The Deity and Work of Jesus: The Solid Foundation of Faith
The apostles John and Paul introduced Jesus with two core truths about His deity and His work, which are the solid foundations of the Christian faith. John the Baptist twice introduced Him as, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29, 36). The apostle Paul also affirmed, “For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2).
The deity of Jesus is the Lamb of God, the Christ, and His work is to be crucified on the cross to take away the sin of the world.
In these last days, Satan is making every effort to disturb and destroy God’s people by raising up many false teachers who deny and confuse these two eternal truths.
- Attacking the Deity of Jesus
Many cults are trying to deny the deity and deny the divinity of Jesus. Even some believers in Protestant churches no longer believe that Jesus is God incarnate. They only believe that He is the archangel, or a servant of Jehovah. This is a serious apostasy and betrayal of God. Not to mention the naive Christians who are drawn into cults such as An Sang Hong or the “God the Mother Society”.
However, the Bible clearly affirms the deity of Jesus:
John 1:1, 14: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
1 Timothy 3:16: “He who was manifest in the flesh” is God Himself.
It is a pity that apostates only see Jesus as a man and no longer recognize Him as God in human form.
- Attacking the Work of Jesus
God became incarnate as Christ with the mission of transmitting the nature and life of God into mankind. This is so that:
God the Father may have a great divine family, with the firstborn being Jesus Christ.
God the Son (the Bridegroom) may have the Church as his corporate Bride, the New Jerusalem.
God the Spirit may have a holy temple, with Jesus as the cornerstone, and each believer as a living stone, a precious gem composed of it.
However, to achieve these things – to have a family, a wife, a temple – Jesus had to be crucified, to “take away the sin of the world.” This means that God accomplished the work of redemption on the cross.
Through this work of redemption, Jesus abolished the Old Covenant, abolished the old creation, and ushered in the New Testament era, giving birth to the New Creation.
The Christian Church today lives in the New Creation, no longer bound by the old laws of the Old Testament regarding ceremonies, festivals, Sabbaths, new moons, circumcision, etc.
Romans 6:14: “You are not under law but under grace.”
Hebrews 8:13: “By calling this covenant a new covenant, he has made the first obsolete; and that which is old and decaying is near to disappearing.”
Except for the moral laws, all other laws of the Old Covenant have passed away, giving way to the New Covenant.
Today, Satan raises up devout but “distorted” Christians who confuse the Old and New Testaments. They seek to prove that Jesus rose on the Sabbath, blind to the fact that the early Church met on the first day, hundreds of years before Emperor Constantine gave the Church legal status and ordered state employees to rest on the first day.
The Apostle Paul in Galatians 4 likened Serah and Hagar to two covenants:
The children of Serah (Ishmael) represent the Pharisees of Paul’s day, born into bondage to the Old Testament written law.
The children of Serah (Isaac) are the heirs, the children of the heavenly Jerusalem, the New Testament Church, which belongs to heaven, born into inheritance with the Kingdom of God and lives free from slavery to the old law.
The devil is raising up a host of children of Hagar to disrupt the freedom Christians enjoy in the finished work of Jesus.
How to Deal with Those Who Destroy the Truth
The apostle John commanded us how to deal with those who deny the deity of Jesus:
“For many deceivers have gone out into the world, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is that deceiver and the antichrist. Take heed, lest you lose what we have accomplished, but you receive the full reward. Whoever goes beyond and does not abide in the teaching of Christ does not have God; he who abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house or give him a greeting; for he who gives him a greeting is partaker of his evil deeds” (2 John 1:16).