By claiming to be God, Jesus is saying that all of God’s dialogue and actions were His own. This means that his teachings in the New Testament must be interpreted in light of His teachings in the Old Testament. Considering that God told Israel to go to war, gave them regulations on how to conduct it (Deut. 20), instituted the death penalty (Gen. 9:6), and regulated deviant sexuality (Lev. 18), it is impossible to claim that Christ is a pacifistic, nonjudgmental figure who is apathetic about abortion and sexual deviancy.
When you ask people to name their favorite Bible verse you’re likely to get a variety of answers. Some invoke John 3:16. Others take refuge in the 23rd Psalm or Jeremiah 29:11. But for me, the best verse in the entire scripture is John 10:30, in which Jesus said these six words “I and the father are one.”
I love this verse for all the obvious reasons. It is this verse where Jesus unambiguously claimed to be the God of the Old Testament. He was crucified because of this verse and those like it (John 10:33, John 5:18, Matthew 26:63-66).
This verse gives life to C.S. Lewis’ classic Lord/liar/lunatic dilemma. Either Christ was a lunatic with delusions of grandeur, the most blasphemous of liars who led people to their death for nothing, or He is correct and deserves to be honored and obeyed as God. This verse leaves no room for compromise.
This verse also refutes the heretical claims of Islam and Jehovah’s Witnesses who say that Christ was merely a man who never claimed godhood.
It helps speak to the Trinitarian nature of our Lord, thus refuting Oneness Pentecostalism.
John 10:30 is also instrumental in tying Jesus to the rest of the scripture. Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would echo what He tells Him to say to His disciples (John 16:13-15). In Acts chapter 2, the Holy Spirit fell upon Peter and he said that Paul’s writings were scripture (2 Peter 3:16). In II Timothy 3:16-17 Paul says that all scripture is “God Breathed.” Since John 10:30 informs us that Jesus is God, all scripture is “Jesus breathed.” That means that ALL scripture – both the Old and New Testaments-ultimately came from Jesus, rather than men.
But there is another reason this verse deserves our attention: it is the ultimate antidote to religious leftism.
The religious left is primarily built upon the idea that the direct teachings of Christ in the gospels should be isolated from and be emphasized to the detriment of the rest of scripture. This is commonly known as red letter Christianity, although not everyone in the religious left claims this label.
Whether the issue is capital punishment, war, homosexuality, incest, or religion in the public square, the religious left always takes a liberal position on these topics using the gospels as proof texts.
