The text confirms it, for one thing: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. And behold, your kinswoman Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For with God nothing will be impossible.” (Luke 1:35–37). Neither Mary’s virgin conception nor Elizabeth’s old age conception were impossible with God. Compare, for example, Jesus’ nearly identical words in his response to the rich young man (a ruler, probably a Pharisee or member of the Sanhedrin) who “went away sad, because he had great wealth” when Jesus told him to sell everything he owned and give it to the poor: “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” “When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, ‘Who then can be saved?’ Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.’” (Matthew 19:23–26)
Second, Jesus himself claimed that God was his Father, and not just in a “poetic” or metaphorical way. He made it so clear that he meant Abba Father (as in “Dad”) that the Jewish leaders considered his claim blasphemy: “So, because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him. In his defense Jesus said to them, ‘My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.’ For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.” John 5:16–18
Third, if God is not the Father of Jesus Christ, then Jesus is simply “another guy”; in fact, he is just another dead, long since rotted away, insane guy. He wasn’t a good teacher or a wise man, he was totally bonkers, out of his mind…a raving lunatic, along the lines of a man who might claim to be a pumpkin! i believe C.S. Lewis was correct in his summation:
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” (Lewis’s trilemma – Wikipedia)
All scriptural emphases are mine.
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