“If Jesus is Not God, Who is Jesus then?”

Joh 5:23 That all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent him.

Heb 1:8 But unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy kingdom.

Isa 42:8 I am the LORD: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images.

God did in fact glorify Jesus. But this in no way is proof that Jesus is God. In the verse in Isaiah God was stating that he would not share his glory with “graven images”. Here is another case where a verse is used out of context and combine it with another verse to make it appear to mean something that it really doesn’t. In fact, God does share his glory with Jesus:

Joh 17:5 And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.

Joh 8:58 Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.

Exo 3:14 And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

The Greek words “egō eimi” that our English words, “I am” were translated from is not likely being repeated in the same way that Almighty God spoke the words “I AM THAT I AM” in Exo 3:14. I won’t go into the grammatics of this right now, but the grammatical tense spoken by God in Exodus is not the same.

Moreover, many times in the gospels Jesus used the expression “egō eimi” and it was not considered blasphemous. If Jesus was using the name of God making himself equal to God, this would be blasphemous and an offense that would be worthy of stoning him to death. In the 4 gospels Jesus says this phrase 81 times and not once is he accused of blasphemy for making himself equal to God nor did they even say anything against him.

The reasons that the Jews wanted to stone him on this particular incident wasn’t because he was making himself equal to God, it was because because they were inspired by their father the Devil!

And what really got them angry was not that he was claiming to be God, but because he told them they would die in their sins; that they were in bondage to sin though they be children of Abraham; that they were spiritually deaf; he told them their father was the Devil and that they were not of God; they were dishonoring him; he accused them of not knowing God, and he accused them of being liars and being born of fornication.

Then what made them mad enough to pick up stones to throw at him was that he said he was greater than Abraham and that he said he actually saw Abraham.

If it were just a case of blasphemy, they would have took him to the leaders of the Jews to be tried and then when being condemned they would take him out and officially stone him. But this was not the case. He accused them of some really offensive things and that is what really roused up their rage. They wanted to stone him on the spot! And this is the reason that he hid himself — so they wouldn’t lynch him!

Jesus is God?

So Jesus did not commit the blasphemous act of claiming that he was God by saying the he was the “I AM THAT I AM”, equal to God. The problem here is the translations from Hebrew to Greek and from Greek to Latin and Latin to English. The English “I AM THAT I AM” in Exodus is not the same “I am” that Jesus spoke in the New Testament Gospels and particularly not the same “I am” in John 8:58. Jesus never blasphemed in making himself equal to God.

Jesus was not equal to God, nor did he ever make himself an equal to God. He said so himself:

Joh 13:16  Verily, verily, I say unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord; neither he that is sent greater than he that sent him.

Joh 10:29  My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.

Joh 14:28  Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father: for my Father is greater than I.

He was accused of making himself equal to God by calling himself the son of God, but calling one’s self a son of God is not making one’s self equal to God. The accusation never stuck and he was even found innocent of the accusation by Pilate.

Jesus is not the “I AM THAT I AM”. He never claimed to be. He never blasphemed in making himself an equal to God. This is what Paul and the church fathers did. Calling Jesus equal to God is BLASPHEMY!