A fundamental question always asked as believers is that if Jesus really claimed to be God. That’s a really important question. So, when we look in the New Testament documents, we have to divide that question into two parts. One is the question of whether Jesus himself ever claimed to be God. The second question is that the New Testament writers present Jesus as God or did the New Testament writers think Jesus was God? So those were distinguishable questions. The answer to both those questions is actually yes.
Not only does Jesus present himself as God, but the New Testament writers also plainly present him as God.Not only does Jesus present himself as God, but the New Testament writers also plainly present him as God. That’s exactly why the church throughout the ages has believed in the divinity of Jesus, because you have both those very powerful testimonies telling you that he is divine.
Now as far as Jesus’ own claims, people are often hung up on this idea where they ask, “Well, wait a second. If Jesus was God, why didn’t he say it more? If Jesus was God, why didn’t he go around saying, ‘Hey, everybody, I’m God,’ and say it all the time like that?” That type of objection really misses the mark.
Just because Jesus was God doesn’t mean he had to say it in this overt direct way all the time. Jesus’ claim to divinity was often done in what we might call a very Jewish way, a way that links him to the Old Testament and sets them in the context of the Old Testament flow of narrative or the Old Testament narrative a redemptive history. Now, of course, Jesus does sometimes directly say he’s God. In the Gospel of John, for example, in John 8, Jesus takes on and invokes the divine name of Yahweh, –“I am”. Jesus also claims divinity in other ways beyond this.
Through his miracles, Jesus in particular does miracles that distinctively positioned himself as the God of the Old Testament. His calming of the wind in the waves, for example, on the Sea of Galilee is an example of how he takes up the attributes of the Old Testament God. There are several links to God doing this very thing in Old Testament settings.
There’s little doubt that Christians can be confident that Jesus, in fact, is God in the flesh.One last example here is the transfiguration. Jesus presents himself as glorified, as in bright light having the Shekinah glory cloud of the God of the Old Testament. Even in the synoptics, Jesus has presented himself as God. We find all of that confirmed in the simple fact that the other New Testament writers make the same point about Jesus.
Jesus not only claims it for himself, but we see in a few New Testament writers, very early, they view Jesus as fully divine. The clearest example of this is Paul himself. In Philippians 2, the famous hymn of Christology there, Jesus is portrayed as Yahweh. “Every knee will bow to Christ;” –that’s an Old Testament reference about how every knee bows to God himself.
There is no doubt that Paul, at a very early time, views Jesus as divine. Paul was drawn on earlier traditions about Jesus being divine, to go probably back even to the very beginning of the church in the 40s of the first century. And, of course, Jesus himself claimed to be divine. When you look at that entire package, there’s little doubt that Christians can be confident that Jesus, in fact, is God in the flesh.
