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Jesus Is The Son Of God by Jeff Pohlman © 2005
Matthew 3 : 16- And after being baptized, Jesus went up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and He saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove, and coming upon Him, 17- and behold, a voice out of the heavens, saying, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased . (New American Standard Version [NASV]- AMG Publishers - Spiros Zodhiates, Th.D. Greek Study Bible - emphasis mine)
T here are religions in the world which place Jesus in some lesser positions, instead of Him being The Son of God, and some which challenge whether He ever existed. Some of the descriptions which dilute Jesus, which I will write about here, cause me to bristle even to think of them. But there are plenty of profligates who have no problem perverting the truth of who Jesus is, so I put this down in writing, in order to help the reader focus on the truth of Jesus-Pure. This is another one of those areas where the apologetics writers and the cult sleuths of the day love to sniff out the errant teaching and expose it to the light of scripture. I continually thank the Lord for people like Josh McDowell, Winkey Pratney, and Walter R. Martin, and you would do well to search out their writings which expose cults, the occult, and errant theologies or religions. Thank the Lord for those types of people, because they perform the task of being the watchman on the wall (don't confuse that with a cult group which has material related to watch towers). The proverbial Biblical watchman sees danger, and alerts everyone to its existence. If you do nothing to educate yourself about the approaching danger nor prepare by entreating the Lord nor defending yourself, then you get overrun, but the watchman has done his job. In the aftermath shadow of the bombings of the World Trade Centers in New York City and the Pentagon plus the downed airplane in Pennsylvania, all on September 11, 2001, we have had numerous threat alerts issued from our newly-formed Department Of Homeland Defense. These sorts of things have been commonplace in countries like England and Europe for far longer than what we've experienced in the USA. The classical "Peter & The Wolf" syndrome tends to develop where the public constituency can wax cynical and apathetic to these alerts and warnings. The same becomes true within Christendom. The saying that "Jesus might return any moment" has been ringing in Christian's ears ever since He left here, over 2,000 years ago, and some folks are just plain dull to the prodding. The historical religious rituals that have been foisted upon humanity since Jesus was here in flesh, by many of the christianist religions that followed Him, have been nothing more than dull repetitions, ritual with no spirit life, and some done in the name of Jesus but becoming outright murder of whole populations (remember the crusades?). Part of the vehemence of today's jihadist islam is a reactionary response to those christianist crusade bloodbaths. Two wrongs don't make a right as they say, and current muslim jihad practice is no more justifiable than christianist crusade butcherings were in the dark ages (why do you think they were called dark in the first place?). It follows then that after generations of wolf-crying, misguided witch hunts and bloodbaths, not to mention the devil and his hordes laughing in full derision as christianists of that era burned their own at the stake for printing (oh my) Bibles; that we come to modern-day generations who think Christendom is an absolute joke. Powerless. Worthless. Baseless in claim. A bore. What are they looking at? History. What in history exactly? The deeds I mentioned above, tons of other charlatanism showmanship acts, and then they point at the dead sepulchers, the cathedrals, the temples, the chapels, and any other buildings that christianists meet in. For England and Europe, this lineage and its attendant buildings runs far deeper than the USA's short history since Columbus escaped Jewish persecution and annihilation at the hands of the King of Spain and sailed, to what's now our side of the world, back in 1492. These modernists see ages upon ages of blood sweat and toil poured into the building of towers, which don't utter a word, which don't house a spirit, but which exact a hefty tax, and suck the breath out of many a generation. There stand the buildings, and nothing speaks back in return. The modernists level a judgment rightly. Where is the Life? Along with those charges come the other questions or theories, all surrounding the central figure to what we are about, JESUS THE CHRIST.
