Jesus is Equal with God in Giving Life

We continue yesterday's meditation on Jesus’ five claims of equality with God. The Lord was responding to the Pharisees after they started persecuting Him when He healed an invalid on the Sabbath. Today, we examine the third and fourth claims made by Jesus.

3) Christ is Equal with God in Giving Life (v. 21).

For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it (John 5:21).

There is only one source of Life, and that is God Himself. I imagine the Jewish leadership was shocked by this statement of Jesus. The Lord again claimed that He is equal with God in the ability to give life. All of humanity stands helpless before the death of a loved one leaving this earth, but the Lord Jesus was and is the Creator who brought forth all life. John the apostle wrote that Christ was in the beginning, here represented as the Word:

¹In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was with God in the beginning. ³Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind (John 1:1-4, Emphasis added).

Several hundred years earlier, the prophet Isaiah predicted the coming of the Messiah, stating that He would have the authority to raise the dead—something Jesus repeatedly demonstrated as a sign that He was the One the prophet spoke of.

Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead (Isaiah 26:19).

To read more on that subject, click the following link: The Word Was God.

4) Christ is Equal with God in His Judgment (v. 22).

Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son (John 5:22).

If you ask anyone who the final judge is, most will say that God is the ultimate judge of people for what they have done in this life. However, Christ states that He is the One who will judge all people. The Father has entrusted all judgment to the Son. The Lord Jesus is perfectly righteous, and He also knows everything about us and has experienced being human from a humble beginning. He can judge because He has walked in our shoes as a man yet remains fully God. We might challenge this statement by noting that the Father is the final judge, since we see God on the Great White Throne at the final judgment (Revelation 20:11-15). The Scriptures teach us that Christ is equal with God and sits on the throne with the Father: "Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Revelation 22:1). Jesus sits on the throne alongside the Father. Keith Thomas

This meditation is a shortened version of the in-depth study: Jesus the Life-Giver.