Thousand Oaks Baptist Church
Jesus Is Jehovah
JESUS IS JEHOVAH - CHAPTER THREE
THE MEAT OF THE MATTER
(New Testament Passages Proving the Deity of Christ)
In this chapter, I want to directly address this question: Does the New Testament really teach that Jesus Christ is (to transliterate from Greek) ho theos (the God - the Jehovah of the Old Testament)? To find out, let's look at a few of the many New Testament passages which bear on the subject.
First of all, let's examine John 20:28,29:
"And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God. Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed."
Now let's take this step by step, question by answer. Was Thomas wrong? I mean, did he err in calling Jesus "God"? After all, a quick check of the Greek New Testament clearly shows that Thomas used a definite article (Greek - ho; English - "the") before the word for God. And whenever the definite article is used before the name of God, every Jehovah's Witness knows that it is Jehovah who is spoken of.
If Thomas was in error, then why did Jesus not correct him? Certainly Jesus had corrected others with wrong views of seemingly lesser consequence. But no correction or condemnation came from Jesus' lips in this instance.
Further, why did Jesus go right on to commend those of us who share Thomas' faith that Jesus is the God, even though we have never seen Him with our physical eyes? It certainly appears that we shall be commended only if we, like Thomas, consider Jesus Christ to be both Lord and Jehovah God!
Second, let's examine Acts 7:59, which depicts the first martyr, Stephen, praying to Jesus:
"And they stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit."
Obviously - and it would be foolishness to take this any other way - Stephen (not the Council) was calling upon - praying to - the Lord Jesus. The Old Testament makes it very clear that to pray to any god, other than Jehovah, was to commit the sin of idolatry. Thus, if the Jehovah's Witnesses are correct, Stephen, the great preacher and staunch man of the faith must have been an idolater, for Stephen was only praying to an exalted spirit creature. But if Stephen was praying as he ought to pray, then Jesus is Jehovah. These are the only two logical choices. No other explanation is possible. Either Stephen died as a sinful idolater, or else he died in obedient faith. Which will it be?
Third, let's examine Galatians 1:1. Here Paul the Apostle makes an interesting distinction concerning the channel and source of his authority as an apostle:
"Paul, an apostle, (not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised him from the dead;)"
Paul's apostleship did not have its source in men, for he says it was "not of [Greek: 'from'] men." Likewise, the channel - the means whereby or through which he received his apostleship - was not a man, for he again says, "neither by [Greek: 'through'] a man."
But then Paul does tell us what is the channel and authority of his apostleship. He says, "... but by [Greek: 'through'] Jesus Christ and God the Father..." And if language and grammar and word sense and sentence construction have any meaning whatever, Paul declares that the channel of his authority coincides with the source of his authority.
What am I saying? I am saying - just as Paul said so clearly - that Paul made a distinction between men and a man; but Paul did not make a distinction between Jesus and His Father. And by using that one little preposition, Paul placed Jesus Christ with the Father on terms of equality. He made them equal in essence.
This is only one example of many which could be cited to show that it was very natural for Paul to refer to Jesus Christ and God the Father in one breath, using the same preposition for both Persons of the Trinity. And for a man who had such a strict, monotheistic, Jewish background, this type of language and grammar would be very surprising and even unthinkable, if Paul really did not consider the Son and the Father as equal.
And Paul never argues the point. He just obviously assumes that all real Christians agree with him about the issue!
Fourth, let's examine John 10:30, where the context clearly shows that Jesus was saying that He and the Father are equal in essence:
"I and my Father are one."
Jehovah's Witnesses typically interpret this verse to mean that Jesus and the Father "are at unity." Of course, this is only an interpretation, but it is one that patently rests wholly on the predisposition of the Jehovah's Witnesses to support their system of teaching. Their interpretation does not rest in or on a textual or grammatical basis, and is, therefore, basically in error.
What was Jesus saying here? Obviously, He was claiming more than just unity of purpose or unity of outlook with God the Father. Moses, the psalmists, and the prophets had done this. Jesus was obviously saying something different and unique here.
What did Jesus mean by saying that He and His Father are "one"? He meant that He and His Father were one in essence - that they were one God. And the Jews got this very message quite clearly. They did not believe that Jesus was God, and when Jesus said this, they took up stones to silence what they considered to be His blasphemy in claiming to be God. And Jesus didn't try to get out of it, either. In fact, He made sure that they fully understood that what they understood what exactly what He had intended.
His answer to them was (if I may be allowed to paraphrase), "If the fallible and sinful judges of Israel were rightly called 'gods,' much more may I, Who Am one with the Father and free from sin, claim the title of 'the Son of God.'"
And then Jesus made the statement of John 10:38:
"But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him."
In this statement, the Lord Jesus Christ claims that He and the Father share equally in each other. This, by definition, is equality of essence.
We may add to these considerations a number of verses in the New Testament where Jesus is called "God" (in the Greek, ho theos).
The first is John 1:1. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." In the Greek New Testament, the third of the three phrases of this verse reads like this: "... kai Theos ein ho Logos." Dr. F.F. Bruce (head of New Testament Language and Literature in the University of Manchester) and Dr. William J. Martin (head of the Department of Old Testament Languages in the University of Liverpool) have the following to say on this verse in the context of this study:
"Much is made by Arian amateur grammarians of the omission of the definite article with 'God' in the phrase 'And the Word was God.' Such an omission is common with nouns in a predicative construction. To have used it would have equated the Word and the Word only with God, whereas without it the force is 'And the Word was Himself God.' The article is omitted, too, on occasion in other constructions; in fact, there are four instances of it in this very chapter (verses 6, 12, 13, 18), and in John 13:3, 'God' is written once without and once with the article. To translate in any one of these cases 'a god' would be totally indefensible ..."
In other words, to have used the article in the Greek would have denied that the Father is Jehovah! And to not use the article gave additional force to the essential Deity of the One called "the Word," Who is Jesus Christ, according to verse 14.
The second verse is John 1:18, where the Majority Greek text makes Jesus the "only begotten God"; the definite article is used, making Jesus out to be Jehovah once again.
The third verse is Titus 2:13, where the literal translation reads, "... the great God and Savior of ours Jesus Christ." Again, the definite article is used, indicating that Jesus is Jehovah.
The fourth verse is 2 Peter 1:1, where Jesus Christ is clearly called our God and Savior. Again, the definite article is used, showing that Jesus is Jehovah.
And in 1 John 5:20, Jesus Christ is claimed to be the true God and eternal life. Again the definite article is used, adding still greater weight to the argument that Jesus is truly Jehovah.