earth; and that Every Tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father' (Phil. 2:9 -11).

Yet further, in Romans 14, he quotes this passage as follows:

'For it is written, As I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to

Me, and every tongue shall confess to God' (14:11).

What are we to say to this?  Is Paul a muddled thinker?  Did Paul write

by inspiration of God?  Did he forget the emphatic 'none else' of Isaiah

chapter 45?  Or did he purposely use the quotation, once of God and once of

Christ, because he knew that Jesus Christ, before His Incarnation, was the

Lord God of Israel?

'Jesus -Jehovah is the only Saviour' (Adolph Saphir).

Recently we had the painful duty of reading a pamphlet which did its

utmost to belittle the claims of the Lord Jesus to supreme Deity.  At the

close was a list of similar publications, one line read:

'Jesus Christ in the Old Testament -- Reduced to 25 cents',

which aptly summarizes this dreadful teaching.  There seems to be no neutral

ground in this matter.  Either Jesus Christ is 'Lord' or He must be reduced

to '25 cents' and His claims not only discounted but rejected as blasphemy.

We either, side with those who took up stones to stone Him or, with those who

fell at His feet and worshipped Him.  If Jesus Christ is Lord as the New

Testament  makes abundantly clear, then He must be the God of Israel, as

Deuteronomy 6:4 declares.  'The Lord our God is one Lord'.  For Israel had

and could have 'no other'.

Let us return to the witness of Isaiah 43:10 -12.  It will be

remembered that Israel are there spoken of as the Lord's witnesses, 'that ye

may know and believe ... that I am He'.  The LXX reads here, ego eimi, 'I

am', and these words are uttered in some solemn contexts in the New

'Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was (genesthai "came

into being"), I Am (ego eimi)' (John 8:58).

That this was a claim to be the great I Am of the Old Testament is made

clear by the immediate reaction of the Jews; 'Then took they up stones to

cast at Him'.  One of the sins that was punished by stoning was that of

blasphemy, and this was the interpretation which the Jews put upon the words,

and which was not corrected either by the Lord or by the Evangelist.

We have already drawn attention to the fact that the normal rules of

grammar were broken by Moses when he construed a singular verb with a plural

noun in writing Genesis 1:1.  Here again, in John 8, the subject is beyond

the experience, the logic or the language of man to express.  Had the Saviour

merely meant His hearers to understand that He was born before Abraham, a

claim that of itself would be impossible to any ordinary man, he would have

been obliged to use the past tense of the verb, saying, 'Before Abraham was,

I Was', but to say, 'Before Abraham was, I Am', does not make sense if

uttered by an ordinary man.  Here, the choice of words, ego eimi points to

the Deity of the Speaker.  Can we imagine John the Baptist using any other

language than that recorded in John 1:30, 'He was before me'?