Belief in the Divinity of Jesus Based on the Old Testament

Can belief in the divinity of Jesus be demonstrated from scripture? If you’ve ever spoken to a Jehovah’s Witness about the faith, you probably know that one of their biggest talking points is the true identity of Jesus. See, they don’t believe that Jesus is God. Instead, they believe he is just a created being. This is probably the biggest difference between their religion and traditional Christianity, so they often try to convert people by arguing against this central tenet of our faith.

Because of this, we need to know how to defend our belief that Jesus is God. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are very good at exploiting people’s ignorance and suckering them into their church, so we need to be able to refute their errors. If we can’t, then we and our loved ones are liable to fall prey to their distorted version of Christianity.

Fortunately, this is not all that difficult. If we know for what to look. The divinity of Jesus is actually one of the easiest Christian beliefs to demonstrate from Scripture. The New Testament doesn’t call Jesus “God” all that often, but it gives us many other subtle (yet decisive) hints that he is much more than just a created being. For instance, it often quotes Old Testament passages about God and applies them to Jesus, and it does this in ways that clearly equate him with the God of Israel.

A Voice in the Wilderness

There are several New Testament passages that do this, and I want to look at two of them here. To start, let’s turn to the beginning of the Gospel of Mark. After an introductory verse explaining the contents of the book, Mark gives a quote from the Old Testament that sets the stage for his version of Jesus’ story:

As it is written in Isaiah the prophet,
“Behold, I send my messenger before thy face,
who shall prepare thy way;
the voice of one crying in the wilderness:
Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.” (Mark 1:2-3)

Mark says that this quote comes from Isaiah, but it is actually an amalgamation of two Old passages, one from Isaiah and one from Malachi:

A voice cries:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” (Isaiah 40:3)

Behold, I send my messenger to prepare the way before me…says the Lord of hosts. (Malachi 3:1)

John and Jesus

In their original contexts, these prophecies both referred to God’s coming to his people Israel, but in Mark, they refer to the coming of Jesus. This is especially easy to see with the verse from Malachi. In its original context, it is in the first person, but Mark changes it to the second person. He takes a text in which God speaks about himself, and he changes it so that God is speaking about Jesus, most likely to emphasize the distinction between Jesus and the Father.

What’s more, the next few verses make it clear that the messenger spoken of in this composite quotation is John the Baptist. The very next verse says that John “appeared in the wilderness” (Mark 1:4), and then a few lines later Mark makes it clear that his mission was to prepare for the coming of someone else (Mark 1:7-8). As we know, that someone else was Jesus, so Mark clearly saw John’s ministry as the fulfillment of these Old Testament prophecies.

This means that God made good on these promises by coming to his people in Jesus and, more specifically, as Jesus. The beginning of Jesus’ public ministry was in fact the long-awaited coming of God to his people, which means that Jesus must actually be God.

The One Who Founded the Earth

That was fairly straightforward, but the next text I want to look at is even simpler. It comes from Hebrews, and it doesn’t need any explanation beyond the absolute minimum. In the first chapter of this book, the author quotes several passages from the Old Testament to show Jesus’ superiority over the angels, and one of them is particularly telling:

In the beginning, Lord, you founded the earth,
and the heavens are the work of your hands;
they will perish, but you remain;
they will all wear out like clothing;
like a cloak you will roll them up,
and like clothing they will be changed.
But you are the same,
and your years will never end. (Hebrews 1:10-12)

When we look for the source of these words in the Old Testament, we find that they come from Psalm 102:25-27, a passage that is explicitly about God. Take a look at the immediately preceding verse:

“O my God,” I say, “do not take me away
at the midpoint of my life,
you whose years endure
throughout all generations.” (Psalm 102:24)

The psalmist tells us that he is talking to God, so when he goes on to praise the “Lord” who “founded the earth” in the next few verses, it is clear that he is addressing God in those verses as well. As a result, we can see that the author of Hebrews is doing the exact same thing that Mark does in the beginning of his Gospel. He is quoting an Old Testament passage about God and saying that it is actually about Jesus, and that can only mean one thing: Jesus is in fact God.

Jesus is God

There are numerous other passages at which we could’ve looked, but these two are enough to prove the point. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are clearly wrong about the identity of Jesus. He is not a created being. He is the God of Israel, the one about whom the Old Testament spoke  in the passages quoted by Mark and Hebrews, so we can be confident that on this question, traditional Christianity wins the day decisively.