Archives for February 2014

PREAMBLE
For the past few years I have been working on a new book, “The Life of Christ in Five Phases.” It is in narrative form and it draws its information from the four Gospel books in the Bible with a big assist from various commentaries on the Bible. There is also a teaching aid I have compiled to assist anyone who wants to purchase it. The textbook “The Life of Christ in Five Phases” and the companion book “The Life of Christ in Five Phases Teaching Aid,” are both nearing completion. I thought it would be good to give my readers a FREE short preview of the book up to the impending birth of Jesus in Lesson Four. The preview will be a series of 3 or 4 posts. This is post #2. Regrettably we cannot include the Teaching Aid in this preview because of technological difficulties. AJS
* * *
God the Supreme Being
We all agree there is a Supreme Being who is basic to our varying views on the Godhead. It would be a logical first step to identify this Supreme Being and, in so doing, take a bold step toward the identification of His Son Jesus.
Just a glimpse of God is enough to make the praying, thinking Christian probe beyond the triune aspect of God and consider that God is yet more than the complex subject we study so avidly. He is more than Father, Son and Holy Spirit: He is many, many things to the universe that depends on Him for its continued existence. His Almighty Self extends to the ends of the universe and, conversely, He insinuates Himself into the most private recesses of the believer’s mind and heart. He is a God of the vastness of the cosmos and a God of the infinitesimal molecules and atoms and quarks of the microcosm or the invisible “small world” of nature. He reaches high, He descends low; He makes Himself smaller than human eye can see; He expands to fill the universe.
“Am I [only] a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off?” (Jer. 23:23) He is truly God in every aspect of creation and beyond.
“O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens.” (Psalms 8:1)
God is the eternal Spirit of whom all men are instinctively aware unless that awareness has been blurred by the supposed reasoning of warped minds. We all intuitively reach for Him until we start using the world’s distorted logic and we then withdraw our outstretched arms.
Even a child knows by some unconscious reasoning that if there is an “Imperfect” there must be a “Perfect.” As adults we not only know this: We know that the Perfect, being perfect, must have come before the Imperfect. We also know that if there is a continuation of anything there has to be a Beginning. If something has momentum, it necessarily had a Start. As we open our search, it does not matter what we call this Start, this Beginning, this Perfect; as long as we, as reasoning adults, are aware of Him in our minds and in the deeper recesses of our beings, the name will come later.
Knowing Him merely as an item of information does not sub¬stantially affect the learner; the learner must become wholly involved with God. Without God all men are woefully incomplete and emotionally and intellectually denied. In Adam mankind knew from its inception the complementary presence of its Creator. At Adam’s first awareness of being, there before him was the Mother/Father aura of God brooding over and around him:
“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” (Gen. 2:7) This scripture is short, but it conveys a powerful concept; deep and lofty thoughts arise when we read it.
All atheists, I surmise, are unwitting “victims” of the truth that humanity is inher¬ently habituated to the sense of the presence of God. The atheist will firmly dispute this statement, but if he should be completely bereft of this essential Presence, the atheist could neither maintain his sanity nor his humanity.
No individual who, because of his godless philosophy and way of living, we classify as being without God, is shut out from the unconscious sense of the presence of God. Such a person has only ignored and/or rejected that Presence. God is merciful beyond human reason; the miserable wretch, who is supposedly without God, may surfeit himself with wine, women and song as Solomon did, and engage in intellectual pursuits and constructive works. But these efforts are but futile flailings against an awesomely superior Power and will avail him nothing but damnation – yet even then, only if he (or she) continues in his sinful, headlong rush to destruction.
If this view of the essential nature of God’s presence is true – and it unquestionably is – we should pursue the biblical trail of this indispensable Being and make every effort to come to grips with Him, see who He is and what place He should occupy in our lives today.
Grasping the Totality of the Father
If there is indeed only one God and not three fully separate Persons (which would make three Gods), who is this one Being? The Bible states that in the beginning Elohim created the heavens and the earth. (Gen. 1:1) Elohim is plural, but is used with the Hebrew verb for “created” that is singular in form, thus: “In the beginning GODS [He] created [singular form] the heavens and the earth.” It is not the Father talking with the Son or the Holy Ghost as separate Beings, nor is it God consulting with Lucifer concerning creation as some have said (which is the height of irrationality). If that were so, why the singular verb? The Zondervan Pictorial Bible Dictionary tells us it is “a Hebrew idiom…a plural of magnitude or majesty,” the result of God’s being who He is. I prefer to think of the statement as being the plurality of God reasoning within His multi-personal Self.
Although we are made in the image of God, we are immeasurably inferior copies of Him. Even so, using that inferior copy as a less than perfect pattern, we can get an embryonic idea of what – the word “what” is used advisedly: we know moderately well who, but too little of what – God is. He is infinitely wise, all powerful, capable of doing all things and knowing the end (to eternity) from the beginning (from eternity). He is the God of wind, rain and fire. He holds the limitless expanse of the cosmos in His hands. He is the God of war (as in the days of the early Israelites), the God of peace, the God of fertility and harvest. He is the God of every part, particle and phase of time, space and creation. Should it be a matter of wonder then, considering these particulars and the above mentioned Hebrew idiom, that the Bible should state that “GODS [He] made the heavens and the earth”?

