Tag Archives: God

Jesus as God, Jesus Christ, Theology

Did Jesus Claim to be God? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

There are at least six ways that Jesus claimed to be God.  First, Jesus Claimed to Be Yahweh, or the God of the Old Testament.  I will draw heavily from Norman Geisler’s Volume 2 of his Systematic Theology series, so when you see quotes, that is where they are from.

So how did Jesus claim to be Yahweh?  First, let’s look at the background of the Old Testament usage of “Yahweh.”

Yahweh (YHWH) or Jehovah is the special name given by God for Himself in the Old Testament. It is the name revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14, when God said, “I am who I am.” While other titles for God may be used of men (adonai [Lord] in Genesis 18:12) or false gods (elohim[gods] in Deuteronomy 6:14), Yahweh is only used to refer to the one true God. No other person or thing was to be worshiped or served (Ex. 20:5), and His name and glory were not to be given to another. Isaiah wrote, “Thus saith Jehovah … I am the first, and I am the last; and besides me there is no God” (Isa. 44:6 ASV), and, “I am Jehovah, that is my name; and my glory I will not give to another, neither my praise unto graven images” (42:8 ASV).

So, the name of God in the Old Testament was exclusive to him.  He did not share it with anyone else.  How, then, did Jesus refer to himself?

Jesus prayed, “And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began” (John 17:5—this is an obvious claim for Christ’s deity, for Jehovah of the Old Testament said, “My glory will I not give to another” [Isa. 42:8 NKJV]).

Jesus also declared, “I am the First and the Last” (Rev. 1:17)—precisely the words used by Jehovah in Isaiah 44:6.

He said, “I am the good shepherd,” (John 10:11), and the Old Testament said, “Jehovah is my shepherd” (Ps. 23:1 ASV).

Further, Jesus claimed to be the judge of all men (John 5:27ff.; Matt. 25:31ff.), and Joel quotes Jehovah as saying, “There I will sit to judge all the nations on every side” (Joel 3:12).

Likewise, Jesus spoke of Himself as the “bridegroom” (Matt. 25:1f.) while the Old Testament identifies Jehovah in this way (Isa. 62:5; Hosea 2:16).

While the psalmist declares, “Jehovah is my light” (Ps. 27:1 asv), Jesus said, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12).

Perhaps the strongest claim Jesus made to be Jehovah is in John 8:58, where He says, “Before Abraham was born, I am!” This statement claims not only existence before Abraham, but equality with the “I am” of Exodus 3:14. The Jews around Him clearly understood His meaning and picked up stones to kill Him for blaspheming (cf. John 10:31–33). The same claim is also made in Mark 14:62 and John 18:5–6.

Again and again and again, Jesus compared himself to Yahweh, the one and only God of Israel.  If we stopped here, this would be strong evidence that Jesus thought of himself as God, but we are only through the first of six sets of evidence.  Stay tuned for more!!

Theology

Does God Need Anything?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Christians believe that God is completely self-sufficient, that he is complete within himself.  There is nothing that God needs that he doesn’t already have.  The quote below, from A. W. Tozer in The Knowledge of the Holy,  summarizes the point extremely well.

To admit the existence of a need in God is to admit incompleteness in the divine Being.  Need is a creature-word and cannot be spoken of the Creator.  God has a voluntary relation to everything He has made, but He has no necessary relation to anything outside of Himself.  His interest in His creatures arises from His sovereign good pleasure, not from any need those creatures can supply nor from any completeness they can bring to Him who is complete in Himself.

Practically speaking, it is a serious error to think that humanity is somehow providing God assistance that he needs to accomplish his tasks.  God may use human beings to complete certain tasks, but he never needs them.  He allows them to participate with him in the affairs of the world, but only out of his good pleasure.  Whenever humans start to think they are indispensable to God, a prideful fall is sure to follow.

Free Will, Human Nature, Salvation, Theology

Can Man Choose God On His Own?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

No.  The Bible seems to clearly teach that God must call on man before man will respond.  Original sin has caused man to reject God without God’s intervention.  Jesus said, ““This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him” (John 6:65).  The Psalmist said, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me” (Ps. 51:5).  God must initiate salvation because man cannot.

