These are words put into the mouth of God, not spoken by Him. They are human tradition, like the notion of us being a physical likeness. Human vanity.
Therefore Jesus cannot be a God,neither can the word.
This is not teaching, it is recording the beliefs of the time. People believed in household individual Gods. That does not mean that they actually existed. The whole point of the Bible is to establish the sovereignty of the one God. Baal was believed in but the Bible discredits it. Mentioning it by name does not give it any credence.
There is one God. Do not try and establish anything else, Whether you believe in the Trinity or not, Jesus cannot be a God in His own right, and neither can John be claiming that the word is/was a god either.
This is a little too simplistic. Absolutely Jews were polytheistic at times. But my understanding is first century Judaism was largely monotheistic. So that seems to be a point of contention or for Jewish scholars to work out. James 2:19: âYou believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe thatâand shudder.â
Is he arguing Jesus was just a man? I am content to say that somehow God begat a piece of himself before the foundation of the world, the first born Son of his creation. Jesus was in that sense God made flesh. Jesus might not have always been co-eternal with God but is still God incarnate. This makes sense of a lot of scripture.
Can he be arguing that? Personally, I find that very sensible. Jesus being a man or just another prophet is certainly inconsistent with a ton of scripture. Jesus being fully God in every way, a co-eternal singular individual of the Triune Godhead is also not fully consistent will all of scripture.
If we do end up with a trinity, the arguments have to be nuanced and they develop a bit later.
The Nicene Creed says:
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
Is the part in bold fully compatible with the typical Trinity? There was only God and then there was God who birthed a Son. A being consubstantial with him. My first thought is not so much.
I donât deny that Jesus both is and was divine. He both is and was deity. I argue from scripture that, although deity, he is not the Most High God who is both his and our God.
Mike,
This seems to me to be improper logic. First, it is obvious to me that the Jews would not make that accusation if they did not have absolute proof that the statement had been made. And even if they had proof, there are many reasons why prosecutors in any culture choose the specific charges, and do not press other charges.
In any case, I believe that Jesus is one with the Father, the âtwoâ bound closer together than I am to me, so the doctrine of the trinity doesnât bother me. I also know that God is so large, so unlimited, that different partial views of God can appear to be separate entities; whether this has any real meaning is unknowable, but the doctrine of the trinity seems to help some people feel that they understand something about God.
At this point it seems appropriate for me to expand on what I said about all of these tricky doctrinal issues a bit ago: I believe that none of these points about details of religious doctrine are essential for salvation. I also am getting quite convinced that God has a purpose for permitting different theological ideas that are not essential for salvation to be propagated. I believe that some of these different descriptions help some people improve their relationships with God, while those same descriptions (Trinity, for example) are impossible for others to accept. In any case, what it means to me that an issue is not essential for salvation is that you can believe one side, I can believe the other side, and we both can be 100% confident that we are saved. A major example of this kind of issue is the understanding of how to interpret scripture: Does Genesis describe a universe created 6000 years ago, or can the Genesis story of creation be interpreted to be consistent with a universe created billions of years ago in a Big Bang?
I am quite sure that we have different, apparently incompatible beliefs on this subject. Yet I am even more sure that we both are saved.
The confession holds that that wisdom of God can be divined through two books: the Bible and Science. The former reveals abstract, theological truths not reachable by science. The latter reveals the empirical truths of physical reality. Here it is:
âWe know Him by two means: First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe; which is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many characters leading us to see clearly the invisible things of God, even his everlasting power and divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20. All which things are sufficient to convince men and leave them without excuse. Second, He makes Himself more clearly and fully known to us by His holy and divine Word, that is to say, as far as is necessary for us to know in this life, to His glory and our salvation.â
While I am not reformed, I hold to the principle behind the confession.
I donât understand. Are you saying that Moses was claiming that his own vanity-driven speculation was something God said?
Psalm 8:5⌠You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor.
Hebrews 2:7⌠You made him a little lower than the angels; You crowned him with glory and honor.
In the original, King David used the Hebrew word âelohimâ - gods. In the latter, it is confirmed that David was talking about angels. Why would David identify âangelsâ as âgodsâ, Richard?
In scripture, Yahweh is called the Most High God and the God of gods. There cannot logically be a âmost high godâ if there donât also exist less high gods. And there cannot logically be a god of gods if there donât exist other gods for that one god to be the god of.
