THE DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST REVISITED IN THE THIRD MILLENNIUM

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Contents

1 Introduction.....................................................................................................................12 Preexistence and Eternality of Jesus Christ......................................................................................293 Jesus Is the Only Savior.........................................................................................................614 Jesus: A Member of the Trinity...................................................................................................895 The Divine Attributes of Jesus...................................................................................................1496 Jesus's Deity Acknowledged by His Contemporaries.................................................................................2197 The Scripture Testifies of Jesus.................................................................................................2838 The Divinity of Christ Does Not Suppress His Humanity: Learning to Distinguish Both Natures in the Scripture.....................383Appendix 1: Prophecies fulfilled in Daniel 11......................................................................................393Appendix 2: Assessing Prophecies in the Qur'an.....................................................................................403Appendix 3: Unfulfilled Prophecies by the Jehovah's Witnesses......................................................................405Appendix 4: Comparisons Between KJV and the NIV....................................................................................411Appendix 5: Comparisons between KJV and (NASB or NKJV).............................................................................423Appendix 6: Contradictions between the Bible and the Mormon Sacred Books...........................................................433Appendix 7: Contradictions among the Mormon's Sacred Writings......................................................................441Appendix 8: Contradictions between the Bible and Jehovah's Witness Teaching........................................................443Appendix 9: Contradictions between the Qur'an and the Bible........................................................................447Appendix 10: Mathematical Prophecy as Interpreted by Sir Robert Anderson...........................................................453Appendix 11: Scientific Evidence for a Young Earth.................................................................................459

Chapter One

Most religions (Hinduism, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witness, Islam, Scientology, Unitarianism, Baha'ism, etc.) claim that Jesus is not God but simply a man. To some he is a human being who has worked his way to godhood; to others he is just a teacher or guru or a prophet of God. Some have argued that there is no indication of His deity in the Bible, much less in any of His sayings in which He never claimed to be God. Others have even taken it to an extreme to argue that Jesus never existed historically. While our focus will not be on the latter issue, as many excellent books already exist that provide irrefutable evidence of Jesus's historicity, this book was written to shed definitive light on this long-standing debate concerning the nature of Christ, particularly His divinity.

In the early centuries of Christianity, controversies had erupted about His humanity, but today the issue seems to have re-centered around his alleged deity by Christians. What does the Bible tell us about the deity of Jesus? Are there Old Testament passages that present Jesus Christ as God? Are there New Testament verses that attest to His divinity? Are there external sources providing evidence of (or claims to) His deity? These are the fundamental questions this book attempts to address while placing the debate in the historical context of Jesus's life, ministry, death, and resurrection.

Ever since the birth of Jesus, controversies regarding His divinity have emerged. The Jewish leadership (both the Pharisees and the Sadducees) and even some professed Christians in the first centuries have wrestled with the idea of a God-man. How could God be man? How could anyone be both unlimited as God and bound by time and space like any human being or angel? Are both divine and human natures embodied in the person of Jesus Christ? Or was Jesus half-God and half-human?

Most seem to agree with the fact that Jesus was undeniably a human being who walked the face of the earth. The issue most people grapple with is His divinity, even as they acknowledge that He was a man. To try to understand this mystery or solve the puzzle, I will conduct a careful and exhaustive examination of the Scripture. Some may be tempted to object that explaining from the Bible what I purport to prove is tautological and already biased. Isn't it obvious that the Bible will claim that Jesus is God? The question is, then: how can we trust that the Bible is telling us the truth?

First, many critics have precisely used the very same Bible to disprove that Jesus is God, and my intention, for one thing, is to enlighten the debate in this regard. On the other hand, I intend to address the concerns of those who would like to reject even the idea of using the Bible in the first place. Therefore, our goal in this book is to provide both internal and external validity to the claims of Jesus's divinity, in keeping with the idea of randomized experiments now so prevalent in social sciences.

Thousands of years ago, Eastern religions developed the idea that God is in each one of us. Now, many people from the West have made it commonplace to think that we are gods in the same way Jesus was: a mere man who worked his way to attain the "God consciousness." This is incarnated, for instance, by the New Age or Mind Science movement, which claims that we can achieve whatever we set our minds to. For instance, actress Shirley MacLaine argues, in the following terms, that Jesus was "travelling in and around India and Tibet and Persia and the Near East" and was trained as a "yogi" before returning to Galilee. She came up with this fantasy simply because there is no record of Jesus's life between age twelve and thirty. Like her, a number of New Agers have claimed that Jesus took those "silent" years to learn from Eastern gurus. If such claims are true, we should find evidence of Hindu teaching in the New Testament writings, with reference to those gurus from whom Jesus presumably had learned. In this book, I will attempt to address this question while providing solid evidence of Christ's divine nature.

First, I will present what the Scripture says about the eternality and preexistence of Jesus. Second, I will document where the Bible emphasizes Jesus as being the one and only Savior, the Messiah that the Jews were awaiting for centuries. Then I will describe Him as a Member of the Holy Trinity, with the special relationship that exists among the three Persons of the triune God, after which I will expose His divine attributes. Next, I will present the writings and sayings of those who have effectively acknowledged the deity of Jesus during His ministry on earth, while exposing how His divinity was challenged to the point of nailing Him to the cross for claiming to be God. Finally, I will highlight the role of fulfilled prophecies regarding Jesus's birth, His earthly ministry,...