Did Jesus Fulfill the Attributes of God?

When I was teaching Sunday school, I did a series of classes using Lee Strobel's works. The following is from The Case for Christ, chapter 9. While there may be the stray original item from me, I deserve no credit for what is written in this particular article. It is properly attributed to Lee Strobel in its entirety.

Many would point to Jesus’ miracles in discussions about his divinity, but other people have performed miracles, so while this may be indicative, it’s not decisive. But of the many things he did, one of the most striking has to be forgiving sin.

If you do something against me, I have the right to forgive you. But if someone else comes along and says, “I forgive you,” that would be meaningless and completely out of place. The only person who can say that sort of thing meaningfully is God Himself, because sin, even if it is against other people, is first and foremost a defiance of God and His laws.

In Psalm 51, when David sinned by committing adultery and arranging the death of Bathsheba’s husband, he ultimately says to God, “Against you, only you, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” He recognized that although he had wronged people, in the end he had sinned against the God who made him in His image, and God needed to forgive him.

But along comes Jesus and says to sinners, “I forgive you.” Immediately the Jews see this as blasphemy; they ask, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” And He goes even further by asserting that He Himself was without sin. And certainly sinlessness is an attribute of deity. Now if I did that, we’d need to form a line for all the rebuttals, but no one could refute Christ.

Although moral perfection and the forgiveness of sin are undoubtedly characteristics of deity, there are several additional attributes that Jesus must fulfill if he is to match the profile of God. How could Jesus be omnipresent if he couldn’t be in two places at once? How could he be omniscient when he says, “Not even the Son of Man knows the hour of his return”? How could he be omnipotent when the gospels clearly tell us he was unable to do many miracles in his hometown?

These questions have no simple answers; they strike at the very heart of the Incarnation - God becoming man, spirit taking on flesh, the infinite becoming finite, the eternal becoming bound by time. Historically, there have been a few approaches to this. For example, at the end of the 19th century, Benjamin Warfield worked through the gospels and ascribed various things to either Christ’s humanity or to his deity.

We have to be careful to avoid a solution in which there are essentially two minds - a kind of schizophrenic Jesus - while at the same time respecting and retaining the doctrine of our confessional statements that Jesus’ humanity and his deity remain distinct, yet they combined in one person.

Another solution is some form of kenosis, which means “emptying” and comes from Philippians 2 in which Paul tells us that Jesus emptied Himself, but emptied Himself of what? Did He empty Himself of deity? Well, then He would no longer be God. Did He empty Himself of the attributes of his deity? Well that’s a problem too because it’s difficult to separate attributes from reality. I don’t know what it means for God to empty Himself of his attributes and still be God.

Some have said He emptied Himself of the use of His attributes. That's probably getting closer, although there were times when that’s not what he was doing - He was forgiving sins the way only God can, which is an attribute of deity. Others say He emptied Himself of the independent use of His attributes, that He functioned like God when His Heavenly Father gave Him explicit sanction to do so. Possibly closer still, but the difficulty is that there is a sense in which the eternal Son has always acted in line with His Father’s commandments - you don’t want to lose that, even in eternity past.

Strictly speaking, Philippians 2 doesn’t tell us precisely what the eternal Son emptied Himself of. He emptied Himself; He became a nobody. Some kind of emptying is at issue, but come on, we’re talking about the Incarnation, one of the central mysteries of the Christian faith. We’re dealing with formless, bodiless, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent Spirit and finite, touchable, physical, time-bound creatures. For one to become the other inevitably gets up bound up in mysteries.

So part of Christian theology has been concerned with trying to take the biblical evidence and, retaining all of it fairly, find ways of synthesis that are rationally coherent, even if they are not exhaustively explanatory. In other words, theologians can come up with explanations that seem to make sense, even though they might not be able to explain every nuance about the Incarnation.

If the Incarnation is true, it’s not surprising that finite minds couldn’t totally comprehend it

God is an uncreated being who has existed from eternity past. But there are some verses of Scripture that seem to strongly suggest that Jesus was a created being. For instance, John 3:16 calls Jesus the “begotten” Son of God, and Colossians 1:15 says he was the “firstborn over all creation” (KJV renders it “His only begotten Son”). Those who consider this correct usually bind it up with the Incarnation itself - that is, His begetting in the Virgin Mary. But in fact, it’s not what the Greek means. It really means “unique one.” The way it was usually used in the first century was “unique and beloved.” So John 3:16 is simply saying that Jesus is the unique and beloved Son rather than saying He’s ontologically begotten in time.

In Colossians, the use of “firstborn” is a bit different. In the Old Testament the firstborn, because of the laws of succession, normally received the lion’s share of the estate, or the firstborn would become king in the case of a royal family. The firstborn therefore was the one ultimately with all the rights of the father. By the second century B.C., there are places where it has nothing to do with order of birth but carries the idea of the authority that comes with the position of being the rightful heir. “Supreme heir” would be a good way to put it.

And if you’re going to quote Colossians 1:15, you have to keep it in context by going on to Colossians 2:9, where the very same author stresses, “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” The author wouldn’t contradict himself. So the term “firstborn” cannot exclude Jesus’ eternality, since that is part of what it means to possess the fullness of the divine.

But what about Mark 10? Jesus is called “good teacher” to which he responds, “Why do you call me good? No one is good - except God alone.” He is using a penetrating question to push the man to think through the implications of his own words, to understand the concept of Jesus’ goodness and, most especially, the man’s lack of goodness. With all that Jesus does and says elsewhere, which way does it make sense to take it?

