IF JESUS IS GOD THEN
HE CARRIES ABSOLUTE
AUTHORITY! WE SHOULD
WORSHIP, OBEY AND
LONG TO KNOW HIM.
T
he divinity of Jesus has been contested
since his life and resurrection. Many
liberal theologians have claimed the early
Christians never believed that Jesus was God,
but that his divinity was invented later. And
Muslims often make similar arguments.
It is true that when the crowds celebrated Jesus’
arrival on a donkey in Jerusalem with waving palm
branches and singing that he was the King of Israel,
they would have perceived him merely as a political
leader, although an anointed one. But Jesus himself
made clear claims about his divinity.
In John 8:48 the Jews claim that Jesus is a
Samaritan and that he has a demon. Few verses
later, in John 8:58, Jesus responds with perhaps the
most challenging claim he could have ever made to
a Jewish audience. He says that rather than being
demon-possessed, he, in fact, is God. He says:
“Before Abraham was, I am”.
It would have been blasphemous to most of the
hearers for him to use the word Yahweh of himself.
Unlike the Hebrew word adonai, usually translated
as ‘Lord’, which sometimes refers to humans
(Genesis 18:12), the word Yahweh, the ‘LORD’,
always referred explicitly to God. ➜
Revival Times May 2017 7