10 - Deity of Jesus Christ, Part 3

Well, welcome to the

Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology. We are glad to have you with us.

And, if you have your syllabus, well, you won't be needing it tonight.

We will not be looking at the syllabus tonight, and there's several reasons why.

This will be the last class for the year, so you'll get a couple weeks break.

I'll get into more details at the end of the show to explain why that is, but this will be the last class of the year.

But, I will be away next week and will not be able to be here, and then we have Christmas and then

New Year's, and I will be taking the time to be working on the material that we're going to go over tonight.

Staying with that, if you look in your syllabus, if you have a syllabus, you'd see that the next lesson is the humanity of Jesus Christ, a very important lesson and one that many take for granted, shall we say.

And the reason that people take it for granted is because they go, duh, yeah, Jesus is human.

Yeah, but that wasn't actually believed in the first century. And so, there's some explaining that has to be done to explain

His humanity, because that's what much of the New Testament had to deal with, many of the writers.

But tonight, what we're going to do, we're still going to stay within the lesson six. Lesson six, which is what we are dealing with on the deity of Jesus Christ, the deity of Christ.

I want to do one more lesson on this, give you some materials that's not in your syllabus, and it's actually material that's going to be coming out,

Lord willing, very soon in a new book. The new book right now, the working title is

Jesus Christ Claims of Deity, and that is a book that I am working on, writing, have quite a bit of it done, of the portions of it.

It'll be a relatively small book, one of those little quarter -size page, maybe 120, 150 pages.

And so, it won't be too big, but it is going to hopefully be a definitive answer to the claims that people make that Jesus never claimed to be deity.

We're going to go through some of that tonight, and I hope that after tonight's lesson, you'll not only be excited to get the book, which, as students, if you enroll in the academy, you'll probably get one for free, but if you want to enroll in the academy, go to the website right there, look at that, it's right there.

And you can get that. The book that we're going to do is hopefully going to be one that will kind of put a nail in the coffin on this debate, although it really won't because most people that refuse to accept any knowledge other than what they already believe, well, they're not going to accept what

Scripture says anyway. But, we're going to go through the Scriptures to show that the evidence is overwhelming that Jesus Christ claimed to be

God, that the New Testament claims that Jesus is God. Alright? So, let's begin.

We've broken the book down, and the book is going to be separated into three sections. The first section, and to help with your memory, it all starts with the letter

W. There are the words of Christ, the works of Christ, and the witness of Christ.

So it's easy to remember. And this is based out of the fact that when you look in John, he says that Jesus Christ said that his works and his witness attestify to what he claimed.

So, what we obviously would know is that his words would too. So let's start with that. Let us start with the words of deity.

The words of deity. Alright? Did Jesus claim the words of deity?

That would be a simple thing. And we're not going to look at too much Scripture tonight because what

I'm going to do is instead of reading the Scriptures, you're going to want to go on YouTube later and re -watch this.

Of course, until the book comes out, and then you can get the book. But until then, I'm going to mention many passages of Scripture.

I'm not going to quote them. I'm just going to reference them for you to look up later. So you may want to take this class, review it again on YouTube later when it's up there.

Take notes for anything that you missed. But when we look at the words of deity, we're going to break those down into two different categories.

Okay? Two different categories. The first one is going to be the explicit words.

Now, let's start by saying what does explicit mean? Alright?

An explicit statement. So an explicit statement is a statement where you have something that is very, very clear.

There's little question in it. It is a statement that is stating something without need for referencing of other things or need of much, well, shall we say, further understanding of the text.

This is opposed to what we're going to talk about in a minute, implicit. But explicit statements. There are explicit statements that Jesus made where he referred to himself as God.

These are just through the Gospels, but Matthew 7, 21 to 22, he calls himself

Lord, Lord. Now that's not just a reference to him being Lord as master or as a ruler or as a teacher, but because it's

Lord, Lord, it's doubly emphasized, which is always used to refer to God.

Alright? So you have Matthew 7. You have Matthew 11, 27. You have

Matthew 12, 6, Matthew 12, 8, Matthew 21, 13. I can go on.

But there's some more explicit ones that we want to focus on. We mentioned last time Mark 2. You can look at Matthew 9,

Mark 2. They're going to deal with the same issue there where he's going to make statements that are pretty explicit.

He's going to say that he has the authority to forgive sin. He's clearly stating that he has this ability to forgive sin.

He's stating he's God in there because that's what the argument is over. But we're going to see in John 8,

John 10, I think two of the clearest in those passages where what you see is that Jesus says,

I am. He calls himself I am. Before Abraham was, I am. Jews pick up stones to stone him.

Now why is that important? Well we see in John 10, he says the Father and I are one.

And you say, well gee, those don't sound very explicit to me. Well they actually are because the Jews of the time, the people of the time, those who understood the meaning, and that's the key, remember, when we interpret something, we're going to interpret it based on the meaning that people understood at the time.

That's how we interpret. And so when we do that, we're going to see that Jesus Christ very clearly was saying he was

God because the people that were there, those that were listening, and those that understood the language of the time, they understood what he was claiming.