The point of scripture is to establish Yahweh as the Most High God of all the other gods - not to establish Him as literally the only god in existence.
5Truly even if indeed there are those called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, as there are many gods and many lords, 6yet to us there is one God the Father, of whom are all things, and we for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we through Him.
58âVery truly I tell you,â Jesus answered, âbefore Abraham was born, I am!â 59At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds.
They attempted to kill him on the spot for - according to you - claiming to be Yahweh. Yet they ended up charging him for claiming to be the son OF God - not God Himself. Thatâs because Jesus never claimed to be God Himself - but the Son of God who was sent down from heaven to do the will of his and our God, Yahweh. Jesus told us point blank that our God was also his own God. (John 20:17) Jesus even refers to Yahweh as âmy Godâ four different times in Rev 3:12.
I truly appreciate your tone and manner, Jerry, but I believe this is a salvation issue. We are to worship the Creator whom Jesus himself worshiped and prayed to - not any of His creations, including Jesus.
Deuteronomy 4⌠15You saw no form of any kind the day the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire. Therefore watch yourselves very carefully, 16so that you do not become corrupt and make for yourselves an idol, an image of any shape, whether formed like a man or a woman, 17or like any animal on earth or any bird that flies in the air, 18or like any creature that moves along the ground or any fish in the waters below.
Romans 1:25⌠They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creatorâwho is forever praised. Amen.
Jesus is God-incarnate. The Son is the image of the Father. He is our creator (see John 1:1) and was with God in the beginning. The angels worship him (Hebrews 1:6).
The Trinity is not explicitly laid out in scripture but a human Jesus isnât either. Apologetic exuberance overstates the case and heretical monotheism errs to the opposite extreme.
Different authors have different conceptions of Jesus which is not surprising if Jesus was God incarnateâŚ. Godâs first-born Son who lowered himself for our sake.
Passages like Philippians 2 bridge the gap. This is the way to make the most sense of scripture. You say to worship only the creator but John 1 gives that role to Jesus. The Christian church was correct to see Jesus as God incarnate. That is Christianity 101. The Trinity is a much more complex theological doctrine. Iâm not fully sold but itâs something I really donât care about one way or the other. Iâd rather say Father, Son and Holy Spirit are three ways God manifests and shows/interacts with us. But I know the Trinity goes beyond that.
Quoting one liners will never convince me of anything. That is not what scripture is for.
For a start Moses is no longer the given author of any let alone all of the Pentateuch. Secondly, Genesis 1-11 is oral tradition. It is neither history nor prophecy, or direct from God⌠There is no reason for God ever to be plural. Neither does He wander around the earth (unless in the form of Jesus)
You really think God planted a tree of Knowledge and tried to keep it from man by telling him not to eat it? Weeds and birthing pains are curses from God?
You really think God confused humanity by making them speak different languages?
You really think that the rainbow is some bow put in the sky by God?
Yiou really think that you are in the (physical) image of God?
Nope â theyâre not the same at all. In John 14:9 it isnât a âhistorical presentâ, itâs a Greek idiom for how long something has been happening for a while and is still happening, but in 8:58 it isnât because the structure isnât there as it is in 14:9 â itâs a bare present-tense assertion that to be translated as you want would need a completing clause. In 8:58 I canât think of a way to finish the thought to make âI AMâ be part of the same kind of structure as 8:58 except by completely rewriting the verse.
And that He meant âI AMâ as indicating He is fully God is evidenced by the Jewish reaction: if He was just saying He had existed since before Abraham, they would have considered Him crazy, but the words He chose were a claim to be divine.
Jerry answers this one later on well enough I wonât bother.
I will just say that your comments on this matter are the sort that typically come from people who donât actually grasp that other languages arenât some code that really means thoughts that can be stated in English.
No, youâre reading it though a materialistic, linear, binary, propositional filter â something that was reasonably excusable for Archbishop Ussher but not for anyone today.
Taking it âat face valueâ when youâre reading a translation is in fact taking it as something it is not. Youâre not taking it as a piece of ancient literature that manages to be two different genres at once while also being a polemic that uses the same order of events as the Egyptian creation story, youâre taking it as though itâs a friendâs great-grandfatherâs diary of events he lived through, something it isnât remoptely close to being.
