Did you know that there are several places in the Bible where Jesus actually says that He is God?  Islam claims Jesus is a great prophet. Many people believe Him to simply be a great philosopher/teacher.  Jesus, as C. S. Lewis stated, did not give us those options. By claiming to be God, He gives us a limited amount of choices.  He is either mad (thinking that He is God), a fraud (saying He is God when He is not), or Who He claims to be: The Messiah, Son of God, and in fact, God in the flesh! 

 

Some people do not understand that Jesus is God.  This is called the Arian Heresy.  Arianism, the doctrine proposed by the priest Arius, repudiated by the early Christian church as heresy, that the Son is finite and created by the Father. To worship Jesus, we have to know who He is. 

Jesus Himself Claimed to be God, Yahweh, Jehovah.   YHWH is the word that is the name given to God Himself in the Old Testament. No other person or thing is to be worshiped. In Exodus 20:5 we read that “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me,.  Also, in Isaiah 44:6 we read  “Thus says the LORD, the King of Israel, And his Redeemer, the LORD of hosts: ‘I am the First and I am the Last; Besides Me there is no God. Then there is Isaiah 42:8  “I am the LORD, that is My name; And My glory I will not give to another, Nor My praise to carved images.”  Knowing this,  Jesus boldly claimed to be Yahweh.  In John 17:5  He says “And now, O Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.  If we look at Isaiah 42:8 and John 17:5, we see that if Jesus is not God then He is praying in vain..

Revelation 1:17 says of Jesus “And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. But He laid His right hand on me, saying to me, “Do not be afraid; I am the First and the Last”

Jesus stated in John 10:11  “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep. Psalm 23:1  The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.

Jesus claimed to be the One who would judge. In Matthew 25:31  “When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. 32  “All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. In the Old Testament, it is written in  Joel 3:12  “Let the nations be wakened, and come up to the Valley of Jehoshaphat; For there I will sit to judge all the surrounding nations.

Jesus spoke of Himself as the Bridegroom in Matthew 25:1, while we see in the Old Testament that Jehovah is called the same thing. In Hosea 2:16  “And it shall be, in that day,” Says the LORD, “That you will call Me ‘My Husband,’ And no longer call Me ‘My Master,’

John 8:58  Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.” 59  Then they took up stones to throw at Him; but Jesus hid Himself and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by.. His claim here was so bold that they took up stones to stone Him for Blasphemy. This claim is repeated in Mark 14:62 and John 18:5-6 The term “I AM” is the same term used for God in the Old Testament, and the Pharisees were mortified.

We know that the Bible in the Old Testament states that God is light. In John 8:12  we read “Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.”  Also, in Psalm 27:1, the Bible  says that the Lord (Yahweh) is my light.

Jesus’ followers declare that He is God.  There are many more claims by Jesus, and the writers of the New Testament that point to the Old Testament that show that He is God incarnate. One which is powerfully obvious is John 1:1  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.2  He was in the beginning with God.3  All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.4  In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. Going back to Genesis 1:1  In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. There is no question that the Bible says that Jesus is God.  He is not only God though. He is unique in that He is fully God and fully man.  Tri-unity of God means that the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God: One God, three distinct personalities. More on that later.

 

These are not all the places where He claimed to be Deity, and many other things point to proof the He is God, but this is some food for thought for now.