A Couple of Little Things

There are a couple of things I keep running into that really bug me. The first one is when people say that Jesus never claimed to be God. His followers seemed pretty convinced. Paul, a man whose persecution of early members of the church stopped when Jesus knocked him off of his horse said, "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation." and "For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell," (Col 1:15 and 1:19) The opening verses of John declare that Jesus created all things.

The Pharisees were wrong in Luke chapter 5 when they called Jesus' miracle healing of the paralyzed man blasphemy, but they were correct when they asked "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" His very conversation with these men confirmed His godhood. There are also the passages in both John 8 and John 10 where upon both occasions some of His fellow Jews intended to stone Him for His claim of equality to the Great I AM.

Jesus did more than strongly imply that He was God. He called Himself the "bread of heaven." Any Jew of that day would have made the connection to manna, and when Jesus claimed as He did in John 6 that whoever came to Him would not hunger and have life, they knew that He meant He was God. He called Himself the Good Shepherd more than once, and said that He knew His sheep. And the Jews knew too, that His statement was a reference to God, whom the writer of Psalm 80 called the "Shepherd of Israel." They knew precisely that He was saying that He was God.

Jesus told the woman at the well that He was the Messiah. He confirmed Peter's statement that He was the Messiah and told the High priest that was the Messiah and Son of God, and the High Priest tore his robes because he thought it was blasphemy. In Matthew 22, Jesus stops the mouths of the Pharisees by demonstrating that the Messiah has to be divine. That is the only way that the apparent contradiction between Psalm 110 and Isaiah 11 can be resolved. He had to biologically descend from David, but be divine and therefore David's Lord.

After He had risen from the dead, Thomas identified Jesus as his Lord and his God. Jesus never refused worship, because as Holy God, He deserves worship. Only He was worthy to pay for our sins. Only His precious blood was sufficient to pay for the sins of mankind. Because of that, all one has to do is repent of one's sins and ask for forgiveness for them, place their trust in Jesus and be saved.

The other little thing that bugs me is the notion that people can go through life without sinning. I was chatting online with a young man the other night who told me that he had been a Christian since age thirteen. Since our discussion began with his asking for someone to explain salvation to him, I thought that a little strange. Was he unsure of his own salvation? Was he striving to learn something new? I had no idea, so I turned the course of the conversation toward establishing his need for a Savior by asking him questions about the ten commandments. He became indignant at the idea that he had sinned, and declared that he had been saved for nine years without a sin.

He told me that sin was a choice, and that no one had to sin. This idea is so ridiculously unbiblical. If we could simply accomplish not sinning, we wouldn't need a Savior. We could just work our way to heaven, and Jesus would not have had to come and walk to the Cross. I told the young gentleman that Paul, toward the end of his ministry called himself the chief of sinners, and that he had been whipped, beaten three times with rods, spent a day and a night treading water in the ocean, and undergone many other hardships for the Lord. I told the young man that I was no Paul, not even close, and that if Paul could not avoid sinning, I didn't expect to.

You know what? That young man never said another word that night. Maybe he was thinking.