They understood what he was claiming because they picked up stones to stone him. Now why did they pick up stones to stone him?

They picked up stones to stone him, he says, for what good works have I done that you're going to stone me?

For you being a man claimed to be God. Now do you see? The context makes it clear that those that were there understood that he was claiming to be

God. Well let's look at the implicit statements. Now an implicit statement, different from explicit, explicit is directly out of.

This is something you have to read into. So an explicit statement doesn't need you reading into it. An explicit statement you'll read into the text.

Now when we go through the rest of the different categories, they really do fit into explicit or implicit.

Maybe you could think of it as direct or indirect claims. But we're looking at the words, the things that Christ actually said that made those claims.

Alright? Now there's many implicit things. For example,

Jesus Christ in Matthew 7, 24 and 26, he equates his words with God's words.

That's an implicit statement. In other words, he's saying that when he speaks, it's as if God is speaking.

Well that's pretty clear. You can see that Jesus made statements.

You can look at Matthew 10, that Jesus claims that the rejection of him and his message is going to be worse for the person who does that than for Sodom and Gomorrah.

He actually claims that if you reject him, you will face a judgment.

In other words, and we're going to look at this even later, that Jesus Christ is saying that he's the standard of judgment.

When the disciples of John the Baptist in Matthew 11, 4 -6, or you could look in Luke 7, 22 -23, and when you look at those, what do you see?

You see that John the Baptist sends his disciples, because he's sitting in jail and saying, Jesus, go talk to Jesus and find out what the deal is, because is he the one?

I mean, I thought he was the one, I saw all these signs, but I'm sitting in jail, I don't see what

I expect to see, and so there's the question, so what happens? Disciples come, and Jesus says, look at the things

I'm doing, and tell John what you see. He's implying to them the fact that he has authority over demons, over sickness, we're going to look at those in detail, but he's implying there that he has the authority of God.

And we're going to see in a moment why that's important, but you can look at some others, you can look at Matthew 20, verse 28, the

Great Commission, you'll see there, sorry, that wasn't the Great Commission, we're going to get to that later, 20 -28, when

Jesus announces that he would be the sacrifice, that he would give his life as a ransom, it implies that his life is not just a human life, it's just not a temporal life, otherwise it can't count for all of eternity, for all of the people.

So, there you go in seeing that there's implications, many of these implications are when you take them with other things, but Mark 10, 17 -18,

Luke 18 -18, Luke 4, 18 -20, Luke 6 -5,

Luke 10 -22, I can go on, but let's look at the next passage, and that is this one, the fact that there's references to God as his

Father, references to God as his Father, and you're saying, well, how is that a claim of deity,

I mean, that doesn't seem like much of a claim. I mean, we call

Jesus Father, and in the New Testament Paul says you can even call him

Abba, which in Hebrew is Daddy, in other words, we can be so intimate with God that we can call him

Daddy, but that is not the way the Jews would see it. Jewish people at that time, and even some today, would find it offensive to be so informal with God that you'd call him

My Father, but when Jesus spoke of it, it was with a terminology that we see from the reaction of the

Jewish leaders that made it clear that Jesus was saying that His relationship with God the

Father was different than their relationship with God the Father. But there's many passages where Jesus refers to God the

Father as His Father, Matthew 11 -27,

Matthew 12 -49, 15 -13, 18 -19, 20 -23, and I'm just giving some of them.

Luke 2 -48, where He says, did you not know that I must be about My Father's business?

He said that to His human parents, making a distinction between His Father Joseph and God the

Father. Luke 10 -21 -22, Luke 22 -29,

Luke 24 -49, John 2 -16 refers to the temple as My Father's house.

When He speaks about His Father, God the Father being His Father, the

Jews understood that this was a distinction because they often questioned

Him on that. Alright, let's look at one other here, another one in this area, and that is the claims that He made when

Jesus Christ claimed to know, to have knowledge of the Kingdom of God. Jesus Christ actually claimed over and over again that He had intimate knowledge of things that went on in Heaven.

Okay, for example, He claimed to know the Kingdom of God in Matthew 5 -3 or Luke 6 -20.

He made the claim in Matthew 18 -19. He claimed to know what the

Father was doing in Heaven at that moment. How could He see what's going on in Heaven?

How could He even know? You and I have never been to Heaven. Well, okay, I haven't.

Maybe you have, but yeah, let's not go there. Alright, there's plenty of books out there of people that have gone to Heaven.

And, you know, I always find it funny because if people, when they write books about, oh,

I went to Heaven and I was in Heaven. They write these books and what do they do? They talk about they were in the

River of Jordan having a splashing fight with Jesus. That is about as disrespectful as you can get.

You know, when we look through the Scriptures and we see people that see

God, they're not having fun and splashing and, oh, let me splash you with water.

That's really in a book. When they see God, what do they do? They bow their face to the ground and say, depart from me because I'm a sinner.

They're not looking to have fun and play. They see how sinful they are before a holy

God and they want God to be away because they realize their sinfulness.

