Jesus Christ asked His disciples a year before He was arrested and crucified, “Who do men say that I am?” The disciples answered: “Some say John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets” (Matthew 16:13-14). Then Simon Peter gave the correct answer: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replied “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 16:15-17).
The Gospel writers Matthew and Luke both recorded Christ’s genealogy. Matthew gives the genealogy of Jesus through His legal father, Joseph, and Luke records Mary’s genealogy.
Approximately six decades after Jesus’ death the apostle John did not begin his gospel with Jesus’ human genealogy or His human birth, but with His divine origin: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God” (John 1:1-2).
What we are being told here is that there were two divine Beings existent together before all else, both of them God. The fact that One is with the other and both are God tells us clearly that there are two distinct personages who are God.
Additionally, John records Jesus’ final prayer before His death: “And now, O Father, glorify Me together with yourself, with the glory which I had with you before the world was” (John 17:5). Here John is consistent with the opening words of His Gospel. Jesus was with the Father before the world was created and had divine glory with the Father. And here, at the end of His physical time on earth, He prays to the Father to be restored to that same glorified state He had earlier with the Father.
John, in the introduction of his Gospel, goes on to say of the One who became Jesus that “all things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made” (John 1:3). He is telling us that the Word, who existed with God the Father, is the One who actually carried out the creation of the universe at the Father’s direction!
The apostle Paul later substantiates in Colossians that Jesus was the Creator of everything: “For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him” (Colossians 1:16).
Paul adds in Colossians 1:17 that “He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.” This means that not only was Jesus the agent who carried out the act of creation, but that He is the One through whose power the creation is sustained.
The great divine Being who is God along with the Father and who was with the Father as God in the beginning voluntarily became a lowly human. He humbled Himself and served us and all of humanity by dying in our stead for our sins.