MISGUIDED PROPAGANDA - A FEW OF MANY Only A Prophet Several religions hold out that Jesus was nothing more than a prophet. From bahai to islam and many in between, you will find this claim in their teachings. To deny who and what Jesus really is, brings the world of relationship in-and-through Jesus down to a sinful world filled with mysticism, magical trickery and carnality. There are differences amongst each group that denigrates Jesus' place and position as The Son of God. For instance, looking at just the two mentioned above, which are two amongst many, bahai is a peaceful-coexistence group with an expressed effort to meld all "faiths" into their one, and they supposedly possess further manifestations of god on beyond Jesus, while islam is a militant supremacy group with an expressed effort to wipe out all other religions, through the proverbial and real sword if need be, and they have no need of a savior because a follower-muslim can earn-work his way into something they call heaven. The word islam supposedly means truth, and the word muslim supposedly means follower (presumably of truth, they would like you to believe). An irony of language is the parody of this particular word islam. In American English, the word slam has a few meanings, like: - the forceful closing of a door; - scoring points in basketball; - hitting a baseball way out into the ball field; - the winning of all but one of the hands in the card game of bridge; and then the one we are looking at - to defame, slander and spotlight a subject or person (which is also the definition of the word "denigrate" that I used above) by talking badly about them, either with propaganda and lies, or exposing the truth compared to their lies. It is thus interesting, that these people who profess to be followers of truth, have a religious affiliation name where they profess to be slamming the rest of the world, i.e. I - - slam. With jihad rampant, talk of moderates distancing themselves from the radical fundamentalists, and so forth, it is no wonder that some don't want to be known for slamming the rest of the world. Some don't care, and are proud to continue on proclaiming, "I slam," a profession of "faith" where they have no problem defaming and slandering, and their specific target is anything to do with Judaic Christianity. Those of this islam group will tell you that they believe in Jesus, the same as they do Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob and Moses, their proclaimed fathers of their religion. Like all of those others, they claim that Jesus was just one of them, a prophet, just like their proclaimed and misguided misanthropic leader, Muhammad. That starting basis should be an indicator, when a religion is born out of hatred, it is on its way to war. Where the people group come from the earlier band of Ishmaelites, and then have a hateful leader who later focuses their efforts, like Muhammad, it only took the windfall profits from sale of their oil to put legitimacy into the sails of their hatred heading into the 21st Century. In fact, Jesus didn't do a percentage of His ministry while He walked the earth, in the gifting of prophecy. What He did do was fulfillment. The muslims have it dead wrong, He wasn't a prophet, he IS a fulfiller. The crux of their problem is that they call a particular being allah, the American press wrongly translates that word as God, and the muslim community wants the whole world to believe that that allah-individual is the same as God, The Creator Of The Universe, yet they deny that Jesus is (forget was) His Son, and they deny the need for faith in His sacrifice, because they have a different set of salvation passages, which are all focused around mankind's works (and that's not "womankind" by the way). Those of the bahai group will tell you that Jesus was as equal of a manifestation as Moses, buddha, zoroaster, confucius, mohammed, krishna, lowe, and baha'u'llah. That's their "thing." But a manifestation of what? They believe that all nine of those humans are equal manifestations of a singular divine conscience-mind, all wrapped into one message for the ages, going forward. If you think about it long enough, you discover that to believe that those nine humans were equals in some grand scheme of unity, then how come they are so contradictory and confusing, if melded together as one? The bahaist's leveling answer is that you would have to revert to the last of the great teachings as being the most superceding-perfect (which would be those of baha'u'llah). The sad truth about this group is that while their major prophets all contradict each other, none of their followers by his or her own admission can claim that moment of peace and joy, with the Creator of the universe flowing in them and through them as them, because their sins are forgiven - NOT. Why can't they experience that? Because they totally remove one's putting faith and trust in grace and sacrifice of The Son of God, Jesus.