Look at Daniel's reaction when he sees an angel even coming. He's just like, whoa, whoa.

And that's not even God. But even more so, what is Isaiah's reaction? I'm undone.

I mean, I'm a people of unclean lips. I'm a sinner and I'm a sinner and I'm a people of sinners.

He's on his face. When John, in the book of Revelation, hears the voice of God, he bows down.

He's not playing games. These guys that write these books saying they saw Jesus in the mirror as they were shaving, you know how

I know they didn't see Jesus? They kept shaving. Yeah, you wouldn't keep shaving if you saw

Jesus. If Jesus appeared in the mirror, you would not keep shaving. You'd be in fear because you'd see

His holiness and your sinfulness. That's one of the beauties,

I guess, of when the moment we die and we can be gone from this body of sin. But I think that if we saw our sin the way

God sees our sin, even just for a moment, it would probably stop our heart. That's how much we are so desensitized to our sin.

We justify it so much. But Jesus Christ, over and over again, claimed

He had personal, intimate knowledge of what was going on in heaven, in the

Kingdom of God, before His existence on earth, during His existence on earth, and what would happen afterwards when we all die at the judgment.

Matthew 18. You can just go through all of Matthew 18. You'll see it a bunch of times. Matthew 18, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 14, 18, 19, 23.

Boy, that's just Matthew 18. But we can keep going. Matthew 20, the first 16 verses.

Matthew 21, 28 to 32. If you want to go to Mark, well, we got Mark 9, 42 to 48.

Jesus Christ warns against sin based on a knowledge of the Kingdom of Heaven, with that knowledge.

Mark 10, 25 to 26. Jesus knows how hard it is for a rich man who depends on their wealth to enter into the

Kingdom of Heaven. You can look at Luke 8, 10.

Luke 9, 11. Luke 10, 11. Luke 10, 17. Luke 13, 18 to 21.

John 3, 3 and 5. John 3, 13. Just to name a few, and I literally,

I'm not saying to name a few just because I don't have anything more to say. I'm saying just to name a few because we got to move on in class.

I literally have hundreds of passages, hundreds. And so, to the question that's in the chat room, yes, all of these are going to be in the book.

What we're going to do with this book actually is this. The book itself is going to be very short, explaining what

I'm, kind of what I'm explaining to you right now. How these things prove the deity of Christ.

But then there's going to be a second section of the book that is literally nothing but the evidence.

We're going to go through and I'm going to give you every one of these passages with a short explanation after many of them that need it to explain why this particular passage shows the deity of Christ.

Now, what you end up having to do is take these things because some of them are implicit, meaning you read into it.

You have to imply the meaning. So, you have to take it and understand how it relates to other things.

What are some of those other things? Well, we're going to look at those. Let's look at some of those, one of those things now. We looked previously at the works of deity.

Now, let's look at the, or I said the words of deity. Let's look at the works of deity.

And the first work that I want to point out is his omniscience, his omniscience.

Now, if you remember, we looked at this, when we talked about this, when we saw the attributes of God, the very first lessons we did, the attributes of deity, we said that there are certain attributes that only are true of God, okay?

And those attributes are the same attributes that Jesus over and over and over and over displays.

In other words, if Jesus Christ has these attributes, that means he is

God, okay? Because these attributes are attributes of deity.

So, that's what we're going to look at. These attributes that, so the first one, and we're going to look at first under the works of Jesus, the omniscience that he did.

Now, when you look at his omniscience, we can look in Matthew 8, 11 and 12, where Jesus knows who's going to be in heaven and hell.

How could you know that? How could Jesus know who's going to be in heaven or hell before he got there?

Furthermore, how could he know whether you and I would be in heaven or hell?

You think about that. We weren't even born yet. If Jesus was just a man, he wouldn't even know you and I.

But Jesus does know you and I. Why? Because he was omniscient, because he was God, all right?

Matthew 9, 4, Mark 2, 6 and 8,

Luke 5, 21. Those three passages all deal with that passage, what I referred to earlier, where Jesus answers the questions in the heart of the

Jewish people. When Jesus says to a man, your sins are forgiven, and they think in their mind, read the text, it doesn't say they spoke it, they thought it.

And Jesus, knowing what they were thinking, answered the question that was in their mind. He displayed his deity.

But just, I'm going to give just a few. Matthew 9, 13, Matthew 9, 24,

Matthew 10, 23, Matthew 11, 11, Matthew 11, 12, Matthew 11, 14,

Matthew 11, 21 to 24, verse 25, 26, Matthew 12, 25.

That's just Matthew. Let's start looking at some of Mark. We can look at Mark. I got to keep going because Matthew is so long.

But we can look at Matthew 26, and in chapter 26, we can look at verse 13, verse 18, verse 21, verse 23, verse 29, verse 31, verse 32, verse 34, verses 45, verses 46, verse 50.

And that's just chapter 26. I mean, I'm hoping that this is making the point really, really clear.

And you're going, hey, Andrew, we're not knuckleheads out here. We're getting the point. Yeah, but I really want to bash it over the heads of people that don't get the point.

