Jesus Is God
Tom Shrader launches a long-term expository harmony of the four Gospels with John 1:1-18, focusing on three key declarations: the Word pre-existed all creation, the Word became flesh, and the Word fully reveals the Father. Drawing on parallel passages in Genesis, Colossians, and Romans, he demonstrates that Jesus is not merely a great teacher or moral leader but the eternal, self-existent Creator God. He calls listeners to move beyond doctrinal familiarity into a living relationship with Christ, and challenges each person to answer Jesus's question: 'Who do you say that I am?'
“Jesus Christ is not a doctrine. Jesus Christ is not a concept. Jesus Christ is not an abstract theory. Jesus Christ is a person. And you can have a relationship with Him.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: A Study Of The Life Of Jesus Christ (2003/2004)
Recorded: 2003 at East Valley Bible Church
Duration: 51 min
Themes: who is jesus, deity of christ, eternal god, knowing jesus, creation, relationship with god, gospel, faith, new believer, seeker, doubting faith, spiritually curious, unbeliever exploring christianity, young adult, longtime churchgoer, person questioning jesus
Scripture: John 1:1-18, John 1:1, John 1:14, John 1:18, John 20:31, Matthew 16, Genesis 1:1, Genesis 1:3, Genesis 1:14, Genesis 1:20, Genesis 1:26, Hebrews 1:1, John 14, Colossians 1:15-17, Romans 1:20, Psalm 19:1-4
Theological Themes: christology, incarnation, logos, word became flesh, divine nature of christ, preexistence of christ, biblical theology, gospel harmony
Full Transcript
Introduction: A Study Through the Life of Christ
Open your Bibles to John chapter 1, verse 1. Today we begin what I am certain will be a long and, I hope, fruitful study in the life of Jesus Christ. We are going to do this by looking at the four Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — bringing them together and harmonizing them. We will take these Gospels, lay them side by side, and with the best of our ability try to arrange them in chronological order. Our hope is to get a deep, rich picture of Jesus Christ — of His life, His death, and His resurrection.
Seeing Jesus as the Gospel Writers Portray Him
I have some very clear objectives in mind as we begin this study. The first is this: I want us to see Jesus as the Gospel writers portray Him. It may well be that when I say "Jesus," you generate in your mind something that is really a caricature of who Christ is. It may have some basis in Scripture, or it may be a total fabrication. It may be that Bible study has never been something you have pursued, and so your picture of Christ is a preconceived notion. We simply want to obliterate that. We want you, me, and all of us, to see Jesus Christ as He is pictured by the Gospel writers.
It is our prayer that the Holy Spirit will open the hearts of unbelievers who are here. It is with great anticipation that we begin this study, and part of what I anticipate is that God will save some of you. Every week when we celebrate communion, we acknowledge that there are people present who are not Christians. It has been my experience, at least historically, that when we talk about Christ and take a historic look at His life through the eyes of the Gospel writers, there are almost always some whom God saves. So be praying — I would encourage you even now to pray for those you know who are here and do not know Christ, or for those you may not know by name but know are present, that God would open their eyes.
Learning from Jesus: Model, Teacher, and Person
It is also my objective that we see Jesus as a model for how we deal with others — those in our family, friends, casual acquaintances, and people at work. Jesus gives us a vivid picture of how we are to handle interpersonal relationships. We find Him both truthful and compassionate. By studying, examining, and asking ourselves not so much "what would Jesus do?" but rather "what would Jesus have me do?" — that is a pretty good question. How would Jesus have you handle this? What do you learn from His life?
Then there is His teaching. He is the master teacher. Through the work of the Holy Spirit and God's grace in preserving His Word, we have been given the actual teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ. I was on a website the other day and found one of the old Spurgeon sermons, and how exciting that is — and then you find a little nugget that somebody else has taught, and that is meaningful too. But to think that you have in front of you the actual teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ is an extraordinary thing. So we had better understand what He says, and obviously we had better do what He says.
