Defending the Trinity: “Jesus never said, ‘I am God’”

One of the most common attacks on the Trinity focuses on the deity of Christ. The skeptic might say, “If Jesus was God, then why didn’t He just say, ‘By the way, I’m God’?” For emphasis, they might even grab your Bible, flip through the pages, and challenge you by saying, “Show me one verse where Jesus said that He was God. You can’t do it, because He never said it!”

While Jesus may not be recorded in the gospels saying the exact words “I am God,” He most certainly claimed to be God in them. Here is one of the best examples:

John 8:58 [ESV] reads, “Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.””

You may be thinking, “That’s incorrect grammar. It should say, ‘I ​was,’ not, ‘I ​am​.’” The phrase, “I am,” in the way Jesus uses it here is a claim to deity. In the Old Testament, God uses this same glorious title to refer to Himself.

Exodus 3:13-14 [ESV} “Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’””

This claim was not lost on Jesus’ Jewish audience. In the very next verse in John 8, ​“So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.” (v. 59) ​Unless you were actually God, any claim to deity was blasphemy, and was punishable by death (Leviticus 24:16).

Admittedly, if this was the only evidence we had in the Bible for the deity of Jesus, it would be much less clear. However, when you take all of the passages of scripture that attest to it, such as Jesus accepting worship from people multiple times when He said Himself that we are to serve and worship only the Lord our God (Matthew 4:10), and what the apostles wrote in the scripture they were divinely inspired to write (John 1:1, Colossians 1:1, Romans 9:5), in addition to the passage we just covered in this article, you simply cannot get around the truth that Jesus is indeed our Immanuel: God with us.