A Misguided Clan Leader While some within leftover Judaism of Jesus' day leveled this claim, this is mainly a charge you will hear from old pagan religions brought forward to today, which were the motivating factors behind the Greeks and the Romans of Jesus' day, who eventually crucified Him. Hebrews who miss the messianic nature of Jesus are exactly that. If they truly believe that Jesus wasn't The Messiah fulfilling their prophecies, nothing more than a misguided clan leader, they should still be engaging in their first testament rituals of animal slaughter and temple ritual caretaking in order to temporarily cover their sins until their prophesied messiah does come. Did another misguided clan leader, some disgruntled rabbi, tell them to stop sacrificing animals within the last couple thousand years? Paganism on the other hand, is at its heart, a religion based on the exaltation of the female, and the usual distractions that satan can inflict on a duped following given to that bent. These people will say that Jesus was great, they believe He existed, but that He's a powerless male placebo in comparison to the spells and incantations they can throw, in today's society. An by the way, they WILL tell you that a white witch IS good. They say Jesus has gone missing for over 2,000 years. This group is joined by hordes of the Norse and Germanic bands and others like the druidic and wiccan bands seen emanating from England and other more northern areas over Europe, but extending into Europe in the final analysis. Obviously, they have found acceptance all over the world, and now produce their latest mockery in the famous million dollar best seller series by Joanne K. Rowling, Harry Potter. I'll not discuss this here, because I have more in depth coverage on it in other places on this web site. Of course, these misguided duped people themselves would like to believe that Jesus WAS nothing more than misguided Himself, which would give their chances at casting spells, partaking in drunken debauchery and sexual perversion rituals a real possibility, without consequence of punishment. However, we know that Jesus was anything but misguided. He always spoke of fulfilling Father's will, while He was in constant communication with His Father. The substance of Jesus' message was-and-is that He is One with Father and Holy Spirit, at the same time He paid the price required for those of us who exercise our faith to also be one with them, making a reality that we can be living in the here-and-now, with Him living in us and through us as us. That's hardly misguided. He paid the price with His own blood. It is finished. We are not waiting for heaven nor eternity to BEGIN, because Jesus said "It is finished." It's already been done - - end conversation. Is Jesus your guide, or is satan your channel-medium? The demons and satan shriek in horror at reality, satan has no blood to pay for sin with, and they are going to be the recipients of a guided (rather than misguided) missile, heading straight for eternal torture in hell.
The Great High One, but We are Brothers and Equal to Him - Gods Ourselves Here is a claim about Jesus, which is found in many cults, including Joseph Smith's mormonism. While the reading about this misguided poor money digger (he and his father were notorious for divining where money might be, through witching sticks and seeing-stones, and they industriously dug all over New York and Vermont) is fascinating, his religion is an amalgam of several sects, from worldwide romanism to freemasonry, due to the parental duplicity in his disjointed upbringing in Palmyra, NY. The leadership of his cult is made up of folks who possess nomenclature which you will find familiar, if you are a student of the Bible. As you progress from their stakes, blocks and wards (precinct subdivisions starting from the entry-low-end of the religion), you progress upward through their governing Aaronic priesthood, through their Melchizedek priesthood, and you end up at the top with their First Council of Seventy, First Council of Twelve and First Presidency. These folks aren't alone in the world with claims to equality with Jesus, they are just the most prolific in our day. The philosophy (can it be called a theology?) basically says that while Jesus was a great one, maybe even without peer, they still believe that their current sitting twelve, along with the highest priest, are the reigning apostles in the earth, and as such, ARE the direct voice of God. They are God. It is as if God Himself is speaking personally. Anything they say, write or publish is the unction of The God Incarnate, so move aside Jesus and let your more-modern brothers do the talking, you had your day, and now it's our turn. Every one of them aspires to serve on the apostles twelve council, if not to someday become the first. Which is no different of an aspiration from what many lawyers in the land desire, hoping to become a judge in a local precinct, all the way to serving on the US Supreme Court. In this brand of christianism there are similarities to true Christianity, and the religion as a whole is polite and peaceful, so they are tolerated by-and-large. In some locales, the sheer mass of numbers of their congregation is definitely overwhelming