Chapter VI
The Divine Works of Christ
Titles can be disputed by appeal to honorific or representative usage (Moses and the judges of Israel are occasionally called “gods” in a derivative sense, Psalm 82:6; John 10:34–36). Works are harder to relativize. The study therefore turns from confession to action: six categories of deed that the Old Testament reserves to God alone, each of which the Gospels show Jesus performing in His own right and on His own authority — not as a prophet relaying a power lent to him, but as one who possesses the prerogative inherently.
1. Christ Forgives Sins
Daniel 9:9; Isaiah 43:25; Mark 2:5–7
“To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, although we have rebelled against Him” (Daniel 9:9). “I, even I, am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake” (Isaiah 43:25) — note the divine self-naming, “I, even I,” and the ground given for forgiveness: “for My own sake,” since only the offended party (God, against whom all sin is ultimately committed, Psalm 51:4) can forgive sin as a matter of right rather than mere mediation. When Jesus says to the paralytic, “Son, thy sins be forgiven thee,” the scribes reason correctly according to their theology, even while drawing the wrong conclusion about Jesus: “Who can forgive sins but God only?” (Mark 2:7). Jesus does not correct their premise. He instead heals the man as visible proof of the invisible, divine authority He has just exercised, deliberately accepting the very prerogative the scribes rightly say belongs to God alone.
2. Christ Is Judge at the Last Day, and Lawgiver
Isaiah 33:22; 1 Samuel 2:10; Matthew 16:27; Matthew 13:40–42; Revelation 22:12
Isaiah 33:22 binds three offices together in a single divine confession: “For the LORD is our judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our king; He will save us.” All three offices — judge, lawgiver, and king — belong to YHWH. The New Testament transfers each of them to Christ without embarrassment. He will “come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and then He shall reward every man according to his works” (Matthew 16:27); at the close of the age He will dispatch His angels to separate the righteous from the wicked, who will be cast into a furnace of fire (Matthew 13:40–42); and in the closing words of Scripture itself He declares, “Behold, I come quickly, and My reward is with Me, to give every man according as his work shall be” (Revelation 22:12) — language indistinguishable from YHWH's own self-description as universal Judge (cf. 1 Samuel 2:10, “The LORD shall judge the ends of the earth”). The same verse that makes YHWH “lawgiver” illuminates Christ's authority, displayed throughout the Sermon on the Mount, to reissue and fulfill the Torah on His own word (“But I say unto you...”, Matthew 5:21–48) — the voice not of an interpreter of the Law but of the One who gave it.
3. Christ Is Lord of the Sabbath
Exodus 20:10; Matthew 12:7–9; Mark 2:27–28
The Sabbath is explicitly “a sabbath unto the LORD thy God” (Exodus 20:10) — it belongs to YHWH as His own institution, marking creation and covenant. When the Pharisees accuse His disciples of breaking it, Jesus does not appeal to a special dispensation; He claims outright ownership: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath: therefore the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27–28). To claim lordship over an institution that Scripture says belongs to YHWH alone is to claim, in substance, to be YHWH.
4. Christ Walks on Water and Calms the Storm
Job 9:8; Psalm 107:29; Matthew 8:26; Matthew 14:25
Job praises God as the One “who alone stretches out the heavens, and treads on the waves of the sea” (Job 9:8) — in the Hebrew imagination, walking upon the sea is an act peculiar to the Creator, since the sea represents chaos that only God can master. The Psalmist likewise praises YHWH: “He stilleth the storm, so that the waves thereof are still” (Psalm 107:29). Both acts — treading the sea and stilling the storm — are performed by Jesus in His own person and by His own command: He walks to the disciples across the water (Matthew 14:25) and rebukes the wind and sea with a single word, after which “there was a great calm” (Matthew 8:26). The disciples' question — “What manner of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey Him?” — is the right question; the only adequate answer is the one the Old Testament has already supplied.
5. Christ Is the Creator
Genesis 1:1; Psalm 146:8; Isaiah 35:5; John 9:6–7, 32
This category gathers an especially elegant chain of texts. Genesis 1:1 establishes that creation is the defining divine act: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Psalm 146:8 then specifies a particular divine work the prophets link to creation: “The LORD openeth the eyes of the blind.” Isaiah 35:5 places this same act within the expected signs of the messianic age: “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened.” John's Gospel records Jesus performing exactly this sign — and performing it, notably, by an act that mimics the original creation of man from the dust of the earth: He “spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and He anointed the eyes of the blind man” (John 9:6–7), echoing the forming of Adam from the dust and the breath of life (Genesis 2:7). The man born blind himself draws the theological conclusion that escapes the Pharisees: “Since the world began was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind” (John 9:32) — this had never happened before, because it is not a healing in the ordinary sense (restoring sight that was lost) but a creative act, supplying a faculty that had never existed. John 1:3 and Colossians 1:16 make the same point with full generality: “All things were made by Him; and without Him was not any thing made that was made” — not one part of creation, visible or invisible, came into being apart from the Word.
6. Christ Is Maker of the Law
7. Christ Sustains All Things
Creation is not only an event in the past; it is also God's continual sustaining of all that exists. Hebrews 1 says that the Son upholds all things by the word of His power, and Colossians 1 says that in Him all things hold together. This is not the work of an angelic deputy who merely executes orders. To sustain being itself is a divine act. Every breath, atom, power, throne, and principality remains in existence because the Son is not one item within creation but the Lord through whom creation is held in being.
8. Christ Is Invoked in Prayer
The earliest Christians do not merely speak about Jesus; they call upon Him. Stephen prays, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59). Paul describes Christians as those who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 1:2). The Aramaic prayer Maranatha, “Our Lord, come,” preserved in 1 Corinthians 16:22 and echoed at the end of Revelation, shows devotion to Jesus embedded in the worshiping life of the apostolic Church. Prayer offered to Christ is not an ornamental detail; it is lived Christology.
As noted above, Isaiah 33:22 names YHWH Himself as Israel's lawgiver (מחֹּקֵק, mechoqeq). The New Testament shows Christ exercising exactly this authority: He does not merely transmit or comment upon the Mosaic Law as a rabbi among rabbis; He speaks as One with the standing to deepen, fulfill, and in certain particulars supersede it on His own authority (“I say unto you,” repeated six times in Matthew 5), precisely as the One who gave it at Sinai in the first place (cf. 1 Corinthians 10:4, where Paul identifies the “spiritual Rock that followed” Israel in the wilderness as Christ Himself).