The Set Up for the End Game (LR)

I’ve shown where we are all headed who know Jesus and believe in Him. I’ve touched on the Great God we serve. See Connected to the Trinity. Next, I want to look at what we are up against to get to the End Game.

In this life, we are up against a foe–a formidable one, the Devil, the Evil One. He sends temptation our way and we don’t always stand up to him and resist. Part of the plan is that we mature in this life and by Jeses’ power,learn to resist–Fight is what my pastor calls it. Realize the Evil One is here and he is real. Believe what the Word tells you about this foe. Jesus is our overcomer (John 1:5) and empowers us to overcome. Light overcomes the darkness. Jesus is the Light. The Evil One came before man was created and he is not going away quietly.

Then, God created. He created the heavens and the earth and everything in the earth including every living creature. You and I He created. As the story moves on man fell. The Fall is the biggest tragedy of all time. The world is as it is today because of the fall. There is beauty and there is good but evil and darkness abound as well.

The Gospel

From the G to the L, this video explains the gospel in four minutes. Amazing word’s put in a simple and easy to understand format.

Alert!! Is the Greek New Testament Reliable?

Archaeology is solidifying the reliability the canon of New Testament Letters and Gospels

with every finding.

Early, early, early fragments of the Gospel of Mark may have been found. Dr. Daniel Wallace reveals the findings in a debate with Dr. Bart Ehrman.  Read more here.

Craig Bloomberg has studied and written extensively on the reliability of the New Testament manuscripts.   See the list of 59 facts about the Gospel of John which are shown to be historically probably by author Craig Bloomberg.

Is John’s Gospel Reliable?  Go at the Gospel of John in a totally different approach!

Related articles

• Buy it on Amazon
• Gospel of John (earthpages.wordpress.com)
• First-Century Gospel Fragment? (str.typepad.com)
• Earliest manuscript of the New Testament discovered? (winteryknight.wordpress.com)
• Daniel Wallace and Bart Ehrman debate New Testament origins and reliability (winteryknight.wordpress.com)
• Reliability of Biblical Documents
• Reliability of Biblical Documents II

A Mass of Variant Views, Part 2

Image via Wikipedia

Now Back  Dr. Ehrman and Jesus Interrupted, on page 178 Dr.Ehrman says that he can’t even deal with an “event” such as a resurrection from the dead because he is a historian only.   So, though he counters some of what he reads in the Gospels about the resurrection, he is admitting, from a historical perspective (which is his domain now), that a historian such as he cannot deal with something like a resurrection from the dead.

But people like you and me can examine the Gospels along with the letter to the Corinthians and come away with our own judgments about the evidence presented there.   Those 500 people who saw Jesus after he died, was buried and subsequently raised from the dead, were Jews—Jews steeped in Jewish history and tradition.  Yet these Jews forsook their culture and history to follow this Jesus.  And not only did they reject their heritage in favor of the statements of Jesus, much of the world of that day became followers of this same Jesus.

This Galilean and his Galilean disciples, unlearned though they were, literally turned the then know world upside down and paid the ultimate price.  They all died martyrs’ deaths.

Who is Jesus and will you ever know who He is?

Who is Jesus? Do you think you know who He is? Will you ever know who He is? Until you have really contemplated Him and looked at the recorded history of Him, you will never know.

Paul’s friend and companion wrote precise details about his life. That would be one place to go and read if you want the history. Read it as history. Ignore the supernatural if you like for the moment and just find out what happened in his life. You owe it to yourself. What have you got to loose? Get an opinion or belief about him based on fact.

If He, Jesus is God-Incarnate, the God-Man, then, He is superior to all!!! No other man on earth claimed deity–that is, no other sane man. No other man/prophet on earth proved or backed up the claim to deity. We, followers of Jesus, simply believe that He is who He claimed to be and that He backed that up in the most forceful way by His life on earth. The largest proof is His resurrection from the dead and ascension into Heaven.

Who is Jesus? — The Incarnation-Implications for you

Actually, the incarnation points to a truth that the cross will make clear, namely, that our salvation is by sheeeeeer grace. I can’t stress that enough. In every other religion the founder is a human being sent by God to show us what to do to be saved. But Jesus is God come Himself. Now if God only needed to inform us what to do for salvation, he could have sent a prophet!!!!!! His personal coming means He will not just tell us what we have to do to be saved, but will do for us all that we cannot do ourselves. He will live the obedient life we should have lived but did not. He will die to pay the penalty for the disobedient life we shouldn’t have lived but did. He came himself to accomplish our salvation for us.

If Jesus is God, there is endless hope for the world and for you! The Bible tells us that Jesus brought “the kingdom of God.” That means that Jesus, the true King, has returned and has begun to put the world right with His power. Right now, that healing is only partial but some day all deformity, decay, sin, disease and imperfection will be complete taken away from here. This means we live with infallible hope (Romans 8:18-25) Whatever problem we face-whether disease or injustice or some other suffering-eventually God’s power will triumph over it. Weeping may remain for the night but Joy comes with the morning (Ps 30:5) Jesus is God. That means God has landed!!! The ideal has penetrated the real and is transforming it into his likeness. The world is destined for joy sooner or later.

I savor these thought and will for my lifetime. Whatever your state today, I hope and pray you have a wonderful day and are overcome by joy in Him.

Who is Jesus? — The Incarnation, a Retake

I realized after getting into the Incarnation of Jesus, the God-Man,  I had left much on the table that was said in the passages I used in the previous blog.  So,  I want to review them again and go much deeper.

