There is a point that Trinitarians will reach when debating the topic of whether Jesus was God. If they get far enough into the debate, at some point they will admit that it doesn’t make sense from a perspective of logic or straightforward Biblical evidence for Jesus to be God, and they will then shift to saying we aren’t going to understand everything, and that is why you need faith. A good friend of mine read my articles years ago when I wrote them, before I had this website. Specifically, he read The Message I am Called to Share, and was not able to answer the questions I posed therein. He then chose to go to Seminary School to get answers to the questions I had. He came to me more than two years later and said that there are not answers to my questions, and that I just have to have faith that Jesus is God. He later maintained that if I understood the Scriptures the way he does, from his studies at Seminary, I would see that, “Jesus was shouting he was God from the rooftops in a very Jewish way.”
My immediate thought was that did not make sense because Jesus was killed for claiming to be the son of God, not for claiming to be God (John 19:7). If he was shouting this claim in any sort of way, surely he would have been charged with it at his death where they were desperately trying to find anything tangible to accuse him of. Still, I was curious if there was anything in the Bible about this, so I searched the Scriptures for further evidence, and stumbled across a verse that confirms that he undoubtedly was not shouting he was God from the rooftops in a very Jewish way, for if he was, the Jewish leaders would not have asked him this: “So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep our souls in suspense? If you are the Christ (Messiah) tell us plainly” (John 10:24). The Jewish leaders knew that the people considered Jesus to be a prophet (Matthew 21:46), but were wondering if he was the Messiah, the one they had been waiting for. It is important to note that they did not ask him if he was God, nor did the Jews ever expect the Messiah to be God. Most importantly, they asked him to tell them plainly, which tells us he had not been plainly telling them who he was. This is why it is critical that we rely on Scripture to tell us who God and Jesus are, and not the doctrines of men.
The Bible tells us over and over again in the New Testament that while Paul was preaching, there was false doctrine being taught and taking hold in many places. Paul was distraught about this very thing in 2 Corinthians. This is in the first century we are talking about, not many years after Jesus’ death. How, then, can we trust the reliability of a doctrine that came 300 years later? A doctrine that was not even accepted unanimously, and fought against by many at the council. We cannot rely on the doctrines of men to teach us. It is the Scriptures themselves that we must rely on, for they are the word of God. We must see what Scripture as a whole is teaching in order to form our belief system, and use Scripture to interpret Scripture. This is the only reliable method of arriving at God’s truth. We must trust His spirit to guide us in understanding His word which He has given to us, for the very purpose of understanding Him.
