Jesus Claimed to be God

If you were to witness a true miraculous healing, what would your reaction be? I like to think that mine would be one of faith, an honest response to a miracle that happened right in front of me.

John 5 starts with an account of Jesus healing a man in a miraculous way. But because it was on the Sabbath, the prescribed day of rest, some saw it not as a blessing but a breaking of God's Word.

But Jesus went farther than that. He called YHWH His Father, and to those who honoured YHWH as the One God, this wasn't just Sabbath-breaking. It was blasphemy, that is, taking upon oneself something that belongs only to God. In this case, Jesus was making Himself equal to God. And John tells us that this was the reason that He was being viewed as worthy of death.

It's a common thing today to acknowledge that Jesus of Nazareth was a real person, but to argue that He wasn't God. Moreover, to argue that He never claimed to be God. But to claim that is to reject the Biblical record. And sure, someone can reject it but that doesn't help anyone's argument that Jesus didn't claim to be God. How could anyone possibly know definitively that He never claimed it? Even ancient graffiti mocks someone named Alexander who worshipped a crucified person as God. What a strong testament to the claim of Jesus, even outside the Bible!

The Bible is abundantly clear: Jesus claimed to be God. John can't make it any more plain than he does in the first part of chapter 5, though he will continue to document other claims to the same thing later on (and this wasn't the first time he documented it anyway).

And so we need to grapple with that claim. It's the fundamental claim of Christianity: Jesus of Nazareth is YHWH; He's God incarnate (in-the-flesh). If He isn't, then He's either delusional or lying. But if He is actually who He claimed to be, it makes all the difference.