It is my objective that we would grow deep in our love for Him. Whatever affection you say you have for Him now, I want it to be deeper a few weeks from now, deeper a few years from now, as you grow to know Him more and more. I want you to maintain and establish a vibrant, intimate relationship with Christ. Let me remind you: Jesus Christ is not a doctrine. Jesus Christ is not a concept. Jesus Christ is not an abstract theory. Jesus Christ is a person, and you can have a relationship with Him.
Relationship Versus Religion
Many of us come from denominational backgrounds where our church experience was not very vibrant, where things were not very real — very rote, very ritualistic, very mechanical. In fact, some of you might even describe it by saying, "Where I used to go to church, it was so dead. There was no life. There was no vibrancy." What separates us from mere religion is our claim that you can have a relationship with Jesus Christ. You do not have a relationship with a concept. You do not have a relationship with a theory. You do not have a relationship with something abstract. You have a relationship with a person.
It is the person Jesus Christ — the expression of the Creator God of the universe — who manifests Himself to us, and we can know Him in a deep, intimate, personal way. How do you grow in love and intimacy with a person? You spend time with them. You listen to them. Most of my phases of life, unfortunately, you have to go through them as well — and we are now in the empty nest stage. The girls are gone.
I know some of you, and I know what you are like as parents. We were exactly the same way. You cannot even fathom it. We love our girls very much, and I could hardly handle it when they went to school for the first time. But let me give you something about this empty nest stage: it is really great. It is not sort of good — it is really great. And I am sure that is eased somewhat by knowing the girls are doing well and by seeing them. I talk to them probably more now than before.
But here is the point. If you are not working on the relationship with that other person — your spouse — and all of a sudden those kids are gone and in a sense the oil is out of the machine, you now have two people rediscovering one another. I do believe that is why we are seeing so many people, after being married thirty or forty years, getting divorced. All of a sudden they are saying, "I did not even know this person." Why? Because there was no intimacy. Why? Because they did not spend time with one another. The same principle applies to how we grow deep in our relationship with Christ.
A Passion for Lost People
I have to listen to Susan and speak to Susan. How do I have a relationship with God? I have to listen to Him — that is Scripture — and I have to speak with Him — that is prayer. The last thing I want to keep in front of us is that we as a church would develop and continue a passion for lost people. I think it is interesting, good, and providential that God has arranged it so that on this very Sunday we send the Johnsons to Uzbekistan, because it is a great reminder that there are lost people around this world who need to hear the gospel.
By the same token, I want you to understand that you do not have to have a passport and a visa to be a missionary. We have already acknowledged that there are people in this room right now who do not know the gospel. There are certainly people in your neighborhood, in your city, in your town, in your workplace, in this state, in this country, and around the world who do not know Christ. The issue is: do you even care?
I have heard as a criticism of East Valley Bible Church that we teach the doctrines of grace and we do not care about lost people. We do teach the doctrines of grace. We teach what Paul wrote, and the fact that most churches do not is what is wrong with the body today. So there is no apology there — we do not shy away from that — and I resent the charge that we do not care about lost people.
Three times a week I am teaching a Bible study in a community with the idea of reaching lost people. Come to Rock.com on Wednesday night and ask whether we care about lost people. Or come to the women's study. Or come to the men's growth group. I do not know that there is another church that has such a beautiful balance between God's sovereignty and our responsibility to evangelize the world.
I love that balance, but it needs to grow even deeper and be even more. There are people around you who are lost, and in Jesus Christ, and Him alone, we find life. Someone sent me an email this week containing a severe warning from R. L. Shelton, and I think it is good. You can know all the doctrines and be a Calvinist, be as clear as a bell doctrinally, and yet go to hell because you never experienced Christ in your heart as Lord and Savior.
The Danger of Cold Orthodoxy
You can become a Bible junkie — that person going on Amazon, buying books, mastering them. You know how all the jots and tittles fit together, you can parse and put it all together, but your heart is as cold and hard as this pulpit because you do not know Christ. It is my objective that we would know Him more deeply and have a desire to share Him.
