Deity of Jesus Christ Discussion with Mike Stockwell

Why Jesus Had to Be Both God and Man

Jesus Christ has to be God. That's an essential thing of Christianity, it's what makes Christianity different than every world religion. This is why it's essential. Every single one of us have violated God's law.

God says that all liars will have their place in a lake of fire which burns with brimstone which is called the second death. There's only one of two ways to pay an eternal fine. Here's the question. Why did Jesus Christ have to be God?

That's an essential thing of Christianity, it's what makes Christianity different than every world religion. This is why it's essential. Every single one of us have violated God's law. God says that all liars will have their place in a lake of fire which burns with brimstone which is called the second death.

There's only one of two ways to pay an eternal fine. We can pay it for all of eternity or an eternal God can pay it once in time and have it count. For all eternity. Why? Because he's an eternal being.

It's because he's eternal that that consequence that he paid counts for eternity. Otherwise, me personally, I don't even know how many lies I've told so for me to pay for my first one, I'll never finish paying the first one to pay the second one.

That's one of the reasons why I can't pay it for someone else. Maybe one of you would be a perfect person and never violate God's law. And you'd say, well, hey, I'm perfect, but you would only be able to pay for one other person's penalty in time because we're not an eternal being.

God being an eternal being can pay an eternal fine that would count for all of time. That's why Jesus Christ had to be God, but he couldn't be just God. He also had to be like you and I. He had to be a man.

We can't go to a judge in a human court and say, your honor, I know I got six months in prison. My poodle will do my down time. The judge is going to go, it doesn't work that way. But one of us can pay a fine for someone else, but we have to be human.

Jesus Christ was God Almighty, became a man for one purpose. He did that so that he could die in our place. Being God, he could pay an eternal fine. Being a man, he could pay for you and I. That is why we can have salvation.

That's what makes Christianity different than any world religion. Because every other world religion is based on works that we would do, but our works will work against us. God will actually judge us by a book, and the name of that book is the book of works.

There's two books that God has in heaven, the book of the lambs, the lambs book of life, and the book of works. Our name is in one of those two books. Either we have been forgiven by God because he's made the payment of sin for us, and our name is in the lambs book of life, or our name is in the book of works, and it's those very works that we're going to be judged by.

We often think our works are going to count for good. But here's a way of thinking of it. If you had a father who takes his son fishing, and his father says to him, hey, I don't want you to go to the lower part of the jetty because it's dangerous down there, but the son, being a typical son, doesn't believe dad.

He says, you know what, I really want to get some fish for dinner. I want to be able to provide for my family. I'm going to go to the lower part of the jetty. When he gets down there, an alligator whips its tail up and knocks the kid in the water.

The kid doesn't know how to swim all that well. Dad dives in the water. He grabs the son. He starts swimming him to shore, and all of a sudden, the alligator rips both the father's legs off. But with all of the father's energy, with everything he has left, as he's sitting there bleeding, he grabs his son to shore, and his son says, hey, thanks, dad, but I really want to make sure I have some fish for dinner.

I'm going to go back to the jetty. That would be disrespectful. Why? Because the father just gave his life to save the son, and the son's saying, but look at the works I'm doing. That's what we're like when we stand before God and say, but God, look at my works.

I know you're God Almighty, and it took your death to pay the punishment for us. But in doing that, we sit there and say we want to add our works to it. We diminish what he has done. That's why Jesus Christ had to be both God and man.

The Deity of Christ in Evangelism and Christian Orthodoxy

Well, welcome to the Striving for Eternity Academy. We are talking this week, as you just heard, about the deity of Jesus Christ. I'm here with special guest Michael Stockwell from Cross Country Evangelism.

Hello, Mike. Hi, I'm sorry to disappoint everybody. I'm not Cy Tembrugge and Kate. That's even better. I do use apologetics.

So we're going to be talking tonight about the deity of Christ. This is a topic, what do you think, does it come up once in a while when you're out on the streets evangelizing?

Oh, yeah. It comes up with all the cults that we run into, it comes up with all different people that we come in contact with.

