“He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” You see what is happening here? If I sinned against my wife and asked one of you to forgive me you would rightfully say, “I cant. You never sinned against me. You must ask God.” Why? Because all sin is ultimately against God. Here Jesus is forgiving someone that had never directly sinned against him. Yet all the sin that this man had ever committed was actually against him.
This is the point of the story. Is Jesus God. Or is he just a great prophet. That is the question that is answered in our confession today. Jesus Christ is the true and eternal God. Muslim consider it blasphemy, Mormons and Jehovah witnesses consider it only partly true. The world thinks its arrogant and exclusive. But it stands at the heart of our faith. That the man who was given the name Jesus at birth is God. He is Yahweh – the great I am. Every perfection of God that we read about in Belgic confession article one is true of him.
Jesus is God: Worship him
- Jesus is God
- Worship him
Jesus Is God.
The well respected Church historian, Jaroslav Pelikan said the following, “The oldest surviving sermon of the Christian church opened with the words: “Brethren, we ought so to think of Jesus Christ as of God, as the judge of living and dead. And we ought not to belittle our salvation; for when we belittle him, we expect also to receive little.” The oldest surviving account of the death of a Christian martyr contained the declaration: “It will be impossible for us to forsake Christ . . . or to worship any other. For him, being the Son of God, we adore, but the martyrs . . . we cherish.” The oldest surviving pagan report about the church described Christians as gathering before sunrise and “singing a hymn to Christ as to [a] god.” The oldest surviving liturgical prayer of the church was a prayer addressed to Christ: “Our Lord, come!” Clearly it was the message of what the church believed and taught that “God” was an appropriate name for Jesus Christ.
Who was born to Mary that day nearly two thousand years ago? Who are we waiting for? Were they waiting for a prophet to arrive? Or just some king? Who are we waiting for to return on the clouds of heaven? Simply some man. Some person called Jesus. No, we are waiting for GOD himself to appear!
It was because the sin in the garden a separation had come, that no man could ever bridge. If God was ever to wlk again with man in his creation like he did with Adam, then he would have to come and do away with sin himself. Because no man could. If mankind was to be restored, then God himself would have to come! And on that Christmas day he did come in the form of the baby Jesus. In the beginning was the Word. And the WORD was God!
No one has ever seen God; the only God who is at the Fathers side, he has made him known. (John 1:18 ESV).
Dear church here in the person of Jesus Christ God has come to his own. Christmas is the celebration of the Birth of Jesus Christ who was God. In that sense it is a celebration of the birth of God. It seems unintelligible. How can God, the uncreated Creator of all things, have a birth? How can a being which is self-existent and eternal, the Creator of time and space, be born? It doesn’t seem to make any sense.
And yet at Christmas this is, in a way, precisely what Christians celebrate. The Christian doctrine of the incarnation states that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh. Jesus was thus truly God as well as truly man. He was born of the virgin Mary; Jesus had a supernatural conception but a perfectly natural birth. Since Jesus was God in the flesh, his mother Mary is therefore called in the early Christian creeds “the Mother of God,” or the “God-bearer.” This isn’t because God somehow came into existence as a result of Mary’s conceiving or that Mary somehow procreated God. Rather Mary could be called the God-bearer because the person she bore in her womb and gave birth to was divine. Thus, Jesus’ birth in this sense was the birth of God.
Indeed, this is also his own claims throughout his life not just in John 1. But we also see it in multiple other places throughout the gospels and particular in John which is quoted by our confession.
Furthermore the Bible says that all men will be judged by Him. As Paul says in Corinthians, “So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.”
He is the one addressed in prayer as we read in 1 Corinthians again, “To those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours.”
He is worshipped as God. As we read in Romans 9:5 where Paul is speaking about to the Jews, ‘Theirs is the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, forever praised! Amen!” I do not know how you can get more clear then this.
Yet many sects do not believe in the divinity of Jesus, because it is such a radical thing to say God in the person of Jesus was born, lived and died. But that is exactly the miracle of the incarnation The Muslims accept Jesus as a prophet but not as God. The sheik’s view him as a high-ranking holy man. The Mormons and Jehovah witnesses both say that he is not god co-equal with the father. Why?
Yet none of them see them as God incarnate. Yet that is what he is. He was always God from the beginning, before the person Jesus was born. And Even while Jesus was Born, he did not cease to be God.