It is good, I think, that we start with John's gospel. In John chapter 20, John tells us exactly why he wrote the book. Jesus did many other things, but John hand-selected these accounts so that we might believe that Jesus is who He said He was — the Son of God — and that if we believe that, we have eternal life. John was an eyewitness. He walked with Jesus in an intimate relationship for three years. He was part of the inner circle, saw the risen Christ, and then heard from Christ again nearly fifty or sixty years after the resurrection when he wrote the book of Revelation. This man knows Christ.
Who Do You Say That He Is?
Here is my question to you: do you believe? It is certainly not a question that originates with me. In Matthew chapter 16, Jesus and the disciples are coming into Caesarea Philippi, and Jesus asks, "Who do people say that I am? What is the word on the street?" They answer that some say He is John the Baptist, some say Elijah, some say Jeremiah, some say a prophet. Then Jesus asks the question we want to keep right in your face: "Who do you say that I am?"
We are talking about a personal relationship with Christ, and what matters is what you say. I do not care what your mom says, what your dad says, what your spouse says, or what your kids say. What do you say? Who do you say that Jesus is?
Frequently when we talk about what it means to be a Christian, I will say it means to believe that Jesus is who He said He was. Well, who did He say He was? He said He was God come in the flesh. That is what the Bible teaches — that He lived a perfect life and died on the cross so that we might have eternal life with Him. Now, do you believe that?
Liar, Lunatic, or Lord
From C. S. Lewis to Josh McDowell to many others today, people like to approach the question this way. There are really only three answers to who Jesus is: liar, lunatic, or Lord. He is a liar — He knows exactly who He is and He is trying to deceive you. Or He is a lunatic, like the people who think they are George Washington and want to tell you how cold it was crossing the Delaware — He is simply out of His mind. Or He is Lord — He is exactly who He said He was. There are no other alternatives.
Having said that, I smile, because I was on a flight one night from San Francisco back home. There were four of us on the plane. One man fell asleep quickly. It was a Southwest flight, and two people across the aisle were seated in the seats facing backward. The flight attendant came over — getting drinks was a pretty easy
Introduction: Who Do You Say He Is?
I was talking with a woman, and the four of us ended up in conversation together. There were two people across the way, and I went over and sat down with them. We got to talking, and I asked them what they do. They said they work for the newspaper — writers, editors, smart and intellectual, discerning. They asked what I do, and I said I teach Bible. They said, "Oh, that's interesting. You believe that?" I said, "Yeah, I do. Believe it all, cover to cover."
Then I asked them what they think about Jesus. They gave all the usual answers — great guy, great teacher, great moral leader. But those aren't legitimate answers. He couldn't be a great teacher, a great prophet, or a moral leader if he claimed to be God and was only those things. He would have to be a liar. I said, "There are really only three options here: He's a liar, He's a lunatic, or He's Lord."
They said there are lots of other options. I said there can't be — that's why there are only those three. I asked them what the other options were. They said they'd have to get back to me. I said, "There aren't any." So the question stands: who do you say He is? What is your answer?
Our prayer is that in the course of this study, the Holy Spirit will open your eyes, and that every person who occupies a space at East Valley Bible Church would say that Jesus is who He said He was.
The Three Key Verses of John 1
Laid out before you is an extraordinary meal in this first chapter of John. I want you to look at three key ingredients: verse 1, verse 14, and verse 18. Verse 1: "In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Verse 14: "The Word became flesh." And verse 18: "No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him."
We are going to move perhaps agonizingly slowly and deliberately through this. J. C. Ryle writes: "Nowhere in the Bible shall we find such clear and distinct statements about our Lord Jesus Christ's divine nature." He is speaking of this first section of the Gospel of John. "Nowhere shall we find so many expressions which, for want of mental power, no mortal man can fully grasp or explain."
