On This Day: Surprising Evidence that Jesus is God

   So they called them and charged them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John answered them, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:18-20)

   I have had JW’s come to the door and tell me that Jesus is not God (I must be a marked man because I see them come to our neighbourhood, but no longer to my house!). I have watched videos of Muslims demanding that the Christians show where Jesus ever said the words, “I am God”. I have seen atheists defending their faith that there is no God. And I grew up with the agnostic claim that we can’t ever know if there is a God for certain.

   From a young age, I knew there was a God and that he was watching over me in a good way, so that ruled out atheism and agnosticism.

   Over the subsequent decades, I have seen the Triunity of God all through the pages of Scripture. It has been amazing to me how people can claim otherwise when it is so clearly revealed.

   A big part of the focus on the Trinity is whether the Bible ever presents Jesus as God. To me, that’s a silly question. Read your Bible. It presents Jesus as God.

   However, the older I get, and the better I get to know the Bible, the more delightful it is when God completely surprises me with something I have never noticed before. And all the more so when it is in a familiar section of Scripture!

   When Peter and John said, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God,” I suddenly saw two persons. The apostles first pointed upwards (with their words) to “in the sight of God”. For their Jewish listeners, in God’s sight meant in the sight of the God of Israel, the one we call “Yahweh”. God was in heaven above, so to be in his sight meant he was looking down on the proceedings, evaluating what both parties were doing (the apostles vs the religious elites).

   The second person was the one the apostles had listened to as “to God”. We could fill pages upon pages with examples of Jesus identifying himself as God, with the apostles and prophets revealing him as God, and how Jesus was the one who told the apostles to teach the “good news of great joy” announced by angels and fulfilled in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ the Lord.

   After the apostle John told us that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1-2), he added, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (vs 14). This is what the apostles had seen.

   The apostle Peter wrote of himself, “as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ” (I Peter 5:1). And, of course, Peter’s witness of the sufferings of Christ included the unforgettable experience of denying his Savior three times while Jesus was suffering on his way to the cross!

   There are such good resources online addressing Jesus’ deity in general, but also in specific response to Muslims, JW’s, Jews, and Mormons who all claim Jesus was not God. However, today God had a very personal ministry to me (after asking him to make my time with him feel like I was with him, not just me trying to understand his word), showing me afresh the multi-faceted revelation of his word that doesn’t require the exact words from Jesus, “I am God”, to show he, his Father, and the Scriptures, all bear witness to the deity of Jesus Christ our Lord.

   Did you need to see this treasure of wisdom and knowledge as much as I did? I certainly hope so. But if not, part of the lesson in sharing this is that God speaks through his word, so make sure you are in God’s word each day, hearing what the Spirit is saying to the churches. Whatever God shows each of us will be equally delightful in ministering to our souls exactly what we need in Jesus’ name.

 

© 2025 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8

Email: in2freedom@gmail.com

Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.)

 

On This Day: The Package is Bigger Than We Thought

   Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago. Moses said, ‘The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers. You shall listen to him in whatever he tells you. And it shall be that every soul who does not listen to that prophet shall be destroyed from the people.’ And all the prophets who have spoken, from Samuel and those who came after him, also proclaimed these days. You are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant that God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’ God, having raised up his servant, sent him to you first, to bless you by turning every one of you from your wickedness.” (Acts 3:19-26)

   “Easy Believism” has been a problem for a long time. It is the false notion that the “package” we call “salvation” is so small that all we need to do is ask Jesus into our hearts, and all will be well. Anything else is considered optional, and, in many cases, so-called “believers” are shocked to discover that Jesus actually requires them to walk in “the obedience of faith” with all their hearts, souls, minds, and strengths.

   When we travel through the book of Acts and consider how the Jewish apostles proclaimed the “good news of the kingdom” to their Jewish audiences, we don’t hear anything that resembles the “just ask Jesus into your hearts” gospel. The good news is always presented as dramatically life changing.

   The Jews would need to leave the old covenant they had lived under since the time of Moses, they would need to confess themselves as sinners in the sight of the God they thought they were serving, and they would need to admit that, even though they were descendants of Abraham, they weren’t actually IN the kingdom of God! They had to repent, be baptized, declare Jesus Christ as Lord, and join the church Jesus was building, no matter what the cost.

