Jesus Christ as the Way, Truth, and Life

Live from Salt Lake City, Utah. This is Heart of the MatterTGNN’s original show where Shawn McCraney deconstructed religion and developed fulfilled theology., where we do all we can to try and worship God in Spirit and in Truth. I’m your host, Shawn McCraneyFounder of TGNN and developer of the fulfilled perspective—calling people to faith outside of religion..

Show 7 483 Jesus Christ Part III February 23rd, 2016

Our prayer tonight will be given by______________

Let’s open up with two emails I received last week – the first provides me with a change to apologize and the second an opportunity to teach. First from Dale on banking. (READ EMAIL HERE) Second from __________ on Islamic God. (READ EMAIL HERE)

The Exclusivity of Jesus

Then . . . Let me begin by emphatically stating that I am convinced, I believe, I will go so far as to say, I know, that “Jesus is the way, the Truth and the Life and no man comes to the Father but by Him.” Is that clear? I am convinced it is my job as a follower of Him – Him, to share and teach Him as the way, truth and life to all who wish to hear, all who seek, by the Spirit.

But we are very funny, us humans. We seek for ways to distinguish ourselves, to establish rules and boundaries and orders as a means to exclude all who differ and to protect our little fiefdoms of truth. Many of us can relate to this practice when we examine music and our personal tastes and love for it. Remember the days when you loved a style of music and found yourself so insulted – angry even – when someone would say your music sucked, or they make fun of it, or they claim that their form of music is better?

Your sitting in Math class and have a sticker on your folder for Madonna and the kid next to you – you know the one – long hair, stoned out of his brains, starts laughing at you for your support for her music. Or maybe you go to a punk show over the weekend and felt so alive in the pit and some girl in your church group the next week starts singing the praises of Captain and Tennille and you just want to rip her eyes out?

Human Tendencies in Preferences

It’s the way we humans are when it comes to things we feel passionate about, things we really adore and relate – We want to promote them (to the right people of course) and we want to demote anything that challenge it – or tries to compete with it. Now whether you realize it or not this is what motivates us all when we look at others who claim to believe and relate to an invisible God that is different than ours.

We say disco sucks to them. Of metal is evil. Or runk or rap or scream is noise. We say we hate country. We mock those who love pop. We divide, we claim our music is best, and we simultaneously find reasons to diminish other genres.

Listen closely: These approaches are a sign of immaturity, the fear of change, a fear of being wrong. It’s comparable to the blind men asked to describe an elephant but the one who is at the tail describes an elephant as a tail, and the one at the foot describing an elephant as its foot. Only when people begin to mature and open up their willingness to see all the elements of music do they then begin to see music as a whole, and various approaches to it as having a purpose, and a place, and yes, even value.

Maturity in Belief

In the realm of music, most people go from being immature and critical and angry of all other forms of music to finding what they relate to best and sticking with it for the rest of their lives. In these people, the anger and defensiveness for their preferred music fades but they become stodgy and old and simply believe that nothing is better than what they have come to love. This is why parents force their kids to listen to the music of their day and recoil at the tunes of modernity.

When it comes to religions we have the very same things occurring – it's frankly amazing. The immature of the faith zealously and radically attack and defend the religion of their youth, claiming it is best and everyone else’s suck and those who have embraced resignation lean back in their easy chairs of tradition and categorize everything that is not what they believe as foolishness – or worse yet, noise.

I want to try and introduce to you how I see things – as a sold-out believer in the Lord Jesus Christ amidst.

The Concept of God in World Religions

A world of other faiths where people DO seek God.

(WHITE BOARD)
One GOD
(No matter how he is seen, he is who He is. If people seek Him they are seeking Him – rightly or wrongly)

Let’s liken Him to (the source of Inspiration of all Music in the Universe)

But until His Inspirations take on Human Form (vibration), his pure music (the Truth) cannot be heard clearly.