Because some people just don't. And so, we really want you to understand. I want you to see this, all right?

But you can go to Mark 8, where the disciples are discussing one another a fact that they have no bread.

And then Jesus being aware of this, He walks into the conversation that they were having without Him.

And all of a sudden, He knows what they were speaking of, okay? You can look at Mark 8, 31, where Jesus explains the future events to the disciples.

Every time He gave an explanation of a future judgment, what He's doing there is

He is showing His deity, okay? He talks about that over and over.

But Luke 7, 40, Luke 9, 47 to 48, where He knew the minds of the disciples.

Luke 11, 17, knowing their thoughts is what it says there. So, you know,

Luke 19, 5, think about this. You may be familiar with this story. Zacchaeus, he's hiding up in a tree, okay?

He doesn't know Jesus. How do we know he doesn't know Jesus? Because he's hiding in a tree looking for Him, to see

Him. If he knew Jesus personally, he could just walk up to Him. But he's up in a tree looking down because he's short of stature.

And what does Jesus do? Jesus walks up, knows him by name. How did

Jesus know his name? A man He never saw before. You ever think about that?

You see, there's so many passages that people just read over in their Bible, and they don't even think that this describes

Jesus as deity. See, when Jesus said to Zacchaeus and calls him by name, I'm going to stay at your house today,

He's sitting there and showing that He knows something that no man could know.

He knows the man's name. He knows the man personally, intimately, all right?

You want more evidence of that? Well, what happened when Nathanael sees

Jesus? Jesus walks up to Nathanael, and He turns to Nathanael and says to Nathanael, and this you can look at in John 1, 50 to 51.

Jesus proves to Nathanael when He sees Nathanael, and He says that this is a man without guile, and He says, you know, how could you know me?

Oh, I knew you before you were sitting under the fig tree. You see, He was proving to Nathanael that He was

God. Nathanael's reaction? Yeah, he recognized it. In John 1, 47 to 49, when that happened, when

Nathanael was still approaching Jesus, Jesus declared to Nathanael, and just as He did with Peter in John 1, 24, 42, sorry, when

He knew who Peter was, He knows who Nathanael is, and we know that this was a divine because Nathanael's reaction was to call

Jesus the Son of God after displaying His omniscience. All right, and we're going to come to why that claim is a claim of deity, okay?

So, that's just His omniscience. Does He have any other attributes of deity that He did by works?

Well, sure, we have His omnipresence, His omnipresence. Now, you say, where does

Jesus Christ display that He's omnipresent, that He's always present everywhere?

Well, it's a passage you're probably very familiar with. Matthew 28, 20, where Jesus says to the disciples, and lo,

I am with you always. And this He's saying to every believer of every age.

To be present with every believer in every age at all times is to have the divine attribute of omnipresence.

So, Jesus is claiming if He could be with everyone. He's with you in your room right now watching this show as He is with me right here in this studio, as He is with countless others around the world who just didn't want to watch the show because, well, they're sinners.

No, I'm kidding. I mean, you don't have to watch the Striving for Eternity Academy to go to heaven, but why take the chance?

I mean, really? All right, so there's some other things that He did as works, and that would be

He displayed that He has the forgiveness of sins. He forgave people's sins.

We already talked about the Matthew 9, Mark 2, and Luke 5 passage, so we won't go there, but we can look at Luke 1, 77,

Zechariah announces that Jesus will provide the forgiveness of sins.

Luke 7, 47 -50, Jesus declared the sins of the woman in the

Pharisee's house were forgiven, and even at the table, there were those that claimed, who is this that He can forgive sin?

They realize what Jesus is saying when He says, you forgive sin. Let me move on because we have a lot to do, a lot more to go through, but Luke 22, verse 22,

John 1, 29, just to give a few more. Next, let's get into the authorities. Jesus Christ showed that He had certain authority that only

God can have, okay? So He had the authority of God. He had the authority of God.

What would that authority look like? Well, in Matthew 21, verses 23 -27, also corresponding to Mark 11, 28 -33, the chief priests and scribes and elders came to Jesus questioning

His authority, and He implies that His authority is from God the same way

John the Baptist's or John the Baptizer's baptism is from God.

You understand the connection there? John the Baptist or Baptizer was not claiming to be

God because He baptized. It was the baptism that He said

He received from God. Now, what's the difference? Jesus Christ is claiming

He has the authority of God who gave that baptism, okay?

So when they challenged His authority, the very question, He implies that He has the authority of God.

Matthew 28 -17, Jesus claims that all authority, this is again the

Great Commission, all authority is given to Him to give to us. It is

His to give. You can't give something that belongs to someone else, all right?

Mark 1, verse 22. Let's look at another one that you're going to see, and you're going to see this throughout

Scripture, okay? Over and over and over again, and many people don't think about this, how this shows the deity.

But Jesus Christ had authority over illness, authority over illness, all right?

You say, well, gee, there's disciples healed. There's plenty of others who did healings, and we see throughout,

I mean, Matthew 4 -23, Matthew 8 -2, Matthew 9 -4 -7,

Matthew 8 -28 -30, Matthew 10 -1, over and over again.

