mattbraunlin
Member
Ultimately, Infinitely Humble
There are some false sects of Christianity, most famously the Jehovah's Witnesses, who deny the deity of Christ. They falsely interpret Scripture in various ways to portray Jesus as the Son of God, but not God Incarnate.Now you can be very sure that the Bible makes it enormously clear that Jesus is God. The Gospel of John is littered with references to his deity, as do the Letters of Hebrews and Phillipians, off the top of my head. But I would like to put forth another reason why we can be sure that God Himself became human and dwelt among us:
To deny Jesus' deity is to call God proud. Pure and simple.
Phillipians 2:8 declares this about Jesus: Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (NASB 1995)
This verse alone can only make sense to its truest extent if Jesus was God. Because if God didn't do it, then we have uncovered something God was too proud to do: become human.
If you reading this are a Jehovah's Witness, or a Muslim or even a Jew, or follow literally any other god but the Holy Trinity of the Bible, do you not realize that you have a massive, invincible complaint against the god you serve? That god or gods are quaking in its boots, hoping you will never get wise and ask one absurdly simple question:
What do you know?!
The false gods of this world don't know what it's like to be human. They make you work and study and obey and travel, they punish you for your sins, they relax in some divine paradise they have made for themselves, and all the while they have never even experienced a toothache.
You endure war, disease, famine, tyranny, childbirth, mental health issues and all the horrors of our plane of existence, and they are all permitted by gods who don't know the first thing about them. Those gods will tell you how to be human, but they'd never dare do it themselves.
Remember when Meatloaf sang, I would do anything for love, but I won't do that? Those gods are basically Meatloaf.
Only Jesus. Only the Second Part of the Triune God loved us enough to become one of us. Only Jesus was willing to sweat in the sun. To hit his thumb with a hammer. To rush to the outhouse. To be obedient to the humans he created. In the most terrifying paradox, Jesus is both the God we do not deserve, and the God to whom we have the fundamental human right.
Jesus Christ is the only God who can look at you, straight in the eye, and say, 'I know how you feel.'
And yet this is not the half of it.
The hells and agonies that we humans rightfully deserve? Jesus took them for us. He was scourged and whipped and tormented into something hardly recognizable as human, and was nailed to a cross to die in disgrace.
And then all the sins and crimes and travesties and injustices which those cowardly gods condemn? He accepted them for himself. It makes me suddenly sick to think of any false concept of hell preached by worldly religions, when their darkest imaginings of hell would be child's play compared to what God endured to ensure me of my place in heaven.
And this is still not the half of it!
Because Jesus' motivation for this indescribable humbling of Himself was nothing more or less than so that he could have a relationship with us.
I have a relationship with God! God is my FRIEND!! We talk together. We laugh together! I can bring my darkest troubles and my purest joys to him. I can bring my complaints to him. He cares about the deepest scopes of the human race, yet I can still come to him in prayer when I lock my keys in my car. He came to me on my level when I was five, and is no more or less on my level as a thirty-seven year old man.
Not one single word of the Bible makes sense if Jesus Christ is not God. The infinite scope of who and what God is could only be vindicated if he manifested himself in this world.
Nothing but Love Itself would have become human