“You are my witnesses,” declares the Lord. “I have chosen you as my servant so that you can know and believe in me and understand that I am the one ⌞who did this⌟. No god was formed before me, and there will be none after me.
That is why I revealed to you what would happen long ago. I told you about them before they happened. ⌞I did this⌟ so you couldn’t say, “My gods have done these things. My carved idols and my metal idols have commanded them to happen.”
“I’m going to send my messenger, and he will clear the way ahead of me. Then the Lord you are looking for will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the promise will come. He is the one you want,” says the Lord of Armies.
(John declared the truth about him when he said loudly, “This is the person about whom I said, ‘The one who comes after me was before me because he existed before I did.’ ”)
So Jesus told them, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you’ll know that I am the one and that I can’t do anything on my own. Instead, I speak as the Father taught me.