Suppose for a moment you are falsely charged with the crime of assuming a false identity and that your enemies, who appear as the prosecution’s witnesses, state that you claimed to be someone you are not. Their evidence is based not on what you said but on what they think you meant.
Despite your innocence, you are found guilty and convicted of the crime. Then, adding to this injustice, many of your supporters become equally confused about what your enemies think you said. But instead of finding out what you meant when you said it, they too believe you to be someone that you never said you were in the first place! Eventually most people come to believe it as well, and then begin to attack those who don’t. Of course, you know who you really are, even if most people identify you as someone you never said you were in the first place!
Confused by all this? No more than those Christians who for almost 2,000 years have misinterpreted the words, “I and my Father are one” as being Christ’s clearest statement of his deity. Before discovering Christ’s true identity, let’s shift our focus from reading John 10:30 as a proof text to its context: the increasing conflict between the Jews and Jesus Christ (who, of course, was himself a Jew).
The Pharisees were the fundamentalists of their day and Nicodemus aside, these religious watch dogs first appear in John 7:32 after Jesus enters Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles. They are seeking to arrest him, but their officers return empty-handed after hearing the great wisdom in the Lord’s words.
Christ’s greatest offence in the eyes of the Jews is his response to their demand to tell them plainly if he is indeed the Messiah. They misunderstand his statement of perfect unity with the Father as a declaration of divinity (John 10:30-33).
Expounding Psalm 82:6, Jesus makes clear that he means no such thing. If the psalmist calls the magistrates of old “gods” because the word of God came to them — when they made legal decisions in His name — why should his listeners take offence at him calling himself “the Son of God”? The Lord’s statement, “I and my Father are one”, was not a claim by Jesus that he was God, but a statement of the perfect working unity between the Father and himself. It was a unity that every true believer now has with the Father and the Son (John 17:3, 11, 21-23).
If Jesus was making a claim to divinity, the accusation by the Pharisees would have been correct, in which case, the sentence they later pronounced on Jesus would also have been correct. It would also mean that every person who believes in Jesus Christ shares the deity of the Father and the Son, because Jesus prayed “That they may be one, even as we are.” (John 17:11)
The Lord’s accusers misunderstood his words and wrongly accused him of claiming that he was God. (The Apostle Paul would later write of him as “God manifest in the flesh”, and that Jesus was “the image of the invisible God”; and yet again that “In him dwells all the fullness of the Deity bodily”. Peter, the disciple, identified Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Thomas, the pessimistic, doubting disciple,
had even greater insight and exclaimed “My Lord and my God!” NT Greek: “The Lord of me, the God of me!”
The first Christians, being Jews, grasped much of what they meant, but later on in time Christians lost sight of what he said and confused the issue of our Lord’s true identity as both Son of Man and Son of God. Which is why we should not quote the words of the Pharisees in any discussion or debate as to the identity of Jesus of Nazareth. King David asked the LORD to wean him from wanting to know things that were beyond him, and when some things that seem “beyond our ken” do well in doing likewise.
Any case of mistaken identity is a serious matter, and this was one of the most serious ever! It is time the Church discarded the unscriptural term “God the Son” and identified Jesus as the person whom he really is — “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16). “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself…”
We need to rediscover the true identity of Jesus the Christ, for only when we do will we attribute to the risen, ascended and glorified Son of God the honour and praise he deserves for his accomplishments! Jesus is “the firstborn among many brethren.” (Romans 8:29) This makes Jesus the Son of God our Elder Brother (Hebrews 2:12).
In Revelation chapter 4, the enthroned God is worshipped as the Creator, and Jesus then appears and is praised as the Redeemer. As Paul the Apostle writes in 1 Corinthians 8:6: “We believe that there is but One God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in Him; and One Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.”
If you’ve ever wished that you had an elder brother who would take up your cause, Jesus is your Man! Jesus, the Son of Man is truly human, and as the Son of God Jesus is truly Divine. We who present him as both in the one need to do so scripturally, and best by basing our case on a sound understanding of God’s Word than on revised and in some points questionable creeds.