We are going to look at things today where the honest answer to the question "How can that be?" is simply: I don't know. I cannot possibly begin to explain them. Ryle continues: "In no portion of Scripture is it so deeply important to notice each word, even the tenses that are employed. In no portion of Scripture do the perfect grammatical accuracy and verbal precision of an inspired composition shine out so brightly. It is not perhaps too much to say that not a single word could be altered in the first five verses of St. John's Gospel without opening the door to some heresy."
That is what we are going to see today. If you do not get this right, the door is wide open to introduce any sort of false teaching — and most of that false teaching is going to be around the person of Christ. Why? Because He is central to Christianity. He is central to everything.
The Word: What It Meant to the Jew
It quickly becomes very important to understand what is meant by "the Word." When we look at it in our Scripture, we see that the word is capitalized — which denotes deity. Just as when you see the word "Spirit" capitalized, we understand the author is speaking of the Holy Spirit. John has decided to use this word to speak of Jesus Christ. He does not call Him the Son of God here yet, though it is very clear that is his purpose. Back in verse 31, John stated that he wants his readers to believe that Jesus is the Son of God — but he does not start there. Instead, he picks a term that would have great meaning both to the Jew and to the Greek.
To the Jew, the word "Word" would immediately refer them back to the beginning — Genesis 1, "In the beginning." A word was not something abstract to the Jew, but something concrete, something more closely related to an event or a happening, something carrying with it perhaps even the idea of creation. James Boyce writes: "This way of thinking results from the Jews' Old Testament theology. What happens when God speaks? The answer is something is done instantly. 'God said, let there be light' — Genesis 1:3 — 'and there was light.'"
It is not at all a stretch, then, for the Jew to begin to think that the Word could manifest itself in a person. They understood what the author of Hebrews wrote in Hebrews 1:1: "God who in sundry times and diverse manner has spoken in times past unto the fathers by the prophets and in these last days unto us by the Son." So the word "Word" would carry profound meaning for the Jew.
The Word: What It Meant to the Greek
For the Greek, the word "Word" carried the idea of reason. The Greeks did not believe that life happened by chance. They believed there was a force, a power, something that brought and maintained order rather than chaos to the universe. The Greeks were perceptive enough to look around and see that there is a giant order at work — that the universe and the cosmos could not simply be. There had to be a creating force.
So when John introduces the word Logos — or Word — to the Greeks, they could easily understand that this Word now becomes flesh. It makes sense to them. John, in a stroke of inspiration, selects a single word — the Word — to represent Jesus Christ in a way that speaks powerfully to both audiences at once.
Verse 14 then tells us: "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and mercy." And verse 18 declares: "No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him."
Jesus Is God: Part 4 of 7
There is no Christianity without Jesus Christ — specifically, without His life, His death, and His resurrection. We have got to get this right. I want to take the first three key verses we have been discussing — verse 1, verse 14, and verse 18 — and see how each one divides into three statements. Then I want to take the first statement from each verse and put them together, then the second, then the third.
Three Statements, Three Verses
The first statement: "In the beginning was the Word." Whatever this beginning is, whatever that point in time is, Jesus Christ pre-exists it. John tells us He was with the Father — in His presence, separate, yet with Him. And Jesus was God, deity.
The second statement comes from verse 14: Jesus became flesh. There is this incarnation, and He dwelt among us. Now we can understand who God really is. Now we can begin to see Him and behold Him. But most importantly, He became flesh so He could die to make atonement for our sin.
"We beheld." That word means to look upon, to contemplate, to learn by looking, to see with eyes that perceive. We beheld His glory — the glory as of the only begotten of the Father. We saw God's grace and mercy.
The third statement comes from verse 18: no man had seen God at any time, because He is Spirit. But this intimacy and this knowledge took place. The only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father — this is Christ, and it speaks of the intimacy of the relationship that Christ has with the Father. Then comes an intriguing, fascinating, powerful phrase: He — Jesus — explained Him, the Father.
Jesus Explains the Father
In John chapter 14, Philip comes to Jesus and says, "Lord, show us the Father. We want to see the Father. We want to understand the Father." And Jesus said, "Have I been so long with you and yet you do not come to know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father. How do you say show us the Father? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me? The words that I say, I do not speak on my own initiative, but the Father abiding in me does this work."