We can look at Mark, Mark 3 -10, Mark 6 -5. We can look at in Luke, and we see that in Luke 5 -17,

Jesus had the power of the Lord to heal, okay? But it's even more than that because Jesus had the power to heal.

In other words, He had the authority within Himself, and we'll see that He even gives that authority to His disciples.

If He has the authority to give the disciples, that He has the authority to give it to them so that they can go and heal others, then the authority is coming from Himself.

And yes, for the person asking out, we will try to get the book in Kindle form. Trying to answer the questions that are popping up in the chat room as well as they come up.

So, if you do have a question, you can pop that up in the chat room, which means you should log in live.

It's one of the advantages to being live. But we see that Jesus, before He sent out the 70,

He gave them the authority to heal the sick, okay?

So, every time Jesus did that, every time Jesus healed the sick,

He was proving that He was God because He claimed the authority to,

He claimed, when He looked at these things, He said He did it of His own authority, not the authority of someone else, alright?

He also showed that He had authority over death, not just His death, but the death of others as well.

Now, His own death is like the greatest. I mean, you need proof that Jesus Christ is

God. He rose Himself from the dead. I mean, if He wasn't God, dead men don't rise, okay?

And so, when you look at that, that is probably one of the greatest evidences.

He said, I will raise Myself from the dead, but He rose others from the dead. In Matthew 9, 23 to 26, which corresponds to Mark 5, 40 to 42, or Luke 8, 54 to 55, those are the same event.

Matthew 27, 50, Jesus had the authority to choose the moment when

He would die. That's how much authority He had over death. He hung on that cross and He said,

I'm going to die at this moment in time. I mean, we could think we could take our own life, but there's people who survive a suicide attempt, so they don't even have control and authority over their own death.

Jesus had authority not only over when He would die, but the ability to raise

Himself from the dead. But we see that He rose other people from the dead. Luke 7, 14 to 15,

He was entering a town called Nain and He saw people carrying a man who had died and they were carrying him.

He was the only son of a mother, a widow. He had compassion on her. What did He do? He ended the funeral procession by raising the child from the dead.

Alright, and so let's look at another one. Not only did He have authority over death, but He had authority over demons.

He had authority over demons and He would do this often when He'd speak to the demons.

Demons would have to obey Him. Jesus, in Matthew 4, 24,

Jesus casts out all the demons. They have to obey Him.

I don't believe they have to obey you and I. It doesn't matter how much we use these magical incantations of, in Jesus' name, we don't have that authority that they have to obey us.

They obey Christ. And we could get into a debate on that. That's fine. Plenty of people do.

They do on our one video, open air preaching with a demon -possessed heckler. Get it all the time. But you can look at Matthew 8, 16.

You can look at Matthew 8, 32. Matthew 9, 32 to 33.

Matthew 12, 43 to 45. You can look at Mark 1, 25 to 26. You can look at Mark 3, 15.

You could look at Mark 7, 29 to 30. You can look at Luke 8, 2 and 3.

You can look at Luke 10, 17. And this is the passage, again, where we say when the 72 returned, okay, in Luke 9, 1,

Jesus gives the disciples the power and the authority over demons.

And how do we know He has that authority? Because in Luke 10, 17, the 72 come back.

They return and they say, wow, we actually were able to cast out all the demons. Why? Because they had the authority given by God.

And if Jesus Christ had that authority to give, that shows that it was

His possession. That's an example of how we know He was

God. Let's move on to another authority He had. He had authority, think about this, over weather.

He had the authority over weather, okay? Being God, He can command the weather.

Mark 4, 39. Luke 8, 24. Matthew 8, 26.

Matthew 14, 32. Mark 6, 51. They're in a storm. What happens?

Be still, right? He says to Peter, come out on the water. I mean, He walks on water. We'll get to that in a moment.

But then what does He do? He tells Peter, come on, to walk on the water. And then when Jesus gets on the boat, it's like, be calm.

You know, time He's sleeping on the boat. I mean, you're talking about professional sailors. John, James, Andrew, Peter.

These are professional sailors. They're out on a ship and they're scared. Why? They're scared because they're seeing

Jesus control the weather. I gotta move on. Let's continue. One more for you is that Jesus Christ had authority over the physical world.

The physical world. More than just the weather. He can make bread out of nothing.

Matthew 14, 19 to 20. Mark 6, 41 to 43.

Jesus feeds the 5 ,000. In Mark 8, the first nine verses, Jesus feeds the 4 ,000.

So Jesus can do these things. He can make lame men walk, all right? Matthew 7, 27.

Matthew 21, 19. Luke 22, 51. I told you you were gonna have to look this up on YouTube.

I was gonna just run through these verses rapidly for you to look up later. Jesus makes water into wine in John 2, 6 to 11.

His first miracle. What does He do? He turns water, regular water, into wine. Let's keep going because we are really behind here.

Jesus is Savior. Jesus is Savior. And so what we have there is that Jesus over and over again claimed to be the

Savior of men. The redemption. He was claimed to be the redemption of Israel. Luke 1, 68 to 79.

