Many people who do not know God have a simple question, if God exists why doesn’t he just make himself known? Where is he? They simply do not perceive that all of creation points to God,¹ they want concrete proof.

Some of them also deny that Jesus ever existed, but most people agree He was an historical person. Instead they deny the divinity of Jesus and many of them deny that Jesus ever claimed to be God. They claim the notion that Jesus was God was an invention by the founders of the Christian religion after Jesus’ death. They would have preferred it if Jesus had stepped onto the world stage and said “here I am, God in the flesh.” But we know that even if He told them they would not believe Him.²

However, we know that He did in fact state that He was God several times. The problem is these people do not have eyes to see and ears to hear, and what is probably even worse than that is they don’t have the heart to understand.³ They don’t look at this with an open mind, they have a predetermined conclusion and they try to arrange their “facts” to meet that conclusion. It’s safer that way for them.

Before we get to Jesus’ claims of divinity, let’s look at something He said when He first came on to the scene. One Sabbath morning He walked into the temple and He got up to speak. He unrolled the scroll of Isaiah and read the following passage:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
    and recovering of sight to the blind,
    to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

²⁰ And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. ²¹ And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” ⁴

In this passage Jesus was claiming to be the Messiah and the Jewish people drove Him out of town and tried to throw Him off a cliff.⁵ Jesus was not making a claim of divinity at this time as the Jewish people would have understood it, but he was making the claim that He was God’s chosen one. And He had already shaken them.

So now we are going to look at several instances where Jesus claimed to be God and we’ll start with the seven “I AM” statements.

• I am the bread of life: (John 6:35)
• I am the light of the world: (John 8:12)
• I am the door of the sheep: (John 10:7, 9)
• I am the good shepherd: (John 10:11, 14)
• I am the resurrection and the life: (John 11:25)
• I am the way, the truth, and the life: (John 14:6)
• I am the true vine: (John 15:1)

Jesus used the term “I AM” deliberately and intentionally, there was no mistaking it, He was invoking God’s name from Exodus 3:14 (I AM) and applying it to Himself.

But this is just the beginning, there were bolder statements to come. In John 8:24 and 8:28 Jesus says of Himself “I am he.” Make no mistake about it, this is a claim of divinity. It is likely these statements do not point back to Exodus 3:14 but rather to Isaiah 41:4 where God says to Isaiah “I, the LORD, the first, and with the last; I am he.”⁶

Now we take a look at John 5:17. When Jesus was accused of working on the Sabbath because He healed a man He said, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” We find out in the next verse that the Jewish leaders wanted to kill Him right then and there because he was “making himself equal with God.” This would not be the last time they would want to stone Him…

We come to John 10:28 and we hear Jesus say of His followers, “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.” Who can give eternal life but God, and just to make this crystal clear Jesus followed it up in verse 30 by saying “I and the Father are one.” There was no doubt how the Jewish leaders interpreted what He said, they picked up stones to stone Him…

Now we come to what I believe is Jesus’ boldest claim of divinity and this occurs in John 8:58:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” 

The Jewish leaders knew exactly what He was claiming. He was pre-existent from before the time of Abraham. Once again the Jewish leaders tried to stone Him.

Why did the Jewish leaders want to stone Him on these occasions? Because in these instances they believed He was committing blasphemy by claiming to be God. There simply is no doubt about this, there is no grey area. He said “I am God” several times in the Bible without using those exact words, and there is no doubt everybody who heard those words knew exactly what he was claiming. Some of them accepted His claims and became followers, while many rejected his claims and wanted to kill Him.

We can even go beyond what Jesus said and we can look at what he did:

He performed miracles in God’s name. In ancient Israel performing miracles without receiving retribution from God meant that God approved of what He was saying and doing and, as we have just seen, He was claiming to be God.

He forgave sins, and who can forgive sins but God alone?⁷ This is what the Jewish leaders asked each other and again Jesus was accused of blasphemy.

That’s not all He did; Jesus accepted worship on more than one occasion. Whenever a man erroneously began to worship an angel sent by God the angel would immediately reject the worship and tell the man to stand up. But not Jesus, this act alone was a claim to divinity.

So yes, Jesus claimed to be God and He acted as if he were God, so those who are denying all of the instances we have just looked at are no longer left with the easy way out. They have a choice to make: They can claim Jesus as Lord, or they can deny Him but what they cannot do is make the claim that the divinity of Jesus was a later invention by the church. I would urge them to choose wisely…

And I haven’t even mentioned that Jesus rose from the dead and was seen by over 500 people during a 40 day period and then ascended into Heaven, because those who deny that Jesus claimed to be God are certainly not even going to entertain the fact that the resurrection is historical. That might be the topic of a future post…

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1. Romans 1:20 ↩︎
2. Paraphrase of John 10:25 ↩︎
3. Paraphrase Matthew 13:15 ↩︎
4. Luke 4:18-21 ESV ↩︎
5. Luke 4:29 ↩︎
6. See “The Moody Bible Commentary” for more. (Bible reference is from the ESV) ↩︎
7. Luke 5:21 ESV ↩︎