Who is Jesus?/Book 1/Part 2/Chapter 6
VI. JESUS AS CREATOR AND SELF-EXISTING
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TAKING the Bible as our authority,—and we have no other document upon which to base any knowledge of either Jehovah or Jesus,—we find that the God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, claims to be the creator of the universe.
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." (Gen. 1:1.)
"To whom then will ye liken me, or shall I be equal? saith the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things." (Isa. 40:25—26.)
"Thus saith Jehovah, thy redeemer, . . I am the Lord that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone; that spreadeth abroad the earth by myself." (Isa. 44:24.)
"Thus saith God the Lord (El Yahveh) he that created the heavens, and stretched them out: he that spread forth the earth, and that which cometh out of it; he that giveth breath unto the people upon it, and spirit to them that walk therein." (Isa. 42:5.)
We find it written concerning Jesus in the New Testament: "In the beginning was the Word [logos, expression of God] and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made. . . In him was life [self-existent life], and the life was the light of men. . . He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. . . And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." (John 1:1, 3, 4, 10, 14.)
Now if Jehovah was not Jesus, the same identical being manifested to the world as a human being, then this statement from the Gospel of John is not true; but we have as much reason to accept it as true as any other statement of the Bible. Being true, it would appear that the infinite and indivisible Jehovah expressed Himself in a concrete and apprehensible form as Jesus, but that this expression was God Himself, the creator of all things. This expression of God, or Word,—Jesus,—is God, and is the creator "that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone; that spreadeth forth the earth by myself."
Jehovah revealed Himself to Moses as the eternal and self-existent one, under the name I am. Jesus said to the Jews, "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad. . . Before Abraham was, I am." (John 8:56—58.) Was he not claiming to be the same self-existing being? Certainly no mere human being that ever lived could have made any such statement. He said again, "If ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins." (John 8:24.) In Revelation he says of himself: "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty." (Rev. 1:8.)
If Jesus was God at all, he must have been in the nature of the case the only God of heaven and earth, for God is one and indivisible. When he had forever put of the infirm humanity assumed from Mary, the temporary limitation indispensable to enable him to reveal himself to men, he said, "ALL power is given unto me in heaven and on earth." (Matt. 28:18.) "All" includes every possibility of power and excludes any other being as Divinely wielding power. In other words, this human manifestation in time and space (Jesus) had ceased to be limited in any sense; the Father and the Son had no longer any apparent separateness; the temporary finite had been absorbed by or transformed into the eternal infinite.