The Difference Between God and Jesus Christ

To understand the difference between any two things or people or places, one would have to have a very detailed, experiential and clear knowledge of each. When it comes to things or people or places that we can feel and touch and physically experienced with our five senses it is not a difficult task.

However, when discussing the Supreme Creator and the relationship of Jesus Christ to the Supreme Creator or God, it is a very difficult thing to conclusively come to terms with. There are basically only three major religions in the world that would be considered monotheistic and they are Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The rest of the world religions are pantheistic or mystic.

So we can limit the discussion here to the three monotheistic religions. Of those three, two of them recognize Jesus who is called the Christ of Nazareth who lived over 2000 years ago in and around Jerusalem as a prophet. Only Christianity recognizes Jesus Christ as God in human form. Trying to now compare God to Jesus Christ does present some problems.

First of all, understanding God outside of the 66 Books of the Bible would not be acceptable to the Christian Faith. One could conclude that God is a “Thinking Structure” as was written about in many different writings. One could describe God as the “common cognizant thought” that all human beings have in common as they are in essence all composed of “cognizant thought”. It could be just the “abundance of love” that is part of this world. It could be the understanding that our thoughts create reality and that God is in all of our thoughts.

Whatever your understanding of God is, it may be only partially correct at best, even if you decide that the Bible is the final arbitrator in describing God, even one’s understanding of God from the Bible is extremely limited.  This would be true even of Bible Scholars who spent their lives studying the scriptures. So let’s now look at Jesus Christ.

It seems obvious from history, both in the historical texts of the scriptures and extra-biblical texts that Jesus Christ existed. His life did accompany many miraculous events that seemed to have been foretold in the Old Testament. He did have many recorded events about his life that are not easily explained. It all started with the events around his birth. It included the numerous miracles recorded in the four Gospels. It culminated in his crucifixion, death and reported resurrection that to this day has not been sufficiently refuted. Simply producing his dead body would have been sufficient but no one was able to do so.

As a result, the life of Jesus Christ has changed the course of history and forced many followers to conclude that Jesus Christ was God in human form. It is from this that the Trinitarian view of God arose from implication. The term Triune God or Trinity when referring to God is not actually found in scripture. In fact, Jesus Christ himself did not claim to be God. The closest he came to saying that is that he was the Son of God, the Son of Man and that he and his Father are one!

However, it can be confirmed that scripture states that believers are also considered Sons of God and one with the Father. Is this different than what Jesus meant about himself? One can look at the book of John chapter 17 where Jesus prays that we are all one with the Father.

God is described from subsequent Christian teaching as One God represented in three Persons known as God the Father, God the Son and God the Spirit. It is from this understanding that Christians believe in One God, represented in three divine persons.

So how is the man Jesus Christ different from God. First of all, Jesus Christ is human. He lived as a human and died as a human. This is not something that God is believed to have ever done before. Jesus Christ arose from the dead in human form. So if Jesus Christ is God, how is he different?

As he ascended to heaven, it was reported in the Book of Acts, he ascended in human form. This means that Jesus Christ has limited himself to time/space continuum. It has to be! The fact that he was apparently able to go through physical walls and ascend into heaven and even walk on water may be an indication that as God, he understood and used the laws of Quantum Physics in such a way that we may discover over time.

The alternative is that Jesus Christ is simply human that had an understanding of how the physical world really works in view of Quantum Physics. There is no indication that Jesus Christ displayed infinite knowledge as God, neither did he display omnipresence as God.

So what is the main difference between Jesus Christ and God?  We would have to say the limitations that he had as a human on this earth that God would not have been limited to. These are all within the time/space continuum that we as humans still do not fully understand.