to those not in their fold (referred to as Gentiles in their religion). And the "gentile" folks in that setting usually exhibit a thinly disguised contempt for their religious neighbors who are a majority. I'm sure this would be a similarity, in feeling, to being a lone Jew or Christian, plunked into a vocational work setting in the middle of Saudi Arabia, where the majority of surrounding locals are Wahhabi Muslims. All being said, the essence of Jesus being The Son of God is missing from the constructs of their religion. He is considered as a son of God, along with many others as equal and direct, while one of those direct sons is one of them. This leads us to the sort of thing where Jesus blew the top off the Hebrew's religion of His day, the ceremonial ritualists who had lost the essence of His Spirit. If you read in Luke 4, you see where He had returned to His hometown temple in Nazareth, He stood up to be the reader of the scroll for the day, within their traditional ritual, He was circumstantially handed the scroll of Isaiah (no where in the Hebrew writings is this particular phraseology written as a repeat), he scrolls down to chapter sixty-one and reads verses one and two which proclaims: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor (of spirit), He has sent me to proclaim release to the captive (spirits), to regain the sight of the blind (spirits), to set into freedom the oppressed (spirits), and to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord. He was a participant within their religious sacraments/ rituals, and yet He and Father played a trump card. They utilized their supernatural abilities to cause this particular scroll to be handed to Jesus when it was His turn to be the reader of the day. Once He read that scripture, one which had been burning on the hearts of the Hebrew community for generations, He had the Holy temerity to tell them that He was-and-is the true fulfillment of that scripture. This separates Him from the run-of-the-mill mormon (or any other cultist of this bent) who proposes that he is one of many equals with Jesus the Christ. Jesus clearly said that He was the only Son of God, by applying this singular scripture to Himself. He had it written by Isaiah, and He made sure it was fulfilled by Him, singularly. For a moment, the fickle crowd was speaking well of Him, if you read verse twenty-two, but after He went on and gave them interpretations and warning about how to treat Him, they rioted instead, and in verse twenty-nine attempted to throw Him off a high cliff - yes - murder Him. So even though the people and priests had a riot on their hands (oops, it was supposed to be a day of rest and a worship service), where they ended up calling Him a blasphemer, and tried to murder Him, He still had the upper hand because it was not His day to die in flesh, nor was a cliff the instrument of death to be applied to Him, so He confounded their minds and walked through their own riot to safety. While it is true that we can say that we have part of Him living in us and through us as us, due to Jesus' blood being shed for us, which we have applied by faith to our personal lives; we are NOT saying that we are God, nor equals with God, all the while negating the power of who Jesus really is. Further; while Jesus makes us sons through faith in Him, we are not saying that we are sons due to our own goodness, nor good works, nor innate original Godliness - like they do.
Neutralized and Subordinated to His Mother There are some who elevate Jesus' mother to a place of equality and holiness with Jesus. Occasionally you might hear of their doctrine of immaculate conception. Upon asking what that is exactly, you will be told that it proclaims that Mary had to be immaculately conceived in order for the same to be so for Jesus. I'm not going to get into this too deeply, other than to say, why stop at Mary? Why not say that Mary's mom was also immaculately conceived, in order for Mary to be Holy? And how about Mary's grandmother? Great grandmother? Where would the requirement stop? If you remember what I wrote above, paganism has at its root belief system, the supremacy of the female gender over the male. This sect of people who subordinate Jesus to His mother's level, also has several large groups which spawn from their ranks (druids, jesuits, knights and orders of the cross, wicca, and so forth), all of pagan ritual beliefs (focused around pagan sexual worship practices in honor of seasonal changes and fertility rites), and stemming from the general area of the central Mediterranean region, intermixing superstition with relics, mystical rituals, astrology, and a sprinkling of Christianity here and there. There are theologians who call this pagan christianism. Some try to solidify legitimacy for this brand of religion saying that the apostle Peter visited Rome, making that the basis for their "claim" as the first branch of Christendom (an ever-raging fight, over and against Greek Orthodoxy). Yet that claim about Peter isn't true. We'll forget that it subjugates Jerusalem to Rome for a moment (wholly because arguments about "first," and a physical "place," have no importance nor bearing in Jesus' economy of His true Kingdom and His true ekklesia), and notice