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What Does the Bible RevealAbout the Trinity? Part 4

by Dr. John Ankerberg, Dr. John Weldon

Does Scripture declare the deity of Jesus Christ?

Many cults and liberal theologians reject the deity of Christ and the Trinity asscriptural 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 teachingbased on its obvious sense, its natural meaning as found in Scripture. Thesewords of George E. Ellis, a nineteenth century Unitarian leader, illustrate the biasesof anti-trinitarian groups and liberals who refuse to accept the Trinity on personalnot biblicalgrounds. Ellis confesses, Only that kind of ingenious, special, dis-criminative, and in candor I must add, forced treatment, which it receives from usliberals can make the book teach anything but Orthodoxy.[1]

No less an authority than the great Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield pointedout 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 allsenses he is depicted as precisely parallel to God the Father. C. F. D. Moulewrote: Far more impressive than any single passage are two implicitChristological 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 ofimagination to grasp the enormity that this must have seemed to a non-ChristianJew. It must have administered a shock comparable (if the analogy may be

allowed without irreverence) to our finding a religious Cuban today indicting amessage from God-and-Che Guevara....

The other Christological pointer, evidenced early, because in the undeniablygenuine Pauline epistles is the fact that Paul seems to experience Christ as anytheist reckons to understand Godthat is, as personal, but as more thanindividual: 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 isGod. Indeed, only overwhelmingevidence in favor of Christs deity would haveconvinced skeptical, staunchly monotheistic, and initially frightened Jews to pro-

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claim 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 hisdwelling among us.

2. John 1:18 The only begotten God.

3. John 20:28 Thomas said to him [Jesus] My Lord andmy 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... MightyGod.

10. Isaiah 7:14/Matthew 1:23 Immanuelwhich means, God with us.

11. Hebrews 1:3 The Son is the radiance of Gods glory and the exact repre-sentation of His being....

12. Colossians 1:15, 16 He is the image of the invisible God... by him allthings 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 literallytranslated 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?

Notes1 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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