Is Jesus God?

If you grew up in a Christian church, you were more than likely taught that Jesus is God. You said it in prayers. You sang it in songs. You heard it from the pulpit every Sunday. For many, it was not a question. It was the foundation.

This teaching is going to ask you to do something difficult. It is going to ask you to set aside what you were taught and look at what YaHoWaH, the Creator, actually said.

YaHoWaH said His word does not return to Him without doing what He sent it to do. That means the truth is in the text. Not in tradition. Not in what a pastor said. Not in what a church voted on. In the text.

We are not asking you to stop believing in the Creator. We are not asking you to walk away from everything. We are asking one question: Is Jesus God? Let us look at what YaHoWaH Himself says about that question.

Before we look at what Yeshua said or did not say, we need to understand who YaHoWaH is. He told us plainly. He did not make us guess.

He has no beginning and no end. He was not born. He will not die.

He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He cannot become something He was not.

He said so directly.

This is the section many Christians have never been shown. Not because it is hidden. It is right there in the writings they read every week. It is simply not what they were taught to look for. Yeshua's own words show a man who was fully aware that he was not YaHoWaH. He said it over and over in different ways.

Yeshua said it plainly: the Father is greater than I. If they were equal, this statement makes no sense.

A man called Yeshua good. Yeshua corrected him immediately: no one is good except God alone. Yeshua separated himself from that category with his own words.

Yeshua called YaHoWaH "my God." A person does not call someone else their God if they themselves are God. This is one of the clearest statements in all of the NT writings.

On the cross, Yeshua called out to his God. If Yeshua was God, who was he calling out to? Can God feel forsaken by Himself?

Twice in the same chapter Yeshua says he can do nothing by himself. YaHoWaH depends on no one. He needs no one's permission, guidance, or instructions. Yeshua said the opposite about himself.

His words were not his own. He was taught by someone else. He was commanded by someone else. He was sent by someone else. YaHoWaH is sent by no one, taught by no one, and commanded by no one.

This is Yeshua himself speaking in prayer. He calls the Father "the only true God." Then he names himself separately as someone the Father sent. Yeshua placed himself and YaHoWaH in two different categories with his own words.

Yeshua said there is knowledge the Father has that he does not have. YaHoWaH knows all things. If Yeshua was God, there could be nothing the Father knows that he does not.

Two separate wills. Two separate beings. If Yeshua was God, he would have been praying to himself, submitting to himself, and overruling himself.

This is the Apostle Peter speaking just weeks after Yeshua's death. Peter, who walked with Yeshua every day for three years, described him as "a man accredited by God." Not God Himself. A man that God worked through.

Let us look at the passages Christians most commonly use to argue that Yeshua is God. We want to be fair and show both sides.

This is not a subtle point in the Tanakh. YaHoWaH did not whisper this or say it once in passing. He said it clearly, directly, and repeatedly through multiple prophets across hundreds of years.

Everything we have read so far comes directly from the text. Now we are going to look at history. Because the belief that Yeshua is God did not come from the Tanakh. It did not come from the prophets. It was decided at a meeting called by a Roman emperor who was not even a follower of the faith. And once it was decided, it became the law of the empire. Not just a belief. A law.

That meeting is called the Council of Nicaea. Here is what happened, why it happened, and what it cost the people who refused to go along with it.

Constantine was the Roman Emperor. He had just finished a brutal civil war and unified the Roman Empire under his rule. His goal was simple: keep the empire together and keep himself in power.

Constantine was not a follower of YaHoWaH. He worshipped Sol Invictus, the Roman sun god, for most of his life. He was not baptized until he was on his deathbed, nearly twelve years after the council. Yet he was the one who called the meeting and shaped its outcome.

Christianity had been growing rapidly across the empire. Constantine saw it as a tool. If he could control what Christians believed, he could use the church to help him control the people. But there was a problem. Christians across the empire disagreed with each other about who Yeshua was. Different cities, different teachers, different beliefs. This disagreement was causing conflict and division everywhere. That kind of division threatened Constantine's control. So he called a meeting to settle it once and for all. Not to find truth. To create unity. His unity. On his terms.

This is a question worth stopping on. Why would Constantine push for the doctrine that Yeshua is God? What did he gain from it?

Here is the answer historians have identified: a doctrine that makes logical sense can be questioned, debated, and rejected. But a doctrine that cannot be understood through reason alone requires something else entirely. It requires people to simply accept what they are told and call it faith.

Think about what the Trinity doctrine actually says. God is three persons but also one God. Yeshua is fully God and fully human at the same time. God was born as a baby, got hungry, got tired, prayed to himself, and died. Most people who hear this for the first time say: that does not make sense. And they are right. It does not make sense.

But that is exactly the point. When you teach people to accept something that defies logic as sacred truth, you train them to trust authority over their own reasoning. And a population that has been trained to stop questioning and simply believe what it is told is much easier to govern. Constantine did not choose this doctrine in spite of its illogic. The illogic was part of the strategy.

In 325 AD, approximately 300 bishops gathered in the city of Nicaea, in what is now modern-day Turkey. Constantine attended, presided over portions of the meeting, and made his preference clear. The central question was this: Is Yeshua of the same substance as God the Father, or is he a created being who came after the Father?

A vote was taken. Approximately 218 bishops voted that Yeshua was fully God, of the same substance as the Father. Only 2 bishops voted against it. What had been an open question for nearly 300 years became, overnight, the only legal position in the Roman Empire. Think about what that means. Imagine being told that something you believe about YaHoWaH is now not just wrong but illegal. That is what happened to everyone who disagreed.

The man at the center of this debate was a teacher named Arius. He had been teaching across the empire that Yeshua was created by YaHoWaH, that there was a time before Yeshua existed, and that Yeshua was not equal to the Father. His well-known phrase was: "There was a time when he was not." Arius was not a fringe figure. His teaching had spread widely and many people agreed with him. But when the vote at Nicaea went against him, everything changed.

Arius was declared a heretic. That word means someone whose beliefs have been officially condemned. He was banished from his city and exiled from the empire. His writings were ordered to be burned. Anyone caught owning his writings faced the death penalty.

Read that again. Owning the writings of a man who taught that Yeshua was not God was punishable by death. This was not a spiritual consequence. This was a law of the Roman Empire, enforced by the state.

Arius was not alone. The bishops who voted against the Trinity at Nicaea were also exiled. Over the centuries that followed, countless people who questioned the Trinity were hunted, imprisoned, tortured, and killed. The Inquisition, which lasted hundreds of years, was in part a continuation of this same enforcement. You did not simply disagree with the church. You disagreed with the law.

This creed was written in 325 AD by bishops assembled by a Roman emperor. It is what billions of Christians around the world still recite today. When someone says "I believe Jesus is God," they are repeating a conclusion that was voted on nearly 300 years after Yeshua lived, in a meeting called by a man who worshipped the sun.

This creed does not come from the Tanakh. It does not come from the Torah of Mosheh. It does not come from the prophets of YaHoWaH. It was written by men, in a meeting called by a political ruler, resolved by a vote, and enforced by the power of the state.

The effects of that meeting are still being felt today. Every major Christian denomination, Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, Pentecostal, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Non-denominational, traces its doctrine of the Trinity directly back to this council. The Sunday worship day replaced the seventh-day Sabbath YaHoWaH commanded. The Passover was replaced with Easter. The personal name of YaHoWaH was removed from Bible translations and replaced with titles like Lord and God, making it nearly impossible for people to find His actual name in the book they were reading every week. None of this came from YaHoWaH. None of it was spoken through His prophets. All of it flowed from the decisions of men who were more interested in power than in truth.