that in historical records like Foxes Book Of Martyrs and others, it appears that Jesus' apostle Peter was never in Rome (scripture even indicates this - that Peter stayed put in Jerusalem while Paul was the itinerant traveler/ ambassador to Europe and Asia). All the while it is said that Simon The Magician of scripture (Acts 8:9-24), tried to buy Jesus' Holy Spirit's power, and after being rebuffed by apostle Peter, decided to make a mockery of apostle Simon Peter's name, calling himself Simon Peter (but still the magician), and having been repelled in Jerusalem, he ended up settling in Rome. Some would conjecture that this Supreme Magi of wild popularity in that whole region, started his own religion, with mixtures of paganism and christianism, and it still exists to this day, as a bane to true Christianity. I'll let the reader make judgments on that one. I can say that I know many fine true Christians within that sect, and I'll not throw rocks at them, letting them decide for themselves what is correct in their own conscience, as far as true Jesus worship and relationship goes. All I know is that Mary was a sinner, the same as you and I, conceived from the loins of two joined human sinners, and Genesis 5 is clear about it. In verse one it declares that Adam was made in the relational sinless image and likeness of God. The sin event happened between Adam and Eve. Then in verse three it clearly states that Adam was well past one-hundred years old when he was father to a son in his sin-image, as well as many other sons and daughters (and by implication - all of his same sin-image). No where does scripture tell us that Mary escaped this genealogy of being created in the sin-image.
Never Existed While this is a weak presentation by some who have haled from Judaism, it is the basic tenet of atheism. If you start with the basic atheistic premise that there is no God, no Creator of the universe, that we exist by pure chance, albeit a highly organized chaos, then it follows that there is no need, and no existence of a savior. Thus they claim that Jesus didn't exist any more than the mythical gods of Chinese-Japanese, Egyptian, Greco-Roman or Norse-Germanic mythologies. To them, God doesn't exist, and Jesus is a myth. This comes down to attempting to show a person, who is thinking from a fleshly basis, about something that exists in a spirit realm. It is done every day. I'll not go into it here, suffice it to say that Holy Spirit is said to be The Hound of Heaven who hunts us down and continues to "dog" us, calling our names, by spirit, convicting us of His reality in existence, and He doesn't give up. Again, if a person is sincere at trying to ascertain verity in history, there are many excellent books in the apologetics arena which address the existence of Jesus in the physical sense, at a particular point in time in the earth. The quantity of the writings and the verity of them so far surpasses any other writing from all of recorded history that it is truly astonishing. However, it requires of a person, the commodity of time to investigate, if they are truly interested. I have found that most people who lodge complaints like this are in truth, lazy researchers, weak-kneed at the alter of investigation, and arm chair critics, perfectly unwilling to do some legwork and research to find out the truth. If they would truly research AND petition God to show Himself, on a consistent basis, I have seen it time and again, where God, The Creator of the Universe DOES show Himself to that individual. The individual's spirit-heart must start to be self-softened and open, in order to truly seek Him. That's a formative step of allowing - - that the person might be wrong in his or her original thesis of a God-void. Know this: Father God is a gentleman, and He does make it a practice of showing Himself, with grace and mercy, so as not to slay and destroy those who seek Him. In the searching, they find that Jesus did indeed exist, He truly is God's Son, and He shed His own blood so that all might become exchanged-life fellowship-partakers of Father right along side Jesus.
ALL ENCOMPASSING CONCLUSION God is comprised of Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Colossians 2 : 8- See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. 9- For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form, 10- and in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority; 11- and in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ; 12- having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. (New American Standard Version [NASV]- AMG Publishers - Spiros Zodhiates, Th.D. Greek Study Bible - emphasis mine)
A fact remains within all of Judaic Christianity, once the sin event occurred, there was no longer free access to Father-Son-Holy Spirit, and to be able to return to that place, there is a need for what is called permanent substitutionary atonement (the sacrifice of an innocent human being's blood/ life is the ransom note required, in exchange for your sin, to buy eternal life for you). Do you partake in Jesus?
© 2005 Permission to copy or reprint granted only if full version is quoted and proper notation of authorship recognition is given.
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