Since the person of Jesus Christ was revealed to mankind 2,000 years ago, there have been lot of deception, confusion, animosity, and hostility against Him at all times, particularly in the area of whom He really is. The growing hostility against Him started shorty after His birth by king Herod up to this point. Satan has always been the very one orchestrating all of these.
But the thing is that the enemy has no issue at all with what people want to believe about Christ as long as their belief isn’t considered as a threat to his ministry of theft, death, and destruction which are all predicated on his ability to deceive people.
However, his main concern has to do with people being willing to embrace and live by the truth found in the Word of God, which Christ is the very embodiment of (John 1:1; Revelation 19:13; John 14:6). As a result, Satan has a twofold strategy that he has been using constantly and consistently against people who don’t belong to Christ in order to keep them in their current lost condition perpetually. That twofold strategy is based purely on negligence along with ignorance. We’ll talk about each of them and how he uses them in order to hold people back from the saving truth of the gospel.
1) Negligence
Negligence involves primarily those who seem to hold a true belief about the person of Christ due to their long exposure to biblical truths. You’ll find lot of them in the church. Interestingly, they believe pretty much everything about Christ such as Him being God, the Son of God, and Him being the Savior of humanity. The big issue is that they are not yet willing to surrender their lives to Him because of sins in their lives they don’t want to abandon.
Sadly, these individuals have allowed the enemy to imprint in their own minds such a misleading and detrimental mindset that they’ll have plenty of time ahead of them to come to Christ, just as though they are in complete control of the future. You see, that’s nothing more than arrogance and spiritual deception, which are the fruits of sin in people’s lives. Consequently, negligence alone has cost countless of people their own eternity.
2) Ignorance
This Scripture pretty much summarizes the second strategy Satan has used to keep people from acknowledging the true identity of Christ.
The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God (2 Corinthians 4:4).
Ignorance can be broken down into three major groups of individuals.
The first group involves people who hold a very superficial belief about whom Christ truly is, which is partially true at some extent. For example, they believe that Christ lived on this earth, He was a noble moral leader, He was a good teacher, a prophet, and a great historical figure. That’s kind of shallow belief is very pervasive in the Buddhist, Islamic, and Judaism circle.
Those who retain a superficial belief about Jesus actually believe just a fraction about whom He is at the expense of not acknowledging the infinite vastness of His true identity (John 1:1-3; Colossians 2:9; Hebrews 1:3; Luke 2:11; Acts 4:12; Philippians 3:20; Romans 10:13). Consequently, they willfully choose to ignore and deny His deity, which is the most important feature about Him that can grant them salvation.
Let’s put that into perspective, it’s like being prescribed a life-saving medicine, for some personal reason, you have chosen to throw away all the pills and keep just the container. After doing that, you’re expecting that somehow healing will miraculously come into your body even if you don’t even take the pills.
The second group involves those who have a completely false belief about Him. And those who have a completely false belief about Jesus believe in absolutely nothing about Him like atheists, agnostics, etc… Or many more who also fit into that particular category actually believe in something that’s completely wrong about Him like Mormon, Jehovah Witnesses, and so forth.
The third group are those known as “Antinomianist” who think they are Christians but are misusing God’s grace by living however they like under the pretense that God’s grace allows them to do whatever they want. Living this way doesn’t honor the person of Christ along with His sacrificial death. The main strategy of Satan is to keep these individuals from ever acknowledging and embracing the true identity of Christ or living in a manner that honors whom He is. Doing so would undermine their false belief systems.
The Deity Of Christ Revealed In (John 14:6)
One thing that might take you as a surprise is how this Scripture verse reveals in Christ the three prime attributes of deity such as omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience.
Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me (John 14:6).
Omnipotence
The power of Christ to grant and maintain the gift of eternal life for countless amount of people who accept Him as Savior and Lord exhibits His omnipotence. The Bible talks about Christ taking up all the sins of the whole world which penalty is eternal death in an absolute and sufficient manner (John 1:29; Hebrews 10:1-18) all upon Himself also showcases His omnipotence as well.
Christ has also made such a monumental declaration in (Matthew 11:28) where He says to everybody, “Come to Me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest”. The point is that a finite or created being with limited power has no capability at all of doing such thing. What about Christ holding the entire universe together which we know is infinite in order to keep it from disintegrating by the power of His Word (Colossians 1:17; Hebrews 1:3).
Omnipresence
One thing that you may have never thought about is that if Christ wasn’t omnipresent coming and relying on Him would have been impossible. Why? Christ is the One giving people access to God the Father, and that kind of access usually takes place simultaneously. So if He didn’t have the ability to be everywhere at the same time, He would have been totally unable to execute such a massive task successfully and efficiently due to the fact that giving countless amount of people access and preserving their access to an infinite and all-powerful God is such an extremely overwhelming task.
Just think for a while about the thousands of individuals that are coming to Christ on a regular basis along with all the Christians all around the globe who are praying in His name simultaneously. How would He have been able to handle that immense task without Him being omnipresent?
Omniscience
I want you to take into consideration these following Scripture verses found in (John 3:36), which says that “And anyone who believes in God’s Son has eternal life. Anyone who doesn’t obey the Son will never experience eternal life but remains under God’s angry judgment.” And the next verse that you need to consider is (Romans 10:13) which says, “For “Everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be saved.”” These two Scriptures apply to everybody, irrespective of where they are in the world.
While carefully reading these verses above, another significant attribute that can be seen is Christ’s omniscience to know those who’re coming to Him for salvation as well those who are living in obedience to His Word. Having said that, you can have countless number of people coming to Christ at the same moment in every corner of the world, and He would be able to handle that just like it was only one person.
Conclusion
Christ being capable of assuming such a colossal responsibility unmistakably proves that He’s functioning at the same dimension of power and greatness as God the Father. In other words, Christ possesses the same level of power and greatness as God the Father. A created or finite entity is only able to handle just one task at a time. So if that was inherently true with Christ in the sense of Him not having deity attributes as many falsely believe; thousands or even millions of us who desired to be saved from our sins would have probably been stuck in the salvation line waiting and waiting to be saved by Christ while Satan would have been triumphing over us.
Lastly, think about what it would be like to actually have our prayers reaching God in a timely fashion. The truth is that God would have still heard our prayers the moment we pray, but according to the New Covenant established through Christ, prayers have to reach God through Christ since He’s the only way to God (John 14:13). The biggest problem would stem from Christ being able to handle only one thing at a time. It means that you’d have God keep on waiting while Christ is incapable of delivering on time. As a result, the entire system would have eventually become completely overwhelmed and crashed.