Jesus is God, God is Jesus!

A young man came to give me a quote on a new home appliance recently and as I was signing the contract he asked what my background was in relation to work. When there’s time to sit and talk I usually share some of my experiences, but that day there was no time to sit and therefore, no time to talk other than to say, “I’m a servant of the Most High God, His name is Lord Jesus.” He said, “I’m a Jehovah Witness.” He didn’t deny my proclamation but he politely asked, “how can Jesus be God, when the Scriptures say He is the firstborn Son?” That’s a common question for a JW to ask and one that I’ve been blessed to answer a few times. 

I said to him, “Well, I’m a witness of Jehovah too … and as you know, no one has ever seen God; but the Scriptures do clearly say that Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God Colossians 1:15. I shared my testimony with him on how I first encountered the Lord and answered a couple more of his questions. His interest seemed genuine so I said, “the best insights one can ever get of the nature and character of God, is to study the nature and character of the Lord Jesus as He reveals Himself in the four Gospels.” I encouraged him to get a concordance and follow through on what the Bible declares about Jesus being Creator of the Universe as well as Redeemer of the soul. Finally, I said I was, “one of Jehovah’s (Jesus’) new creations 2 Corinthians 5:17.

JW theology thrives on words such as ‘firstborn’. They’re very good at turning and twisting words and phrases of Scripture. But it’s also important to note that ordinary JW’s don’t know as much about the Bible as they would have you believe. This makes it all the more important for Christians to know what it is we believe from the Bible and why. Biblically, ‘firstborn’  doesn’t mean Jesus was the first born in the sense that He Himself was a created being. Rather, as the Son of God, He is the Agent in all creation with authority over all created things. Jesus, as the firstborn in the new creation – the church, means He’s the first to rise from the dead in a transformed state of being. So far as God is concerned, Jesus is first in everything.

It’s common for me to encounter people from all sorts of religious and philosophical backgrounds and although most of them know less than my JW friend does about the Bible, it has never stopped them from attacking the biblical doctrines of creation and Jesus Christ as the Human manifestation of God. Some do it out of ignorance; others do so out of arrogance. As I look around today, it’s very clear that such attacks are here to stay and they’re on the increase. Even in the church evolution is favored over creation, which means many are ignorant of just who Jesus Christ really is. In relation to this I read recently, “Lots of people (Christians) believe lots of things, which is nice.” It’s not nice, it’s ugly.  

So the purpose of this post is to bring the two doctrines together … Jesus Christ, God Almighty Incarnate and Jesus Christ, Creator of all that exists everywhere. The opening verse of the Bible declares, In the beginning God created the…….earth Genesis 1:1. Who is the Creator? In the opening verses of the Gospel of John we learn exactly and unmistakably Who the Creator is, none other than Jesus Christ, the Word of God. He was with God and He was God right from the beginning John 1:1-2. The following Scripture is very clear, All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made John 1:3. This means Jesus Christ has always been much more than simply the good Man who went about doing good 2000 years ago. 

In my post: God Did Get It Right The First Time I say, “The Holy Spirit of God has preserved the word of God; He exalts the Lord Jesus Christ to His proper place.” Here’s one example of what I mean. In 1 Timothy 3:16 we read, God was manifested in the flesh. That’s what you’ll find in an authorized version of the Bible. In other more popular translations saturating the evangelical world you’ll read, ‘He appeared in a body’ ‘He who was revealed in the flesh’ ‘He was manifested in the flesh’ ‘He appeared in a human body’ ‘Christ came as a human’ ‘Christ was revealed in a human body’. None of those are as powerful as, ‘God was manifested in the flesh.’ I’m not a King-James-only advocate, but it pays to have one like it within reach..

Jesus is God, God is Jesus! That’s it … end of story! Every other claim, every other denial is a lie. Yes, there are 3 Persons in the one God but the one God is Jesus … Lord Jesus. As Christ ones, let us never allow ourselves to be told, duped, conned or deceived into accepting anything that would even remotely draw us away from this reality. The way to stand in such reality, is to stand, kneel, lie, sit, work, rest and play in the mighty presence of Jesus, always. If we’ll do that, the Holy Spirit of God will do the rest. I believe there are two reasons why so many Christians around the world are weak on creation/Creator/Jesus is God theology – reason one: they’re not hearing this proclaimed – reason two: they are hearing it but taking it for granted.