Luke 2, 30. Luke 2, 36 to 38. He's, Anna says that He is the redemption of Israel.

He's the Savior. Now remember, in the Old Testament, it's really clear that God is the

Savior. So if Jesus is the Savior and God is the Savior, what does that say that Jesus?

It says that He's God. John 3, 36. But not only is Jesus the Savior, not only does

He claim to be the Savior, but He claims to be the judge. The judge.

This is yet another work of Jesus. We have Matthew 3, 12. Matthew 7, 23 where He's gonna be the one to declare who goes into heaven and who's not.

Matthew 10, 26 to 27. Jesus implies on the judgment day that He will expose all things that are being hidden.

Jesus ends up implying not only that He's the judge, but that He's the standard of judgment.

So He's gonna be the standard of judgment. But you can look up Matthew 16, 19. Matthew 23, 12, 13, 14, 15.

You can look up Mark 9, 41. Mark 12, 40. Luke 10, 13 to 16.

Luke 11, 23. Luke 12, 8. John 3, 36. Just to name a few.

Now, let's look at one other work that He did. And that is that He was creator.

That He is creator. Okay, John 1, verses 2 and 3. And John, and verses 10.

Jesus Christ claimed to be the foundation of time.

Jesus claimed that He was the creator. Now, this is an interesting one for this reason.

I don't know if I have time to go into this, but real quick. We see that Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and God the

Father, all were involved in creation. I don't have time to continue on that. But John 1, 11 to 13.

Jesus Christ claims that He's the adopter. He is the one that adopts us. That we have the right to be called the child of God under one condition.

That we receive Him. He's the one that is going to give us that adoption into His family.

Alright? So, we looked at the works, the words of Jesus. We looked at the works of deity.

Now, let's look at the witness of deity. The witness of deity.

The first one is that He's virgin born. He's virgin born.

Okay? Why is that important? Jesus over and over again. Matthew 1, 18. Verse 20.

Verse 23. Luke 1, 26 to 37. It states very clearly that Jesus was born of a virgin.

In other words, He had no human father. Why is that important?

Sin is passed on from the Father. Jesus had no sin. God cannot sin.

Alright? But I want to focus a little bit more on some other things here. Okay? And that is the titles of deity.

The titles of deity. Alright? And so, when we look at the titles of deity.

Jesus Christ over and over again was called Lord. I already mentioned Matthew 7, 21 to 22.

But Matthew 8, 2. Matthew 20, 33. Matthew 21, 3. 22, 42 to 45.

Mark 7, 28. Luke 1, 43. Luke 2, 11.

Luke 3, 4. Luke 5, 8. I could keep going. But Luke 24, 3.

Jesus over and over again was referred to as Lord. Now the context makes it clear.

For example, as in Luke 13, 15. Where Luke refers to Jesus as the

Lord. A definite article. Alright? Zacchaeus calls Jesus Lord twice in Luke 19, 8.

This is not just as a master, as a man. But as something more. Now, let's look into the next title.

The title is Son of God. I'm not even going to quote all the verses. There's tons of verses where he's used. Notice, it's the demons and men that are calling him the

Son of God. Why? Because of the fact that Son of God says, as we looked at before in the previous lesson.

This is showing the attributes of God. That he has the identity of God.

To save time, I'm not going to go through them. Because we looked at those. Jesus Christ claimed to be the Son of Man. Why is that a reference?

Well, if you look back in Daniel, it's a Messiah reference. And we know the Messiah, through the Old Testament, was going to be

God. Jesus Christ kept referring to himself as Son of Man. Why? Because that's what they questioned.

Alright? Son of David. The Son of David would be the Messiah. Now, if we keep looking back, this Messiah, we're going to look at later, actually the next one, the

Christ. The Christ, or Messiah, was to be God. If you look in the Old Testament, and you start looking at the comparisons of who the

Messiah was. When Jesus claimed to be the Son of David, this very special person. When he referred to himself as the

Christ, I'm not going to go through all those different passages. When he referred to himself as the King of Israel, the

King of Jews, and other titles like the Chosen One, or Son of the Most High, these are all titles that show that Jesus Christ is more than just a man.

He is God. So, those are the titles.

I'm trying to get quickly, because we're running out of time. But he had attributes of deity.

He had certain attributes of deity that we already looked at some of them.

But he was eternal. Luke 1 .33, Luke 3 .23,

Luke 10 .18, John 1 .2, John 1 .15, John 3 .13,

John 3 .31, all show his eternality. He's holy, according to Luke 1 .35.

Jesus is holy. Jesus is the source of life in John 1 .4. Jesus is the glory of God in John 1 .14

and John 2 .11. Jesus is sovereign as God in John 3 .31

and 3 .35. You're kind of seeing that this is not just a few passages of scripture here.

Jesus is worshipped. This is another witness. It's a witness because people worshipped

Jesus. Matthew 2 .2, Matthew 2 .8, Matthew 2 .11, those were just when he was a babe.

