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Hey, this is John at the Bible Project, and on the podcast we've been going through a fairly long series on the complex identity of God in the biblical story.

The depiction of God from Hebrew scriptures is of God as a complex unity, who is both above, totally other, as creator and ruler, but also,

intimately involved in the grit and detail of human history.

If you've been following along with this series, you've been wrestling with us about the complicated and unexpected ways the biblical authors depict the creator God.

In the last episode, we got to Jesus of Nazareth, and we asked the question, was this human in some way also the creator God?

Because nowhere in the New Testament do you strictly see the phrase, Jesus is the always.

The gospel authors are using the narrative medium to make claims about Jesus, but it's not a normal way, I guess, that maybe modern or Western Christians have thought about this.

We're looking for a nice sentence that just says the fact, you know, give me the facts, and that is what the gospel authors are doing through the medium to wish.

Style narrative.

Today on the show, we're going to look at what Jesus thought about his own identity.

We'll look at the claims that he makes about his relationship with the father, claims that ended up getting a kill.

And then he goes and says something like this.

All things have been handed over to me by my father. No one knows the son except the father, and no one knows the father, except the son.

Those to whom the son reveals him.

So what Jesus is saying here is, listen, the son of man, I am the human one appointed to share in God's own rule of creation, but people don't recognize him.

No one knows the son, but the father knows me. That's just a story.

He has a saying, I know who I am, I'm the real deal.

And the fact that all of these people don't recognize it or reject that doesn't affect the reality of his claim.

We'll look at how Jesus claimed that he is offering to others a unique relationship with the Creator God, and how this unique relationship is symbolized by the significant tradition of baptism.

Baptism is a way of you undergoing what Jesus underwent when he was publicly identified as a child of God, the child of God.

All that and more today on the podcast, thanks for joining us. Here we go.

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