Also Known As God

If he wasn't God on earth then why is the world still talking about him?

John 1:1-5  In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God.  2  He existed in the beginning with God.  3  God created everything through Him, and nothing was created except through Him.

4  The Word gave life to everything that was created, and His life brought light to everyone. 5  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it.

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This is a different genealogy from what you see at the beginning of Matthew and Luke’s gospels, they both show us the human genealogy of Jesus, but John goes way back beyond the humanness of Jesus and he points out the fact that Jesus is God and since He is then He always existed with God.

The four books of the Bible that tell us about Jesus time on earth are written to different audiences and therefore they give us a different perspective on who Jesus is. Matthew shows us Jesus as the Messiah and King of Israel, in Mark there isn’t a genealogy because Christ is presented as a Lowly Servant which wouldn’t have His lineage tracked, in Luke He is the Son of Man rejected by Israel. John the apostle and author of this book wants us to know that Jesus is the Son of God.

Jesus Christ is nothing less that God in a body, He isn’t some mystic, divine being up in heaven somewhere and He isn’t an angel that got a promotion. Jesus was there with God in the beginning when God decided to create, Jesus was there when God gave physical life to this world and now he has come to earth to give us spiritual life.

It is amazing that the world is still talking about this man. Every other great man in history combined doesn’t get the amount of attention that Jesus gets.

"The philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who together are said to have formed the philosophical foundation of Western culture. And yet, despite being in the public eye for only three and a half years, Jesus and His teachings have arguably impacted the world far more than the collective erudition of these three great philosophers whose combined careers totaled more than 150 years."

“Jesus: Why The World Is Still fascinated With Him” -Tim LaHaye

There are people who love Him and swear that He is who He claimed to be and there are others that will bend over backwards to distort the truth. There are plenty of religions in the world today that blaspheme against Jesus saying He was not God, some religions even go as far as to claim that Jesus didn’t even claim to be God.

1 John 2:22-23 And who is a liar? Anyone who says that Jesus is not the Christ. Anyone who denies the Father and the Son is an antichrist. 23 Anyone who denies the Son doesn't have the Father, either. But anyone who acknowledges the Son has the Father also.

There are plenty of religions in the world today that blaspheme against Jesus saying he was not God, they say that he was an angel that was given some deity, some say he is just one of many sons of God, or he is just a good man that God exalted at Jesus baptism. Some religions say that Jesus didn't claim to be God. It is blasphemous to say that he is a prophet of Islam, or claim that he is one of many sons that God created or that he was good enough to be elevated to become a god.

1 John 1:1-2 We proclaim to you the One who existed from the beginning, whom we have heard and seen. We saw Him with our own eyes and touched Him with our own hands. He is the Word of life. 2  This One who is life itself was revealed to us, and we have seen Him. And now we testify and proclaim to you that He is the One who is eternal life. He was with the Father, and then He was revealed to us.

John, who was probably Jesus closest friend, gave us his testimony about Jesus, John wants you to know what he saw and heard and why his life was so radically changed. His experiences with Jesus are very important to him and he wants us to know Jesus the way that he did after spending three years with him. John heard the claims by Jesus, he saw the proof in how He lived, and the things that He did, it all made sense to him that Jesus really was God and our Savior.

Jesus referred to himself as:

✔  the bread of life, (John 6:35-51)
✔  the light of the world, (John 8:12)
✔  the door, (John 10:7-9)
✔  the good shepherd, (John 10:11-14)
✔  the resurrection and the life, (John 11:25)
✔  the way the truth and the life, (John 14:6)
✔  the true vine (John 15:1-5)

Jesus question is for all of us

Luke 9:20  Then He asked them, "But who do you say I am?" Peter replied, "You are the Messiah sent from God!"

Is He a radical thirty year old carpenter that left the family business and got Himself killed for no reason? Did He fake the fulfillment of prophecy? Could a man possibly be born in the right circumstances in order to fulfill hundreds of prophecies in order to trick us? How could His miracles have tricked so many? If He is just a liar then why is the world still so obsessed over one liar?

If Jesus is really the only son of God, fully God revealed to us in a body, then the question that Jesus asked Peter is the most important one that we need to answer as well. “But who do you say I am?”

What if He really is who he claimed to be? If He told us the truth about being God then everything else that He said should be extremely important to us as well. We should be digging into God’s to find out what He wants us to know and what He wants us to do.