There are many ways Christians know Jesus is God, but few more powerful than the testimony of His character.

For instance, as human beings we’re more than aware of our dependence upon other things, most notably through consumption. The human machine was built as a dependent object, something not only needing basic necessities such as food, air, and water, but also personal necessities such as the need to be loved and adored, the need to feel safe, and the desire to accumulate resources for survival.  At the base of our chemical, social, and spiritual existence, we’re really just needy beings, and at the very base of our need lies a personal connection: the need to experience our Creator, to know His presence, to have His guidance.

The average person–maybe even every person–can’t really give every second of the day to someone else without taking something, whether it be time, resources, or appreciation, so when we see people who impoverish themselves in order to give, many people are struck with a sense of admiration; as though, despite what we may all wish about humanity, perhaps charitable behaviors in the extreme were unnatural.  Or to put it another way, we all understand there’s no such thing as true human altruism.  And to a degree, we’re right.

But supposing a being beyond the consumptive process existed, beyond time-space, who created the very laws of our universe, who is beyond our concepts of beginnings and endings, beyond the process of survival, beyond our mind’s physical entrapments, what would that being be like?  We would know, first off, that this being would be creative, it would make profound statements about our condition (as it engineered everything about us), and it wouldn’t try to consume very much, as it already owned everything and needed nothing.  In fact, if such a being were to become a human like one of us, it would probably disregard many basic necessities out of its desire to continue to build, to give, to help.  And furthermore, we could expect it to be radically independent from false moral constructs, dispensing an uncommon wisdom which looked far, far deeper into the human soul than most humans were willing to look.

Now, some would expect–partially correctly–that this being would immediately place itself in a position of physical, absolute authority, since it commanded time, space, and (if you believe in the Bible’s account of Heavenly realms) legions of angels.  But if we are to believe that such an all-powerful being existed, then we would have to acknowledge that His total control could have already been established.   In light of this, the purpose of human autonomy from His being couldn’t be for any other reason than one: He wants us to know Him as our Creator, to love Him as He is perfectly good, and to freely choose His blessings instead of being mandatorily subjected to the beauty of His kingdom.  Of course, we Christians know that all of creation will be knowingly subject to Him at some point, but this brief time of personal tragedy, the reign of evil, and the pain of death is necessary for our love of Him to exist.

The reason this ties into Christ’s character is simple.  The funny thing about humans is that we like to create God, fashioning Him in our own image, pretending He thinks like us, would act like us, would love and hate like us, would understand like us.  But the truth is that He would do none of these like we would (Isaiah 55:8-9).  Even assuming He were to come down to earth in the form of a human being, if it really were Him, we would probably get Him all wrong, expecting the end-times conqueror instead of a suffering servant.  But this Jesus Christ, this God-man, this suffering servant, didn’t take.  He didn’t conquer forcefully.  He didn’t even survive.  Because He is God, because everything emanates from His being, because He is the one who gave us this temporary autonomy for the purpose of the existence of love, He came to resurrect the human heart from the dead, to give the promise of everlasting life in a kingdom without sin, and as one of my favorite pastors would say, to live the life we should have lived and die the death we should have died.

And ever since Moses delivered the Law, we should have known God’s own character would have attempted exactly this.  There is a commandment which deals exclusively with a state of mind instead of a particular behavior, and it is the commandment to not covet (Deut. 5:21).  While listed last and generally ignored by many, this command gives us insight into the fact that the Lord’s very character is opposed to material jealousy, which the Apostle Paul repeatedly equates with–no, defines as–idolatry itself (Col 3:5).  In short, our Lord’s character is so opposed to a consumptive, selfish existence, that Paul described those who focused only on themselves as worshiping their own ever-consuming stomachs (Phil 3:17-19).

Christ’s appearance as an impoverished, suffering servant wasn’t solely for the purpose of forcing people to face His truth without any sort of worldly persuasion (ie, without good looks, nice clothes, prestigious job, etc).  Rather, it was meant this way since the beginning of time so that we could know He was the being beyond all beings, the all-giving, ever-loving, non-consuming Jehovah. And while we’re not commanded to give up every earthly pleasure in order to live the Christian life (Col. 2:16-19, thank Jesus for that one), we are given the chance to accept a never-ceasing joy and life that comes from His spirit within us. While physical human existence apart from God demands a race for satiation, consumption, competition, and survival before an inescapable entropic collapse, Jesus Christ reverses this process from within us, giving us the power to love, to hope, to dream, to be comforted, and to truly live, by both our fusion with and transformation through His very essence (Ephesians 1:7-14).  

How can we not love a God like that?

Further reading: [1] Isaiah 53, written hundreds of years before Christ, which describes Him perfectly as a lowly servant.