But Whom Say Ye That I Am?

“But whom say ye that I am?” Imagine, for a moment, how Jesus’ question may have hung in the air. He had brought the twelve disciples to the region of Caesarea Philippi (Matthew 16:13), away from the crowds and familiar environs of Capernaum and the Sea of Galilee, to ask them this important question. It was a pivotal moment in Jesus’ ministry—one which would introduce the final phase of His mission (verse 21).

Christ had addressed the question to all the disciples—and open-ended questions addressed to a group can be followed by an extended, uncomfortable pause as each one considers whether or how he should answer. Was each disciple formulating a response, weighing the evidence and claims of this singular man they had followed for several years?

Peter, as he often did, was the first to answer: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” (v16) The evidence must have been so clear to him, the divine inspiration so certain, that there was no need for deliberation or hesitation.

But what a shocking answer for any good Jew to give! In another place, Jesus’ claim of a special father-son relationship with God was well understood by His enemies to be a claim of equality with God, and thus clear grounds to seek His death as a heretic:

But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God. (John 5:17-18)

By contrast, when Jesus asked a similar question to the Pharisees, they answered in doctrinaire fashion that Messiah was “the son of David” (Matthew 22:42), which was scripturally correct, but incomplete.

What is the difference between these two answers concerning sonship of the Messiah, one given by careful, well-educated Pharisees and the other from the lips of an often impetuous fisherman-turned-disciple? It is nothing less than the difference between the wisdom of man and divine revelation; between veiled Old Testament prophecy and glorious New Testament light; and between the law and grace ( John 1:17).

How each of us answers Jesus’ question “But whom say ye that I am?” will show what we believe about the extraordinary claims of Jesus Christ and the nature of God. The correct answer to this question is the “rock” on which Christ builds His church (Matthew 16:18).

The Nature of God

Before we go any further in our exploration of God, we must recognize our limitations. We may think that we understand the nature of God, and so begin to extrapolate beyond what is revealed in scripture. However, like Job’s three friends, we run the risk of developing wrong ideas and incorrect conclusions about God.

Our minds cannot understand His greatness nor fully comprehend His nature, much less describe it properly. The very root of the Hebrew word for Holy is “other”. Therefore, when we speak of a Holy God, we are speaking of a being that is not only beyond the reach of our intellect and imagination, but of a wholly different order than ourselves. He is the “I am that I am”: the Divine reference point and Origin of all things, and nothing created can contain Him.

We honor God best by accepting His revelation as He delivered it to us, and rejoice with that enlightened intellectual of scripture, the Apostle Paul:



O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor? Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen. (Romans 11:33-36)

The Nature of the Son of God

In the days of the early church, the prominent heresy concerning Christ was that He had not ‘come in the flesh’ (1 John 4:3). Today even secular historians will acknowledge the existence of Jesus Christ as a man, and the issue has now shifted to Christ’s identity as the Son of God.

The Bible does not try to explain or reconcile Christ’s human and divine nature, it simply records them as parallel truths. We can trace these two threads through scripture, beginning in Genesis with God’s prophecy that the seed of the woman would one day crush the head of the serpent: Eve’s child would triumph over Satan and bring about his destruction. However, what member of Adam’s fallen race could even dream of overcoming such a powerful opponent?

More light came through the prophecy of Isaiah: God the Son would come to earth, and in the darkness of the virgin’s womb would put on flesh to become Emmanuel, “God with us” (Isaiah 7:14, John 1:14, Matthew 1:23). Hebrews 2:16 adds, “For verily he took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the

seed of Abraham”. Thus, Christ would be both truly God, and truly man.

In Christ we see everything that it is to be human and everything that it is to be divine at the same time, without either compromising the other. When the Apostle Paul wrote that Christ was in the “form of God”, he said:

Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. (Philippians 2:6-8)

The Greek word for “form” (morphe) describes the actual specific essence—that which makes something what it is. The word “fashion” (schema) on the other hand mostly speaks of the outward appearance. Therefore, Christ may have appeared to the people of his time as a mere human, but He was truly divine, God in the flesh. It is nothing less than a mystery that He voluntarily emptied Himself and took on human nature with the ability to experience all our infirmities and be tempted as a man in all points, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15). He became an obedient servant, subjecting Himself to humiliation and death on the cross. In all of this, He did not give up His divine attributes but remained truly God and yet truly man.

It was no accident that Christ selected simple men as His chosen witnesses. They would tell the world of their Lord and His Kingdom without feeling the need

to explain the mystery of how a son of fallen Adam could also be the Son of the Holy God. They simply bowed their heads before this great and life-giving truth without trying to deconstruct it to satisfy human curiosity.

God is One

For more than 3400 years, every observant Jew has taught his children to daily recite the Shema (so called from its first word in Hebrew), which begins:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord. (Deuteronomy 6:4)

This most basic biblical teaching that there is one—and only one—God is found not just in Moses, but is demonstrated throughout scripture: in the creation account, by the calling and promises to the Patriarchs; through the praises of

the Psalms, to the prophets’ indictment of Israel’s polytheistic idolatry; and the resulting judgment of a singular sovereign God who wields the nations of the earth as His instruments. Moreover, the truth that there is one God is faithfully repeated in the New Testament by Christ and his apostles (Mark 12:29,

John 17:3, I Corinthians 8:4-6, I Timothy 2:5, James 2:19).

The Shema continues in verse 5 with, “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might”, indicating that the one God demands exclusive devotion. The Bible clearly states that no other being or object is to be worshiped: a prohibition so important that it underpins the first, second and third commandments of the Decalogue (Exodus 20:3-7).

Even the angels, beings that far exceed mankind in glory and power, nevertheless refuse the worship of man (Colossians 2:18, Revelation 19:10, 22:8-9). This is not so with the fallen angels, and when their leader craved worship from Jesus, Jesus responded with a simple instruction from the law:

Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. (Matthew 4:10)

God is truly one, beside Him there is none other, and He will not share His glory with anyone else (Isaiah 42:8, 44:8, 45:5, 48:11). Yet in the Bible, Christ is addressed as God. How can this be?

God is Three in One 

Although the word “Trinity” does not appear in scripture, many Bible passages declare that Christ is God, the Holy Spirit is God, and that they together interact with God the Father. Taken together, these scriptures reveal that God is three in one—a Trinity—consisting of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.