Yahweh who is pierced and mourned in prophecy is Jesus who is pierced and mourned in fulfillment.
All it took was a social media post entitled “Jesus Is God.”
The post is brief and based entirely on Scripture. In response to the objection that the Scriptures never say that Jesus is God, I quoted verbatim seven passages from the NT where he is, in fact, explicitly called God (John 1:1; 20:28; Rom. 9:5; Titus 2:13; Heb. 1:8; 2 Pet. 1:1; 1 John 5:20).
Case closed, court adjourned, right? Not quite. At present, the post has over 8,000 comments on my Facebook page. And, no, they don’t all say “Amen.”
Why does smoke virtually billow from my phone if I dare to scroll near that post? Because, obviously, this bedrock doctrine of Christianity remains hotly contested.
Many people are okay with calling Jesus everything from an élite teacher to a prophet, or even to something akin to a god. But capital “G” God? True God of true God? No. For them, that is taking things way too far.
Just for the sake of argument, let’s say someone offers this protest: “Look, even if those NT verses supposedly teach that Jesus is God, here’s what actually happened: his early followers, in their theological zeal, deified Jesus. The Greco-Roman world was certainly familiar with the deification of rulers. Julius Caesar, Augustus, and others received divine honors. The same thing happened with Jesus. It’s a simple case of overzealous apotheosis.”
How might we answer this? Do we have any other literary evidence that Jesus is God? I’m glad you asked. Yes, we do. Let’s have the New Testament hand the microphone over to the Old Testament.
And let’s ask a very specific question: Does the Old Testament merely predict a human Messiah, or does it already speak of this coming Messiah as divine, as God? How did the Hebrew psalmists and prophets, before the incarnation, already confess the deity of the Lord’s anointed?
Let’s work our way backward, beginning with a prophet near the tail end of the OT.
Zechariah and Yahweh Pierced
About five hundred years before Christ, Zechariah stepped into the prophetic pulpit. He admonished and encouraged the people, partly by relaying visions of God’s plans to establish the messianic kingdom.
In one of these visions, the Lord said through Zechariah, “I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me whom they have pierced; and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only son, and they will weep bitterly over Him like the bitter weeping over a firstborn” (Zech. 12:10; NASB).
The speaker is Yahweh. He does the Spirit-pouring. He is the one upon whom they look. And he is “Me whom they have pierced.” God is pierced, mourned over, as one weeps over a firstborn son. John quotes this verse as fulfilled in the crucifixion of Jesus, when a soldier speared the side of Jesus (John 19:37). He quotes it again in Revelation, “Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all the tribes of the earth will wail on account of him” (Rev. 1:7).
That’s right: Yahweh who is pierced and mourned in prophecy is Jesus who is pierced and mourned in fulfillment. Jesus is God. He is Yahweh incarnate. Zechariah confesses the full divinity of the Messiah.
Isaiah and the Messianic God-King
Around two centuries before Zechariah, the prophet Isaiah left us a wealth of Christology in sixty-six chapters. He preaches the conception and virgin birth of the Messiah, his place in David’s family tree, the worldwide exodus he will effect, the rise and extent of his kingdom, and most famously, how the suffering Servant would lug our sins all the way into the grave and emerge alive again.
Early in his book, Isaiah describes how the Messiah will rule “on the throne of David” (Isa. 9:7). He will bring light to Galilee of the Gentiles (Isa. 9:1–2; Matt. 4:12-17) and provide victory as Gideon did “on the day of Midian” (Isa. 9:4). Then the prophet gives us the fourfold name of this Son: “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isa. 9:6).
This King is a wonderful, supernatural counselor, governing by wisdom. He is the fatherly ruler whose care for his people is everlasting. He is the prince who brings a peace that the world cannot give. And he is El Gibbor, Mighty God, the very title Isaiah uses in the next chapter for Yahweh himself: “A remnant will return, the remnant of Jacob, to the mighty God” (Isa. 10:21).
When Gabriel appeared to Mary, he sang in tune with Isaiah. He said that the Lord God would give to Jesus “the throne of his father David” (Luke 1:32). In addition to being Wonderful Counselor, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace, Jesus is what? He is El Gibbor, Mighty God. Isaiah, too, confesses the full divinity of the Messiah.
The Sons of Korah and the Divine Throne-Bearer
Like Isaiah, the Psalms are painted floor-to-ceiling with colorful promises about the Messiah. Jesus said as much when he told his disciples that everything written about him “in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44).
Just to take one example, look at Psalm 45. This is a wedding song by the sons of Korah about the king and his bride. The king is praised as handsome, graceful, and victorious. The bride is glorious, beautiful, and devoted. In the middle of the psalm are these words addressed to the king, “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever” (Ps. 45:6). In the very next verse, God is said to have anointed this king. That’s right: God the king has been anointed by God the Lord.
Though Judean kings exercised a divine office inasmuch as they were the royal representatives of Yahweh in Israel, none of them was God, of course. But the Son of David truly is. The preacher in Hebrews quotes Psalm 45 to show Christ’s superiority to angels, “But of the Son he says, ‘Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions’” (Heb. 1:8).
Jesus is God the King who has been anointed by God the Father. In concert with Zechariah and Isaiah, the sons of Korah confess the full divinity of the Messiah.
Time Would Fail Me
To borrow a line from Hebrews, “time would fail me” if I kept going (Heb. 11:32). We could describe the Lord whom Isaiah saw in his temple vision as Jesus (Isa. 6:1–5; John 12:37–41), the divine shepherd whom Ezekiel promised as our Good Shepherd (Ezek. 34:11–16, 23; John 10:11), the Son of Man who rides Yahweh’s clouds and receives everlasting dominion in Daniel’s vision (Dan. 7:13–14; cf. Ps. 68:4; Isa. 19:1), or the Lord at the right hand of Yahweh in Psalm 110 (Ps. 110:1; Matt. 22:41–46).
If we had even more time and space, we would document Jesus as the Messenger of Yahweh, who is called God and Yahweh, who bears the divine name, receives worship, and exercises divine authority (Gen. 16:7–13; 22:11–18; Exod. 3:2–6; 23:20–23; Judg. 13:15–22).
Let this suffice, then, as both testimony and teaser. Testimony that not only in the NT but also in the OT, Jesus is God, fully divine with the Father and Holy Spirit. Teaser, in that this sampling of OT texts serves as an invitation to dive more deeply into the OT to discover all the various ways that the patriarchs, psalmists, and prophets agreed with John that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).
