Humanity and Deity of Christ

The famous German evangelical pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, famously explained that “nothing can be known either of God or man until God has become man in Jesus Christ.” These words stand out for me because Christ plays a rather diverse role in who He is and what He brings to this world whether it’s terms of a scriptural or theological basis as Christ is both man and God.

There are different times in scripture when Christ is seen through the lenses of human as well as deity and these moments are magnificent for believers. Most times in scripture, we see one or the other which is great for believers because we know who our God is and what He is capable of but when both sides are evident, it’s even greater so Christians can have their and eat it, too.

Alistair Begg in “Name Above All Names,” remarks “. . . once people stop believing in the God of the Bible, they don’t believe in nothing–they begin to believe in anything.” Once you think about quote then you realize just how much truth it holds. Personally, I have witnessed it in the lives of those who claim to be Christians as the further away from Christ they have gone, the more they are willing to believe even if it contradicts scripture.

A friend and acquaintance of mine claims he is a Christian and a believer in Christ but He rejects the deity of Christ by explaining there is a duality of Christ rather than a Trinity and that Christ was simply in the human form only. While these issues have been discussed for a long time now even dating back to the early church fathers, the only place we need to look is scripture itself for our answers and it is clear that Christ, while in the human form, was both in the human form and deity: “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9).

This is not another article to explain the Trinity and while there does need to be more and more discussions, this article is to remind people that Christ did walk the Earth in the human form but while He walked, He was still God. This is important for all believers because many times, we forget about the bigger picture especially when the storm comes. When things go bad and we do not understand them, it does not mean that God is not there but we must focus our attention on God rather than the storm itself and we see this illustrated perfectly in Mark 4 with Christ and His disciples on a boat in the middle of a storm.

Although Christ had shown these people so much and they knew what He was capable of, they still feared the storm. However, when Christ calmed the storm, they were still fearful because they were unsure of how or what caused Christ to perform this miracle. Rather than seeing the bigger picture and being peaceful, they were fearful and made things worse by wondering what was really at play which reminds me of the old saying “the more things change, the more they stay the same” because too many people are like this today. Although we are told “I and [my] Father are one” (John 10:30), we wonder how can Christ be both God and human because we cannot be two things at once.

Instead of limiting God by what we cannot do, we should simply trust in God’s word: “But to us [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” (1 Corinithians 8:6). After all, God’s word has been since the beginning of time—both our timeframe and His—regardless of how much we try to change it: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Scripture clearly explains to us that “But God hath revealed [them] unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10) and while it’s good to test the spirit of all things (1 John 4:1), we as humans have a bad habit of turning even the simplest of task into rocket science: “So then faith [cometh] by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17).

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