The Role of Jesus

WORLD RELIGIONS
Each presents a combination of different instrumentations which produce their own sounds, rhythms, and grooves which draw and attract those who have been groomed or “accustomed” to hearing it. The chords they play ring true.

But here’s the key that is hard to understand. The instruments that turn the inspiration for music from God into sounds – vibrations – are all Jesus. He’s the percussion, He’s the strings, He’s the wind instruments – and most people have yet to discover that He is the one who transforms ”the inspiration for music from God” into sounds we can hear. Until He is known, religions will forever be interpreting and misinterpreting the “inspirations for music from God.” BUT . . . it is all coming from the same God. All of it.

Diverse Devout Seekers

DEVOUT PEOPLE WHO ARE . . .
Baptist. Mormon. Catholic. Buddhist. Muslim. Presbyterian. Oneness Pentecostal. Jehovah’s Witness. A member of a Cult

• Let’s use 9 families to represent people who truly seek God. Baptist. Mormon. Catholic. Buddhist. Muslim. Presbyterian. Oneness Pentecostal. Jehovah’s Witness. And a member of a Cult. (draw)
• Now we have to get beyond the prejudice that only the group you belong to seeks to love and follow and worship God but that there are others who truly are devout in their search, okay?
• (Draw) Now we might liken “God” to the inspiration of all music. To say that God is not the inspiration of the music millions of devout followers respond to is to simply fall back into the attitude that “my music is best and yours is just noise,” right? All devout are seeking to Know Him, hear Him, follow or dance to Him – remember, He is the original source of all music.
• (go to top)
• Our job is to get people to realize that God is the inspiration and Jesus is vibration, that’s all. And until we are successful at this message, we realize that all devout people are responding to inspirations, and that these heavenly inspirations come from the same God. We accomplish nothing (but to prove our immaturity, fears, and uncertainties) when we tell people who strain to hear Him that their music sucks.

(BACK TO CHAIR)

Okay, let’s continue our discussion of Jesus as the Son of God and Old Testament references we use to justify the claim.

Let’s look at one more example in the Old Testament where Son of God is used but has then been grossly misappropriated today as a means to feed the masses myths about our Savior.

It’s in Daniel 3:25 when Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego are bound and cast into a fiery furnace because they refused to worship Nebuchadnezzar’s image.

There in the midst of the fire, a fourth being appears who, according to the words of Nebuchadnezzar, says:

“And the forth has the form as the Son of God.”
(Son and God in caps in the King James).

This part of Daniel was written in Aramaic, and the actual language should not be translated as Son of God uppercase and singular but “son of the gods” (lowercase and plural).

Why did the King James translators take the liberty to make it singular and uppercase?

Tradition? A desire to perpetuate myth? An attempt to perpetuate the doctrine of the pre-incarnate Christ having an actual form of a man?

Can’t really say.

What’s intriguing about this is first, Christians have long perpetuated the myth that this was the pre-incarnate Christ walking with the faithful amidst the trials of their faith (which I believe He does but Daniel is not a good prooftext to support it).

What is also interesting is the

Interpretation of the "Fourth Being" in Daniel

LDS (in their version of the OT) also identifies this “fourth being” in the chapter heading of their Bible as “the Son of God,” meaning Jesus. Both the LDS and those Christians who support this interpretation are off the mark in my opinion. First, Nebuchadnezzar was a pagan, a great Monarch King of Babylonia. He did not know or worship the living God nor would he have ever been in on the idea of a future Messiah who would be called the “Son of God.” Secondly, as pointed out, he didn’t see a “being in the form of the Son of God” but saw something in what HE SAID was “the form of the son of the gods” – which to him probably meant he was speaking of an angel or heavenly being of some sort.

