Jesus Proclaimed as God Throughout Scripture
“I am trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 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 the 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 patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. . . . Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.”
(Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis)
The question of Jesus’s divinity is often debated and is such a heavy topic because based on Scripture, it has eternal consequences if you get it wrong. So needless to say, this topic cannot be dissected enough. So, is Jesus God? Was he just a prophet? A kind man doing miracles for the well-deserved? There are several ways to get to the truth of the matter, but let’s provide proof scripturally as to what was defined and understood regarding the nature of Jesus’s Divinity by Himself and the others around Him who heard Him teach.
First, let’s start with the Old Testament. In Isaiah 7:14, it was prophesied that “the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and she will call his name Immanuel (God with us).” Isaiah was making known that God was going to be with “us” through a Messiah in human form. It was then proclaimed to Joseph in Matthew 1:23, that who Isaiah was referring to was the Son whom Mary was carrying and that Isaiah’s prophecy was going to be fulfilled through Jesus Christ.
Later John 1:1 states that “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” and then John 1:14 states that “the Word (God) became flesh and dwelt among us”. These correlations in scripture when pieced together, show what was understood not only in the Old Testament but in the New Testament: the prophecy that “God was going to dwell with us” was fulfilled through Mary’s son, Jesus Christ.
Jesus was not only referenced to be God by Scripture itself, but He also often referenced Himself to be God by using Old Testament Scriptures so that the people of His day would easily understand what he was saying. For example, in the Old Testament when God called Moses to deliver Israel from Egypt’s rule over them, Moses asked God “Who is it that I should say sent me?” And God answers Moses and says “I Am Who I Am. Say this to the people of Israel: I Am has sent me to you.” (Ex 3:14) Jesus later proclaims in John 8:58, “Before Abraham was, I Am”. This was a bold proclamation in saying that He was the “I Am”, the exact name that God used for Himself in Exodus, and the Israelites of His time knew exactly what He was saying because they wanted to stone Him for it (John 8:59).
This is honestly an inexhaustible topic. But throughout Scripture, it was not only referenced that God, a Messiah, was going to come and was later fulfilled through Christ “through a virgin birth,” but Jesus Himself even referenced Himself as God. We can disagree with Scripture, but we cannot deny what Scripture states and even what was understood by all, at that time.
