Why it matters that Jesus is God

“God and His Son”
For some reason I saw this on a book cover and it hit me wrong. Kind of like the Title “The Half Known God” which is all about how Lutheran’s supposedly don’t know about the Holy Spirit, but wouldn’t that be the Two third’s known God.
In any case, I’m not saying that it is wrong to say “God and His Son” after all Jesus did identify himself as The Son of God. I am absolutely certain that the book whose cover I noticed this phrase on is perfectly orthodox. I think I might even order it for my congregation. But this is the problem I am running into these days, and why this phrase has jolted me a little. It is this, increasingly people are thinking of Jesus as someone other than God. The phrase might have been a little better if it had read “God the Father and His Son.”
As it is, when someone says God it tends to be a knee jerk reaction to think of the Father, and Him alone. I’m not sure why this is, but it is. I find evangelicals these days that are shocked to hear Jesus referred to as God. You ask a Mormon “Is Jesus God” and you get no, he is the son of God. Though they believe he became a god, and so can you. This is Arianism. And Arianism isn’t just dangerous because it is named Arianism and was condemned by a church council. It is dangerous because it makes the cross worthless. It makes Christ and Him Crucified worthless. It turns Christianity into nothing more than another religion of works. Because this is it, if God didn’t die on the cross for you, well then no one did.
This is why Mary is known as the Theotokus, or God bearer. If she didn’t give birth to God, if she didn’t give birth to her creator, then God did not die on the cross for you, and so no one did. The cross is then worthless. Why, because in no way does one man’s death, even if he did manage to live a perfect life, account for the sins of the world. But if that man is also God then that blood has the infinite worth of God attached to it and in it is found the forgiveness of sins.
To be sure, theologies that don’t account for the divinity of Christ find some point to the cross. It is hard to ignore such a central event in scripture, but the cross does not accomplish the forgiveness of sins in these theologies. The cross becomes an example to follow, be willing to die for your convictions sort of thing. Or it becomes a display of sympathetic love, he suffers with us, the same way a husband puts on sympathy weight when his wife is pregnant. In the end though, Jesus doesn’t do much for you in these theologies. He does no more for you than Buddha, Ghandi, or Aristotle, which is to say nothing. He becomes a great teacher of ethics. Though, one might question that. He certainly did a few things that go against the grain of the P.C. Culture both of his day and ours. I mean driving people out of the temple with whips? He had a sarcastic and biting sense of humor at times. Wasn’t much one for acknowledging the validity of other faiths, witness John 4. And he could preach hell fire and brimstone to make a Baptist sweat. I want to be Christ like, but do people know what that means when they ask me to be Christ like? Because normally, when they ask this, I’m looking to put my sarcasm aside and grab a bullwhip. On my better days it means I am attempting to make wine in my basement. I do have to admit though the idea of walking around homeless for a few years mooching off of friends and being a pain in the backside of society does appeal to me. I just don’t think Christ really wants me to abandon my family like that.
You see where this kind of thinking can go. I think I might be more inclined to listen to Christ than to be “Christ like,” whatever that means. And listening to him you hear something a bit different than the normal Jesus schlock so common today. This Jesus schlock is the symptom of a very shallow if not heretical Christology. It was this sort of schlock that cranks out a new atheist every minute that the council of Nicea addressed when it addressed Arianism and a few other heresies that refused to see the divinity of Christ, or on the other hand his humanity. Go either way and the cross is worthless. God dies as Man on the Cross to take away the sins of the world.
This is the point of the first chapter of the gospel of John from John 1:1 where the word is with God, and is God, through whom everything was made, and without whom nothing that was not made that was made, to john 1:14 where this very same word responsible for the creation of the world is made flesh.
God is God. You don’t become God. Either you are or you are not God. God is eternal, which means if you are not eternal you are not God. That is to say if you have a beginning you are not God, even if you do have eternal life. You cannot become God. God is, that is the primary meaning behind the LORD’s name, Yahweh, I am. This is what Jesus is saying when he says before Abraham was I am. This is the meaning behind his self referencing himself as the Son of God. He is begotten not made, and he is the only begotten, and that is not just some nicety, but a reality. No one else is begotten of the father. Though we are all created by him. This is why Jesus refers to the Father as “My Father” and the Jews want to stone him. It isn’t that the Jews had no sense of God as being Father, quite the contrary. But then one who has siblings does not when talking to his brother say “my dad” as if one had a special relationship to dad that the other did not. Yet this is what Jesus is saying. He instructs us to talk to God the Father and address him as our Father, but when he pray we say “Our Father” to acknowledge that we have siblings in the faith, brothers and sisters in Christ. Jesus referred to the Father as being his Father alone. He is begotten we are created.
Now how one is begotten in Eternity is a perplexing concept to think out, I leave it as a mystery to be explained or not at some other time. I trust God can do what he wants how he wants, and some things are just beyond us. But begotten of the Father Jesus is, which means he is eternal with the Father. He and the Father are One. (John 10:30) Hear O Israel, The LORD your God is one. (Deuteronomy 6:4) There is but one God, there cannot be two. God says we are not to have any other God’s before him. We are to have one and only one God whom we are to fear love and trust above all others.
This is the meaning of the Trinity, or the doctrine of the Triune God. God is three in one, three separate and distinct persons, but one God. Jesus therefore prays to the Father because he is not the Father, but he is still God. There is one God in whom we are to fear, love and trust, and this God manifests himself in Jesus Christ, he becomes man, for us men and our salvation, the eternal clothes himself in the mortal that he might die, and make the mortal eternal giving you and I life. And this makes the Cross of infinite importance for us, because it is there that the Infinite, the author of life, died that we might be given life. And that is what Christianity is ultimately about. Thomas was right to answer the resurrected Jesus “My Lord and my GOD!” Jesus is God. And when God dies for your sins, there is nothing left for you to do about them, it has been done, they are forgiven. And then one understands why Paul knew nothing but Christ and Him crucified when he was among the Corinthians. What room is there for anything else?