Jesus explains, exegetes, interprets. When I see Jesus, I have seen what the Father is like. How would the Father respond? The same way Jesus responds.
Now take those three verses, break them apart, and put them back together. The first phrase: "In the beginning was the Word," and "the Word became flesh." In the beginning there was the second person, the Son, and the Word became flesh and dwelt — literally pitched a tent to live temporarily — and visited us. No one had seen the Father at any time, not up to that point, but now we have beheld Him.
The second phrase: The Word was with God, and the Word dwelt with us, and we have a glimpse of His glory. On the Mount of Transfiguration, we saw the glorified Christ. Throughout His life we see His glory in the way He lives — His justice, His mercy, His love. And the Word is the only begotten of God, in the bosom of the Father.
The third phrase: The Word was God, and the glory of the only begotten of the Father is full of grace and truth. By seeing, by studying, by scrutinizing Jesus, we understand the Father.
You Cannot Know God Apart From Christ
When somebody says, "I want to know God," that is very popular in the world we live in. People want to know an awful lot about God. They want to be spiritual. They want to talk about God. But you cannot fully talk about God or fully understand Him apart from Christ. If I want to know God, I have to know Christ.
Verse 1: "In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, and the Word was God." F. F. Bruce, writing of this sentence, writes this: "John intends that the whole of his gospel shall be read in the light of this verse. The deeds and the words of Jesus are the deeds and words of God." If that is not true, this book is blasphemous. If you want to understand the Gospel of John, you have to read it in light of those three principal statements made in verse 1.
The Word Pre-Exists Every Beginning
Look again at verse 1: "In the beginning." When is the beginning? For the sake of this discussion, I will say it does not even matter where you place it. I would suggest that when we go back to Genesis 1:1, we are talking about something that took place roughly ten thousand years ago — what would be called the new earth. So I would put my little X there. You might say no, we can carbon date this rock, and it goes back hundreds of thousands of years. So you put your X there. Or you may say it is billions and billions of years. You put your X there. I do not care. For the sake of this discussion, it does not matter where you put your X. Wherever you mark the beginning, Jesus predates it. That is the point John is making.
As we studied last week, when we look at God's non-communicable attributes — His self-existence, His eternality — that is Jesus. It does not say that in the beginning the Word was made. It says, "In the beginning the Word was." The phrase "the Word was" appears three times in verses 1 and 2. Wherever this starting point is, He predates it.
Does John 1:1 remind you of Genesis 1:1 — "In the beginning, God"? What those two statements have in common is that they both frustrate me. "In the beginning was the Word." "In the beginning, God." I want to know more. Explain it to me. Give me more. And God says, I am giving you all you need.
Genesis 1:1 does not tell us anything about Him — just that He was. There is no explanation given, and therefore God is saying none is needed. "In the beginning was the Word." Jesus pre-existed, and the Word was with God.
The Eternal Relationship Within the Godhead
From all eternity, there was an intimate relationship between God and the Son, between Christ the Word and God the Father. Going back to Genesis 1, early into Scripture, we get a sense, a hint, that there is a Son and a Spirit. Genesis 1, verse 1: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and void, and the darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving." And then we have the story of creation unfold.
"Let there be light," verse 3. There was light, and there is day one. Then He said let there be this expansive mist, and the waters separate the waters from the waters, and we have the second day. There is a third day when God calls into being dry land. In verse 14, lights come into being, and there are stars and expanse. In verse 20, waters are teeming with creatures, and there are birds, snakes, and all sorts of life.