And that's one of the things we end up having to deal with often, is we have to deal with the fact that there's often times we have to talk with people who are Jehovah Witnesses, who would not believe that Jesus is God.

Yeah, they deny the deity of Jesus Christ, yes.

Mormons who have a different take, they actually would say that they believe in the deity of Christ, but they have a totally different view than we have. They think he is just another God, like God the Father, and like you and I could be.

That he was Lucifer's spirit brother.

You might make a pretty good God, but I wouldn't want to see me as God. No. Scary. Me neither. One of the things that might surprise people is if you go out on the streets and you refer to Jesus as God, you're going to find a lot of professing Christians that deny that Jesus is God.

Or try it on Facebook. Did that this week. Then they're not Christians. That's right. Why are they not Christians if they don't believe in the deity of Christ?

That is the center of our faith, that God became a man. Without that, we have nothing.

The scriptures kind of talk a little bit about that, Jesus being God. Oh yeah.

It's all throughout the scriptures. You can go through the New Testament and find the deity of Jesus in just about every book of the New Testament. We're going to do that. Why don't we do that. Let's take a look at some passages.

Well, the first one that comes to mind for me is, it says, And his name shall be called Emmanuel, God with us. That's clearly who Jesus is. And in 1 Timothy, it also says that great is the mystery of godliness, that God was manifest in the flesh.

And who came in the flesh but Jesus Christ? And anyone who denies that is an antichrist.

Jesus Forgives Sin and Reveals His Authority

Now, what about, we were doing earlier. Let's take a look at some passages. Let's look at Mark 2. We were talking about this one earlier. Someone asked earlier on Facebook of me this week, they're talking to someone that's a Jehovah Witness, and they said, What are some good places you can turn to see the deity of Jesus?

Where does the Bible say it? You know, you have to get on Facebook and get in the good book.

That's right. You shouldn't be on Facebook if you haven't been on your face before God and first in God's book. Okay. That'll re-clarify that. That's right. And so, you know, if we look at Mark chapter 2, this is a very interesting text because people often say that Jesus never claimed to be God.

But take a look at what he says here. If you look at Mark 2, and we're not going to read through this, but this is an account where Jesus goes in, there's a crowd of people, they're friends of this one man who's lame, they're trying to get him in to see Jesus so he could heal him, but there's no room.

They rip off the roof, which is not something you want to do to your neighbor's house if you want your neighbor to still like you, but they rip his roof apart and lower the man down. And Jesus, to the Jewish leaders, has the nerve to say, Son, your sins are forgiven you.

And when he did that, they were all murmuring about only God can forgive sin.

And so Jesus, of course, quickly said, No, no, no, no, you guys are mistaken. I wasn't claiming to be God, right? No. No. But he actually says here that what he then did is he said,. Which is easier to say, your sins are forgiven, or rise up and walk?

And it's obviously easier to say your sins are forgiven because there's no evidence of that. But to say to a lame man who's never walked, rise up and walk, then all of a sudden, that has some way of showing evidence.

And that's exactly what he did. So instead of saying, I'm not God, he said, I'm going to prove that I'm God.

He says that the Son of Man has the power to forgive sin.

Scripture Claims About Christ's Deity

Yeah. So what passage would you turn to? You have someone that says, Well, I don't believe in the deity of Jesus Christ.

Well, I have a few of them that we can turn to. But I guess we'll start with, let's see. We'll go to 2 Corinthians 5, and it's verse 19. It says, God was in Christ. Boom. We're done. God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, imputing their trespasses.

But I mean, really, you know, Jesus said, He said, If you have seen me, you've seen the Father. We're done with this session now. Because that's it. I mean, Jesus said that, If you've seen me, you've seen the Father.

I mean, who other's word are we going to take better than Jesus Christ?

But then what do you say when it says that, which is the argument you're going to get, that it says that the Father is greater than I am, or than I.

Well, as far as that, it says, but then Jesus, it was said that, He says, I and the Father are one, and then we have another scripture over here that talks about that He didn't consider it robbery to be equal with the Father.

And that's in Philippians.

