His words, when applied to context, but to how the Jews took it. They wanted to immediate take and stone Him for blasphemy, and it wasn’t because He was a raving madman, but He called Himself God in their own Messianic language and terms.
Some today might say, “why wouldn’t He just say He was God?” but even I myself
admit that I would probably write someone off immediately as mad if someone
said that to me, and when you are trying to appeal to someone who believes
themselves to be right, it is better to show them piecemeal and bit by bit so
they can see for themselves, for, as my earthly father likes to say: a man
convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. When looking in
context and applying Jesus’s claims for Himself against Messianic prophesy
(which context and proper application are crucial in historical documents as
well as should be in religious documents which could have massive implications
to our lives), there is no doubt that Jesus knew Himself to be the Messiah and
God on Earth, and outwardly claimed so.
Alright! I hope all of these are blessing you. I have a few more to go, and then I'll be out of these and petition for more, as the world needs and God calls.
Let me know any follow-up questions you have!
xo,
Jess
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