Then in verse 26, God says, "Let us make man in our image according to our likeness." The grammar is interesting there. God does not say, "I will make a man in my image, in my likeness." God says "let us," plural, make man in "our," plural, image, in our likeness. Before there was any creation, there was this God — what Scripture tells us was God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
Your mind should be asking: how can that be? How can He have three persons? Does that mean three gods? No. Just one God who manifests Himself in three persons. I don't understand how one plus one plus one can be one, or how He can fully be the Father, Son, and Spirit simultaneously. Every illustration I use for the Trinity, somebody washes it away. Water can exist as solid, ice, and gas, and someone will point out it cannot exist in all three states simultaneously. I don't know. All I know is the Bible says it is that way. The Bible says it is true.
Boldly Declaring the Deity of Christ
In the beginning there was Christ, and Christ was with the Father and the Spirit, and in fact Jesus was God — boldly and openly declaring His deity. As F.F. Bruce said, if you don't get this right here and now, you open up a whole Pandora's box that leads into all sorts of heresy.
One heresy holds that Jesus is a created Son — the first among creation, better and bigger than you and me, but still created. The Bible says no. He simply was. Others say there is no Trinity. You will hear that often: the word "Trinity" never appears in the Bible. That is fine, but what do we do with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit? It is simply easier to say Trinity, though "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" works equally well if that is more clear and helpful.
The dominant heresy, however, is probably the idea that Jesus is not God — that He was a good teacher, a good man, a great moral leader to be placed right alongside Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and others who had a profound moral effect. The thinking goes: follow them, they are good role models, and you need a role model. The problem is that is not what the Bible says.
We said from the very beginning that our objective was to see what the gospel writers say about Jesus. They say He pre-exists all things, that He was with God, and in fact He was God. If your view of Jesus is anything other than that, it is false teaching. It is heresy — even if you have the name Jesus Christ in the title of your church. If you are dealing with a Jesus other than the biblical Jesus, it is wrong.
We do not use those terms very often anymore — right and wrong, good and bad — because judgment is perceived to come with them. We have even lost the sense of those words in ordinary speech. If someone says the pizza was good, well, pizza cannot be good. It may taste well, but a pizza cannot be good. How was the ballgame good? A ballgame cannot be good. Goodness is a moral category. And you cannot say that Jesus was simply a good man, because Jesus was God, and anything less than that is false teaching. Do you see how serious this is?
Christ Eternal, Distinct, and Creator
Verse 2 is almost an emphatic repetition of verse 1. It states He was in the beginning with God. Christ is eternal. He is distinct from the Father. He was God. There was never a time when Christ was not, and was not with the Father.
Then verse 3: "All things came into being by Him; apart from Him nothing came into being that came into being." Just look at that statement for a moment. John declares that Jesus was the Creator, and he states it both positively and negatively. Positively: all things that came into being came into being by Christ. Negatively: apart from Him, nothing came into being that has come into being. When we look back at creation and the world around us, we understand that Jesus Christ was there — He created.
Paul Confronts Heresy in Colossae
Turn to Colossians, chapter 1. Paul is writing to this church, and part of the false teaching historically present in Colossae was that false teachers had come in and begun to teach that Jesus was very important to creation — the most important of the creation — but not the Creator. So Paul has to deal with this heresy head-on.
Verse 15: "He is the image of the invisible God." Paul is speaking about Jesus. "For by Him —"
Jesus as Creator
"For by Him all things were created, both in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things have been created by Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together." That Jesus is the Creator is a foundational truth, and we can understand something about the Creator from the creation itself.
Romans 1:20 says, "For since the creation of the world God's invisible attributes, His eternal power and His divine nature, are clearly understood." We have said this many times: you can look at creation and understand something about God. You begin to see His power and His nature, and you begin to be overwhelmed as you look at the sheer size of creation.
When you look at those pictures taken from outer space looking back at the earth, it looks like a very fragile marble hanging there. Twenty-five thousand miles in diameter, just hanging there in space. As we try to navigate our way around this planet, that is a lot of miles.
The sun has a diameter of 864,000 miles — a hundred times that of the earth. Within the sun you could place 1.3 million earths. There is a star whose diameter is a hundred million miles, which is larger than the earth's orbit around the sun.
