I Jesus God

Scripture Reading: John 14:15-31; Deuteronomy 11:1

              Is Jesus Christ God? Did he ever make such a claim for himself? Those who heard him in the context of 1st century Judaism thought so. They accused him of blasphemy because they understood he was claiming equality with God. Jesus never said they misunderstood him because, yes, that is what he claimed.

              John 14:15 is one such example: If you love me, you will keep my commandments. Such a statement might sound innocuous when heard apart from the backdrop of the Old Testament. But when you were steeped in the Old Testament, as were Jesus’ disciples and the culture in which he spoke things like this, you couldn’t miss the point. If you heard Jesus say this back then you would hear an echo of Moses saying, You shall therefore love the LORD your God, and keep his charge, his statutes, his rules, and his commandments (Deuteronomy 11:1).

              Jesus demanded for himself a level of devotion the Old Testament assigns to God alone. He did so, not in ignorance of what Deuteronomy said, but in full awareness of it. He said things about and claimed things for himself that only God can say and claim.

              As C.S. Lewis famously wrote: I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him [that is, Christ]: ‘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 up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.