Who Do You Say I Am?
What did Jesus mean when He asked, “Who do you say that I am?”
This article examines how personal versions of Jesus can distort the gospel and why understanding the Messiah through the Old Testament is essential for a grounded faith.
This piece is the first in a series called Four Anchors. It explores four truths hold my faith—and my writing—steady. They are the compass points I return to, the anchors that keep me from drifting: God’s Messiah, God’s Promise, God’s People, Our Hope. These are the anchors that shape how I read Scripture and see see the world. In this series, I’ll trace each one—why it matters, how it holds, and what it reveals about the God I trust and seek to reflect.
Who Do You Say That I Am?
In the Gospels, Jesus presses his disciples with a question that still echoes today: “Who do you say that I am?”
It wasn’t a question for strangers. It was for those who had walked with him, eaten with him, witnessed miracles, and heard him teach. They had plenty of material to work with. And yet, his question cuts deeper than facts. It searched for loyalty, recognition, and faith.
It asks whether the Jesus they thought they knew was the Messiah he claimed to be.
I have a friend who lives in that question every day. He searches for Jesus everywhere, unsure what to believe about him. His beliefs are a murky mixture. There’s some liturgy from childhood that feels empty now, some fragments from passionate sermons, some cultural clichés about Jesus as nothing more than a moral example. He weighs them all against each other, confused and unsatisfied, groping for something real. He wants a straight answer.
Well-meaning Christians tell him to just believe. Jesus loves you. He died for you. He wants to be Lord of your life. But what “Lord of your life” means looks different for every person he meets. The standard is all over the place. Some assure him that everything good is from God, every bad thing from Satan, and that we all have little agency in between. Nature whispers a different story—beauty, goodness, pulsing life—but he wonders: is that God, or something else?
So he is left searching, repeating the question: Who do you say Jesus is?
He sees only the versions others offer—the Jesus they’ve pieced together from their own journeys. And since no two versions look the same, he’s left to build his own collage, with no trustworthy standard to measure it against.
Worse, it has left him under the impression that Jesus is whoever someone says he is.
The Jesus We Build
When we describe Jesus to others, our testimony often reflects how we first encountered him. And while that’s not unimportant, it’s crucial to recognize that it’s not necessarily the same as who he claims to be.
• To the beggar, he’s a provider.
• To the addict, a chain-breaker.
• To the brokenhearted, a miracle-worker.
• To the lonely, a friend.
• To the confused, an answer.
• To the desperate, a way-maker.
• To the abused, a savior.
And he is all these things. Our Lord is deeply relational, attentive to the smallest hair on our heads. Our personal testimonies matter deeply to the world. They are first-hand accounts of the goodness of God in our lives.
But if that is all we ever say—if these are the only stories we tell—we shrink Jesus into a reflection of our own needs. Our witness becomes a patchwork stitched from wounds and proof-texts: bits of comfort, snippets of rescue, fragments of help. None of them are wrong, but few present the full figure that Scripture gives.
Faith can’t rest on a Jesus defined only by our experiences mixed with some popular stories about him.
Our witness may begin with our own story, but it must grow into the story Jesus told about himself—or else we end up worshiping our own reflection in a pool of a million others.
And what does that say to those watching? When they peer in, they don’t see the Messiah of Scripture—they see a different Jesus for everyone.
The Messiah We Ignore
Most of us read the Gospels as if the story of Jesus begins in Matthew 1, climaxes in John 3:16, and resolves at the empty tomb. But the Gospels were never meant to stand alone. They were written as a radical claim—eyewitness proof that this man named Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah the Hebrew Scriptures had been promising all along.
Yet, how many of us could honestly say we could explain what Messiah even means? Could we outline a biblical job description of the Messiah’s tasks and responsibilities? Not a Jesus-colored mockup, but the real, robust portrait the Old Testament actually gives?
Jesus could.
