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APOLOGETICS |
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What Does the Bible Reveal About the
Trinity? - Part 4
By
Dr. John
Ankerberg, Dr. John Weldon |
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Does Scripture declare the deity of Jesus
Christ?
Many cults and liberal theologians reject
the deity of Christ and the Trinity as scriptural
teachings only due to their own biases. But it is
significant that even some Unitarians who reject the
Trinity nevertheless confess that it is a biblical
teaching based on "its obvious sense, its natural
meaning" as found in Scripture. These words of George E.
Ellis, a nineteenth century Unitarian leader, illustrate
the biases of anti-trinitarian groups and liberals who
refuse to accept the Trinity on personal—not
biblical—grounds. Ellis confesses, "Only that kind of
ingenious, special, discriminative, and in candor I must
add, forced treatment, which it receives from us
liberals can make the book teach anything but
Orthodoxy."1
No less an authority than the great
Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield pointed out that the
doctrine of the Trinity "is rather everywhere
presupposed" in Scripture.2
As E. Calvin Beisner, author of God in
Three Persons, states,
The
testimony of the New Testament to the deity of Christ
is unanimous.... Were there no passages at all which
directly call Christ God, we would still have a great
weight of evidence that is the New Testament
conception of him, for in all senses he is depicted as
precisely parallel to God the Father. C. F. D. Moule
wrote: "Far more impressive than any single passage
are two implicit Christological ‘pointers.’" At first
is the fact that, in the greetings of the Pauline
epistles. God and Christ are brought into a single
formula. It requires an effort of imagination to grasp
the enormity that this must have seemed to a
non-Christian Jew. It must have administered a shock
comparable (if the analogy may be allowed without
irreverence) to our finding a religious Cuban today
indicting a message from God-and-"Che" Guevara....
The other
Christological pointer, evidenced early, because in
the undeniably genuine Pauline epistles is the fact
that Paul seems to experience Christ as any theist
reckons to understand God—that is, as personal, but as
more than individual: as more than a person. This is
evidenced by certain uses (though admittedly not all)
of the well known incorporative formulae, "in
Christ,...3
Please consider the following scriptures.
These clearly teach that Jesus Christ is God. Indeed,
only overwhelming evidence in favor of Christ’s
deity would have convinced skeptical, staunchly
monotheistic, and initially frightened Jews to proclaim
His deity to a hostile Jerusalem and later the world.
1. John 1:1, 14— "The Word was God...
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among
us."
2. John 1:18— "The only begotten
God."
3. John 20:28— Thomas said to him
[Jesus] "My Lord and my God."
4. Titus 2:13— "Our great God
and Savior Jesus Christ."
5. Hebrews 1:8— But about the Son he
says, "Your throne, O God, will last for
ever and ever."
6. 2 Peter 1:1— "Our God and
Savior Jesus Christ."
7. 1 John 5:20— "Jesus Christ. He is
the true God and eternal life."
8. Colossians 2:9— "In Christ all the
fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form."
9. Isaiah 9:6— "For to us a child is
born... and he will be called... Mighty God."
10. Isaiah 7:14/Matthew 1:23—
"Immanuel"—which means, "God with us."
11. Hebrews 1:3— "The Son is the
radiance of God’s glory and the exact repre- sentation
of His being...."
12. Colossians 1:15, 16— "He is the
image of the invisible God... by him all
things were created."
13. Acts 20:28— The church was
purchased with the blood of
God.
14. 2 Corinthians 4:4— "Christ, who is
the image of God."
15. Romans 9:5— "Christ, who is God
over all, forever praised."
16. 1 Corinthians 1:24— "Christ the
power of God and the wisdom of God."
17. 2 Thessalonians 1:12— "Our God
and Lord Jesus Christ."
18. Philippians 2:6— "being in very
nature God." (The Greek could be literally
translated "continuing to subsist in the form of
God.") 4
In light of these scriptures and more,
can any thinking person logically deny that the Bible
teaches Jesus Christ is God?
Notes
1 In E.
Calvin Beisner, God in Three Persons (Wheaton,
IL: Tyndale, 1984), p. 25.
2 Ibid., p.
26.
3 Ibid.,
pp. 33-34.
4 Ibid., p.
30.
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Copyright 2006, Ankerberg Theological Research Institute |
