Over the last few months I’ve been asked repeatedly the hard questions about the identity of Jesus, and have decided that a series addressing the major complications of Jesus’ identity should ensue. Since Jesus is our savior, our defender, and our God we should know as much about him as possible and not settle for a Sunday school depiction of him carrying a lost sheep over his shoulder. Jesus is more than a shepherd, a prophet, a king or a savior. He is a person, with all the complexities that a person holds and more since he is also God.

Which brings us to the first challenge about Jesus: Is Jesus God? According to Jewish tradition Jesus -- even if he were the Messiah promised from the Old Testament -- is still only a man. Deuteronomy teaches that “The Lord our God is one” (Deuteronomy 6.4), not two or even three. Similarly, according to the Jehovah’s Witnesses the idea of the Trinity is foreign to Biblical thought, therefore Jesus cannot be God. Most unbelievers agree that the notion of the Trinity is too complex and fraught with contradiction, after all 1+1+1 always equals three and never one.

To answer the question of Jesus’ divinity then is to defend the distinctly Christian idea of Trinity. This is never a discussion I relish because it involves truths that are beyond our understanding, but I’m going to give an example that I hope will serve to clarify and not muddy the concept all the more. As a word of caution, all analogies are going to fall short on one point or another because we are using items taken from the physical world in an attempt to explain the nature of a spiritual being. It’s a bit like describing an ocean to someone who has always lived in a desert. Even if you showed them a glass of water and asked them to think of what it would be like if the sand were replaced with water, they would still miss all the complexity of waves, the depth of the sea, the increased buoyancy of salt water, and the kinds of creatures that live in it. Even a photograph wouldn’t do it justice. So with that in mind, let’s continue.

The Trinity can be likened to a book. We may describe a book by its height, its width and its depth, but remove any one of these three and you no longer have a book. Likewise, we describe God as having one essence (or nature) with three persons. Each person has many of the same attributes, like having never been created (eternal) and having all knowledge and wisdom and authority… The list goes on. They are truly one being, without division, and with three persons who are all necessarily God.

I say “necessarily God” because its true. If the Messiah were only a man, then there is no salvation for mankind. A created being cannot redeem the rest of creation (of which he is a part) because that being would be in need of redemption too. Therefore, the Messiah cannot be a created being and must be fully God. As logical as this is we need not rest on logic alone, Isaiah prophesizes about the Messiah saying, “For a child has been born to us, a son has been given to us. He shoulders responsibility and is called: Extraordinary Strategist, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” It would be blasphemy to call any human “Mighty God” or “Everlasting Father.” And in the New Testament Paul tells the Colossians, “For in him [Jesus] all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form” (Colossians 2.9).

If we say that Jesus is a man we are in disagreement with Isaiah and Paul, and if we say that Jesus is “a god” then we violate Deuteronomy 6.4 (“the Lord our God is one”). Only the Trinity keeps both teachings in full view. Complicated? Yes. Yet even this complication helps prove our case as C.S. Lewis so aptly observed:

It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not. The table I am sitting at looks simple: but ask a scientist to tell you what it is really made of—all about atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit my eye and what they do to the optic nerve and what it does to my brain—and, of course, you find that what we call "seeing a table" lands in mysteries and complications which you can hardly get to the end of.