When I first started watching movies as a child, I loved dinosaur and giant monster movies like King Kong and Godzilla or any of their various spin-offs. Needless to say, “King King vs. Godzilla” was one of my favorites.

Another one I remember was “Son of Godzilla” about an infant-aged and sized Baby Godzilla who was always being bailed out by The Big Guy. You see, whereas Godzilla would roar raging fire out of his mouth at will, destroying whole blocks of Tokyo in a single blast, Son of Godzilla would try to emulate him but only smoke rings would come out.

On top of that, the Son was too small to fend for himself, so whenever some other dinosaur or dragon was about to kill and eat him, Godzilla would have to come to the rescue.

There’s a spiritual application here since so many think of Jesus this same way, the Son of God who is inferior to, reliant upon, substantially less than the Father. Indeed, entire false religions are built upon this heretical precept — a damnable lie that rejects the essential, fundamental and foundational doctrines of the Trinity and the deity of Christ.
The deception usually revolves around the biblical language of Christ’s incarnation (notwithstanding the fact that incarnation literally means He was God incarnate).

The Bible teaches that Jesus willingly submitted Himself to the Father for the purpose of the sacrifice that He would make on the cross for our sins, coming into this world as the Son of Man (fully man) and at the same time Son of God (fully God). Philippians 2:8 relates: “And being found in human form, He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

So they use semantics, linguistic trickery to deceive the masses by taking verses or passages in which Jesus is speaking as the submitted Son of Man or the Bible is speaking of His earthly ministry to claim the Father is the one, true, only God and Jesus is someone or something else — a liar for sure, or a lunatic, as C.S. Lewis so famously and rightly argued, but surely not God Himself.

For instance...Did Jesus need to be baptized? No, of course not! Even John the Baptist understood and acknowledged this, yet Jesus insisted that it had to be done. Why? In willingly submitting Himself, Christ was patterning for us what the Christian life should look like.

Look at the extraordinary statement Jesus makes about Himself in John 3:13: “No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man WHO IS IN HEAVEN” (emphasis mine). How could Jesus have been in heaven at the very moment when He was speaking these words on earth? There’s only one way, only if He truly is the One who is “over all, the eternally blessed God” as Romans 9:5 declares of Him (see also John 3:31); only if He truly is the “great God and Savior” as Paul affirmed (Titus 2:13) and Peter too (2 Pet. 1:1) in Scripture.

Interestingly enough, the religious leaders during the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry knew exactly what He meant when He identified Himself as the Son of God. That’s because, despite their own rebellion against God, they knew the Scriptures. They just didn’t believe or obey them.

Thus, they understood that Jesus was identifying Himself as the Eternal Son of Isaiah 9:6: “For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

There’s no doubt this verse refers to Jesus, the Child born in Bethlehem but also the Son given of heaven, making Him the Eternal Son of God, the One whom the prophet Micah foretold was “from everlasting” (He always existed, see also John 1:1, Heb. 13:8, etc.), the One whom Isaiah also said would be born of a virgin and called Immanuel, literally “God with us” (Isa. 7:14).
How do we know the religious leaders fully understood this? Well, because they said so.

When Jesus affirmed Himself yet again as The Great I AM (as He repeatedly did in His incarnation), He concluded one debate with them by stating, “My Father has been working until now, and I have been working” (John 5).
Thus, Scripture reveals in the very next verse that the religious leaders “sought to kill Him all the more,” not only for violating the Sabbath (in their minds) but for “making Himself equal with God.” Fully, equally, eternally God in human flesh — that’s what Jesus means, and what Scripture itself means, by Son of God, so to reject Christ’s claims or to reinterpret the term by making up your own meaning for “Son of God” is to reject Christ Himself.

Then again in John 10, the religious leaders sought to stone Jesus to death for blasphemy — accusing Him thus, “because You, a man, make Yourself God” (verse 33).

Jesus never denied this charge but rather consistently defended the claim as His position. In the same way, when Thomas worshiped Him as God, Jesus accepted his worship (John 20:28).
Now the question comes to each one of us, posed by Christ Himself in Matthew 16, carrying eternal consequences: “Who do YOU say that I AM?” (emphases mine).

And it comes with this grave warning, as given by Christ to those religious leaders during their continuing debate over His deity, when He told them “if you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins” (John 8:24).