Do those words seem strange together? Does God have limits? No. His power and His understanding are unsearchable (Psalm 145:3, Psalm 147:5, Luke 1:37). Yet God does have definition. There is very real (and tremendously important) criteria that make it clear that He is the One living God and that everything else is not. Before we are able to understand the deity of Jesus, we have to take much care to understand the biblical revelation of the uniqueness of God.
As one author has said, “It is important to begin by clarifying the question. When people ask “Was Jesus God?” they usually think they know what the word “God” means, and are asking whether we can fit Jesus into that. I regard this as deeply misleading.”
This is the most foundational of Christian questions – what does “God” mean? – and the answer to the boundary lines of meaning need to be blazing and not blurry in our hearts.
The typical answer to this question, found in theological works both ancient and modern, comes in the form of incommunicable attributes. This phrase simply refers to the concept that God has characteristics (attributes) and that cannot be shared (incommunicable). They are easy to spot because nearly all of the major attributes of this category begin with the prefix omni-, im-, or in-. Examples include ingenerate, incorruptible, immutable, impassible, infinite, incomprehensible, incorporeal, indivisible, omnipresent, etc.
Most people recognize that these exact terms are not in the Bible. What is almost completely unknown, however, is that they are not even Christian in their origin. The majority of these adjectives originated within the Greek philosophical tradition and were in use prior to the writing of the New Testament. As the gospel spread throughout the Roman empire in the first several centuries after the apostolic era, later church fathers increasingly began to use these preexisting categories of thought to explain God to their audience. While some of these (e.g. the eternity of God) may have biblical connotations, defining deity in this way makes it very difficult to understand the New Testament teaching about the divinity of Jesus. To take an unbiblical definition of God and attempt to find biblical language confirming it proves to be a very frustrating and confusing quest.
The apostles, of course, would not have used Greek philosophical language to communicate the truth about their Lord and Messiah. If Peter or Paul desired to proclaim that Jesus was divine, they would have drawn upon the way the Old Testament describes the uniqueness of God. They would have used the biblical boundary lines for God and not philosophical ones.
To understand the identity of Jesus we must, therefore, start with gaining the right perspective on the theology of the Old Testament. What you find when you do so is a remarkably simple, and yet devastatingly holy, portrait of the Holy One of Israel and what it is that makes Him different than everything else in the heavens and the earth.