Philippians, that's 2 .6. And that's a great one, because in there He's saying, and that actually, why don't we turn to that one real quick. Correct. Because that one, there's something interesting with Philippians 2 .6.

And that is that there's some people that, it's called, there's actually a heresy that some hold to that is called the kenosis theory. Where they say here, if you look in Philippians 2 .5 and 6, it says,.

I'll read it. Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal with God. Keep going for a little bit. But made Himself of no reputation, and took upon the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.

Being found fashioned as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of a cross.

Okay, so what they actually say is that the word here is He emptied Himself. And they actually, some will argue that Jesus was God, but on earth He stopped being God. In other words, the thought is that somehow Jesus emptied Himself of being God, and was a man on earth, and then became God again.

And so when He was on earth, He wasn't God. But here's why what Mike was saying earlier. If you don't believe Jesus is God, you can't be a Christian. If Jesus is not God, you don't have an eternal payment made.

You can only have the eternal payment by a temporal being paying it for all of eternity, or an eternal being paying it once in time, and that's what Jesus did. Being an eternal being, He can pay the fine.

So if Jesus wasn't God on the cross, then we're still dead in our sin. And that's the heresy when people say that He emptied Himself, that when He walked earth He only did what the Father did through Him.

He didn't do it of Himself. And so the kenosis theory has got a problem. Yes, He emptied Himself, but He emptied Himself from the use of His attributes.

He was fully God and fully man, and for Him to live a perfectly sinless life, He had to be God. I mean, because all men have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

The Hypostatic Union and Trusting God's Revelation

Yeah, and that actually, we should define it. Let's deal with some definitions of terms. The hypostatic union. It's those big words you use at dinner parties to impress your friends, right? Mike was using that tonight at dinner.

In between bites of lasagna.

The hypostatic union is what? He's fully God and He's fully man at the same time. 100 God, 100 man.

But wait a minute, Mike, I can't comprehend that. It's hard to comprehend. So if I can't comprehend it, does that mean it's not true?

No, the Bible says that we lean not on our own understanding, but in all our ways we acknowledge Him. So even when we don't understand things, we trust God.

We trust in God. So the thing that we see there is that we have God being fully God, fully man, 100 God, 100 man. But here's the thing, when people say, but I can't comprehend it, you know what they're actually doing?

They're setting their reason to be higher than God. In other words, they're using their reason to actually judge God. As if it's their reason that has to be the thing that all things answer to. How do you validate your reasoning?

Well, I can't validate my reasoning. You use your reasoning to validate your reasoning? That's the only thing I would have.

And so the reality is that what we end up with is, and if you remember in the very first activity of God that we looked at in this class of systematic theology, we saw that God is incomprehensible. In other words, that we won't understand everything there is to know about God, but that which we can know, we can know because He's revealed it.

We won't know Him completely, but we can know Him with assurity. So, we should actually welcome you. We do have some new students in the academy. We also know that there are some new trolls, some new atheist trolls who have been watching the page, so we welcome you as well.

Is there any reason why we call them trolls? Well, that's a term that they use.

Oh, they use that term? Yeah. Why, they live under a bridge? Well, because they hide out and pretend to be something they're not. Using fake Facebook profiles, things like that. Now I'm hip to it. So, what other passage can you turn to?

Christ as Creator, the Word, and the Son of God

Well, we can turn to Colossians 2 .9, For in Him dwell all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. I mean, those scriptures are very clear that in Christ dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily.

Now, if you keep going in Colossians, it's a very interesting one to bring up if you are talking with a Jehovah Witness, because this will also bring out another way you can see the deity of Christ. Not only by the clear claims as Mike read, but look at Colossians 1 .15 and 1 .16.

It says, He is the image of the invisible God, this is speaking of Christ, the firstborn of all creation, for by Him all things were created, and nothing is in heaven or on earth, visible or invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers, all things were created through Him and for Him.

Now it says in verse 17, He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.

They've corrupted that verse. No, what are they doing? They change it.