Misinterpretations and Linguistic Context

Why are the LDS and the King James wrong in making this fourth figure Jesus? First, neither Aramaic nor Hebrew has capital letters – so the King James translators took misleading liberties here. Secondly, ancient writings in Aramaic prove that the term used here – bar-elahin – was used in their literature to describe subordinate gods (angelic beings), etc. Finally, if we drop down to verse 28 of Daniel 3, Nebuchadnezzar himself says:

“Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who hath sent his angel, and delivered his servants that trusted in him, and have changed the king's word, and yielded their bodies, that they might not serve nor worship any god, except their own God.”

We said last week that contextually speaking, the Jews of the Old Testament, when reading their sacred texts, were not really looking for a Messiah to come and save them until the Maccabean revolt. Then David’s throne, which they believed would never go away, had gone away, and at this point, they began to see the Old Testament narrative as predictive of a Messiah who was to come . . . and save them.

Expectations of a Messiah

I would agree with most scholars that by the time Jesus appeared the Jews were not by any means looking for the Messiah to be “the Son of God” but were looking for an earthly King to emancipate them from physical bondage – one like unto Moses who had led their people out from Egypt. Also, while pagan nations would speak of men being gods, to Jews, the idea of Yahweh having a son was unconscionable. I mean even among the Roman Empire a custom had begun where they attributed “divine sonship” to their emperors!

Caesar Augustus, the emperor when Jesus was born, was hailed “son of God,” and “Lord” and was considered the “Savior of the World.” According to Andrew T Lincoln, in his book, Born of a Virgin, the Romans called Caesar Augustus’ birth “good news” and they believed that he was going to establish what could be reliably considered to be “a lasting reign of peace.” Lincoln, a distinguished professor of the New Testament says that “Luke’s story of (Jesus’ birth) both echoes and challenges the imperial propaganda about Augustus.” Harrell points out that while Jesus is referred to as the Son of God more than thirty times in the New Testament, only a few of them refer to His biological birth.

Theological Perspectives on Jesus' Sonship

Why is this important? The LDS believe that Jesus was the Son of God through His biological birth. They believe that Jesus existed as a created person prior to His biological birth. They believe that He was the first-created spirit child of Heavenly Father with the rest of us following thereafter in the spiritual creative order of humankind. Trinitarianism teaches that Jesus was the Son of God at His biological birth. They believe that Jesus existed as a person prior to His biological birth. They believe that He is the spirit child or Son of Heavenly Father too.

In order for biblical Christianity to be seen clearly and the failures of Mormonism to shine most bright, the traditional Christian view must be revisited through a stripped-down view of what the Bible actually says as a means to show that we actually do NOT agree with much of what Smith borrowed from the faith . . . and then tweaked. What do I mean by this? Mormonism, a creation of Joseph Smith, is an amalgamated, altered form of Trinitarian theology. In other words, vestiges of creedal trinitarianism thrive in this new fangled faith’s explanation of Jesus. In order for us to absolutely clear the path for Mormonism to be seen as faulty, we…

Reevaluating Religious Traditions

MUST – MUST divest ourselves of the traditions and myths we have embraced as a means to show that Smith did nothing but create his counterfeit . . . from a counterfeit! I doubt this will ever get legs because it will take a herculean effort of reason, patience, and a heart-felt willingness for seekers of truth today to confront the mythical, man-made traditions present in our own faith before we can show that the founder of Mormonism incorporated elements into his religion that were faulty in ours.

This is how much I care about reaching Mormons. It’s not just to get them to leave Mormonism, it’s to help these devout people to leave FOR the truths of Christianity and NOT just for another set of traditional fables. So let’s look at the brass tacks of what I’m talking about.

The Role of Jesus' Sonship

Theologian James Dunn posits things this way, saying: “the first Christians thought of Jesus divine sonship principally as a role and status he had entered upon being appointed (listen) being appointed at His resurrection.” What?! Let me read this to you again carefully. Ready? “the first Christians thought of Jesus divine sonship principally as a role and status he had entered upon being appointed (listen) at His resurrection.” Jesus divine Sonship was a role and status being APPOINTED at His resurrection?

