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John 1:1
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Many religions will ascribe some type of great status to the Lord Jesus. For instance, Islam regards Jesus as a prophet of God, and some Eastern religions are happy to acknowledge Jesus as a great teacher. Only biblical Christianity, however, confesses that Jesus, the Son of God, is Himself God.
Today we are considering the deity of God the Son, a truth that we find taught throughout the Scriptures. Sometimes, as in today’s verse, we have a very direct statement that the Son is God. John 1:1 takes us all the way back to eternity past to describe the preexistence of the Word—Logos in the Greek—who is none other than the Son of God. This Word, who became incarnate and took on the name Jesus, was there at the very beginning, before creation, and indeed from all eternity, for John says that “the Word was God.” It is difficult to find a stronger indication of our Lord’s divinity than this text, for here John establishes an identity between the Logos and God Himself. He also establishes some kind of distinction, saying that “the Word was with God,” and we will see in a few days that this distinction does not pertain to the essence of God but rather points to a distinction in persons in the Godhead.
In addition to direct statements of the Son’s deity, we see evidence that Jesus the Son of God is God Himself when we observe Him doing things that only God can do. In Mark 2:1–11, Jesus forgives a paralyzed man of all his sins, and the Jewish leaders accuse Him of blasphemy for it. Only God, of course, can grant such forgiveness, and the Jewish leaders accused Jesus of blasphemy because they recognized that Jesus’ pardoning the man constituted a claim to be God. If Jesus were not God, His act of forgiving the man would be blasphemous, but it is not blasphemy if it is true. Jesus proved the truth of the claim by doing something else that only God can do—namely, giving the paralytic the ability to walk.
Biblical evidence such as these passages and many others are what led the church at the Council of Nicaea to confess that the Son is homoousios—of the same substance with God. In other words, the Father and the Son both possess all that makes God God. Neither is more God or less God than the other. Athanasius of Alexandria, the great fourth-century defender of the deity of the Son, wrote that “the Word must be described as the True Power and Image of the Father, in all things exact and like the Father.”
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
When we trust in the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation, we are trusting not in a mere man—though He is a true man. We are trusting in the God-man, the incarnate Son of God who is God Himself. Because He is God, Jesus can be trusted to save us to the uttermost and we can have full confidence that He will complete His good work in us.
For further study
- Isaiah 9:6–7
- Micah 5:2
- John 20:24–29
- Romans 9:1–5
The bible in a year
- Leviticus 11–12
- Matthew 25:31–26:19