Do you remember what the change was they did with that verse? Something with the... It's the word other. The word other. So in verse 16 and 17, what they say is that Jesus created all other things. Now why would they have to add that word?

They add that word because their theology teaches that Jesus was a created being. He was an angel that became a man and returned to being an angel. And so they don't believe that Jesus Christ was deity.

So He was... God created Jesus, and then Jesus created everything else. That's how they would argue it. But the problem is that there's nothing in this text, in the Greek, that argues for adding the word other.

Now they used to be a little bit more honest, actually. In their older... In the last maybe 15, 20 years, they had the word other in brackets so that you knew that it was added and it wasn't in the Greek.

They've taken that out in the recent times. Me and you, though,.

We can go to scripture, we can go to John 1 and look at that and say in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And we don't have a problem with that. And that clearly shows that Jesus is God because He was the Logos, the Word, who was with God and was God.

The problem is now, if you're talking to Jehovah's Witnesses, their scriptures have been corrupted and they add that one letter, A, that He was a God. So it would be hard to deal with them, but me and you can look at that and we accept it.

We don't have to sit here and think, oh, we... John 1, 1,.

Which they would often turn to, and it's an interesting thing. A friend of ours, Mark Spence, actually did some homework on this and looked up the... in a court case where they had a court case for the guy who did the translation for the Jehovah's Witnesses.

And under a court of law, he admitted that he doesn't know Hebrew and Greek. But if you look at John 1, 1, the Jehovah's Witnesses will argue that there's not a definite article in front of... where it says, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was God.

They would say there that there's not a definite article, so in other words, it's not the Word was THE God. So they would insert the Word was A God with a little lowercase g. And that's the issue, is that they've actually changed that.

So in other words, they have two gods. They have God the Father.

And Jesus Christ, the lower god. But that's what happens if we're talking Jehovah's Witnesses. They won't argue. They'll say, yeah, Jesus was the Son of God. But when I speak to them, I say, Jesus is God the Son.

And that makes it different. And they won't agree with that, that He was God the Son. Mm-hmm.

Jesus as God the Son, Hebrews 1:8, and John 8–10

Okay, what's the difference between saying that Jesus Christ is the Son of God versus God the Son?

The Son of God would just say that He was a Son, that He wasn't God. He was just a Son.

He wasn't... It's taking away from His deity. So the emphasis is on the Sonship. The Sonship.

Okay. And then with that, I take them to Hebrews. Okay. And Hebrews has a bunch of stuff. Good scripture here. But the one that specifically stands out is Hebrews 1 .8. It says, But unto the Son, He saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.

So this is God the Father speaking about the Son saying, Thy throne, O God, is for ever. And it's capital G. It's not little g. It's capital G.

You wouldn't be able to argue the capital lowercase in the English, right? Because it's not going to be that way in the Greek. They didn't have upper and lower. But the context makes it clear that this is speaking of God.

Mm-hmm. Right? So then, what do we do with passages like... I mean, people argue... I debated a guy, Joshua Evans. I don't know if you ever heard of him. He's a leading Muslim apologist. He's kind of like the James White of Islam.

And I debated him, and he said, Jesus never claimed explicitly to be God. But then you have this in John chapter 8. Jesus speaking, and he said, at the end of John 8, in verse 58, Jesus said to them, Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.

And if you remember the lesson that we did on the names of God, I am is a name of God, specifically of his deity, of his self-existence. And it says in verse 59, And they picked up stones to throw at him.

Okay? Now, I'm saying that for this reason. Now flip over two chapters. Because the stones are going to become important again. If you look in John chapter 10, Jesus again is speaking to them. And he says to them, in verse 30, He says, I and the Father are one.

So not only does he claim to be, I am, but he says, He and the Father are one. Then again, the Jews pick up stones to stone him. And Jesus said, For many good works which I have shown you from my Father, for which of these do you stone me?

And the Jews answered him, saying, For good work we do not stone you, but for blasphemy, because you being a man make yourself God. So if you look right there, it's very clear from the context that the Jews of the time understood when he said, I am, and when he said, The Father and I are one, that was a claim of deity.

