Published: 10 June 2014

“Hullo, hulloooo, hullo”, came the call a few days ago from just outside my study window. I went outside and immediately guessed that the lady calling for attention was a Jehovah’s Witness. In the background I could see her accomplice already engaging someone else on our property. As I approached she commented on the lovely day and a pretty section of our garden. This was her opening from which to launch about the creator of these things. As JW’s do not believe in a biblical creation, but in a combination of ‘day age’ and Genesis 1:1 as an indeterminate amount of time within which to fit ‘true science’, this seemed a bit impertinent. The disingenuous nature of the JW presentation was repeated when she then referred to the “son of God, Jesus” as being the “saviour”. Disingenuous, as she knows that most people with any Christian background would understand those words in the context of Jesus as the second person of the one triune God; while as a JW, she does not believe in the deity of Jesus Christ.

I immediately graciously challenged her on her statement and she acknowledged that JW’s do not believe that Jesus is God; a theology at odds with 2000 years of orthodox Christian doctrine, is explicitly claimed by Jesus Himself and implicit in much of the Old Testament as well. In other words, she knew her statement about Jesus was a ruse to get people’s guard down. I put it to her that if salvation is through a belief in Jesus Christ, as we both acknowledge, then who He is must be extremely important. The Bible tells us that “there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Establishing the true identity and nature of this Jesus is therefore a matter of (eternal) life or death. Will any Jesus do? Obviously a Jesus da Silva in Peru will not. And so establishing the true identity and nature of the Jesus we are called on to believe for salvation is imperative. There is an infinite gulf between a Jesus that is ‘The Son of God, the second Person in the Trinity, being very and eternal God, of one substance, and equal with the Father’1, and a Jesus that is not.

She stated that Jesus is not the eternal God, but ‘a god’, created by God the Father, as He created Satan who is also called ‘the god of this world’ in 2 Corinthians 4:4. She then went on with the familiar JW ‘proofs’ of their denial of the deity of Christ.

Why is Jesus referred to as ‘the firstborn of all creation’ in Colossians 1:15? Why is He called the ‘mighty God’ in Isaiah 9:6 and not almighty God? Why does Jesus say, “the Father is greater than I” in John 14:28 if He is equal with God? All of these objections to the deity of Christ have been adequately answered by Christians since the Church began and are covered in the ‘Related articles’ section below. The powerful refutations come from within the Bible itself, showing the folly of building a theology on an isolated verse without ‘examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so’ (Acts 17:11), as did the Bereans in response to Paul and Silas’ teaching.

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