Listen, Mormons and Christians alike have long accepted teachings that say Jesus was a literal figure (bearded and long haired) who dated back into the eternities, uncreated . . . and standing equal next to His long haired and bearded father. Both parties, misappropriationg Old Testament passages, in some form or another refer to this as His “eternal sonship.”

But is there another explanation that has escaped us for hundreds if not thousands of years? One that if we begin to see it in biblically supported ways will clearly illustrate the errant views of both the original counterfeit and then the “counterfeit of the counterfeit?”

Reexamining Biblical Interpretation

You see, for a Mormon to see the divine attribute of Sonship given to Jesus upon his deathSeparation from God—now overcome. Physical death remains, but it no longer separates us from life with God. and resurrection removes the “literal biological Sonship” away from what they have long endorsed. And for Trinitarian Christians to accept another (biblical) view it allows them to remove the dark beard and long haired Jesus from standing beside His father from eternity as well – which is just NOT the case.

Of course they won’t want to do accept this view – they will want to cling to the man-made myths they have grown to love and adore, but let me explain how I see Jesus as the Son of God, and then we’ll use the Bible to support my claims. I would suggest that there was no eternal sonship of Jesus but there has always been God – who the Bible describes as a consuming light, fire, and love. I would suggest that the Bible tells us that God has related and interacted with human beings through “Words” and by “Spirit.”

I would suggest that a human child name Yeshua was conceived of a woman by the Holy Spirit (which was God). I believe that this child, from the onset of its earthly existence, was filled with the “Words of God” but as a human was just like all other human children. He was taught. He learned, and his body felt pain and pleasure.

Hebrews tells us that this human child, though the Son of God, “learned obedience by and through the things He suffered.” Hebrews 5:8

In other words this human child overcame the desires and will of his very human flesh by living according to every word that proceeded from the mouth of God – and remember, “the very Words of God were what was in Him clothed in flesh.

The Regeneration of Jesus

As a means to get a grip on Jesus let me ask you this? Did He need to be born again? Well first ask yourselves this question– was He a man? To this all Christians say yes. And what did this man say in John 3:3? He said: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of GodGod’s spiritual reign—fulfilled and present, not political or future..” So this man, Jesus, even though a child of God full of spirit and truth, had to be regenerated.

(Listen – this is important in my estimation) If He, was a person who always existed as a person with God, and was co-equal with God as this person, or as the LDS say, he was the first

The Necessity of Christ's New Birth

Spirit person of many in the pre-existence, then the notion of Him needing to experience regeneration is foolish. But if He was a Man, if His mind, will, and emotion were human, if His pre-existence was in the form of being God’s words, then “unless He was born-again, He would not even see the Kingdom of God.” So I would suggest that Jesus had to be regenerated before entering into the Kingdom of God.

The Role of Jesus

Now, because He is the only begotten of the Father and the arche of the human race (the first) I am personally convinced that what He did, and how He did it (in terms of chronology) is not exactly how it happens with all of us. In other words, there was so much that He was accomplishing as Lord, King, Savior on our behalf it’s impossible to apply all that happened to Him straight over to every individual.

Jesus as the Template

We might say that He physically was the primary physical template for the redemption of Man spiritually, if that make any sense. And so He came to His own, which God established as His (through Abraham and David) and physically and individually accomplished all that was necessary for those of His own who received Him . . . and then the rest of the world.

The idea that Jesus was, or had to be, born again or regenerated is an odd concept for the trends in Evangelicalism today. Yet, (as Don Preston maintains) “the reality and necessity of Christ's "new birth" is well established in scripture, and is vital for a proper understanding of eschatologyStudy of “last things”—TGNN teaches all biblical eschatology was fulfilled in 70 A.D. More."

We’ll continue to talk about Jesus and nuances of Him relative to the LDS and the Evangelical next week.

Let’s open up the phone lines

(801)

And while we wait take a look at this”

SPOT HERE PLEASE