Actress Shirley MacLaine has played many roles throughout her extensive film career, including her own life story in the TV movie made from her autobiography. A central theme of the book and movie is MacLaine's immersion in New Age religion. In one scene, after discovering the "god within her," she is seen standing in front of the ocean at Malibu Beach chanting "I am that I am" over and over again as the waves crash into the shore.

This New Age belief in the "inner god" of man is one which Christians understand to be not only grievous error theologically but the height of absolute blasphemy. Indeed, under the Mosaic law which was still in effect during the time of Christ's incarnation, such blasphemy was a capital crime and punished by death on the spot!

Yet when the wicked religious leaders rejected Christ by appealing to their faith in Abraham, who had lived some 2,000 years earlier, Jesus responded: "Before Abraham was, I AM" (John 8:58). The religious leaders immediately began picking up rocks with the intention of stoning Him to death. This shows they knew exactly what Jesus was claiming, so they saw Him as being guilty of blasphemy. This was the very charge they brought against Him to orchestrate His execution, as they accused Jesus in John 10:33 -- "because You, being a Man, make Yourself God" (see also John 5:18).

For any other person to make such a claim, to identify Himself as God in human flesh, would surely have been blasphemous. But in Jesus' case, it happened to be true.

After all, with His various "I AM" self-references in John's gospel account and elsewhere, Jesus openly and repeatedly declared that He was the true God. The great theologian and creation scientist Henry Morris puts the historic Christian (biblical) doctrine into perspective by explaining: "He was actually claiming to be the God to whom Moses spoke at the burning bush and he asked God what His name was. God had answered that His name was 'I AM' (Exodus 3:14). He is the God who is eternally self-existent, transcendent to time as well as to space and matter. And that was who Jesus was claiming to be!"

As the brilliant academic and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis argued, this meant Jesus was either Lord (God), a liar or a total lunatic. There are no other options He left open to us.

Scripture in fact identifies Jesus as God throughout both the Old and New Testaments -- starting in the very first verse of the Bible: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The Hebrew word for God in the original language here is "Elohim" which reads as plural -- literally, "gods created the heavens and the earth." Not three gods, but one God in three distinct yet co-equal and co-eternal Persons: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. The one true triune God, Trinity, who is called the Godhead in Scripture ("in Christ dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily," Colossians 2:9, etc.).

So a few verses later in Genesis 1, God says to Himself as the Great Creator: "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness" (verse 26).

In some of His other "I AM" declaration, Jesus revealed Himself as:

*Being the Source of life (John 1:4) and having power over death: "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me, though he die, yet shall he live" (John 11:25-26).

*The Beginning and End of all things as the One who created all things (John 1:3, Colossians 1:16): "...'I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,' says the Lord, 'who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty'..." (Revelation 1:8).

*The One who gives light and life to all mankind as the true Light (John 1:4-5, 9): "I am the Light of the world" (John 8:12).

*The One who conquered death forever and gives that same victory to all who trust in Him by faith alone: "I am He who lives and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. And I have the keys of Hades and Death" (Revelation 1:18).

Lee Strobel, author of "The Case for Christ" (and the other books in the "Case" series), puts it this way: "Anyone can claim to be God, but Jesus backed it up with the empty tomb."

Jesus is called the "Mighty God" by the prophet Isaiah (Isa. 9:6-7), the "great God and Savior" by the Apostle Paul (Titus 2:13), "our God and Savior" by the Apostle Peter (2 Pet. 1:1), the Word who "was God [always] and became flesh" by the Apostle John (John 1), and "my Lord and my God" by the Apostle Thomas (John 20:28).

There really is no great mystery here, the Word of God makes abundantly and undeniably clear that, just as He said all along -- JESUS IS "I AM."