I thank God for science, but science is not God; Jesus is God. All science bows to Jesus, He doesn’t bow to science – and people who bow to science rather than Jesus are bowing to a false god. How foolish when the word God (Jesus) has nothing good to say about false gods. Atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, gluons, fermions, leptons … there are hordes of people who can tell us about these, but they can’t tell us about the Creator of these; therefore, such knowledge is good for this world only. Hebrews 11:3 tells us God spoke those things into existence. How awesome is that?! Even the very best of science is unable to top that. Jesus, the Word of God spoke them into being – and into being they came.

This is why we need to be in awe of Hebrews 4:12 For the word of God is living and powerful….. Jesus is the living and powerful word. With regards the prophet Isaiah when he ran and hid from Jezebel; the Jews fully knew that the Word of the Lord meant that the living God came and spoke with him 1 Kings 19:9. The living God, Jesus – all-knowing, all-powerful. As one old saint put it, “He spoke all things out of nothing in the creation…..He is the interpreter of His Father’s mind and our Advocate with the Father.” We Christ ones could never be in more safer hands! Not so, those who’ve put themselves into Charles Darwin’s hands. How sad that so many millions of people have chosen the mind of Darwin instead of the mind of God.

Jesus personally demonstrated that He is the Creator. By raising His own body back to life after three days of death and walking out of that tomb, He demonstrated that He has power over life. Just as it is only God who can create something from nothing, only God has power to create life from death John 2:19-21. So far as I can tell, one of the reasons Christians don’t like to talk about creation is because most unbelievers will quickly jump in with, “How did He do it?” In other words, they allow themselves to get side-tracked and then become embarrassed because of a lack of scientific knowledge. We don’t need scientific knowledge. What we need is to stick to our guns and pin them down to facing up to the fact of God, not the “facts” of science.

To their questions on creation and any statements on science, I put the question, “Is there a God – yes or no?” If they say no then I have nothing more to say to them on the subject. If they say yes, my next question is, “Who is God?” Should they say they don’t know, I ask, “Why don’t you know?” Under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, He’ll put you on the front foot and them on the back foot. That’s the way it should be always. We don’t need to know about the science of it all and bear in mind, they don’t know as much as they would have you believe they know anyway. Their questions are simply smokescreens to hide behind so that they don’t have to face up to issues of God and the fact that He commands them to repent of their sin and unbelief.

Just as we once knew it, unbelievers know they need to repent … God has put that knowledge deep within them. What they may not know is how to go about it and what it all means for them. This is where we can bring the gospel into the deal. Something like, “God became a Man so that He can show you Who God is and what He is like  … God wants to reconcile Himself to you, but first you must turn away from your sin.  Now they’re really on the back foot. They’ll either stay and ask how questions on that or they’ll run a mile! If they stay, we can talk to them about the new creation plan God has in mind for them which they know nothing about! It’s one thing to be ignorant about creation, but quite something else to be ignorant about new creation.

New creation is where I left it with the young JW man. In sharing my testimony with him about my encounter with the living God Jesus, I mentioned that one of the first things I noticed myself no longer doing was swearing and blaspheming the name of Jesus. As well, I mentioned that my desire for excess alcohol began to wane, along with negative emotions such as: fear, worry, anxiety, anger. I told him that whilst I didn’t know what was happening at the time, I was later to discover that I was experiencing the truth of the Scripture, Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold (lo, see), all things have become new 2 Corinthians 5:17.

And that’s only the beginning! There’s a day up ahead when this same living God Jesus will make all things new Revelation 21:5. That includes a new heaven and a new earth to be created after this present universe is folded up and cast away like a worn out old blanket. What a day that will be! The Old Testament believers knew about this Isaiah 65:17 and, like everything else revealed to them by the living word of God, they humbled themselves and believed it by faith. They didn’t allow themselves to get side-tracked by words, irrelevant questions and arguments. To them God was God and that was enough. For us, Jesus is God, God is Jesus and that’s more than enough. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible,……. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist Colossians 1:16-17.