John 1:1-3, 14

Here John challenges the pagan and the jewish views with these statements about the incarnation.   How does the incarnation challenge your world view?

The Incarnation in Jesus challenges the empiricist view.  This view denies that there is any eternal, supernatural world, or that the supernatural can ever break into and violate natural laws in the form of miracles.  The Incarnation, is THE Great Miracle of all time!

The incarnation challenges the post-modern view of the world.  What I hear from post- moderns is more mood than a coherent philosophy, but the post-modern view is that all depictions of reality are social constructs to serve the purpose of the dominant group, that there is no such thing as Truth with a capital T.

The incarnation, teaches that there is an absolute Truth and that Truth has become a human being.  Also, the incarnation challenges the modernized versions of religion which consist almost entirely of ethical behavior rather than focusing on the being, that is, what is inside a person.

The focus on ethical behavior puts in the background what is believed or the bases of that belief by saying “All religions basically believe in the same God. What really matters is that you are a good, loving and honest person.”

This pervasive view makes God a very vague and impersonal being.  God becomes a mysterious life-force and not a person we can know and relate to.  God is referred to in a very generic way.  Due to influence of eastern thought, many focus on meditation rather than verbal prayer-communication in order to “touch the divine.”

The incarnation, however, tells us that we have a palpable God—one who can be known, talked to, listened to, served, and loved.  The Incarnation gives us the most personal God in the face of modern efforts to depersonalize Deity.

John 14: 6,  I Timothy 2:5
How does the incarnation of God lead one to understand Jesus as the only mediator, the only way to reach God?

There is very strong opposition to the idea that Jesus is the only way to know and reach God.   This is seen as extreme narrow-mindedness.

This one aspect of the incarnation could take hours and hours of devotion and discussion.  Here I will only give a very brief summary.

If He, Jesus is God-Incarnate, the God-Man, then, He is superior to all!!!   No other man on earth claimed deity—that is, no other sane man.  No other man/prophet on earth proved or backed up the claim to deity.  We, followers of Jesus, simply believe that He is who He claimed to be and that He backed that up on the most forceful way by His life on earth.  The largest proof is His resurrection from the dead and ascension into Heaven.

You must understand that Christians who accept the Word of God, do not choose to believe that Jesus is the unique way to God.  Once we believe He is God in the flesh, we simply have to see Him as the only way to know and serve God truly.  Once that is understood—nothing else–no other prophet, no other religion, compares to His life and revelation.

Matthew 9:2-3

Here Jesus takes the authority to forgive sins.  The teachers of the law very correctly believed He was claiming a right that only God has.  When Jesus forgives this man’s sin,  he is saying that all sins are AGAINST HIM.  How can He say that if He is not God?  He can’t.  Only God can claim that all sins are against Him, since He made the world and everything in it and all sins are against His creation.  This scene makes it clear who Jesus claims to be.  He claims are radical as demonstrated by the reaction He got from Jewish leaders.

Matthew 11:27

“All things have been committed to me”   Wow!!  That is a staggering claim that he has the right and power to control everything that exists.

“No one knows the Father but the Son”  He claims to have complete knowledge of the Father in a way that no one else in the universe does.

“…no one  knows the Father”    He cannot mean that no one has any knowledge or any relationship to God.  Many know God in a limited way, so Jesus must be claiming absolute knowledge of God.  He is saying, “Compared to the exhaustive way I know the Father, no one knows him at all.”    But that raises a question—how could any mortal human claim to completely know the infinite God?

“…no one knows the Son but the Father.”  This may be more startling that all the statements he made here.  He is saying that He alone is capable of knowing the Father, so, the Father alone is capable of knowing him!!!  This is a flabbergasting claim that the Son, Jesus, is at an equal level and standing with the Father.

John 8:52-59
He claims to have existed well before Abraham was on earth.

John 20:28-29
Jesus accepts Thomas’ worship of Himself as God here.  Did you know that John repeatedly falls at the feet of an angel in worship in the book of Revelation??   The angel forbids it each time he does.  Jesus never forbids worship of Himself.

Mark 1:2-3
(Isaiah 40: 3-5)

Mark is saying that John the Baptist is the messenger predicted in Is 40:3-5.  There Isaiah says that the messenger is paving the way for YAHWEH ie, the LORD of glory!!!!!!   Therefore,  Mark is saying in the most unmistakable terms that in Jesus is the Lord God Himself.

Acts 20:28

Luke recorded Paul speaking about the church which “God…bought with his own blood.”  Think about that–the only person who shed blood, on the cross, was Jesus.  This means that Jesus was God and that His blood was God’s blood.  This shows that Luke and Paul believed that Jesus was full deity by the way this is recorded.

Colossians 2:9-10

This is unmistakable:  “All the fullness of the Deity (the only Deity) dwells in bodily form.”   Who was that?  It was and is Jesus.  Paul could have used a greek word that simply means divine qualities or godlike-ness.   Instead he uses the actual word for God   Theos.  Which means that God in all his fullness is in Jesus.  We can’t say that Jesus has part of the divine nature, but that all of it is in Him.

Hebrews 1:1-3

I said this before but I will say it again.  Jesus is the “exact” representation of God’s glory and being.  He is a mirror image, an absolute equal to the reflected object in every way—shape, brightness, clarity, etc.   Jesus holds the entire universe together;  he sustains it with the “word of his power.”

I believe there is only one conclusion we can take away from these scriptures.  Jesus is the supreme, the Majesty. He is to be honored, reverenced and worshiped because He is God.

I’d love to discuss with you further.