JESUS CHRIST: GOD-MAN - Vital Christianity

239
Jesus also speaks to His disciples of these greater things to come:
"I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in Me will do what I have been
doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to
the Father" (Jn 14:12).
Martin Luther throws light on the meaning of these verses:
"To go to the Father means to receive the kingdom of God in which he will be
equal to the Father and acknowledged and honored in the same majesty. For
this reason I go there, namely, to the Father, he says, because I will be greater
than I am now. Hence of his current office, as he then carried on his work on
earth, it was correctly said: the Father is greater than I, since I am now a
servant; but when I return again to the Father, I shall be greater, namely, as
great as the Father; that is: I shall rule with him in equal power and majesty."1
There is a sense in which Jesus had ceased to be equal with the Father because of the
humiliation of His present condition which involved entrance into a status which was lower than
that which belonged to Him by nature.
The text of John 14, therefore, refers to the glory which will be Christ's when He goes to
the Father. Although the Father is now (while Jesus is on His mission of humiliation--suffering
and death) "greater" than Him, in the future He will again equally share in the glory of the
Father.
● "You are gods" (Jn 10:35).
This bold statement must be seen in its larger context. The full text is:
"Jesus answered them [the Jews], 'Is it not written in your Law, 'I have said you
are gods,' to whom the word of God came—and the Scripture cannot be broken—
what about the One whom the Father set apart [sanctified] as his very own and
sent into the world? Why then do you accuse Me of blasphemy because I said,
'I am God's Son'? (vv. 34-36).
Jehovah's Witnesses and others claim that these verses identify Jesus as one human being
among other human beings and shows that His claims to divinity are not to be taken seriously.
Admittedly the argument before us is a difficult one since it is a rabbinic form of
argumentation which depends upon distinctions which were of great importance to the rabbis but
which do not seem so important to people of our day. What is confusing at first is that Jesus
heads in the opposite direction of what He has been saying up to now: that He claimed to be God