So does God intervene to convict all men of their sins and call them toward him?  Yes, he does.  All men are given the chance to accept or reject God because God calls all men.  According to 2 Pet. 3:9, “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”  According to 1 Tim. 2:3-4, “This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

God will freely offer the gift of salvation to everyone, but each person must decide to accept or reject this free gift.  God must call us first, as we are incapable of inclining our wills toward God on our own.

Historical footnote: The belief that mankind is born innocent of original sin and can freely choose God without God first initiating salvation is called Pelagianism.  This heresy was condemned by the Council of Carthage (A.D. 416-418).

Jesus as God, Jesus Christ, Theology

Did Jesus Claim to be God? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

A foundational issue for Christianity is the question of whether Jesus claimed to be God and whether his disciples understood him to be claiming he was God.  This series of posts will examine the first question and we will follow this series with the question of the disciples.

Here are the topics we will cover:

  1. Jesus Claimed to Be Yahweh.
  2. Jesus Claimed to Be Equal with God.
  3. Jesus Claimed to Be Messiah-God.
  4. Jesus Claimed to Be God by Accepting Worship.
  5. Jesus Claimed to Have Equal Authority with God.
  6. Jesus Claimed to Be God by Requesting Prayer in His Name.

We will cover passages that expound upon each of the above claims and try to build a solid basis for the deity of Jesus.

Why is this topic important?  Because it is a central teaching of Christianity, and if it is not true, then Christianity is false.  But worse than that, the deity of Christ is one of the key elements of our salvation.  If Jesus is not God, then we have no reconciliation with God.  If a mere man died on the cross and was resurrected, then our sins are not forgiven and we will perish.

The gospel that the early church taught, in its simplest form, was the deity, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  Without the deity of Jesus, there is no gospel.

I hope you’ll follow this series and be astounded at all the ways the NT claims Jesus is God.  It should be eye-opening!

Salvation

Can I Be Saved By a Simple Prayer?

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The Bible unequivocally teaches that faith in God is what saves.  So the question before us is whether speaking a “sinner’s prayer” constitutes saving faith.

All people possess intellect, will, and emotions – the ability to think, choose, and feel.  When the Bible refers to faith, it seems to teach that faith involves all aspects of a person.  In other words, a person’s intellect, will, and emotions must all be involved for faith to be salvific.

Let’s look at intellect first.  Based on the NT, there seem to be six propositions that a person must intellectually believe to be saved:

  1. Existence of God
  2. Necessity of Grace
  3. Human Sinfulness
  4. Christ’s Deity
  5. Christ’s Atoning Death
  6. Christ’s Bodily Resurrection

Each of these doctrines must be intellectually held by a person to be saved.  But believing in these truths with the intellect is not enough.

Billy Graham once said:

The word believe means more than just intellectual faith, because the Bible says, ‘The devils also believe.’  The devil is a fundamentalist, and he is orthodox.  He believes in Christ.  He believes in the Bible.   Intellectually, he believes in the dogma.  He believes in the creeds.  But the devil has never been saved and he is not going to heaven.  You may be able to recite theology, but I tell you that is not enough.

Saving faith also encompasses the will and emotions.  The NT seems to teach at least six ways that our will and emotions must be involved in our faith.

First, true faith involves trust in God.  Trust is the confident expectation that God will do what he says he will do.  Trusting God involves an act of the will that is beyond mere intellectual assent.

Second, true faith involves the willingness to fully commit ourselves to Christ as the means of delivering us.  Saving faith involves a true commitment to the gospel.

Third, true faith involves our obeying God’s command to believe in His Son.  If we have saving faith, we will obey God’s command to believe in His Son.  If we truly understand who God is and what He has done for us, our intellectual knowledge is accompanied by obedience to God’s command to turn to Him.   The demons do not obey the gospel and have forever turned their back on God.  Though they know who God is, they disobey Him.  Likewise, unsaved people have no will to obey God.

Fourth, true faith involves love of God, which is the greatest command.  “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37).  You cannot have a saving relationship with God unless you love Him.  Love of God is willing the ultimate good.  God is the ultimate good. This is not merely a feeling of warmth toward God, but a robust passion and desire for Him that manifests in all our actions.

