Simon Peter, a bond-servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who have received a faith of the same kind as ours, by the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ …  (2 Peter 1:1)

Nothing is more central to our Christian faith than the belief that Jesus is God; we see this teaching in many places in Scripture. This one comes from the one who confessed, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16). In the introduction to his second letter, the apostle Peter writes with the sense that the truth of Jesus’ deity is common knowledge and accepted as foundational. He refers to “our God and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Some commentators misunderstand this verse, thinking that Peter refers to “God” as distinct from “Savior, Jesus Christ.” In that thinking, both God and Jesus act righteously. However, Dr. Daniel Wallace, a widely recognized Greek scholar and author of a widely used authoritative textbook on Greek grammar, has written extensively on the sentence construction in this passage. He concludes that the underlying Greek grammatical structure is unambiguous: Jesus is both God and Savior; the two descriptors, “God” and “Savior,” refer to the same person, “Christ Jesus” (Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, by D. Wallace). A similar grammatical construction can be seen later in the chapter, where Peter writes, “… the entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be abundantly supplied to you” (2 Peter 1:11, emphasis added). Jesus Christ is both Lord and Savior, in the same way He is both God and Savior.

The apostle Paul expressed Christ’s deity in the same way when he referred to “the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus” (Titus 2:13, emphasis added). So there is no doubt that the apostles believed and taught that Jesus was God. He is not just a divinely inspired man, nor is He just a great teacher. He is not divine in some sense of being a lesser god. He is nothing short of God! For Jesus Christ IS God.

Peter, who knew the Lord Jesus Christ well, walked with Him for three-plus years, and saw Him in His post-resurrection body, does not write sloppily of this issue. Remember, he lived among the Jewish people, where any hint of blasphemy was a capital offense; he would not have made a statement that would be nebulous or misleading. No! He writes unequivocally: Jesus is God.

What does that mean for us? As God, Jesus is worthy of our worship and our complete submission before Him, and we bow before Him in total obeisance. The man Jesus of Nazareth was and is the Creator God of the universe.

Lord Jesus Christ, You are God and Savior; You are MY God and Savior, and I bow my life down before You. You alone are worthy of my praise and worship.