For the past few years I have been working on a new book, “The Life of Christ in Five Phases.” It is in narrative form and it draws its information from the four Gospel books in the Bible with a big assist from various commentaries on the Bible. There is also a teaching aid I have compiled to assist anyone who wants it. The textbook “The Life of Christ in Five Phases” and the companion book “The Life of Christ in Five Phases Teaching Aid,” are both nearing completion. I thought it would be good to give my readers a FREE short preview of the book up to the impending birth of Jesus in Lesson Four.  It will be a series of 3 or 4 posts. This is post #2. Regrettably we cannot include the Teaching Aid in this preview because of technological difficulties.            AJS

•         *         *          *

Who Is Jesus?

Any attempt to get an intellectual knowledge of Jesus Christ is bound to produce a certain amount of frustration. We can never in this life fully know who and what He is; we do not have the mental capacity. Trying to get a full concept of the Eternal God dwelling in finite man makes one’s mind tremble like a 2?liter engine attempting to operate on 120?octane gasoline. The fuel is richer than the mind can possibly handle. But this should not keep us from trying to comprehend Him. It has never stopped mankind in trying to know more about any other subject. And there is always the grace of God to help us — if our motivation is pure.

We want to learn more of Jesus in a scholarly way, but that by no means is the end of our quest. What we should want above all is to know Him better as our Savior and to experience the vital spiritual life that He gives us. Intellectual knowledge of the Christ without an accompanying heart acceptance of Him is sheer futility. But to know Him more than casually, by intellect and by heart (the inner person), is our goal.

Three Aspects of God

Text Ref. 5

To know Jesus of course we must have at least a relatively good knowledge of God. We know that there are these three divine expressions: God the Father; God the Logos or Word (John 1.1); God the Holy Spirit. The three, we are told, constitute the Holy Trinity. It would serve no good purpose to contend that there is no such word in the Bible as “trinity.” That is not pertinent because there still remain undeniably a Father, a Logos or Word and a Holy Spirit, whatever one chooses to name the overall concept.

Of course we who comprise the “Oneness” movement are supposedly completely at odds with the Trinitarians. This writer cannot agree with this stance. When one studies the writings of the Trinitarian theologians (as opposed to the man who voices his unlearned opinion at the local barber shop) one can see that, although the words may be different, they are saying in essence what we are saying. After they go to great lengths to tell us there are three Persons in the Godhead, they then insist that the three are not actually three since the three are of one essence and think and agree as one. The main point here is that they are firm in their assertion there is only one God.

Is there, then, such a wide gulf between them and us? While we stoutly and correctly maintain, as they do, that there is one God, do we not admit there are three distinct manifestations of the one God? We carefully avoid saying there are three persons as if fearful that will proliferate the one God. But one of the definitions of “person” is this: “Any of the three modes of being (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) in the Trinity [Godhead].” (Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia © 1999).) That should not ruffle our Pentecostal feathers too much.

There are different spheres of operations for the three respective manifestations of God although there is a blurring of the boundaries at times. This is because whether one refers to the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit, they are all one God. Each expression or manifestation of God is fully God, therefore each one shares the responsibility and/or credit for all the actions taken by the other two facets of God.

For example, Christ created all things (Eph. 3:9; Col. 1:16, 17) but we would not presume to say that the Father and the Holy Spirit were completely shut out of this activity. There is another example to buttress the premise that one manifestation of God does not operate independently of the other two: The Holy Ghost dwells in the hearts and directs the activities of the saints of God according to John 14:26 and 16:13. But in Acts 16:7 we read that the “Spirit of Jesus” (ASV, RSV, NIV) was He who directed the journeys of Paul and Silas. This Spirit of Jesus 0of course is the same One we call the Holy Ghost. The scripture’s apparently chance reference to Him as the Spirit of Jesus helps to confirm our contention that the three are all one God and what one does is in effect done by all three. At the same time we must remember that God chooses to differentiate between the respective works of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and that is the way we should view their operations.

To state it again, there are without argument a Father, a Son, and a Holy Spirit, and each one is a strong and distinct manifestation/expression/person — but of only one God. Yet we cannot deny that Jesus, while standing here on earth, prayed many times to the Father who, Jesus said, was in heaven. This would seem to indicate there is more than one Person in the Godhead. Perhaps we can resolve this dilemma before we are through with this quest as to who Jesus is.