I hope they didnât come to their conclusions âsola scripturaâ, since that is an unbiblical doctrine! But they based it on the Hebrew, nothing else.
Genesis has two different creation accounts, one mostly in Genesis 1 and the other in Genesis 2.
Utterly without evidence you smeared a brother Christian as essentially an atheist. I donât have to âknow that one manâs heart/mindâ any more than the fact that he was a Christian â but you made an assertion without any facts about him at all.
Seems to me thereâs a command against that.
That assertion itself violates the commandment against bearing false witness! Itâs a claim invented by people trying to avoid facing the reality of a truly ancient Earth and an even more ancient universe and is thus deceptive at root.
Genesis 1:1 is a description of creation. It is usually seen as the start of the creation story in Genesis 1 but everything else in Genesis 1-2 is just an Earth- and humancentric view of how the things familiar to humans appeared in the created Earth. This is a viewpoint I have taken, others may disagree.
Interestingly, that was a clash between a biblical understanding of things and a pagan understanding â and the pagan one was Arianism.
Nope â itâs only irrational, as my brothers the mathematicians would say, to the mathematically challenged; apparently if you know how to do n-dimensional geometry itâs quite simple (for my part, itâs simple enough for anyone with enough experience with things scientific to recognize that for some things the proper operation is addition while for others it is multiplication; if you recognize that then the Trinity is elegantly rational).
Besides which, second-Temple Judaism already had a threefold concept of a single God before Jesus even was born; all the early Christians did was formalize that.
BTW your list is nice but Jesus made it plain that He is God very plainly when He told the Jews that He is greater than the Temple: in first century Judaism, the only thing greater than any temple was the deity whose house it was.
LOL
Someone gave you a list of their fruits, and that list looks pretty darned Christlike.
No, it isnât â itâs the wrong kind of ancient Hebrew literature (in fact itâs two different kinds of literature at once that has three different meanings at the same time â a masterpiece of writing!).
That lie is tiresome. If you want a translation that gets the sense of the grammarâ
In the beginning the Logos was being; and the Logos was being facing God; and God is what the Logos was being.
The âa godâ assertion requires mangling the grammar, and thus was correctly noted as a heresy long, long ago. That Satan has managed to resuscitate that heresy in modern times does not change the fact that it mangles the grammar of the text.
We really need an improved text editor; underlining, different text size, and strike-through would be immensely useful!
I say that because the word âaloneâ doesnât belong there: it doesnât come from the text.
Although we are told what the result is when someone is baptized just in the name of Jesus:
Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent to them Peter and John, who came down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit, for He had not yet fallen on any of them, but they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.
Reading in the English confuses the issue, though you need to grasp Greek more than just turning Greek words into English ones: when Acts says someone was baptized âin the Name of Jesusâ, that phrase means âunder the authority of Jesus in the way that He commandedâ â itâs just the use of a Greek idiom (though one that carries into English with phrases like âin the name of the King!â or âin the name of the law!â). So when we read, âbaptized in the name of Jesusâ, we have to ask, âHow did Jesus say to be baptized?â
And we find that in Matthew 28 â a passage that appears in every ancient manuscript and against which there isnât the slightest bit of evidence except speculation.
What was He condemned for â not the trumped-up charge they fed Pilate, but in the Sanhedrin? He was condemned for making Himself equal with God.
So youâre being deceptive⌠again,.
When you read the Greek from a first-century Jewish perspective the hard part isnât finding the Jesus proclaimed Himself to be God, itâs that He managed to do it so often without getting hauled away!
It also butchers the grammar.
Arianism was based on bad exegesis and bad philosophy back in the first centuries, and it hasnât gotten any better; the only difference is that today itâs more deceptive.
And if it actually read âa godâ, there wouldnât have been any Jewish converts left in the church once Johnâs Gospel got circulated! There was either totally and thoroughly divine, or there was mortal; there was no mix, no âa godâ.
No, first you have to forget Greek grammar.
Only if you have a shallow understanding of Greek.
What that clause actually says, is âAnd GOD is what the Logos was beingâ. It indicates that all that the Logos was was God, and that nothing about the Logos was not God â so âfullyâ isnât a bad translation.
I donât know why Iâm bothering; everything you write has been refuted on this forum before, and the scriptures admonish not to cast pearls before swine.
