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DID JESUS EVER SAY "I AM GOD, WORSHIP ME"?

I was in high school when a Muslim friend asked me where in the Bible Jesus Christ said he was God or should be worshiped and I simply had no answer. I did not know back then just how popular this question is among Muslim apologetic circles. Muslims are trained from a very young age to challenge Christian beliefs and to defend their own. Christians sadly aren't accorded this sort of preparation. In a world where truth is constantly disparaged, norms questioned and beliefs scrutinized, Christians need to be better equipped to stand up to these challenges. Unfortunately this isn't the case. Ask any Christian (child or adult) a theological question and they'll be hard pressed to offer a satisfactory answer. This is an area we should all strive to improve on.

Of course Jesus is not explicitly quoted in the Bible as saying that he is God or that he should be worshiped, but that's not the only way in which truth is established. Doctrines, like all truth, aren't built on single unequivocal statements. And this does not apply to Christian doctrine only. Muslims too believe certain things that are not explicitly stated in their Quran or Hadithes. For example Muslims attest that Jesus was a virgin-born son of Mary yet there is not a single unequivocal statement in the Quran or from Jesus attesting to this. How then, do we know whether or not Jesus is/was God? Well, this is not the object of this article but I'll summarize a few points.

Doctrines, like all truth, aren't built on single unequivocal statements

When it comes to the question of the divinity of Jesus Christ we should ask ourselves a few questions: Did Jesus display characteristics which are consistent with divinity or not? It is my submission to you that he did. Secondly, we could ask "What did Jesus think or say that he was?". Obviously, there is no single unequivocal statement attributed to Jesus by the new testament writers where Jesus explicitly claimed to be God. I struggled with this fact for so long myself and I understand why anyone would be inclined to conclude that this only means that Jesus was not God. But what a minute, if Jesus was merely a human being why did he apply the attributes that belong only to God to himself? If Jesus never claimed to God, why was He so often accused of blaspheme by the Jews of his time? Why did all his apostles believe Him to be God? Would a mere man claim to be one with God (John 10:30)?

When we deny the divinity of Jesus, we begin to run into so many difficulties with the New Testament. The New Testament and indeed the entirety of the Bible only makes sense when we accept the reality of the divinity of Jesus. I'll present a few evidences for the divinity of Jesus here, to illustrate this point. These are: Old Testament Prophecies about a future saviour contained divine attributes (Isiah 9:6-8, Psalms 45:6-7, Jeremiah 23:6 and Isaiah 40:3), Jesus accepted worship (Matthew 14:33, Luke 24:51, John 20:28, Matthew 2:11 and Hebrews 1:6), Jesus participated in creation (Colossians 1:16), Jesus will conduct the final judgement (John 5:22, 2 Corinthians 5:10, John 5:27, Revelation 9:11), plus a host of affirming statements by Jesus about himself  (John 10:30, Mathew 12:8, John 8: 58, Mark 14:62 ) and the testimonies of the apostles (John 1:1, John 20:28). 

Take for instance Isiah 9:6-7 where a find a prophesy in the Old Testament about Jesus saying "For unto us a Child is born, Unto us a Son is given;And the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." (NKJV). This clearly shows that one of the attributes given to Jesus even before he was born in a human body was "Mighty God." In Daniel 7:13-14 we find the title "Son of Man" that Jesus applied to Himself. We also find divine attributes associated with this "person" for example he is given "everlasting dominion" and "Glory" and "all people, nations and languages should serve him." We know from cross-referencing that Jesus's the fulfillment of these prophecies, affirming His divinity.

Some statements by Jesus also affirm his divinity. I'll highlight a few of them. "I and my Father are one."( John 10:30), He who has seen Me has seen the Father (John 14:9). “I tell you the truth, before Abraham was even born, I Am !” (John 8:58), nevertheless I say unto you, hereafter shall ye see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.” (Mathew 26:64). All these statements if said by any man would be blasphemous. And in fact if you read the context, Jews accused Jesus of blasphemy for speaking thus, and this only serves to prove our point: Jesus claimed divinity. We too, confronted with these statements, are faced with a hard choice: we could either conclude that Jesus was God or insist that he was a blasphemer. We are left with no middle ground. You cannot say he that was a mere prophet because a mere prophet would be blaspheming if he ever made such claims. 

A careful study of the Bible reveals to us that Jesus was both divine and human at the same time. By taking the human body to live among us, He did not cease to be God {he emptied himself of his outward glory by reducing himself to the form of a lowly servant. He became human! He humbled himself unto death - Philippians 2:6 -8(PTP)}. Jesus came to the earth in a human body and took human attributes (he got hungry, tired, slept, wept and died) but he was God. He was fully human as he was fully divine. In becoming human, he did not cease to be God, but he gave up some divine attributes like omnipresence so as to live among us, die for us and save us from our sins. Therefore we see in Jesus a person who exhibited both human and divine attributes. 

It is difficult to exhaust all the points, and present the arguments and counter-arguments for the divinity of Jesus in one blog post. But let me say just one thing: Christianity is older than Islam by at least 600 year! Did you know that Mohamed, the founder of Islam, was born more than 700 years after the death of Jesus! This doesn't prove anything, but it places the writers of the New Testament closer to the fact than the writers of the Quran. Look at it this way; Jomo Kenyatta died in 1978 and we all know he was a Kenyan. If someone come to us 500 years later and claimed that Kenyatta was an Indian, would we believe him?


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