Jesus: The Great I AM
Who was Jesus? This most important question has led to several different responses. Many say he was a great moral teacher. Others argue he was a prophet. Some suggest he was religious zealot or a cynic. People who make these claims rightly recognize the radical imprint Jesus left on society, yet they won’t go so far as to admit that Jesus was divine.
Christians have no such problem affirming Jesus’ divinity. They do so for the reason that Jesus claimed to be divine, and at the same time backed up that claim with miraculous powers. It’s one thing for me to claim that I’m God; it’s another thing for me to prove it to you by raising the dead, calming storms, and walking on water. Christians affirm Jesus’ deity because they believe the Gospels contain authentic history — including the parts where Jesus makes divine claims.
Perhaps the most provocative divine claim Jesus ever made is in the Gospel of John. There, he claims to be “I AM.” To which you might reply, so what? What does that even mean? That sure doesn’t sound like he’s claiming divinity. On the surface, you’d be right. But when you consider the broader context, you’ll see Jesus’ claim is quite radical.
JEWISH MONOTHEISM
Jesus was a Jew, and he burst onto the scene, immersed in this religion that was distinct from all other ancient religions. You see, the entire known world at the time adhered to polytheism — the belief in several different gods. Different cultures had different gods. There were fertility gods, sun gods, rain gods, love gods, war gods, and gods for anything else you can think of.
Yet Judaism was unique in that it only believed in one God. And not just one God, but a transcendent creator of the universe kind of God. All the other gods were limited to their various cultures. Moreover, they were contained within the universe itself. The Jews claimed that their God was over the entire universe.
This monotheistic belief was and is part and parcel of the Jewish faith. It was so fundamental to their belief that to deny it was to commit the most blasphemous of sins. After all, the first of the Ten Commandments forbids worshipping other gods when it states, “you shall have no other gods before me.” That is, Israel’s God, and Israel’s God alone is God. There aren’t any others.
Furthermore, there’s a short confession in Deuteronomy 6, known as the Shema, that Jewish parents traditionally recited with their children on a daily basis. The Shema states, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut 6:4-5). You can see from this creed how important monotheism was to the Jewish faith. There is one God, and only one. To think or say otherwise was unconscionable.
BEFORE ABRAHAM WAS, I AM
Fast-forward to John 8, and we find Jesus engaged with Jewish leaders who had this deeply held monotheistic beliefs. In the context, Jesus defends himself against these Jewish leaders who labeled him a Samaritan and demon-possessed. He responds to these Jews in a rather unusual way.
He asserts that Abraham rejoiced to see his day. To which the Jews replied that Jesus wasn’t even fifty years old. How could he have seen Abraham? Here is Jesus’ response in John 8:58:
“Very truly I tell you, before Abraham was born, I AM!”
Jesus makes a couple powerful claims here. First, he claims pre-existence. That is, he claims that he existed prior to Abraham who came 2,000 years before him. Furthermore, he claims something even more profound by calling himself “I AM.” At first glance, it seems that Jesus doesn’t know grammar, but that’s not what’s going on here. Instead, he’s making a radical claim about his identity. But to understand the fullness of this claim, we need to go back to a familiar story in the book of Exodus.
TELL THEM I AM SENT YOU
In Exodus 3, God appears to Moses in the burning bush and tells him that he’s going to use him to deliver Israel out of Egypt’s hands. Moses, quite skeptical at the moment, asks God for his name. This is a reasonable request. After all, the Egyptian gods had names, why would he be any different?
God replied in Exodus 3:14-15, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you… This is my name forever, this is how I am to be remembered in every generation.”
Did you get that? God told Moses his name is I AM. That’s his personal name — Yahweh in the Hebrew. When we turn back to John 8:58, we see Jesus invoking this exact name for himself when he says, “before Abraham was born, I AM.” Jesus explicitly claims to be the God of the Old Testament — the God who spoke to Moses in the bush. He claims to be Yahweh.
If you don’t believe Jesus was making that claim, consider the Jewish response. In the very next verse, it reads, “At this, they (the Jews) picked up stones to stone him” (Jn 8:59). This is what any good Jew would do, after all. Jesus is committing blasphemy! Or so they thought. And the penalty for blasphemy was death (Lev 24:16).
JESUS: THE GREAT I AM
At this point, you might be asking how Jesus wasn’t committing blasphemy? After all, if there is only one God, how could Jesus himself also claim to be God? The answer is found in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity which states there is only one God who is comprised of three distinct persons — Father, Son, and Spirit. That is, Jesus didn’t claim to be a different God altogether, but a different person contained within the same Godhead.
It took the early church a while to make sense of this, and we can understand why, but from the earliest of times, the church exalted Jesus to divine status. Cambridge scholar Richard Bauckham affirms this when he writes:
The inclusion of Jesus in the unique divine identity, was central to the faith of the early church even before any of the New Testament writings were written… Although there was development in understanding this inclusion of Jesus in the identity of God, the decisive step of so including him was made at the beginning.1
Jesus claimed to be the great I AM. The early church believed he was the great I AM. If he was, and is, in fact, the great I AM, we must come to grips with that claim. It won’t do to remain neutral towards him. As C.S. Lewis famously said:
You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God.2
I recommend the latter.
