Well, at least maybe some of you are rethinking your position since Jesus never explicitly made that claim and that would have been a point he would have most assuredly emphasized. Messiah and King of the Jews does not equal God, the God to whom he constantly prayed to and constantly made reference to. How does one sit at the right hand of the Father and also be the Father?
It is a complicated process to make Jesus and God the same entity by using the bible as the source even if you use all the accepted canonized New Testament that we have today.
Thoughts of others:
Christ forgave sins, but only God can forgive sins (Mark 2:10). Moreover, these great powers He gave to His disciples to exercise in His name (John 20: 22-23); Mark 16:17; Matthew 28: 19-20).
There is no text in Messianic literature that shows the Messiah pardoning sins, yet Christ does so in His own name. His claims thus become explicit. Here are some examples:
"And entering into a boat, he passed over the water and came into his own city. And behold they brought to him one sick of the palsy lying in a bed. And Jesus, seeing their faith, said to the man sick of the palsy: Be of good heart, son, thy sins are forgiven thee. And behold some of the scribes said within themselves: He blasphemeth." (Matthew 9: 1-3).
(Would that not, by extension make Him God? -me)
Jesus refers to himself with the divine name—I am —in several places. This “I am” formula is a reference back to the Divine Name revealed to Moses in Ex. 3:14. Not only does Jesus refer to himself as “I am” four times in John’s Gospel (see John 8:24; 58; 13:19 and 18:5-6), but when he does so in John 8:58, the Jews to whom he was speaking understood his meaning because they immediately wanted to stone him for blasphemy!
Jesus places his word on the same level as the word of God—the Old Testament. “You have heard it said . . . but I say to you . . .” (see Matt. 5:21-28). This is in sharp contrast to the prophets of old who always made clear the word they were speaking was not their own: “The word of the Lord came unto me, saying . . . ” (cf. Jer. 1:11; Ezek. 1:3, etc.). Only God possesses this kind of authority.
Jesus is referred to as “equal” with God by both John and Paul. In John 5:18, the author comments on why the Jews wanted to kill Jesus: “Because he called God his Father, making himself equal with God.” Paul refers to Jesus when he was “in the form (Gk. morphe; in Greek usage this word means the set of characteristics that makes a thing what it is) of God” thinking “his equality with God” not something to be grasped onto, but emptying himself and becoming man (cf. Phil. 2:6-10). Paul assumes his readers already knew Jesus to be equal with God, the Father.
Jesus is referred to in the New Testament with the title Lord as it is uniquely applied to Yahweh in the Old Testament. Jesus calls himself “the Lord of the Sabbath” in Mark 2:28. The Sabbath is referred to as the “Sabbath of Yahweh” in the Old Testament (cf. Ex. 20:10; see also Is. 8:13, referred to in 1 Peter 3:15; and Joel 2:31-32, quoted both in Acts 2:20-21 and in Rom. 10:13).