I mean, they understood he was claiming to be God. I mean, why did they crucify him?

Well, for the fact that he was upsetting their political standing. Well, that too. Because he said he was God. Yeah. So, one of the questions that's coming in though is we read.

Colossians 1, 15, and 16. It refers to Jesus as the firstborn. And this is something if you took our class on biblical hermeneutics, you remember that there's language has changes over time. In other words, Mike, if I said the word that someone is gay, what do you think I mean?

Happy. Well, what do you think I mean in today's day and age? He's a homosexual. He's a homosexual. And FDR was referred to as being a gay man. Now, we don't think he was a homosexual man. We think he was a happy man as he said.

Because the word gay changed over time. That's why we need to take back the word. That's exactly well, it's the reason we need to interpret within the context of when it's written. So, when Jesus says I am or Jesus says the Father and I are one, we're understanding it the way they understood it not the way we would today.

Now, the word firstborn in our day and age has lost the sense we think of it as a birthright or as someone who's born first. But firstborn often in scripture and the biblical times had more of the idea of a precedence or as a priority.

In other words, Isaiah, okay, was he the Abraham had the first two children. Was Isaiah the firstborn or the secondborn physically? Do you remember? Isaac, you mean. Isaac, sorry. You're right. Isaac was the firstborn.

Well, he's called the firstborn but who's really the firstborn of Abraham was really Ishmael. So how could Isaac be the firstborn when Ishmael was born first? It talks about the priority. The firstborn was one that spoke of a birthright of who was going to get that birthright as the firstborn of the family but its emphasis is on the priority of the one.

And so when it talks about Jesus being the firstborn of all creation it's talking about.

Him in the sense of being the priority and that all of creation is going to follow, you know, we will eventually follow like him being glorified. Like his uniqueness. Yeah. So when we, I mean, if we look at these passages it seems, I could be wrong, but it seems kind of clear that Jesus is claiming to be God.

I don't have a problem with that. Do you know of any passages where we see that Jesus claims to have the same attributes of God? If you look all the miracles that Jesus performed, I mean, he had to be God.

I mean, he fed the 5 ,000 with, you know, five loaves and two fish. He said he fed the 4 ,000 with seven loaves. You know, I mean, this is, I mean, a man can't do that. So you're saying that because he did miracles that's a claim of deity?

Oh yeah, he's definitely, it definitely takes God to perform those miracles. What if I argued, as I had someone argue this week, that Jesus did that because the Father did it for him. It's not going to change the reality that only God can perform miracles.

If I argued that God didn't exist I bet I could argue better with that wall behind us and get just as far. But, the reality though is that when we look at these things people, some would say well, Jesus was able to do those miracles because the Father did it for him.

And there's an interesting passage as I've been working through the Gospels on my book specifically dealing with the claims of the deity of Christ. And in Luke, we see, I think it was Luke chapter 10, I wasn't prepared to go to this one and so I'll have to look.

Yeah, it's Luke chapter 10. It said, starting in verse 15, I think it was, no, it was before that, it says that Jesus, when he sent out the 70 in the beginning of the chapter, he sent out, he gave them the authority and the power to cast out demons and to heal the sick.

So now, he can't give that and he can't give that authority if the authority is not his to give. So, all those times he did those miracles, those are claims of God. What about the actual attributes? Does he have the attributes of God?

Say, was he, did he claim to be eternal? Yeah. He says, he gives eternal life. Yeah. Well, in order to give eternal life, you'd have to be eternal.

Well, you had one earlier that we were talking about in Revelation where he claimed a title of eternality, a title that's used to refer to the eternal nature of God in Revelation. He says, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the Almighty.

And he said that I think in the passage you were looking at like three times in there. He's Alpha and Omega. Now, the beginning and the end, Alpha being the first letter of the Greek alphabet, Omega being the last, he's kind of saying from A to Z, there's nothing other than him.

His self existence was what he claimed. So, these are the things, I mean, people argue that, well, the Bible really doesn't claim that Jesus is God, though. I mean, like I said, you can look through. You make it sound like it's hard to find.

