Jesus to his disciples: “You believe in God. Believe also in me… if it were not so I would have told you…” Jesus was assuring them they could trust in him because he would not exclude them or betray their interests. But it shows Jesus regarded God as totally distinct from himself, and belief in one still needed additional belief in the other. There is God, and then, there is other, Jesus himself.
The usual dogmatic opposing view is that Jesus taught he is one with the Father. Well, a man and my wife are one. But their children still need to believe in each of them. The unity of which Jesus was teaching, which he has with the Father, is such that he could pray “Let them be one, even as we are one”; he prayed with those words to God.
These truths belie many doctrinal dogmas.
Do these truths constitute any attack on the divinity of Jesus Christ? Divinity of Jesus is a different matter. There is the matter of identity first. Then comes divinity.
Jesus distinguished the Father as El Elyon, the Most High, in the very discussion where he stated his unity with the Father. The distinction Jesus made is clear that it is the Father who is El Elyon, not Jesus himself. In that discussion he quotes the psalm — Psalm 82 — which distinguishes the Father as Most High El Elyon in a context of gods being rebuked by this Most High God. So a son is not the Most High, but rather a son of the Most High. “If he called them gods”, Jesus said, meaning by “he” in context, the Most High. The same Father who sent him. It could be said that in the psalm it is the psalm which is calling the sons of God ‘gods’; there is that alternative reading of it, which seems valid, but the context of the psalm words actually makes it that the Most High is the one speaking, calling these beings gods. Perhaps both readings of it are valid. But the overall point stands. Jesus regards (and he teaches it) the Father as the king above all gods who judges the gods, as was revealed in the overcoming of Egypt’s gods with the ten plagues and Exodus, and this Father is therefore, to Jesus, the Most High. While Jesus is the set apart son, these other gods though called sons, do not please God ultimately, while Jesus does. So they are doomed to suffer a demise like the death humans suffer, while Jesus will die and be raised by the Father to live forever, without any such doom.
It has been said that if a god loses all worshippers, they effectively cease from history, effectively dying.
The Book of Revelation completes the picture, with Jesus and the Father, the latter called the One seated on the throne, at the very end, there together forever. As Paul put it, God is then all in all. Revelation even starts in clarity speaking of Jesus and God. God gave Jesus the revelations.
So Jesus has divinity like the gods who are sons of the Most High, but his divinity outlasts theirs.
Jesus and the Most High means Jesus and the Father, means Jesus and God, means Son and Father, throughout his own teachings recorded in John and in Revelation.
See also https://chatgpt.com/share/6a829ef1-ab00-83eb-92c9-dce48d77acbe
Could it be that the Roman Empire sought to kill off worship to the Father as Most High God, as revenge for killing off of its gods? Nietzsche did say God was murdered, by modern Western scholarship. Islam too objects to perceived undermining of God as the Most High, and seems to regard Western theology about Jesus as guilty of doing this.
We ought to be diligent and earnest in proving our innocence of any such coup against the Most High God, whether or not we think there is such a coup. Rather than go along with suppressing the original meaning of teachings of Jesus in John’s texts, to prove we are not killing off worship of the Father as sole Most High God, we ought to first establish who Jesus is in relation to the Father, then separately ask what “divine” means of Jesus. That is not a denial of Jesus being divine, but rather earnest effort to preserve the higher divinity of the Father, as not just a god, but as the one Most High God.
See also https://chatgpt.com/share/6a82f46b-8ddc-83eb-8a32-e9c44e216d21