But you can look at Matthew 26 .7, cross -reference that with Matthew 26 .12, Matthew 28 .9,

Matthew 28 .17, Luke 17 .16 and 17. You can look at Luke 24 .52.

Jesus was also, not only was he worshipped, but scripture testified to him.

He was testified to scripture, alright? So, the scripture accounts that he is

God. How scripture was fulfilled by Christ. So, what that means is that when

Christ fulfilled these scriptures and it was referring to those scriptures meaning God would do these things, therefore he's showing he's

God. Matthew 26 .24, Matthew 26 .54.

You can look at Matthew 27 .35. You can look at Mark 1, 2, and 3, verses 2 and 3 that is.

Matthew 18 .31 -33, Luke, sorry that's Luke 18 .31

-33, Luke 24 .27, John 2 .22. That's just a few, alright?

Now let's look that he was recognized as God. He was recognized as God. Who recognized him as God? Well, first he was recognized as God by God the

Father. God the Father, okay, had recognized him as God.

Matthew 3 .17 at his baptism. Matthew 17 .5,

Mark 1 .11, Mark 1 .27, Mark 9 .37, John 1 .33

-34, okay? Another is that not only did God the Father recognize him as God, but holy angels recognized him as God.

Holy angels recognized him as God. And that is

Matthew 3 .16, Mark 1 .10, Mark 1 .12, Luke 2 .25

-26, Luke 4 .14. Some of you in the chat room are thinking if I can talk faster. I can. Are you ready?

Okay, not only did Jesus, was Jesus recognized by God by the holy angels, he was also recognized by God by demons, by demons over and over again.

Demons recognized him as God. They called out to him as God. In Matthew 4 .2,

4 .6, Luke 4 .9, you can look at Mark 1 .34,

Luke 4 .34. Next you'll see also not only was he recognized by God the

Father, recognized by holy angels, recognized by demons, but he was recognized as God by the disciples.

By the disciples, all right? So the disciples recognized him as God. Matthew 8 .25,

Matthew 8 .27, Matthew 4 .33, Matthew 16 .14 .16,

Matthew 17 .3, Matthew 17 .6, Matthew 21 .20, Luke 9 .54,

Luke 24 .12, just to name a few. And not only did his disciples, but also other men, other men recognized him as God.

All right? When we look at the other men, we can see that he was called the Christ, the

Messiah in 1 .16, in Matthew 1 .16, Matthew 8 .2,

Matthew 8 .5 and 6. You can look at Matthew 9 .8. You can look at Matthew 9 .20 to 21.

You can look at Matthew 15 .22. You can look at Matthew 22 .33. You can look at Mark 1 .27.

You can look at Mark 2 verses 3 and 4, Mark 7 .37. You can look at Luke 4 .32.

You can look at Luke 4, Luke 5 .9. There's a lot of them. But here's another one that's really neat to see.

And it's not only was Jesus recognized by God the Father. Let's actually back up. He's recognized by God the

Father. He's recognized by God the Holy Angel. He's recognized as God by the demons. He's recognized as God by his disciples.

He's recognized God by other men. But he's recognized as God by his enemies. Even his enemies had to admit he was

God over and over again. They never questioned the source of what he's doing. They recognize the things he's doing is far beyond what a man could do.

Matthew 9 .3, Mark 2 .7. You can look at Matthew 9 .34,

Matthew 12 .10. You could look at Matthew 27 .40

to 43. Look at Mark 3 .1 and 2. Luke 11 .15,

Luke 14 .1, Luke 22 .64 to 65. And then there's other witnesses on top of that.

You could look at the fact that Matthew 2 .11 mentions that his mother showed, you know, that Jesus is mentioned before his mother in Matthew 2 .11,

14 and 21. Showing that Jesus is the priority over his mother. That wouldn't be the way you do things back then.

The parents would have the priority. But Jesus has priority over his parents. Matthew 7 .28, we see in Matthew 27 .52

to 53. Matthew 28 .7, Luke 11 .24 to 26, Luke 11 .31

to 32. Luke 23 .44 to 45, Luke 24 .36 to 42.

John 1 .16 to 17, just to name a few. Your challenge is to go back to this when we have it on YouTube and look up every one of those verses.

And that's not even half of the verses. That's not even half of them.

That's how many verses there are that refer to Jesus as God. As I mentioned before, 44%, basically 476 verses, unique verses, refer to, out of the 1 ,071 verses in Matthew, refer to the deity of Christ.

That's 44%, all right? There's over 600 references in these different categories because some verses have two references for them.

And so there's over 600 different references in the categories. I think,

I hope that I've made it very clear to you that Jesus Christ claimed very clearly just through the

Gospels that He was God, okay? Now, time to take a breath.

So the reality is that Jesus Christ was claiming very, very clearly that He is

God, okay? Now, with that all being said,

I say that so that it would be really clear. But there are people who will, you'll see them on Facebook, they deny the deity of Christ and they call themselves

Christians. This is why we're putting this book out, because there's not many people that are writing on this specific subject just this way.

They've kind of go over different areas. They may write a theological novel, so they're dealing with all systematic theology and they'll have a section devoted to the deity of Christ.

