Deity of Jesus Christ Discussion with Mike Stockwell

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. 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 is 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've 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

Lamb's 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

Lamb's 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 of 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.

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 Timbrookian Kate. That's even better.

I do use apologetics. So we're going to be talking tonight about the deity of Christ.

And 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. Yes. 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. So we have, but one of the things actually 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.

I mean, without that, we have nothing. And 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. 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 off 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.

Now that we've clarified that. That's right. And so, you know, if we look at Mark 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 in 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. 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. 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 chapter 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.

Yeah. Because that's it. I mean, Jesus said that, If you see 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 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. 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 fashion 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.

Yeah, and that actually, we should define it. Let's deal with some definitions of terms, right?

The hypostatic union, that'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 without my reason. 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, and we do have some new students in the academy.

We also know that there's some new trolls, some new atheist trolls who've 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?

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?

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.

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. What do they do? They change it. Do you remember what the change was they did with that verse?

Something with the... It's the word other, they insert 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 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. You know, 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. 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. It's taking away from his deity. So the emphasis is on the sonship.

The sonship. And then with that, I take them to Hebrews.

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.

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've 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 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. So one of the questions that's coming in now 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 language 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 that we think of it as a birthright, 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. Abraham had the first two children.

Was Isaiah the firstborn, or the secondborn, physically? Isaac, you mean.

Isaac, sorry. You're right. Isaac was the firstborn. Well, he's called the firstborn, but 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.

We will eventually follow like Him, being glorified. Like His uniqueness. Yeah. So 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. He fed the 5 ,000 with 5 loaves and 2 fish.

He said He fed the 4 ,000 with 7 loaves. 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, 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 through Him? You can argue all you want. 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, some would say, well,

Jesus was able to do those miracles because the Father did it through Him. And there's an interesting passage, as I've been working through the

Gospels in 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, 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 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 attributes? Does He have the attributes of God?

Like, say, 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. 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.

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 could 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?

Someone's 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.

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, oh, this is what the

Bible really should have said. When we read it, we have to read it with kind of 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.

But the Bible is still pertinent for today.

I mean, it hasn't changed as far as... So language has an interpretation.

Well, there's poetry... And that would be interpreted differently than a letter.

Right. Jesus spoke in parables, you know, so we have to...

So when people argue, say that as a Jehovah's Witness would, that 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 is going to be, find me where in the Bible it talks about an eternal hell.

Jesus says it will be eternal damnation, eternal punishment.

I mean, it talks about it all the time. Eternal. It's not a temporal. Yeah, I mean,

I like to go... I'm trying to look it up off hand.

I think it's, I want to say Psalm 12 .2, but I'm not seeing it there.

Well, I like to go to... There's one in Psalms where it says that it talks about that we die into eternal life and eternal contempt.

Well, what would be the opposite of eternal life? That would be eternal death.

Eternal. It's eternal. Yeah. So 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, that may be descriptive of something, but what is it describing?

You have to understand what he's trying to say by interpreting the language he's using. Yeah, 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 going to 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 when we talk of the deity

Christ, the one everyone will always go to, the Father is greater than I. Now, when we talked about this hypostatic union, 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 going to come, but Jesus says only the

Father knows. He says angels don't know it, not that Simon knows it, but only the Father. And he'll say 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 look at it as though everything has a rank structure, even in a family.

The husband is the head of his home. We have presidents that are in authority.

And I believe that there is sort of that structure that the

Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Son submits to the will of the

Father. Okay. But also with that, we do have this reality that Jesus Christ being 100 % man can speak as a man.

He was tired. He slept. He needed to eat. All of these things that he needed to do because he was also the son of man.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. The Muslims wouldn't agree with you on that one. Okay, so what would the Muslims say? Now you have a problem there.

Okay. Well, they would say that God ate. God went to the bathroom.

God died. I mean, I say God made the digestive system. What's the problem with that?

Okay. What are they really saying when they say it? We had this over in England.

They can't believe that God could die. That God could die. And so, essentially, aren't they then putting their own human reasoning above what

God says? Right. That's what I would say, yes. But, I mean, the scriptures clearly show that God died.

