---
title: Isaiah 45:5
url: https://jw-apologetics.app/verses/isaiah-45-5/
markdown: https://jw-apologetics.app/verses/isaiah-45-5.md
type: verse
perspective: Protestant (historic Nicene) response to Jehovah's Witness teaching
reference: Isaiah 45:5
testament: OT
section: Prophets
index: https://jw-apologetics.app/llms.txt
---

# Isaiah 45:5

## Text (Berean Standard Bible)

> I am the LORD, and there is no other; there is no God but Me. I will equip you for battle, though you have not known Me,

## NWT Wording of the Key Phrase

- NWT (2013 revision): "I am Jehovah, and there is no one else. There is no God except me. I will strengthen you, although you did not know me,"

## JW Usage

Used to close off the Trinity in a single line: Jehovah says there is no God except him, so Jesus cannot be God. It also underwrites the newer Watchtower framing in which Jesus is described as "divine" without being God — a middle category that lets a Witness grant Christ's exalted status while keeping him outside the one God.

## Protestant Usage

Agree with the verse without reservation, then ask where the middle category is meant to sit. If there is no God except Jehovah, then "divine but not God" has nowhere to stand. Either Jesus is inside that one God or he is a creature, and the Watchtower's own verse rules out a third shelf between the two. That question is worth asking gently, because most Witnesses have not noticed that the concession they have been taught to make — Jesus is divine, just not God — is the one thing Isaiah 45:5 forecloses. The Hebrew Bible knows Jehovah, and it knows creatures. It has no class of genuinely-divine-but-lesser beings. Then take them to Colossians 2:9 in their own Bible, where Paul says all the fullness of the divine quality dwells in Christ bodily. Not some of it, and not something adjacent to it. If all of it is in him, and Isaiah says there is only one who has it, the arithmetic does the rest. Compare Isaiah 45:21, Isaiah 45:7.

## Arguments Using This Verse

- [Divine but Not God — The JW Half-Step](https://jw-apologetics.app/arguments/divine-but-not-god-jw-position.md) — Colossians 2:9 — fullness of the Godhead bodily forecloses the distinction [Deity of Christ]