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Jesus. The Lord Jesus, therefore, found the man and asked him this question:
'Dost 1 thou believe on the Son of God?' The man said, 'And who is
he, Lord, that I way believe on him?' In reply to this question the Lord Jesus
said: 'Thou hast both seen him, and he it is that speaketh with thee.' Then the
man replied, 'Lord, I believe.' It should be noticed that, in some ancient
manuscripts in this passage, the words are 'in the Son of man,' though in
many very ancient manuscripts they are, as above, 'in the Son of God.' We
cannot, therefore, be so certain as we are in other verses that Christ here
spoke of Himself as the Son of God. But the title 'Son of man' also implies a
dignity for [far] greater than that of any created being, for it contains a
reference to the book of the Prophet 2 Daniel, as we have already
seen.
(7) There are other passages in which Christ distinctly sets forth the same
claim to be the Son of God, but it is unnecessary to mention more than one or
two of them besides those already quoted. Two, however, are of such importance
that we must not pass over them in silence. In one it is written 3
that on the sabbath day the Lord Jesus Christ healed a man who had been ill for
thirty-eight years. When the Jews declared that to do a good work like this on
the Sabbath was a sin, and persecuted
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PROOF OF THE DEITY OF CHRIST
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Jesus because He had done it, He defended Himself by saying: 'My 1
Father worketh even until now, and I work'. He referred to the passage in the
Book of Genesis where it is written that, after creating the world, God 'rested
2 on the seventh day from all his work, which he had made.' Christ's
words meant that, although all the time which had elapsed since man's creation
on earth was God's Sabbath day and God had been resting on it in the
sense that He had not created on earth any creature more recent than man, yet in
another sense God was still working on His Sabbath, inasmuch as He was caring
for and providing for men. Therefore, the Lord Jesus Christ argued, 'as in this
sense my Father is still working on His Sabbath, I too am justified in doing
such work as showing mercy and healing on the Sabbath. day'. But such an
argument included an unmistakable claim to be God's Son. The Jews fully
understood this, and 'for 3 this cause therefore the Jews sought the
more to kill him, because he not only brake the Sabbath, but also called God his
own Father, making himself equal with God.' In the rest of the chapter we are
told how Jesus, in spite of this, continued to teach and insist upon this great
cardinal doctrine of Christianity. He spoke perhaps still more clearly a little
later when He said, 'I 4 and the Father are one.' It was principally
because of this claim that the most pious of the Jews insisted upon Pilate's
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