   What Peter told the Jews in today’s text above challenged my thinkin’-cap. Partly this was because I am still amazed at how the Old Testament Scriptures spoke of what Jesus did during his ministry and what he will do when he returns. And partly because of how radically life-changing it was for these people to admit their “wickedness” and turn to “this Jesus” for complete salvation.

   One of the Scriptures I often share to help myself and others picture how much change we should expect in our lives when we receive Jesus is this:

   “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:13-14).

   The tiny package of “just accept Jesus into your heart” pictures Jesus coming to us. The full package of salvation sees Jesus calling us to come to him. And coming to him means being delivered out of our sinful lives, being transferred into his kingdom, and living the life of redemption in a restored relationship with God.

   And, in that relationship, Jesus is now head of his church, we are now members of his body, the Spirit has gifted us to serve others in love, and 100% of who we are and what we have is his. Yes, 100% of it!

   My fear is that the majority of people who have only asked Jesus into their hearts have never actually opened their hearts to Jesus at all. Some may have been born into the church as preemies, so to speak, but others have only put on the clothes of self-centered religion and have never been saved.

   While there is some distinctiveness in how the gospel was first shared with the Jews who had such rich history in the Scriptures, it was to prepare the way for us Gentiles (non-Jews) to realize that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” that “the wages of sin is death”, and that only when we repent (turn from sin) and believe (turn to Christ) can we leave our world of sin, enter Jesus’ kingdom, and walk with our Savior in the newness of life.

   Please do not take any chances with this. The small package version of the gospel does not save anyone. Jesus is the full package of salvation, and we all must be sure we have come to him, and that no one can ever snatch us out of his hand!

 

© 2025 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8

Email: in2freedom@gmail.com

Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.)

 

 

On This Day: A Debt Cancelled; A Gift Received

   And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. (Acts 2:38)

   Spending time with God in his word and prayer is not only about learning facts and information. It is about getting to know God better than we have ever known him before. Sometimes that revolves around discovering things in his word that have never stood out to us which leads us to relate to God more deeply about those very things.

   But other times it is discovering a new facet of something we already know and feeling it touch on things going on in us and around us that are simply the present work of God in our lives.

   Today, my meditation on God’s word led me to see “forgiveness of your sins” and “the gift of the Holy Spirit” in a relational way that hadn’t stood out to me previously, or that just happened to be exactly what I needed today. Either way, it ministered to me the word of God, and it led me to trust him for the very things he was speaking to me about.

   Previously, when I would hear the word “sin”, I would think of it as a thing. It was a particular transgression. An act of wrongdoing. It was simply a thing that was bad, wrong… SINFUL!

   But today’s focus on Peter’s use of “sins” was the discovery that it was more about the effects of our wrongdoing. In other words, it was about the guilt that separates us from God. It wasn’t just doing bad things, but doing the very things that took us away from God.

   So, when Peter emphasized the “forgiveness” of our sins, it was about God dealing with our estrangement from him so there was no longer anything between us. Our sin-debt was cancelled. Our violation of relationship with him was forgiven. The guilt, shame, and fear of sin were removed. From God’s side, there is no longer any debt, any condemnation, any works that still need to be done to restore us to him. He has done it all in Jesus Christ, and repentance and faith (as expressed in baptism) bring us into this gift of God.

   On the other side, the “gift of the Holy Spirit” is all about attachment. Forgiveness heals the estrangement, and the gift of the Holy Spirit gives us restored attachment. God removes what took us away from him and gives us his own presence to bring us close to him.

   I share this, not only to satisfy the full-brained needs of our bodies, and the full-minded needs of our souls, but to testify that what God showed me today was what I needed today. I needed to be reminded, and to feel it more deeply, that there is no longer anything between me and God to justify feeling estranged from him. And I needed to be reminded that the free gift of the Holy Spirit is God’s way of attaching to us during this earthly life so we can keep getting to know him better than we have ever known him before.

   And all of that made this Scripture resonate in and around me like a friend God has given me to help me along my way: “and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). When God gives the Holy Spirit to his forgiven children, his love is poured into our hearts. We grow in our experience of that love (attachment) as we seek every day to be “filled with the Spirit”.

   To put this into practice, my primary focus will be on the “set your minds on the Spirit” activity of faith. The battle is for my mind. Satan is just as active to speak his lies to my mind as God is at work to speak his truth in love. But God has spoken his love into my heart today in the exact way I need, and I expect he will keep me focused on him throughout this whole day so that his love feels every bit as real as it really is.

 

 

© 2025 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8

Email: in2freedom@gmail.com

Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.)