Fifth, true faith involves childlike trust entailing humility.  There is no room for arrogance in saving faith.  Demons exhibit no humility toward God, whereas believers realize that humility is the only reasonable response because God is completely responsible for their salvation.  Dr. Gary Inrig explained humility this way:

If I try to make myself as small as I can, I’ll never become humble. Humility comes when I stand as tall as I can, and look at all of my strengths, and the reality about me, but I put myself alongside Jesus Christ. And it’s there, when I humble myself before Him, and realize the awesomeness of who he is, and I accept God’s estimate of myself, and I stop being fooled about myself, and I stop being impressed with myself, that I begin to learn humility.

Sixth, true faith involves repentance.  Faith implies the kind of commitment to and trust in Christ that will make an actual change in one’s life.  True repentance is a real change of mind about our sin and about who Christ is – our Savior.  Repentance is life-altering as well.  Therefore, faith and repentance are inseparable in the same way that the command to “come here” cannot be fulfilled without “leaving there.”  True faith and repentance, regarding one’s salvation, involve embracing right and rejecting wrong – one cannot be exercised without the other.

So, is a simple prayer enough to save?  If that simple prayer is being spoken by a person whose faith is intellectual, trusting, committed, obedient, loving, humble, and repentant, then the answer is “yes.”  If not, then that prayer may be a significant step, but until the person has truly applied all of his personhood to his faith, it has not saved him.

Mormonism, Theology, Trinity

Why Is the Trinity Important?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Because it is the best synthesis of all biblical data on the nature of God.  All other views deny or ignore major swaths of Scripture.

For example, on one of our blog posts, there is a thread where Darrell presented numerous passages to a Mormon about the oneness and unity of God.  Instead of dealing with these passages the Mormon writer chose to ignore the passages and continuously point out other passages in the Bible that stress the plurality of God.

In Mormon theology, there are countless gods, and all human beings may one day become gods themselves.  So, of course, Mormons have to dodge and duck all of the passages in the Bible that speak on the oneness of God.  They ignore biblical data in order to accommodate their theology.  Their theology is more important than the data in the Bible.

The Trinity realizes a unity and plurality in God that makes sense of all the biblical data.  There are three persons (plurality) in one nature (unity).

All of the passages that emphasize the divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are recognized.  All of the passages that recognize the unity of God are recognized.  Both of these truths are held, and neither is denied.

Is your theology more important than what the Bible actually says?

Theology

Can Theology Teach Us Anything Useful?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Many Christians cringe in horror when they hear the word theology.  They think of complex and boring doctrines that just don’t matter to the average Christian.  After all, they think, I have the Bible and that’s all I need.

But what is theology?  Theology, in its simplest meaning, is a rational discourse about God.  Theology covers a broad range of topics: the Bible, creation, sin, salvation, end times, the church, and the attributes of God.

That last topic, the study of the attributes of God, is known as theology proper.  But why bother studying theology?

There are several good reasons why we should study carefully the attributes of God.  First, as A. W. Tozer once wrote, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”  According to Tozer, “No people has ever risen above its religion.”

Second, “The mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God.”  Since God is the ultimate being in existence, then our concept of Him will necessarily be the highest conception of anything we can conceive of.  Sh0uldn’t we get this conception right?

Third, “There is scarcely an error in doctrine that cannot be traced back to false beliefs about God.”  Every heretical offshoot of Christianity is characterized by incorrect conceptions of God.  It always starts there.

Fourth, “Until a man sees a vision of God high and lifted up, he cannot understand the gospel.”  Why is that?  Because the gospel proclaims that Jesus had to die to reconcile us to God.  The reasons Jesus had to die are God’s total moral perfection, holiness, and justice.  If you do not understand these things about God, then the atoning death of Jesus makes no sense.

Fifth, we cannot recognize false gods until we know the true God.  There are numerous religious groups out there claiming to be Christian or claiming to be compatible with Christianity.  How can you tell which are and which are not?  You must understand who the God of the Bible really is, and that is what theology teaches you.

Sixth, and finally, you will never find ultimate satisfaction in anything less than the Ultimate, who is God.

For all of these reasons, I commend the study of theology to you.  If you truly want to know God, then what are you waiting for?

Prayer

What is the Purpose of Prayer?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

It is not to get what we want, but what God wants.

It is not to convince God to change his mind, but for him to change our minds.

It is not to have our will done in heaven, but for God to have his will done on earth.

Prayer is the means by which we praise God for who he is, ask him for forgiveness, and thank him for everything he’s given us.

We are to bring all of our concerns to him, but we know that what we want is not always best for us or for anyone else.  That’s why Jesus said, “Not my will, but yours,” when he was praying to the Father.