It takes sunlight 8.5 minutes to move from the sun to earth, traveling at the speed of light — 186,000 miles a second. That same light would take more than four years to reach the closest star, Alpha Centauri, which is 24 trillion miles from earth. Within the Milky Way, the galaxy you and I live in, there are billions of stars, and astronomers estimate that millions or billions of galaxies exist. The estimated number of stars is 10 to the 25th power — roughly the number of all the grains of sand on the world's beaches.
The Scale of Creation
Someone who was in the first service this morning worked on the Voyager project 25 years ago. They sent Voyager out into space, and Voyager is on the edge of leaving our galaxy. It took 25 years to get there. To travel to and through the next star, traveling at 78,000 miles an hour, it will take roughly 200 years. The data, when it comes back, is not something any of us will be around to receive.
That is the point of all of this — what do we think about all of this, and then how fragile it is? The earth rotates on an axis such that if it moves just a fraction of a degree in either direction, we would either burn up or freeze. How do you explain that? God created that. Christ created that.
Psalm 19:1–4 says, "The heavens are telling of the glory of God and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there any words; their voice is not heard."
Who Do You Say He Is?
Who do you say that He is? If your answer is anything other than that He is the self-existent, eternal God who came in the flesh so that we might see Him, know Him, and that He might save His people from their sin — if your answer is anything other than that, you are worshiping a false god.
Our desire is that you would know Christ, that you would have a relationship with Him. I try to take myself back 23 years to when I heard that for the very first time. It was a very foreign concept to me, because in my religious background I was always trying to appease an angry God who was pretty well fed up with the way I lived, because I didn't live perfectly. My understanding was that my relationship with Him was not going to exist unless I somehow did enough good things to make Him happy.
Then the Scripture came along with some bad news: I could never do enough good things to make Him happy. And then came some very good news: Jesus died so He could satisfy God's wrath. Do you know that God? Do you know that Christ? Would you like to? Would you like to know more about Him?
There will be people at the front of the worship center after the service who would love to meet with you and talk with you about what it means to know Christ. It may be that you want someone to pray with you — maybe you have had a particularly hard week, a difficult time, a health issue, or simply a burden you are carrying. Maybe you just want to share a praise with somebody. Come and pray with those who will be here at the front afterwards.
Created Versus Built
He created this world. We are not talking here about building it — do you understand the difference? I am not particularly technical. I was thinking about this last year at the Shepherds Conference, where they gave us a Bible — a great teaching Bible, a perfect size to teach from. I thought I would use it for this harmony study, but I realized I needed to tab it, because I do not have time to look things up while teaching.
So I went and got tabs, and I asked Susan if she could put them in for me. She said she thought it would be a good exercise for me to do it myself. I said I would ruin it, but she encouraged me to try. So I got them out while she was cooking and sat down with them.
I said, "This is stupid." She said, "What do you mean?" I said, "They're saying to start with Revelation in the back and work your way to the front. That's dumb. I don't do it that way." She said, "Well, that's so they'll be in an order where—" And I said, "Save it."
Jesus Is God
I'm not very mechanical — you all know that. Some of you really are. You're a real whiz. I mean, you could not just have a Bible, but you could build a car. I want you to get something here: we aren't talking about building a universe, we're talking about *creating* a universe. If you go to build a car, where are you going to get the rubber? We're talking about starting from nothing. Think about that.
There's nothing wrong with letting your mind be swept away with this — with who He is. And wherever your starting point is for the beginning, He is before that. He was with the Father, communing with Him. And I have to believe, since one of God's attributes is love, that they were intimately loving one another.
Not only that, He was and is God. If your answer and description of Him is anything other than that, you are worshiping a false god. You can have a vibrant relationship today — right now — with the Creator God of the universe through His Son, Jesus. How exciting.
We will pick up right there in verse 3 next week.
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*Father, help us see this truth. Use this truth to open our eyes and ears. Let us love You more and more. God, I pray for those that are here, that You may be working in their life even now to understand who You are and grow in their love for You. God, we love You. We praise You. In Jesus' name, amen.*