According to the Law (Deuteronomy 13), Jesus was a false prophet because he taught us to follow other gods (namely, the Trinity, including the god Jesus), gods our fathers have never known or worshiped. This makes all his miracles utterly meaningless

Have you ever read what Jesus and his followers taught? They emphasized, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). Follow him. Obey him. Jesus pointed everyone to God his heavenly Father—by his miracles, by his message, and by his life. He lived, died, and rose again for the glory of his Father. Thus, Jesus was a faithful and true prophet.

We have already discussed in depth the issues of the tri-unity of God and the divinity of the Messiah, demonstrating clearly that such beliefs, when properly understood, are in complete harmony with the Hebrew Scriptures and are thoroughly monotheistic. Of course, there have been all kinds of misunderstandings between Christians and Jews through the years. Early Rabbinic literature seemed to think that the followers of Jesus worshiped three gods,⁷³ while the statues of Jesus, Mary, and the saints that were made by the Catholic Church certainly departed from the purity of the New Testament faith. But these are misunderstandings and aberrations, and no honest reader of the New Testament could come to any other conclusion but that Jesus and his followers pointed all people to worship the one true God.

Since we have spent so much time on these issues already, I will list here a representative sampling of New Testament verses. This way, you can see for yourself that Jesus was in no way, shape, or form a false prophet who led people to worship foreign and strange gods. Rather, he pointed all people to the Lord.

His ministry of healing and miracles brought glory to God:

Great crowds came to him, bringing the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute and many others, and laid them at his feet; and he healed them. The people were amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the crippled made well, the lame walking and the blind seeing. And they praised the God of Israel.

Matthew 15:30–31

Everyone was amazed and gave praise to God. They were filled with awe and said, “We have seen remarkable things today.”

Luke 5:26

When he came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen.

Luke 19:37

His teaching brought glory to God (these are a few examples out of scores):

Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.… Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.… Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Matthew 5:16, 44–45, 48

Be careful not to do your “acts of righteousness” before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

Matthew 6:1

This, then, is how you should pray: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Matthew 6:9–10

His Father’s kingdom and his Father’s will were the entire focus of his life and ministry. He himself was the way to the Father—not to some new, strange god, but to our Creator and Lord: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). He pointed all people to his Father:

You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.

John 4:22–23

I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him.… If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own; but he sent me.

John 5:43; 8:42

It is only natural, then, when John the Immerser, the forerunner of the Messiah, was born, his old father, Zechariah, spoke these Spirit-inspired words:

Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel,

because he has come and has redeemed his people.

He has raised up a horn of salvation for us

in the house of his servant David

(as he said through his holy prophets of long ago),

salvation from our enemies

and from the hand of all who hate us—

to show mercy to our fathers

and to remember his holy covenant,

the oath he swore to our father Abraham:

to rescue us from the hand of our enemies,

and to enable us to serve him without fear

in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.

Luke 1:68–75

At last, God was sending his redeemer so that his Jewish people—and the Gentiles too—could “serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.” This is hardly some kind of idolatrous, new religion! This is the fulfillment of the Mosaic faith.

When we look at the words of the Jewish followers of Jesus as recorded in the rest of the New Testament, we see the exact same themes and the exact same emphasis: Through Jesus the Messiah, we can come into an intimate relationship with the one true God, and it is the responsibility of those who follow the Messiah to make God known to the entire world.

• On the feast of Shavuot (Pentecost), when the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit, the assembled people from several different countries heard them “declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues” (Acts 2:11). Moments later, when Peter addressed the crowd, he stated that “Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know” (Acts 2:22).
• As the number of these Jewish followers of Jesus began to grow rapidly, it is reported that “every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people” (Acts 2:46–47).
• When the lame man at the Temple was healed, “he jumped to his feet and began to walk. Then he went with [Peter and John] into the temple courts, walking and jumping, and praising God” (Acts 3:8). This is the explanation given by Peter: “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus” (Acts 3:13). Such is the early record of the assembly of believers.
• To the recently transformed Thessalonians believers—formerly idolators but now worshipers of the one true God—Paul wrote, “Finally, brothers, we instructed you how to live in order to please God,” explaining, “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the heathen, who do not know God.… For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. Therefore, he who rejects this instruction does not reject man but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit” (1 Thess. 4:1, 3–5, 7–8). Obedience to God was the issue.
• In like manner, Peter exhorted his readers to “live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us,” further encouraging them to “live as servants of God” and “fear God” (1 Peter 2:12, 16–17).

Similar examples could be given almost without end. In fact, there are more than twelve hundred references to God—meaning the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—in the New Testament. Thus, the point is clear: Jesus the Messiah, the true and faithful prophet, directed all mankind to worship the one true God. In that regard—and this is something to ponder—he has been the most successful and effective Jewish prophet who has ever walked the earth. Hundreds of millions of Gentiles now love, adore, worship, and serve the God of Israel because of him.

⁷³ C. G. Montefiore and H. Loewe, A Rabbinic Anthology (New York: Schocken, 1974), 7, notes that, “I have not come across any passage [in Rabbinic literature] which seriously tackles the Christian conception of the Trinity, or which attempts to show that a Unity, which is a simple and pure Unity, is a higher or truer conception of the divine nature than a Unity of a Trinity or than a Trinity in a Unity. Where the Rabbis reply to the minim (heretics, sectaries, and sometimes Christians), they always represent these minim as believing in many gods. In other words, the doctrine of the Trinity (if that is referred to) is construed to mean Tritheism, which indeed was, and perhaps still is, its vulgar corruption. Hence the ‘replies’ are to-day of no particular interest, being somewhat obvious and commonplace.”

Brown, M. L. (2000). Answering Jewish objections to Jesus, Volume 2: Theological objections (48). Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books.

According to the Law (Deuteronomy 13), Jesus was a false prophet because he taught us to follow other gods (namely, the Trinity, including the god Jesus), gods our fathers have never known or worshiped. This makes all his miracles utterly meaningless