You look through the scriptures and that's all that you see is Christ's deity. When we look at this, though, how important is it to see that Jesus Christ is God?

Well, like you said before, and even in your little open air clip there, the importance is that God became a man because we needed a sacrifice. And that's the difference between us and a lot of the other false religions that are out there.

The Christian religion has forgiveness of sins and it's through the shedding of blood that a man's blood was shed. Okay, so some are saying that the biblical language would not reflect it literally. What would you say if someone was saying, well, you can't argue based on the biblical language because it's not meant to be literal.

What's not meant to be literal?

The word of God. I mean, sorry, the Bible. Well, then obviously you're not a Christian if you don't believe in the inerrancy and infallibility of the word of God. That shows that you haven't been regenerated and you don't cherish God's word.

It says, thy word is truth and that's what we trust and we trust that God's word is true. So, but the question though is if we're not supposed to take the Bible literally, how are we supposed to take it?

I mean, what are you left with? That you can make it say whatever you want it to say? Which is what many people try to do. They try to make the Bible say anything they want it to say so that they can basically start with their own conclusion and say, this is what the Bible really should have said.

When we read it, we have to read it with the who, what, where, why, and when type of reading so that we can, you know, who was he speaking to, during what time, you know, those type of things when we read it.

So, but, I mean, but the Bible is still pertinent for today. I mean, it hasn't changed as far as... So, so language has an interpretation. Well, there's, there's poetry... So, and that would be interpreted differently than a letter?

Right. Jesus spoke in parables, you know, so, so we have to, it's different. So, so, when people argue, say that as a Jehovah Witness would, that there is no, there is no hell. Okay, that it's not a literal hell.

Well, who am I going to believe? Am I going to believe the Jehovah's Witness or am I going to believe Jesus Christ himself? Okay, their argument's going to be, find me, find me where in the Bible it talks about an eternal hell.

Jesus says, you'll, it'll be eternal damnation, eternal punishment. I mean, he talks about it all the time. Eternal. Well, why? It's not a temporal. Yeah, I mean, I like to go, I'm trying to look it up offhand.

I think it's, I want to say Psalm 12, 2, but I'm not seeing it there. Well, I, there's one in Psalms where it says that it talks about the, that we die into eternal life and eternal, what's contempt? Well, what would be the opposite of eternal life?

Uh, that would be eternal death. Eternal. It's eternal. Yeah. So, it's, there's no middle ground. It's either one or the other. When you take all the passages where Jesus talks about the wailing and gnashing of teeth, granted, it may be descriptive of something, but what is it describing?

You have to understand what he's, what he's trying to say by interpreting the language he's using. Yeah, he's using, he's using descriptive language, but that descriptive language of something that would be like the lake of fire, it's descriptive, but what's it descriptive of?

I mean, is hell a literal fire? Maybe. I mean, it's described that way, but the emphasis is on that it's a conscious physical place where we're gonna go and feel the consequences. Well, the Bible says, and the smoke of their torment went up day and night forever.

Forever. That's eternal. Tormented eternally. Yeah, and so when we look at the way we interpret, we have passages that some will say, and, and, when we talk about the deity of Christ, the one everyone will always go to, the Father is greater than I.

Now, when we talked about this hypostatic union, um, how does that answer this dilemma that Jesus Christ could say that the Father knows something that he doesn't know? The Father knows when the final days are gonna come, but Jesus says only the Father knows.

He says, angels don't know it, only, not the son of man knows it, but only the Father. And he'll say that the Father is greater than him. Those seem to give a separation of Jesus from God the Father as if God's greater than him.

Well, I, I look at it as though, you know, everything has a, a, like a rank structure even on a family, the, the husband, uh, is the, is the head of his home, we have presidents that are in, uh, authority, and I believe that there, there is sort of that structure that the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, the Fa, the Son submits to the will of the Father.

Okay, so, uh, but with, also with that, we do have this reality that Jesus Christ being 100 man can speak as a man. He, he was tired, he slept, he needed to eat, uh, all of these things that he needed to do because he was also the Son of Man.