Jesus is WHO?!

Hello everyone. Before diving into the waters tonight, I’d like to thank Dan for his comment yesterday. I see your point, but I can’t say I agree entirely. However, it is a secondary issue. I’d also like to thank all my friends who dropped by in the post that I made to be for my friends. It was great to get to see you all and I hope that we can do it again soon sometime.

Tonight, we’re going to be continuing from what we said last night about Romans 10:9 and the identity of Jesus in that verse. We’re going to start again at verse 9 and go all the way to verse 13. If you need to review last night again, that’s fine.

⁹That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. ¹⁰For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. ¹¹As the Scripture says, “Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” ¹²For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, ¹³for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

Our first Scripture quotation in this passage comes from Isaiah 28:16 and is seen as a way of avoiding the scourge of death. Isaiah tells of a stone being laid in Zion and whoever trusts in that stone will not be disturbed. That stone is the foundation. The reference is pointing to Psalm 118:22

The stone the builders rejected
has become the capstone;

This became a favorite verse of the New Testament writers. Jesus was that capstone that was laid. The one that had been rejected by all had become the hope of all Israel. However, our main point will be what happens in verse 13. Paul tells us there that whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. The reference is Joel 2:32.

And everyone who calls
on the name of the LORD will be saved;
for on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem
there will be deliverance,
as the LORD has said,
among the survivors
whom the LORD calls.

What is important for our purposes today is what ties in to verse 9. Who is the Lord in Joel 2:32? It is none other than YHWH. Paul has said that if you believe Jesus is Lord, you will be saved, and then comes to a verse with calling on YHWH and says that if you call upon the Lord, you will be saved.

Paul saw calling Jesus Lord and calling him YHWH then as one and the same. This is interesting when we look in the New World Translation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and see that in Romans 10:9, they translated Kurios as Lord, but when they get to Romans 10:13, all of a sudden it gets translated as “Jehovah.” This would be quite a shift in the Christocentric argument of Paul however.

The conclusion is that Paul knew exactly what he was doing in quoting this text and what it meant. A Jesus who is less than deity is a Jesus who cannot save. For Paul, to call upon Jesus meant to call upon YHWH. Jesus was one who had the full nature of YHWH and because of that, he could and CAN provide salvation.