And the reason why Jesus had to be

God in order to pay for our sin. I mean, he had to be

God to make that payment. If he's not eternal, and if his death is not eternal, then the eternal debt is still owed.

In Acts 20, 28, it said God purchased the church with his own blood.

And Moses, the prophet Moses, says that the blood atones for the soul.

So, to the Muslim, I said, where is your atonement? Well, they have an issue there. How do you reconcile

God's justice and his mercy? Because they'll say he's most merciful, but he can't be just in laying criminals into paradise if he just lets them off.

Right. And so, this is where Christ reconciles those. The reality is that Christianity is the one religion that's different than any other, because Muhammad is dead.

Any man could have been taking the place of Muhammad. There's nothing special in Muhammad. There's nothing special in Buddha. Nothing special in Joseph Smith.

But Jesus is alive. I'm sorry. You're going to break out some song. Some Shaolin.

But that's it. Jesus is alive. Jesus Christ died an eternal death to pay an eternal fine, that we can have eternal life, being an eternal being, and he's eternally alive.

Amen. And that's the thing. And so, some others want you to sing Shaolin, it seems. But that's it.

Right there. That's what makes it different. They don't want me to sing it. I don't want you to sing it. Shannon, come on over here and sing

Shaolin. But here's what we have. We end up looking at this, and when we look at a

Muslim that makes that argument, or sometimes a Jehovah Witness that says, how could God die? What they're doing, and they may not be aware of it, they're putting their reasoning above Scripture.

And they're saying, well, my human reasoning is greater than this word. You know what? We can't comprehend everything there is to know about God.

And so, what happens is, because God says it, that settles it. It doesn't matter whether you and I believe it or not.

If God says it, that settles it. And this is where we may not fully comprehend it.

And to a Jehovah Witness, often what the Jehovah Witnesses will do is, they'll say, well, I can't understand,

I can't comprehend how Jesus could be

God. One of the things I did, I don't know if I ever shared this with you. Well, they don't believe that anyway.

Well, they'll say... They believe he was Michael the Archangel. So once again, they're at another dilemma.

Because if they take the Scripture, even though they've taken it and changed it, in the beginning was the

Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God. They say he was a God. Well, which is he?

Is he Michael the Archangel, or is he a God? Well, I think they would argue that sometimes the angels are called the sons of God, as a title of angels, and so they would probably argue, and I'm trying to argue for them, but they would argue probably that he's a

God in that sense. So, would he be able to receive worship? Well, they would actually argue that there's no text of Scripture where Jesus received worship.

Oh yeah. And if you go to Revelation... No, I would go to Thomas when he fell and he said,

My Lord and my God. That's the one to go to, because if you go to the one in Revelation, they'll argue that that wasn't in the earlier manuscripts.

But see, here's the thing, when they say that Jesus never said he was God, or that it doesn't make sense to them how he could be

God, they're unknowingly setting themselves above God as if they're the judge of God.

That's scary. Yeah, that is. I wouldn't want to be having judged God and say,

I'm going to judge God on what he can or cannot be, and then find myself under his judgment one day.

Well, I mean, you go to 1 John and it says, Whoever believes that Jesus didn't come in the flesh is an antichrist.

Now, wait a minute, is Jesus going to be the judge of all of mankind, or will that be

God that's going to do that? Well, that's another scripture. It says God is the judge of all in Hebrews 12, 23.

But then you have scripture that says, The Father judges no one, all judgment has been committed to the

Son. So Jesus is the judge. We will all appear before the judgment seat of Christ and give an account for what we did in the body, whether good or evil.

So clearly that's saying that Jesus is God. So Jesus claimed to be

God. Jesus had the attributes of God. Jesus does the works of God.

We saw in Colossians, he does creation. Who raised Jesus from the dead?

Did God the Father raise him from the dead? Well, he says, No man takes my life. I lay it down and I will take it up again.

And that's what he did on the third day he rose from the grave. So he rose himself from the dead.

He said, No man takes my life. I'd like to see Muhammad try that one. I mean, that's the reality.

He had the attributes. He had the claims. He had the nature.

He had the works that God does. No one is the author of creation but God.

The Father claims he did it. The Son claims he did it. And the Spirit claims he did it. Who rode

Jesus from the dead? The Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The scriptures all say that all three of them were involved in that.

