Who Is Jesus?

No question in the Christian faith is more basic than this one. Every other doctrine turns on the answer, because what a person concludes about the identity of Jesus decides what he can believe about salvation, revelation, and God Himself. The Gospels record that Jesus put the question to His own followers, and the church has never been permitted to set it aside. To ask who Jesus is, therefore, is to ask the question on which everything else depends.

The Master Statement

Scripture gives a single sentence that holds the answer more completely than any other. "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself."¹ Every word carries weight. The one who acted in Jesus was God. The place where God acted was in Christ, a real man who lived and died. And the work accomplished was reconciliation, the bringing back of a world estranged by sin. This sentence refuses both of the errors that have always threatened the church's confession. It will not allow Jesus to be reduced to a mere man in whom God was merely present as an influence, and it will not allow the humanity to be treated as an appearance. God was in Christ. The full deity and the true humanity meet in one.

Held Within the One God

The confession of Christ's deity is not a retreat from the truth that God is one. It is made inside that truth, never against it. Israel's great confession stands unbroken, "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord."² Christian teaching about the Son does not add a second God alongside the first. It confesses that the one God is genuinely distinct in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, distinctions Scripture describes in terms of sending and being sent, giving and being given, and shared glory, while the Godhead remains one.³ Whatever is said of the Son is said within that one confession. This is why the church has rejected the idea that the Father simply became the Son, as though God changed masks, and equally the idea that the Son is a separate deity. The Son is truly distinct and truly the one God.

True God and True Man

Scripture speaks of the deity of the Son without hesitation. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."⁴ "In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily."⁵ "God was manifest in the flesh."⁶ Jesus could say, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."⁷ These are not statements about a specially gifted man. They are statements that the fulness of deity is present in Him, whole and not partial, from the beginning and not added later.

At the same time Scripture insists on a true humanity. The same Word "was made flesh, and dwelt among us."⁸ He grew, He hungered, He wept, He died. When the text says that Jesus "increased in wisdom and stature," it describes the growth of the man in his apprehension of the deity that dwelt in him, not any growth in the deity itself.⁹ The letter to the Philippians affirms the deity plainly and locates the humbling in His earthly obedience, not in any surrender of what He was.¹⁰ He is one, at once true God and true man.

A Mystery Confessed, Not Explained

The union of full deity and true humanity in the one Christ is a matter the church has always confessed rather than dissected. The historic councils drew careful boundaries, ruling out the errors that would divide the one Christ or blend the two natures into a third thing, and those boundaries are worth honoring as protective history. They mark off where the road runs off the cliff. They do not pretend to map the interior of the mystery. Scripture presents Him whole, the eternal Son who was in the beginning, the child born in Bethlehem foretold long before, the crucified and risen Lord seen by many witnesses.¹¹ The right response to such a person is not first to explain Him but to trust and worship Him, for in Him God drew near to reconcile the world.

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Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.