In my last blog I wrote about the aseity of God – the fact that God is self-derived or self-originated, has absolute self-sufficiency, independence, and autonomy. God just has BEING and existence so it is a truth when He calls Himself Yahweh, I AM.
God is a BEing. We are human gonna BEs or, at worst, HAS BEENS but God goes on always BEing from eternity to eternity. We can talk about where we came from or where we are going, but with God it is always He IS.
Before the mountains were born, before you gave birth to the earth and the world, from beginning to end, you are God (Psa.90:2).
I came from a strongly anti-trinitarian background so when I noticed, many years ago, that Jesus caused quite a stir amongst the Jewish leadership when He said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), it was quite an eye opener.*
Jesus used divisive statements about Himself being the great I AM to make it clear to those around Him that He was, in fact, God. This is why the Jewish leaders were so incensed against Him and why they wanted to kill Him.
I would go further and say that it is this distinctive, that Jesus is God, that pits every false religion against Christianity. Every religion on earth teaches the pathway to God but Christianity teaches that God came to us. He really was God with us:
“Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel, which means ‘God is with us’” (Matt. 1:23).
So important was this point (that Jesus be worshipped as God) that the apostle John went so far as to say that if anyone doesn’t accept this truth then they were the antichrist!
1 Dear friends, do not believe everyone who claims to speak by the Spirit. You must test them to see if the spirit they have comes from God. For there are many false prophets in the world.
2 This is how we know if they have the Spirit of God: If a person claiming to be a prophet acknowledges that Jesus Christ came in a real body, that person has the Spirit of God.
3 But if someone claims to be a prophet and does not acknowledge the truth about Jesus, that person is not from God. Such a person has the spirit of the Antichrist, which you heard is coming into the world and indeed is already here (I John 4:1-3).
Knowing Jesus and worshipping who He truly is brings you into a covenant relationship with Him, the Father and the Holy Spirit – a whole new exciting life of promise and discovery. Diligently search out who you worship.
* By way of emphasis, 7 times Jesus used the Koine Greek term Ego eimi (Greek Ἐγώ εἰμί), literally I am, as an emphatic form of the copulative verb εἰμι, so that these form part of a title for Jesus (John 6:35; 8:12; 10:9,11,14; 11:25; 14:6;15:1,5).
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All quotations are from the NLT.