Finding Jesus in the Bible…So We Can Follow Him in Life
Bible Reading Plans
- Plan One: New Testament Only
- Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
- Plan Three: New Testament + History
- Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3
Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.
Extras
Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute
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Christ Is God
Chapter 5 – God and Christ in the New Testament: After Resurrection
The first Gospel of the New Testament – Matthew – begins with a genealogy. That genealogy begins with Abraham…goes through David…then all the way to Jesus. The point was that messiah was the descendent of both Abraham and David…and therefore the Messiah. Matthew makes this clear in his first verse:
Matthew 1:1 The record of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham:
Just as in Old Testament times, people living at the beginning of New Testament times still thought of messiah as human. (It’s capitalized here because I’m quoting from a modern English translation of the Bible.) It was natural for ancient Jews to consider any descendant of human beings – even great human beings like Abraham and David – to be human rather than divine.
Granted, Jesus performed more miracles than anyone in the Old Testament had performed. More than Moses, Elijah, and Elisha put together. But none of those miracles would’ve made people think He was God. Especially since Jesus was giving all the credit for the miracles to God.
Therefore, people were not any closer to saying that “Christ is God” in the first part of the New Testament than they were throughout the Old Testament. Rather, messiah was God’s man – a great man, to be sure. Greater than Abraham, greater than Moses, greater than David. And he was finally on the scene. But no one was saying “Messiah is God.”
Then something changed the landscape – dramatically. That something was the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. It was a miracle unique to all human history. Everyone raised from the dead before – whether by Jesus or anyone else – eventually had to die again. For good. But Jesus was raised to never die again. This is because he wasn’t raised back merely to earth like all the others. According to the Scriptures, he was raised all the way to the right hand of God! As it was written:
Psalm 110:1 The LORD says to my Lord:
“Sit at My right hand
Until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet.”
Remember the two New Testament quotations of this Old Testament verse that I showed you in the previous chapter – one from a few days before He died, and the other from his trial which was the night before He died.
All 27 of the New Testament texts were written after Jesus had been raised from the dead. The four Gospels talk mainly about life He lived prior to resurrection. But everything from the end of the Gospels, through the Acts of the Apostles, through the Epistles, and through the book of Revelation are about the resurrected Jesus. Therefore, everything that was written in the New Testament was written with the resurrected, sitting-at-the-right-of-God Jesus in mind.
I am not saying that Jesus rising to the right hand of God automatically leads to saying “Christ is God.” It doesn’t. But it did cause pious Jews to see their Messiah and God in a greater way than they had ever before imagined. I’ll explain further in the next chapter.
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