He saw himself through the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. He explained his mission through books most of us barely know and seldom read. Like every Jewish boy, he wasn’t born with the Scriptures preloaded into his mind. He learned them through sitting in synagogue, listening to his parents tell the stories, sing the psalms, and celebrate the holy days. Year after year, the words of Moses, Isaiah, David, and Jeremiah poured into his ears. He prayed the shema. He repeated the laws. He wrestled with the promises. He heard of Abraham’s covenant, David’s throne, God’s dwelling in the midst of his people.
Those words didn’t just instruct him. They shaped him. Jesus used the Hebrew Scriptures to understand who he was and why the world needed the Messiah these Scriptures outlined. So when he stood up on shabbat in Galilee and declared, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to proclaim good news to the captives and to declare the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18), he knew exactly what he was saying.
But do we? Who were the captives he had in mind? What “year of favor” was he referring to? Could we answer with the same clarity his first audience would have known, let alone the clarity Jesus himself had?
That day in the synagogue, Jesus wasn’t improvising. He was stepping into an office the Scriptures had described for centuries. That is the Messiah he claimed to be—not only our personal Savior, but the Anointed One with a mission that stretches beyond a sacrificial death.
A Thin Gospel
If we’re honest, the Old Testament Messiah does not neatly fit into the standard gospel message. A descendant of Abraham ruling on David’s throne from Jerusalem? How exactly do we present that as good news to our lost friends asking the hard questions? Truth be told, we are unprepared to. Which is why so often, we don’t.
Instead, we present the Jesus we think we know and leave the rest to pastors, churches, or theologians to fill in. We’re all sinners, and sinners need Jesus. That message feels solid enough. Messiah of the Old Testament? That can wait.
But the gospel stripped of its messianic foundation is frail. It may soothe for a moment, but it will not withstand the pressures of a darkening world.
Who Do You Say He Is?
And so question presses in again: Who do you say I am?
Have we leaned too long on a Jesus shaped only by our own journeys, pain points, and Christian imaginations? Do we actually live as though he is who he says he is?
The Messiah is not a neutral figure. His role comes with specific tasks, responsibilities, and expectations that will cut across our traditions and challenge our culture. The kingdom he proclaimed was never meant to be reduced to mere kindness or spiritual platitudes. It was the kingdom promised to Eve, to Abraham, to David, and declared by the Prophets. A kingdom already breaking in through Jesus’s spirit living in his followers, yet not fully here.
The world is not drifting towards peace. The days grow darker, more polarized, more hostile. And people who don’t know Jesus can sense it. My friend sees right through the thin claim that “Jesus saves.”
The prophets described the coming kingdom as labor pains—waves growing sharper, stronger, and closer together until God’s reign invades the land through the Messiah he anointed. This is the story Scripture actually anticipates, even if it’s a story we haven’t always had ears to hear.
To follow Jesus in such times requires growing in the knowledge of the Messiah he claimed to be. That means adopting a messianic stance toward Scripture—reading the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings the way he did. Most of us were never taught to do that. No wonder we avoid his question. It’s easier to stick with the Jesus we’ve inherited or experienced than to measure our version of him against the Messiah of the Hebrew Scriptures.
But this can change. Jesus invites us to make his story part of our own. And he is faithful to open our eyes and help us understand it.
At the Mountain’s Foot
Right now, our Lord stands at the right hand of the Father, enthroned on the heavenly mountain, veiled from our sight. Are we waiting in trust, filling our lamps with the oil of the Word, ready to recognize him when he comes? Do we know him well enough to describe his story to others—not only a “Savior who forgives sins,” but the Messiah who reigns, who rides the clouds, who will restore all broken things?
Today, believers stand at the mountain’s foot with two options. We can lift our eyes to the Messiah Scripture foretells. Or we can bow to an image of Jesus pieced together from gospel fragments, personal pain, and cultural tradition.
Who do you say that I am?
Your answer doesn’t change who he is. But it does shape the gospel you live, the Jesus you proclaim, and the hope you offer a world still searching for the truth.
Who do you say that he is?
This piece is the first of my Four Anchors series. Next, we’ll turn to God’s enduring promises to Abraham. Until then, may this anchor hold you steady in a world adrift.