The French mathematician and apologist Blaise Pascal reached a startling conclusion: ‘without Jesus Christ the world would not exist, for it would either be destroyed or be a hell.’

Here’s the fuller passage:

‘The God of Christians is not a God who is simply the author of mathematical truths, or of the order of the elements; that is the view of heathens. … But the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of Christians, is a God of love and of comfort, a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses … who renders them incapable of any other end than himself. All who seek God without Jesus Christ, and who rest in nature, either find no light to satisfy them, or come to form for themselves a means of knowing God and serving him without a mediator. Thereby they fall either into atheism, or into deism, two things which the Christian religion abhors almost equally. Without Jesus Christ the world would not exist; for it would necessarily either be destroyed or be a hell.’¹Blaise Pascal, Pensées [Thoughts], §556, trans. W. F. Trotter (public domain); slightly amended. On the universal significance of Jesus Christ, refer to Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4 Volumes, ed. John Bolt (Baker Academic, 2003-2008), 3:470-71. Also see Douglas Groothuis, Beyond the Wager: The Christian Brilliance of Blaise Pascal (IVP, 2024).

‘The identity of God hangs on the identity of Jesus.’

The Only Route In

That’s exactly the perspective of the biblical good news. Jesus Christ is the gospel’s top-line teaching about God.

God may be known only through Jesus. And God is known through Jesus alone. The gospel tells us, first and foremost, about the God of Jesus Christ. Its ‘foremost use’ is to ‘show Christ.’²Leiden Synopsis, 22:56, 245. And then — then — we can know God.

‘All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him’ (Matt 11:27).

The identity of God hangs on the identity of Jesus.

Knowing God, approaching God, coming to God — the true pathway proceeds through a person: the Lord Jesus Christ. He, the God-man, is the gospel’s primary figure, the one individual in and through whom the great God of the universe is to be found, known and loved.

The God of the gospel is ‘the God of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (Eph 1:17).

No Going Behind His Back

So the good news tells us who God is in relation to Jesus — and only in relation to him. It tells us who God is in relation to Christ because it tells us who Christ is in relation to God. He is God himself.³The technical theological term is autotheos (Greek autos, ‘self’ or ‘same,’ and theos, ‘God’). He is God the Son. God is Immanuel, God with us, present to us personally, only in and through the God-man Jesus Christ.

And here’s what follows from that, stated bluntly. Because it is God himself who is present to us and reveals himself to us in Jesus Christ, to seek to know God by some other route — through philosophy or other religions — is to go behind God’s back.

Which disrespects God, who in love and mercy has revealed himself truly and directly to us in his Son.

For Christ is God the Son incarnate — God in human flesh, God in human form, God as a human being, ‘adding humanity to his Divinity, not divesting himself of Divinity by his humanity.’⁴Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity, 11.4; Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2.9:214-15.

That tells us something about the kind of God he is: the kind who can and did assume and take on human nature, ‘yet without sin’ (Heb 4:15).

Four Councils, Four Sentences

Over time, biblical teaching about the Person of Jesus came to be more fully and formally expressed in four essential elements:

1. He is truly God (The Council of Nicaea, AD 325)
2. He is truly human (The Council of Constantinople, AD 381)
3. He is one Person (The Council of Ephesus, AD 431)
4. He has two natures (The Council of Chalcedon, AD 451)⁵See Fred Sanders, ‘Christ and the Trinity,’ available at https://youtu.be/jJZNeLjK4IY?si=7uq6DAoN9JjXhUt3 [accessed 240813]. ‘[T]he Word begotten of God before all ages, and ever dwelling with the Father, became man. Here are two chief articles of belief: First, in Christ two natures are united in one person in such a way that one and the same Christ is true God and man. Secondly, the unity of his person does not prevent his natures from remaining distinct, so that the Divinity retains whatever is proper to it and the humanity likewise has separately what belongs to it’ (Calvin, St. John. 1-10, 20).

Four centuries of careful work, and each statement was needed because something had gone wrong when one of them was denied.

Five Ways the New Testament Says It

The first thing the good news tells us — the gospel’s top-line teaching about God — is that Jesus Christ himself is truly and fully God.

