(The final installment in Ron Shockley's series about Jesus)
The following common sense arguments regarding how The Bible clearly demonstrates that God and Jesus are not the same being are ones that tend to come up quite often among those promoting Jesus as God. Many times I have been told in discussions with those wishing to support a Trinitarian or even a Oneness/Modalist viewpoint that these are simply tired old arguments. Yes, the arguments are centuries old and people often tire of them. But that doesn’t mean that they still aren’t valid objections. And their validity remains all the more significant due to the fact each of these are easily answerable when one uses common sense as their guide.
- Scripture calls Jesus a man while telling us that God is NOT a man.
Acts 2:22 “Jesus of Nazareth was a man commended to you by God with mighty deeds, wonders, and signs, which God worked through him in your midst, as you yourselves know.”
Acts 17:31: “Because He has established a day on which He will judge the world with justice through a man he has appointed, and He has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead.“
Vs.
Numbers 23:19 “God is not a man, that He should lie, Nor a son of man, that He should repent;..”
Hosea 11:9 “…For I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst,…”
- Scripture tells us that Jesus prayed to and has a God. Yet God doesn’t pray to anyone because He alone is God.
John 17:3 “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.”
John 20:17 “Jesus said to her, “Stop clinging to Me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to My brethren and say to them,
‘I ascend to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.’”Rev. 3:12 “He who overcomes, I will make him a pillar in the temple of My God, and he will not go out from it anymore; and I will write on him the name of My God, and the name of the city of My God, the new Jerusalem, which comes down out of heaven from My God, and My new name.”
Vs.
Isaiah 44:6 “”Thus says YAHWEH, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, YAHWEH of hosts: ‘I am the first and I am the last, And there is no God besides Me.”
Isaiah 45:6 “That men may know from the rising to the setting of the sun That there is no one besides Me. I am YAHWEH, and there is no other,”
Isaiah 45:18 “For thus says YAHWEH, who created the heavens (He is the God who formed the earth and made it, He established it and did not create it a waste place, but formed it to be inhabited),
“I am YAHWEH, and there is none else.”
- Scripture tells that Jesus was tempted. Yet God cannot be tempted.
Matt 4:1 “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”
(see also Mark 1:13 & Luke 4:2)Hebrews 4:15 “For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.”
Vs.
James 1:13 “Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone.”
- Scripture tells us that Jesus died. Yet God is immortal – incapable of dying.
1 Cor. 15:3 “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures”
Vs.
1 Tim 1:17 “Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.”
Unless you are forcing yourself to hold onto the post-Biblical creeds of man,
the honest, logical, and common sense conclusion should be that Jesus is
NOT literally God himself. Jesus is just who God promised His Messiah
to be,
a special human MAN who would be brought
into being at a point in time from the Hebrew people and “anointed” with God’s
Spirit so that he could accomplish all the God wanted him to do.
This is
said perfectly several times in the book of Acts.
Acts 2:22 “Jesus of Nazareth was a man commended to you by God with mighty deeds, wonders, and signs, which God worked through him in your midst, as you yourselves know.”
Acts 10:38: “how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power. He went about doing good and healing all those oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.”
Acts 17:31: “Because He [God] has established a day on which He will judge the world with justice through a man he has appointed, and He has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead.“
Jesus is the promised HUMAN Messiah – the descendent of Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, & David. He is the greater Moses who was to come FROM his own people. He was to speak and do all that God assigned him to do. Does God tell Himself what to do? Does God anoint Himself? Does God pray to Himself? Does God go directly against what He promised and foretold about HIS begotten Son? NO.
Let the plain common sense truth of
Scripture speak for itself.
Jesus is the Son OF God, the
Messiah. Jesus is not God Himself.
Extracts from the first seven installments are contained in the July, 2011 blog entry below.
