Who is Jesus?

Part of my story of becoming a Christian was a development in my understanding of the person of Jesus Christ. I had heard He was the Son of God, but didn't really understand what that meant (how could God have a son?), and didn't want to attribute too much honour to Him in case God would be offended. But part of the workings in my mind when coming to believe the gospel was realising if Jesus was only a man he could not pay for the sin of all mankind, so he had to be more, he was God. That was what made sense to me at the time.

But even after becoming a Christian it has been a journey to understand who Jesus is and why it is not just OK but right and pleasing to God, to place such emphasis on Him.

But this question of whether Jesus is God is part of the larger question "who is Jesus". And that is a question we should be able to answer.

There is a personal answer to that question. The man born blind who was healed by Jesus in John 9 probably didn't know much about Jesus from Scripture, but He knew Him from what He had done in his life. So there is a knowledge of Christ based on our experience of Him.

But more important than our understanding of Christ is what God says about Him. And to learn that we need to go to the Scriptures.

Christ is our access point to God. So our understanding of Him affects how we live our lives as believers: how we pray (do I pray to God, or do I pray to Jesus); how we understand the gospel and share it with others (who died on the cross? Can I say that God died on the cross?).

And as a Christian, learning more about the history of Christianity, I learned that the Trinity was considered a key doctrine. But I have heard some Unitarian arguments recently, from people who I would have thought were genuine believers, and wanted to address them from Scripture.

Labels and categories can be helpful, but I find with the bible things are often nuanced and rarely fit into neat categories. I will look at the arguments of not Trinitarianism or Unitarianism, but as sources for questions to ask Scripture. That's to say I'll be taking a bottom-up rather than top-down approach.

So I am planning a series of posts that will look at the question of Who Jesus is from Scripture. This is a vast topic and I am not as qualified as many to address it, but I want to have an understanding that is not based on tradition or man's opinions, but from the Scripture.

Post list:

Jesus the revelation of God
Jesus is the LORD
Theophany and the incarnation
Jesus the Son of God
Jesus the King of Israel
Should I pray to Jesus or God?
The Spirit of Christ and the Spirit of God
The Trinity and Trinitarianism
Unitarianism
Historical understanding of the deity of Christ
Jesus in the Gospels
Jesus in Acts
Jesus in the Old Testament