The New Testament indicates Christ’s Divinity in a variety of ways.⁶On the various ways the New Testament teaches the Divinity of Jesus Christ, see Robert M. Bowman and J. Ed Komoszewski, Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ (Kregel Publications, 2007). Jesus shares in:

• the name of God
• the attributes of God
• the deeds of God
• the honour of God
• the rule of God⁷Bowman and Komoszewski, Putting Jesus in His Place, passim.

The opening words of Mark’s Gospel (1:1-3) identify ‘Jesus Christ, the Son of God’ as kyrios, ‘the Lord’⁸The exact Greek in Mark 1:3 is tēn odon kurion, ‘the way of [the] Lord.’ — the word used in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures for God’s special name YHWH (I Am Who I Am, Exo 3:14).

In the rest of the New Testament, Jesus is called ‘Lord’ more than one hundred times. In sheer extent, that’s the most basic element of its presentation of his Deity.

Seven Times, Called God Outright

At least seven times, Jesus is directly said to be theos, ‘God.’

‘Although direct application [of the word theos] is not the only way of explicitly indicating the Divinity of Jesus, it is obviously a very powerful way.’⁹Robert C. Doyle, ‘Using the Bible: The Biblical Frame and Explicit Statements.’ An unpublished lecture.

John 1:1 ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’

John 1:18 ‘No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.’

John 20:28 ‘Thomas answered him [the risen Jesus], “My Lord and my God!”’

Romans 9:5 ‘To them [the Jews] belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.’

Titus 2:13 ‘waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ.’

Hebrews 1:8 ‘But of the Son he says, “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the sceptre of uprightness is the sceptre of your Kingdom.’

2 Peter 1:1 ‘Simeon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ.’¹⁰Thanks to Robert C. Doyle for setting this out in ‘Using the Bible,’ guided in turn by the work of Murray J. Harris, Jesus as God: The New Testament Use of Theos in Reference to Jesus (Baker, 1992), 271-73, and 274 n. 2.

Beyond those seven, a further sample of New Testament statements declare Jesus Christ to be Immanuel, God with us (Matt 1:23; cf. Isa 7:14; 8:8); the Son of God (Mark 1:1; Eph 1:13-14); and the Word of God (John 1:1-18).

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• 1
  Blaise Pascal, Pensées [Thoughts], §556, trans. W. F. Trotter (public domain); slightly amended. On the universal significance of Jesus Christ, refer to Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4 Volumes, ed. John Bolt (Baker Academic, 2003-2008), 3:470-71. Also see Douglas Groothuis, Beyond the Wager: The Christian Brilliance of Blaise Pascal (IVP, 2024). ↩︎
• 2
  Leiden Synopsis, 22:56, 245. ↩︎
• 3
  The technical theological term is autotheos (Greek autos, ‘self’ or ‘same,’ and theos, ‘God’). ↩︎
• 4
  Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity, 11.4; Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2.9:214-15. ↩︎
• 5
  See Fred Sanders, ‘Christ and the Trinity,’ available at https://youtu.be/jJZNeLjK4IY?si=7uq6DAoN9JjXhUt3 [accessed 240813]. ‘[T]he Word begotten of God before all ages, and ever dwelling with the Father, became man. Here are two chief articles of belief: First, in Christ two natures are united in one person in such a way that one and the same Christ is true God and man. Secondly, the unity of his person does not prevent his natures from remaining distinct, so that the Divinity retains whatever is proper to it and the humanity likewise has separately what belongs to it’ (Calvin, St. John. 1-10, 20). ↩︎
• 6
  On the various ways the New Testament teaches the Divinity of Jesus Christ, see Robert M. Bowman and J. Ed Komoszewski, Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ (Kregel Publications, 2007). ↩︎
• 7
  Bowman and Komoszewski, Putting Jesus in His Place, passim. ↩︎
• 8
  The exact Greek in Mark 1:3 is tēn odon kurion, ‘the way of [the] Lord.’ ↩︎
• 9
  Robert C. Doyle, ‘Using the Bible: The Biblical Frame and Explicit Statements.’ An unpublished lecture. ↩︎
• 10
  Thanks to Robert C. Doyle for setting this out in ‘Using the Bible,’ guided in turn by the work of Murray J. Harris, Jesus as God: The New Testament Use of Theos in Reference to Jesus (Baker, 1992), 271-73, and 274 n. 2. ↩︎