Jesus said in John 14:28, “The Father is greater than I.” Context, context, context! The disciples are moaning because Jesus has said He’s going away. He says, “If you loved me, you’d be glad for my sake when I say I’m going away, because the Father is greater than I.” That is to say, Jesus is returning to the glory that is properly His, so if they really know who He is and really love Him properly, they’ll be glad he’s going back to the realm where He really is greater. His limitation (humiliation as a theological term) is coming to an end.

When you use a category like “greater,” it doesn’t have to mean ontologically greater. If I say that the president is greater than I, I’m not saying he’s an ontologically superior being. He’s greater in military capability, political prowess, and public acclaim, but he’s not more of a man than I am. He’s a human being and I’m a human being. So when Jesus says, “The Father is greater than I,” one must look at the context and ask if Jesus is saying, “The Father is greater than I because he’s God and I’m not.” That’d be a pretty ridiculous thing to say because it’s a useless observation.

The comparison is only meaningful if they’re already on the same plane and there’s some delimitation going on. Jesus is in the limitations of the Incarnation, but he’s about to return to the Father and to the glory he had with the Father before the world began.

The Bible says that the Father is loving, and the New Testament affirms the same about Jesus. But can they really be loving while at the same time sending people to hell? After all, Jesus teaches more about hell than anyone in the entire Bible. Doesn’t that contradict his supposed gentle and compassionate character?

Picture God in the beginning of creation with a man and woman made in His image. They wake up in the morning and think about God. They love Him truly. They delight to do what He wants; it’s their whole pleasure. They’re rightly related to Him and they’re rightly related to each other. Then sin and rebellion enter the world, and these image bearers begin to think they are the center of the universe. And that’s the way we think. All the things we call “social pathologies” - war, rape, bitterness, nurtured envies, secret jealousies, pride, inferiority complexes - are bound up in the first instance with the fact that we’re not rightly related with God.

From God’s perspective that's shockingly disgusting. So what should He do about it? If He does nothing, he’s saying that evil doesn’t matter to Him. Wouldn’t we be shocked if we thought God didn’t have moral judgments on such matters?

Having said that, hell is not a place where people are consigned because they were pretty good blokes but just didn’t believe the right stuff. They’re consigned there, first and foremost, because they defy their Maker and want to be at the center of the universe. What is God to do? If He says it doesn’t matter to Him, God is no longer a God to be admired. For Him to act in any other way in the face of such blatant defiance would be to reduce God Himself.

But tormenting people for eternity seems vicious, doesn’t it? In the first place, the Bible says here are different degrees of pun-ishment, so not everyone consigned there suffers the same. In the second place, if God took His hands off this fallen world so that there was no restraint on human wickedness, we would make hell. Thus, if you allow a whole lot of sinners to live somewhere in a confined place where they’re not doing damage to anyone but themselves, what do you get but hell? There’s a sense in which they’re doing it to themselves, and it’s what they want because they still don’t repent.

One of the things the Bible does insist is that in the end not only will justice be done, but justice will be seen to be done, so that every mouth will be stopped. In other words, at the time of judgment there is nobody in the world that will walk away from that experience saying God has treated him or her unfairly. Everyone will recognize the fundamental justice in the way God judges them and the world.

How can Jesus’ failure to push for the abolition of slavery be squared with God’s love for all people? Was he morally deficient for not working to dismantle an institution that demeaned people who were made in the image of God? Not to romanticize slavery at all, but we’re all pretty much aware that the slavery discussed in the Bible was indentured servitude as opposed to the brutal practice we are all too familiar with. It usually served an economic function. There were no bankruptcy laws, so if you got into a terrible bind, you sold yourself and/or your family into slavery.

As it was discharging a debt, it was also providing work. It wasn’t necessarily all bad; at least it was an option for survival. In Roman times there were menial laborers who were slaves, and there were others who were the equivalent of distinguished PhDs, who were teaching families. And there was no association of a particular race with slavery.

But you have to keep your eye on Jesus’ mission. He did not come to overturn the Roman economic system, which included slavery. He came to free men and women from their sins. What His message does is transform people so they begin to love God with all their heart, mind, soul and strength and to love their neighbor as themselves. Naturally, this has an impact on the idea of slavery. The overthrowing of slavery, then, is through the transformation of men and women by the gospel rather than through merely changing an economic system.

We’ve seen what can happen when you merely overthrow an economic system and impose a new order. The communists got rid of the oppressors of the peasants, but that didn’t mean the peasants were suddenly free - they were just under a new brutal regime. In the final analysis, if you want lasting change, you’ve got to transform the hearts of human beings. And that was Jesus’ mission. And let’s not forget, the driving impetus for the abolition of slavery was the evangelical awakening in England.

According to the New Testament every attribute of God is found in Jesus Christ:

Omniscience - In John 16:30 the apostle John affirms of Jesus, “Now we can see that you know all things.”

Omnipresence - Jesus said in Matthew 28:20, “Surely I am with you, always, to the very end of the age” and in Matthew 18:20, “Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”

Omnipotence - “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” (Matthew 28:18)

Eternality - John 1:1 declares of Jesus, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Immutability - Hebrews 13:8 says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”

Also, the Old Testament paints a portrait of God by using such titles and descriptions as Alpha and Omega, Lord, Savior, King, Judge, Light, Rock, Redeemer, Shepherd, Creator, giver of life, forgiver of sin, and speaker with divine authority. It’s fascinating to note that in the New Testament each and every one is applied to Jesus. Jesus said it all in John 14:7: “If you really know me, you will know my Father as well.”