And creation, you hear, let us make man in our image. Who is that talking about?

That's talking about the triune God right there. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it's a thing where sometimes people think that the

Bible doesn't talk about Jesus being God. But they overlook many of the passages.

You brought up some of the passages of him doing miracles. I mean, he rose the people from the dead.

He, as you mentioned, with the feeding of the 5 ,000 or the feeding of the 4 ,000, produced bread out of nothing, basically.

I mean, he took some bread and multiplied it to feed thousands. And being God, he would be able to overstep the laws that we're governed by, but he wouldn't be subjected to them.

He walked on water. He ascended up into heaven. He flew without a plane.

So for him to do those things, he can do that. God can do that. Yeah. And that's the reality.

When we look at the Scriptures, he's claiming throughout this in so many different ways that he's

God. Well, more than his claims, even his actions.

He says, the works that I do. He says in the book of John that Jesus was there and he said, my works and my witness attest to me.

And that's what we have. We have his words, his works, and his witness.

He says, if you don't believe me, believe the works that I do. You know, even if you look, take a look through the

Gospels and look at the way the demons responded to Jesus. They called him the Son of God.

Jesus called himself the Son of Man, emphasizing his humanity. The demons called him

Son of God because they knew who he was. But even the demons, even his enemies, the

Jewish leaders never denied the miracles that Jesus did. They denied the source of it, but they never denied the miracles.

And so even his enemies attest to the fact. He took on the claims of deity.

He took on the title Christ, which is, as we saw in the Old Testament, the Christ was the

Emmanuel, God with us. So he had no problem doing that. And as you read in Philippians, he had no problem, he didn't think it robbery to claim to be equal with God.

I think that's one of the clear ones right there. You know? And so when we go through the

Scriptures, we see throughout that it seems very, very clear that Jesus was making the point that he was

God. But there's one thing that many people don't understand. One thing that a lot of people don't pick up on, and that is that in the day that the

Bible was written and the New Testament was written, most people didn't question his deity. They questioned his humanity.

Are you familiar with Gnosticism? A little bit? Gnosticism was this. Gnosticism taught that anything physical was evil and anything spiritual was good.

And what the Gnostics were saying was that Jesus was not human. He was God. He was spirit.

He was good. He wasn't human. And that's why John, the author

John, who had to deal with the Gnostics so much, in his epistles he says, if you don't believe that Jesus came in the flesh, you don't know him.

Right. And it talks about that. It says, Being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient up to death, even the death of a cross.

So he became flesh, but he was without the sin nature.

He wasn't sinful. Yeah. And that's an important point. Why didn't

Jesus have a sin nature? How do we get a sin nature? Is it passed on? It's passed on through your genes.

Through the father or the mother? Through the mother. No. Through the father. The sin nature is passed on from Adam, right?

And that's the thing. I'm thinking the Jews get passed through the... The kingship gets passed through the father.

And then through your Jewish heritage. Heritage comes through the mother. And the reason the Jewish heritage gets passed through the mother, and the reason why

Jesus didn't have an earthly father is because he had no sin. He was born without that sin nature. So he didn't have a human father to pass sin onto him.

He had an earthly mother, and he had no sin. So he could live that perfect life that God demanded of the law.

And being innocent, he can then pay the crime that we properly owe, that eternal fine.

Right. That's what makes the gospel so beautiful. That's what makes Christianity the only true religion, because it offers forgiveness of sin.

It's through Christ. He says, I pour out my blood for the remission of sins.

No other religion can say that. You know, one of the things that I say to people is, you know how you know

Christianity is a religion from God and not a religion from man? It's the only religion where God does the work to save humanity.

Every other man -made religion, man does the work to save humanity. That's how you know.

It says, not by works of righteousness that we have done, but by his mercy he saved us, through the washing of regeneration, by renewing of the

Holy Spirit. So it's of God. Well, it's, you know, it really is,

I hope that you guys have looked at the multitude of verses, and we haven't even touched the surface of them.

Going through just the book of Matthew, which has 1 ,071 verses in the book of Matthew, 44 % of them, it's like 470 -some verses, refer to the deity of Jesus Christ either directly or indirectly in one way or another in the ways that we are describing, either in what he said, in his words, in his works or his witness.

