Christ Fully God

There are many verses that could be used to demonstrate that Jesus Christ is fully God, and I have posted another post about that.  But, there are two key memory verses to remember, John 1:1 and Hebrews 1:8.

John 1:1 says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

The Gospel of John focuses upon the Divine nature of Christ.  It starts with a verse that harkens back to Genesis 1 with the parallel phrase, "In the beginning was the Word."  This was the beginning of all things, just as "in the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth."  But, what is seen here is that the past progressive form of the verb, translated, "was," shows that when the heavens and the Earth came into being, the "Word" already was in existence.  "In the beginning was the Word."  What is this "Word" that was already in existence in the beginning?  The "Word" is the "Lógos," the word
"Lógos" embraces an exceptionally wide semantic field, including the ideas of account, proportion, explanation, principle, reason, thought, as well as continuous statement (e.g., narrative, story, speech, history), individual utterance (e.g., proverb, maxim, command), discussion, debate, and, as a grammatical term, phrase or sentence.  (from International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, revised edition, Copyright © 1979 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. All rights reserved.)  All these concepts imply an active expression of truth, logic, and thought.

We find that this pre-existent "Word" was both "with" God and "was" God.  How could one be God and "with" God simultaneously?  Theologians struggled with this concept for centuries.  What was concluded was that there was only one God, just as the great "shema" from Deuteronomy 6:4 says, "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one." There is only one God.  Yet, John 1:1 says that the Logos was also God.  Was the Logos the same Person as the Father?  No, because the Logos was also "with" God.  The resolution that Christian theologians reached is that there is one Spirit "essence" of God, but there are three subsistence "Persons."  The Logos is one of those three Persons, the others being the "Father" and the "Holy Spirit."

We find that in John 1:14, it says, "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us..." and in verse 18 is says that "No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him."  Jesus was the result of the Word taking on human flesh.  By that act, the express thoughts of God were revealed in bodily form to the world, so if one wonders what God is like, they need only look to Jesus and they will find the expression or explanation of God's unique nature.  Jesus was fully God, but.....He was also fully man, united in one Person.

There are some who have mistranslated John 1:1 because their Greek language skills are deficient, and it has led to the false doctrine that somehow Jesus is "a god" but not "the God."  The reason for this mistranslation, they claim, is that there is a definite article in the phrase "the Word was with God" before the word God, pedantically translated, "the Word was with the God."  But, they note that there is no definite article in the phrase "and the Word was God" before the word "God".  So, they conclude that the word God is indefinite, and should be translated "a god," implying that somehow the Son of God is not quite God, that He is something like a demi-god.  This mistranslation is indeed unfortunate, and is the result of poor scholarship.  The fact is that there is a grammatical rule in Greek that when an anarthrous (lacking the definite article) predicate nominative appears prior to the verb "to be," that it is ALWAYS definite; in fact, it is not only definite, but it is emphatically so.  This is exactly the case in this verse.  So, what the writer is saying is exactly opposite to what the Jehovah's Witnesses, and others like them, try to make the text say.  The text may be pedantically translated, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with THE God, and THE God was the Word."   In fact, John is emphatically identifying the Word as fully God, but he is also distinguishing the Son as a separate person as the Father.  Both Father and Son are fully God, one essence, but subsisting of two persons.  It is a mystery, but not less true.  The grammar fully supports it.  It could not be stated any clearer.

Hebrews 1:8 says something similar.

⁸ But of the Son He says,

“Your throne, O God, is forever and ever,
And the righteous scepter is the scepter of ^[a]His kingdom.

Here, we see the righteous God, but in verse 9 it also says, "therefore God, Thy God, hath anointed Thee with the oil of gladness above Thy companions."  So, we see two persons, one who has an eternal throne and a righteous scepter, but that same person has been anointed by "God" with the oil of gladness.  The only way to resolve this is to conclude that both are God, but there are two persons, the Son and the Father, who anointed the Son.  This reinforces the deity of Christ.

    Heb. 1:8