Let me ask you something. Is Jesus your Lord? In other words, Is he your Boss? Your Master? Your Guru? Your Leader. Your Teacher? If you say Yes, then I assume that you aim to agree with his teachings about God.
So, what does Jesus teach about God? And what does he teach about himself?
In Jesus’ teaching, the one God is none other than the one he taught us to pray to as "Our Father in heaven." [7] Jesus prayed to the Father too, and once addressed him as "the only true God." [8] If the Father is the only true God, then no one else is.
Jesus, God’s Anointed One (that is, his Messiah or Christ) is a unique man, like he explicitly says: "but now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God," [9] and likewise the apostles preached Jesus to be "a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you." [10] The Father, whom Jesus is seen to worship, obey, and pray to, is Jesus’ God too - like he explicitly says to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection: "Do not touch me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ " [11]
And the Lord Jesus says in the vision recorded in Revelation 3: "If you conquer, I will make you a pillar in the temple of my God; you will never go out of it. I will write on you the name of my God and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem that comes down from my God out of heaven, and my own new name." [12] God Almighty can’t be under any other; he cannot have a God, and so we know that his Son is someone else, a man who does have a God, as he says, the same God who is over you and me.
Jesus is truly called the unique "Lord" now, but this is not a way of saying that he is equal to his and our God. Rather, the Father is, in Paul’s words, "the God of our Lord Jesus Christ." [13]
Unlike the unique Lord of the Old Testament, that is, Yahweh himself, this "Lord" is, like us, under God. Yet he is, according to the New Testament, the greatest revelation of God, indeed, his true image, [14] which is why he says that if you’ve seen him, you’ve seen the Father [15] - not because he is his own Father, or is a divine Person equal to him, but rather because he is like his Father, being his unique image.
For us, the tri-personal God is a fiction first imagined in the 4th Christian century ...
In contrast, our heavenly Father is real. Jesus fully revealed him and is now the raised and exalted immortal man who is the unique mediator between God and us. [16]
Unless otherwise noted, biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.
[7] Matthew 6:9.
[8] John 17:3.
[9] John 8:40.
[10] Acts 2:22.
[11] John 20:17.
[12] Revelation 3:12.
[13] Ephesians 1:17.
[14] Colossians 1:15.
[15] John 14:9.
[16] 1 Timothy 2.5.
The above excerpt was taken from
"Where We Stand: 2022"