It seems pretty clear. So we are here with Mike Stockwell, our special guest who's down, he's with Cross Country Evangelism.

So Cross Country, you go around and share the gospel? Yeah, we go everywhere. I just got back from Mexico, was in Mexico City.

So that's Cross Country's evangelism. I think you've got to change it. I think you've got to change it, yeah. And I was with my partner in my ministry,

Robert Gray. I was down with him in Syracuse, New York, with Pastor John Speed at Christ is

King Baptist Church. We were down there doing a lot of evangelism out there. We had a really great week there of preaching.

And where are you headed after? And now tomorrow we'll be out at the College of New Jersey to preach with guys from Jeremiah Pride.

So if you're in the area, if you're in New Jersey, if you're by the College of New Jersey, even if you're an atheist and want to try to stump

Mike, which doesn't happen very often, but you can give it your best shot. But if you're out in the area of College of New Jersey, get out there tomorrow.

Are you going to be out there in the afternoon? We'll be out there by noon. By noon, so get out there. And if you're a believer, you can encourage them.

But if you disagree with the message, if you're one of those atheist trolls that are watching, hey, get out to College of New Jersey and get out and watch them.

And then after that, you're headed down to VA, right? We're going down to Virginia to preach down there. There's a bunch of events going on.

So we're glad to see that guys like you are devoting yourself full time to traveling this country, to sharing the gospel.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Mike's ministry, the ministry that God has for him,

Cross Country Evangelism, both he and Robert Gray, when you look at what they're doing, they have given up their whole life to travel.

And you put on, what, like 200 ,000 miles on your car in a year? A lot, a lot. So you can be praying.

I'd encourage you actually to go out to his website and donate so he can get a new car because it's up there in miles.

But this is a guy who is devoting himself to deliver this message that we're talking to tonight of this gospel, this good news.

And so you're going to be out with me. Someone was asking in the chat room whether you're going to be there, but you're going to be out at Super Bowl Outreach, aren't you?

Yes, you're going to be out there. And hopefully we'll be able to kill two birds with one stone by going out to Mardi Gras.

That's right. That's on Bourbon Street. So they're actually going to have both of them. So you can go. We're going to be down at Mardi Gras and Super Bowl.

And that's going to be end of January. And you can go to Super Bowl Outreach if you want to sign up. Sign up quick.

There's only about 10 slots left. If you want to be on our team with both Mike and I, we're going to be having a team together.

And we're going to be there. You have to say that you want to be on my team so that you get assigned to the team.

But there's not too many seats left or spots left. So I encourage you to do that quick.

Sports Fan Outreach International? Well, I think the site just for the Super Bowl, SuperBowlOutreach .org.

Isn't it filled up? It's pretty close. If it's not filled up, it's close. It's close.

And, you know, if you can't go, if you have somewhere you can't go, please go to the website. There are some people who want to go, but they cannot get the money.

And they're looking to get sponsored. Please consider whether you'll sponsor someone to be able to go.

There's a lot of people that would like to, but they just don't have the means. And maybe you can't go, but you can provide the means.

I'd encourage you to consider doing that. If you have any questions from the show, you can find us on Facebook in the

Striving for Eternity group. You can email us at theacademyatstrivingforeternity .org.

And next week, we are going to be going through our lesson, looking at the syllabus, and looking at the lesson on the deity of Christ.

We're going to try to do that whole lesson in one week. Can't guarantee it, but we're going to try.

And you'll see some of the same passages of Scripture and a lot more than what we've dealt with tonight.

One thing we do want you to see is that the Scriptures are full and clear that Jesus claimed to be

God. And the reason that it's so important is because if Jesus Christ was not

God, then we are, as it says as far as the resurrection in Romans 15, we are most men most pitiful because we believe in something that we're still dead in our sins.

If Jesus wasn't God, we're still dead in our sins. And so I want to encourage you to come back next week, sign up with the

Academy. If you're not a student already, sign up so you can get the syllabus and follow along.

You can still follow along online, but it's much better if you follow along with the syllabus. There's a lot of information in there, 70 or 80 pages of material that you'll get.

So I encourage you to consider doing that. We thank you and we want to encourage you again, as with every day, to go out and strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.