As my wife likes to say, God is not a genie in a bottle.  He doesn’t operate by our commands.  He has a long-term plan for the earth and all its inhabitants.

When we pray, we’re not trying to change his plans.  He is changing ours.

Atheism, Philosophy

Who Made God?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Nobody.  Christians hold that God has always existed and will always exist and is, therefore, uncaused.  Only things that begin to exist need a cause, and God never began to exist, so God needs no cause.  Nobody and no thing made God.

Something or someone had to have always existed, or else everything that exists now would have ultimately come from nothing.  Nothing causes nothing, so the fact that something exists today means that something or someone must have always existed.  Think about it.

An infinite regress of causes going backward in time not only doesn’t solve the problem, it makes the problem infinitely worse!  You are just adding an infinite number of effects that need a cause.

You have to stop somewhere with causation.  Atheists often claim that the universe needs no cause, but if it began to exist, then it does need a cause.  The atheist may respond that the universe never began to exist, and therefore does not need a cause.  But this is a statement of faith.

Ultimately, you either go with God or matter, personality or impersonality, rationality or non-rationality, intelligence or non-intelligence, as the source of everything.

What you decide says a lot about you.

Atheism, Evolution, Philosophy, Religion, Truth

Can Naturalistic Evolution Yield True Beliefs About Reality?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Philosopher Ken Samples, in a recent “New Reasons to Believe” (Vol 1 , No 1) publication, argues that naturalistic evolution cannot explain how human beings can have true beliefs about anything.  Naturalistic evolution posits that there only exists the material, natural world around us.

Everything that exists is the result of  random, material processes working over billions of years.  According to naturalists, the ultimate result of those natural processes is the wonder of the human mind.  So why doesn’t this theory make sense?

Samples offers three reasons.  First, “Naturalism postulates a nonrational source for man’s rationality.”  Naturalists believe that nonrational, impersonal, unintelligent, and purposeless processes produced rational, personal, intelligent, and purposeful human minds.

But, as Samples argues, every effect must have a cause greater than itself.  This is exactly the opposite of what the naturalists would have us believe!  The effect of the human mind is orders of magnitude greater than its alleged cause, the matter of which it is composed.  Samples concludes that the naturalist “is assuming a trustworthy reasoning process only to conclude that his reasoning is is ultimately untrustworthy.”

Second, Samples argues that “evolution promotes a species’ survivability, not its true beliefs.”  Natural selection, the primary evolutionary mechanism, only selects for survival.  But having true beliefs about the world is not always required for animal survival.  One can think of examples where an animal’s beliefs about its surrounding environment are irrelevant to its survival.

Human beings survived for thousands of years without knowing about the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics or the DNA double helix.  Are knowledge of the laws of logic and geometric proofs necessary for humans to reproduce?  Our knowledge about the world seems to be complete overkill for evolutionary survival.

Third, Samples reasons that “false beliefs illustrate evolutionary naturalism’s epistemological unreliability.”  Many atheists today argue that mankind’s beliefs about God, morality, and life after death are mere evolutionary vestiges that must have served some survival purpose in the past.

It seems that almost all of humankind, through recorded history, has held that God exists.  Evolutionists admit this, but answer that this belief was necessary in the past, but is no longer necessary.  It is left over from man’s earlier evolutionary stages.

But that means that evolution can produce false beliefs about reality.  Naturalistic evolutionists strongly urge that religious beliefs are false, but they also believe evolution produced these beliefs.  Samples asks:

If evolutionary naturalism can cause a person to believe that which is false (such as religiously oriented beliefs) in order to promote survivability, then what confidence can evolutionists muster that their convictions are reliable, true beliefs?  And if evolution cannot guarantee true beliefs in a person’s mind then how does one know that belief in evolutionary naturalism itself is a true belief about the world?

Maybe naturalism is just evolution’s false belief du jour.  There is no way for evolutionists to know!  Now that is some serious irony.

Christians, on the other hand, are able to easily explain the human mind and its ability to have true beliefs.  A rational, personal, intelligent, and purposeful God is the source of our rational, personal, intelligent, and purposeful human minds.

Samples concludes, “Such conceptual realities as logic, mathematics, knowledge, and truth flow from a supremely intelligent divine mind.”  In this case, the cause more than adequately explains the effect.