But there isn't a book that just lays out all of the evidence just on the claims of the deity of Christ through the

Gospels. So this is what it's going to be. So I encourage you to go back, re -watch this, and be anxiously waiting for the book to be coming out, because I do hope that it's going to be out very early this year, except editing can be crazy.

And trust me, if you talk to my proofreader, she'll tell you, I like need, it's going to be a lot of work.

Yeah. But I hope that this was really good for you. If you have any questions, you can contact us at the academy at strivingforeternity .org.

Now, if you are a student of the Academy, this is the last week of the year.

All right. Being that it is the last week of the year, there is no more classes this for the next three weeks.

All right. There's no classes for three weeks because of some different events going on.

We have, I'm going to be away. I'm going to mention why in a moment. But there's also going to be Christmas and then

New Year's. So we are going to take a break and give you a class break, like you'd get in school.

So no class for the next three weeks. But being that this is the last class for the year, okay, that means that those of you who have enrolled in the

Academy, your Academy membership has ended with this last week.

In other words, you won't have the benefits unless you go back to the website and enroll again for next year.

Okay. Sign up again. If you have already signed up, if you have already enrolled and you don't want to go through the form, just email us at academy at strivingforeternity .org.

Okay. Just do that and let us know. Send in the money and we'll enroll you for next year.

So you get all the syllabuses. However, one thing that has changed for next year, and I'm encouraging you, if you want to enroll, enroll now.

We are going to be changing the structure of the enrollment year by year. We're going to be doing some things different.

One thing that we're going to change for the next year is that we are no longer going to have the conference call.

So if you want to be part of the conference call and you're an enrolled student, do that today.

Okay. Make sure you enroll today. Why? You're not going to get another chance.

There's a reason why we're doing this, and I do want to explain that reason so that you know why we're doing it.

The board of directors had met. We had all decided that this was something that it wasn't being as utilized as much as we had thought, because we're using more things like the email and even more so in the

Facebook, the Striving for Eternity Facebook group. And it's for that reason that we're encouraging you to go out there.

Okay. But the other reason is because my time is limited.

Why? It's going to be even more limited because I am just enrolled and am looking to start my doctrinal studies.

We feel that that would be beneficial to the ministry, and so I will be starting that. So time is going to be really tight.

So that is the reason we're going to be eliminating that, because it wasn't really being used as much as we had thought.

All right. Where will I be this weekend? Well, that has to do with the person

I want you to encourage this week. All right. This week especially, because this individual person is someone who

I'm really... I've been encouraged by, I think you will too, but it's a special week for him.

Because this week, I will not be available because I'm going to his wedding, and that is John Hissop.

Now, John is marrying someone who works for striving for eternity, Melissa Burdett.

And so we've asked you to encourage her in the past. Well, John, I got to meet at the academy, the

Ambassador's Academy, out with Living Waters. John went with me and Melissa.

I'm being blamed for their wedding because I'm the one that encouraged and got Melissa to come out to that academy with me.

And so she had gone to that one instead of the later one that she was going to go to. And therefore, she ended up meeting

John. But John ended up contacting me before the Reason Rally and said, hey, is it okay if I get put on Melissa's team?

And I said, no, you're Canadian. You're on the Canadian team. But I knew why John was thinking that.

So we kind of knew that John was having some interests in this young lady. Well, after the

Reason Rally was over, they got to talking. And sure enough, they decided they would start getting together. John came down to the

States to pay her a visit, ring in hand, though he didn't tell her. And he decided to ask her to marry him.

And so John will be getting married to Melissa this weekend.

And so that is really kind of cool. And I believe that our good friend

Tony Miano may be doing the wedding. I do believe I had heard that early on, but we'll see. But I encourage you to encourage

John. John's got a heart for the gospel. And those of you know that I joke with Melissa because she could break me in two with all of her karate background.

Well, John is a healer. John's a paramedic. So when Melissa gets done hurting me, John can heal me, right?

John will patch me back together. They're perfect for each other. She could break people, he can heal them, right? But John's got a heart for the gospel.

And I'm excited to see what God's going to do with two fervent evangelists like they are, marrying one another.

So I want to encourage you to go out and encourage him this week. We're going to take three weeks off, all right?

So again, we will not be here for three weeks. So don't forget that.

Don't be like tuning in and going, where's the show? It won't be live. So that is

December 17th, December 24th, the day before Christmas, and December 31st, okay?

The next three weeks. So we will have no more shows for the end of the year. And just to wrap up all the different questions that I didn't catch.

Yes, Joe, you're trying to look like Spurgeon. But no, you don't. He was a lot bigger.

Saw a life -size picture of him in his office. He was bigger than you. Don't try to be like him.

I'll miss you too, those who are in the chat room saying we'll miss you. But we will still be on the

Facebook page, and I'll still be posting you some questions and throwing you some quizzes out there. So pay attention because we will be rewarding some people throughout the year for those who pay attention the most or who are most active in the

Facebook group, all right? So we want to encourage you to remember to go out and strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.