As John Calvin says, For even if the Word in his immeasurable essence united with the nature of man into one person, we do not imagine that he was confined therein. Here is something marvelous: the Son of God descended from heaven in such a way that,… he willed to be borne in the virgin’s womb, to go about the earth, and to hang upon the cross; yet he continuously filled the world even as he had done from the beginning!
In his own life he could read the heart, something that is only attributed to God. He forgave sins. He controlled creation, he claimed to be from all eternity. He referred to himself as I AM. He was raised from the dead. He himself made the womb into which he was born, the tree upon which he died, and the tomb from which he was raised.
For me, one of the most staggering truths in the universe is the fact that at a point in history “God appeared in a body” (1 Timothy 3:16). The baby born in the stable in Bethlehem was God. Mary held God! Think about it! Amazing! No wonder Paul exclaimed, “Beyond all question, the mystery of godliness is great: God appeared in a body!” (1 Timothy 3:16).Worship Him
There is then no other option this season then to do what the confession tells us we are to do. “And so he is true and eternal God, the Almighty, whom we invoke, worship and serve. There was no discussion and no debate in the first century of the Church that Jesus is God. That was what so many died for. Was Caesar god, or Jesus? Must every knee ultimately worship the Roman god or this man who the Christians called Jesus. Caesar's are gone, no one bows to them. But Jesus is alive, and still the knees bow. But the gods of our own age would make Jesus out to be anyone but God. Either a great philosopher, prophet, spiritual guru but not god. If you look at the sects of Christianity many of them deny the Godhood of Jesus. Because they know if Jesus is God – he is Lord in an ultimate sense. And indeed we see his divinity in the transformation of this world since he has ascended.
While many have asked and offered to answer the question, “Who is Jesus of Nazareth?”, no one can escape the evidence that He was a historical person and that His life radically altered human history.
As the historian Jaroslav Pelikan put it: “It is from His birth that most of the human race dates its calendars, it is by His name that millions curse, and in His name that millions pray.”
Due to His influence, Jesus of Nazareth has been transforming lives for almost two millennia. In the process, He has rewritten the direction and outcome of human history. I
Jesus claimed to be God. Jesus thought it fundamentally important what others believed about Him. He wasn’t interested in neutrality. He said I and the Father are one. When forgiving sins he went the extra step to prove that he also had the authority to do so by healing. When Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” His being God was central to His messages; Jesus regarded the two as inseparable.
As C.S lewis said: “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 with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
So, who is this man to you today? God? Then you owe him your life. You owe him worship not just on Sundays but every day of your live. then you owe him total, absolute, and unquestioning obedience. If he is God then all his words that he ever spoke are not just words but are creative action. If Jesus is God, then we can truly know God in Him. If he is God,m you can trust him absolutely. Then God has revealed himself in history. This is astounding. And a tremendous comfort. For in Jesus Christ God has shown himself to be God of saving action. A covenant God that always and forever keeps his word.
Dear Church I do not know what your vision of Jesus is. But our culture as given us a domesticated, hippie, postmodern version which looks nothing like the Jesus that we know. This Jesus is nice, accepts everyone and everything. But that is not eh picture we get. Particularly of him as he is now in revelation. Jesus is not some weak human anymore… he came in humility he will return in exaltation and glory. He came to save, he returns to Judge. He is GOD! He is holy holy holy. The saints reaction to seeing the Lion or the Lamb or the man with a sword is worship. Total worship. Look at the book of revelation and see how the people bow and and worship and sing. Or run, cry, and are terrified. These are reactions that you only see with God in that book. It is because Jesus is God.
So to conclude in the words of Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ. Jesus deserves the Honors only due to God, Jesus shares the Attributes that only God can possess, Jesus is given Names that can only be given to God, Jesus performs Deeds that only God can perform Jesus possesses a Seat on the throne of God
Dear Church, Jesus our savior is worthy of all honor and glory and power and dominion for ever and ever and ever. He is God. If he is not then Bible is false. God is a liar, and we believe in a fairy tale. We remain dead in our sins. If he is god, then all things are being made new by his resurrection power. Then the new creation has already begun. Our sins are forgiven, and he has the power to bring us all the way. The divinity of Jesus is central. And anyone who does not believe that Jesus is God stands condemned. May we worship him, obey him, follow him. And show him to the world.
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see!
Hail the incarnate deity!
Pleased as man with men to dwell,
Jesus our Emmanuel!
Hark! The herald angels sing,
“Glory to the new-born King!”
Amen.