Who Is Jesus? (Part 1): He Is God

The Wednesday feature of the Worldly Saints blog is a Scriptural meditation whereby I take a verse or passage I have been pondering lately and seek to edify my readers with it’s promises, encouragements, warnings, rebukes, etc.

Who is Jesus Christ? That may be the most important question one could ever ask. What you think about Christ is the most important thing about you. If Christ was only a man, then you can just forget about Him. But if He was truly who He claimed to be – God – then our lives ought are to be yielded to His will and faithful service ought to be our eternal joy desire.

In John 1:1-18, the Apostle John tells us exactly who He is and in the next few months, we will consider six descriptions of our Savior from this Gospel’s Prologue:

#1 – Jesus Christ is divine – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without was not any thing made that was made” (vs. 1-3).

This probably sounds much like those words in Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” or the beginning of John’s 1^st Epistle – “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the Word of life.” I believe John is showing this Word was not only in the beginning, but He was with God and was God. There was no beginning for the Word. In the beginning when beginning because, the Word already was!

Jesus Christ was in the beginning. This does not mean that He had a beginning. It means He always has been. Kent Hughes wrote in his commentary on the Gospel of John, “He always was wasing.” He’s always been there. There was never a time when He was not; He continually was and is. In other words, He is eternal. When creation began, Jesus already was. This explains a bit why John doesn’t open his Gospel with a genealogy like Matthew or Luke; this was the only genealogy he needed – the Word always was.

Not only was he intimate with the Father (“the Word was with God”) but also He was equal to the Father: “and the Word was God.” This “falls in line” with the purpose of the Gospel of John. All throughout the Gospel, John shows miracles (e.g., Christ turning the water into wine in John 2, Christ healing the nobleman’s son in John 4, Christ healing the paralytic in John 5, Christ feeding the 5,000 in John 6, Christ healing a blind man in John 9, Christ raising Lazarus in John 11) or make statements about His deity (John 3:13, 31; 6:31-33, 38, 47-51, 58; 7:28-29; 8:14, 23, 40-42, 56-58; 14:1; 16:30; 17:7-8) or brings forth witnesses (John 1:34, 49; 13:1-3; 19:7; 20:17, 28) to further prove the Word was God.

The proof the Word was God is that He created. The reason He points to the role of the Word in creation is because He just proclaimed Him God and when you think of God, one primary act you think of is creation. Everything past, present and future owes its existence to the Word. It was all made by and through Him. This pictures the totality of His involvement in creation. Christ was the Creator alongside of God.

Think about this. There are about 200-300 billion stars that scientists “know of” in the galaxy. That’s our galaxy! Scientists also know that there is a minimum of one billion galaxies. You do the math that is what we call ten octillion. An octillion is a ten with twenty zeroes behind it! And Jesus created it all! Not even a single blade of grass was created outside of Him. Only if Christ was the Divine One could He also be the Creator of the universe. Christ participated in the creation of the world (“us” appearing in Genesis 1:26). Jesus made everything and sustains everything.

Jesus is God.