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To: Buggman
Re: "The Word is the Holy Spirit.

" Wrong again, but nice try. Yeshua speaks of His departure being a prerequisite for the delivery of the Spirit in John 15:26: "But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me."

His deperture was not a prerequisite. The Holy Spirit had come all along. The Holy Spirit came to Mary, Elizabeth and Zechariah. The Holy Spirit was present throughout the OT. John 1:14, "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. Notice, the Word became flesh, not was flesh. W/o the flesh, there is only the Holy Spirit. The flesh simply supports the functions of spirit.

"Are you suggesting that post-Resurrection the Messiah Yeshua became disembodied again?"

I have no idea what this means. Disembodied?

"You are obsessed with Yeshua's flesh, as if that were all the Son is. Why should it be so confusing to you that a member of the Trinity should pre-exist His incarnation as a Man?"

It is not all the Son is. His spirit, the Holy Spirit preexisted. That is not the Son though. The distinguishing characteristic of the Son is His flesh, the incarnation, the happening where God became man. W/o that, there is no Son and therefore no Trinity.

" How is it that you don't even know the basics of Messianic prophecy?"

Both passages refer to the incarnation. It is the Holy Spirit of the Father that became flesh and dwelt among us. These passages do not mean Jesus preexisted. It means the Holy Spirit of the Father would become man.

Re: John 10:30

"But that just proves my point, of course. Yeshua, the Word and Son of God, pre-existed His Incarnation; therefore, the Trinity pre-exists Miryam."

You don't know what a trinity is. You'll have to learn what it is before you can understand it. Before the incarnation, there was no trinity. Trinity requires the incarnation and God was not eternally incarnated. The universe is only about 15B y/o.

"Until the coming, there is no trinity. Your conclusion does not follow from your premises. Your "logic" is sloppy."

Explain trinity.

"Only by becoming fully identified with Man in every way could God redeem us in His economy of justice and mercy. Therefore His Word, who had previously been known as the Angel of the LORD, was born into the world as a human being, so that He could be our Kinsman-Redeemer."

It was the Holy Spirit that was known and became incarnated.

Re: As per prior post above, Eve is the mother of all the living.

"Except Adam, and except the Living God."

The prior post quoted Gen. Adam named Eve. As I said, Eve is the great, however many times grandmother of Mary, who was the Mother of God. That is a truth regarding the incarnation.

"Tell me, if Mary is the Second Eve, did she not come from the Second Adam as the first Eve came from the first Adam? And did not both come from God, who is the Second Adam?"

Mary is the Mother of God. She is the Mother that gave birth to God and facilited the incarnation of the Holy Spirit. God is the Father of all the living, w/o exception. That includes His incarnation, the beginning of His Trinity.

2,466 posted on 12/20/2006 10:30:45 AM PST by spunkets
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To: spunkets
His deperture was not a prerequisite. The Holy Spirit had come all along.

True, but not in the sense that He came on Shavuot (Pentecost): Previously, the Spirit came on certain individuals for a time and for a set purpose, e.g. the prophets; after Shavuot, He comes to permanently dwell in the hearts of all who believe.

In any case, there is no denying that the NT record is clear that the Spirit came in some particularly strong sense after Yeshua departed from the world; ergo, there is a distinction between the two, even as they remain echad (one).

I have no idea what this means. Disembodied?

Dis = Not, Embodied = With a Body. Are you saying that the Spirit took a body (the Son), then shucked it in Heaven to return to live in our hearts?

The distinguishing characteristic of the Son is His flesh, the incarnation, the happening where God became man. W/o that, there is no Son and therefore no Trinity.

"The Son of God" is but one of His titles, and you are reading too much into it without taking into account His other titles, like the Word (Isa. 55:11, John 1:1), the Arm of God (Isa. 40:10), the Angel of YHVH (Exo. 3:2, Zec. 12:8, etc.), and the Glory, visible manifestation of God (Ezk. 10). He is the Person through whom God creates and interacts with His creation, as the Holy Spirit/Breath is that which gives life.

Your thesis seems to be that God was either a monad or a duality (Father and Spirit) until the Incarnation, when He became a Trinity. This is simply not supported by Scripture.

It is the Holy Spirit of the Father that became flesh and dwelt among us.

So you keep claiming. However, this falls apart for several reasons:

First, the Spirit descended on Yeshua as distinctly separate from Him at His Baptism (Mat. 3:16), so your thesis would require us to believe that Yeshua was just another man, and not the Son of God, for the first thirty years of His life. The birth narratives make it clear that this is not the case, and this would destroy your theory that Mary is responsible for the Trinity in either case.

Second, all three members of the Trinity are represented distinctly in Rev. 4-5, where in your model the Sevenfold Spirit should have been in the Lamb, not represented separately.

Third, you are suggesting that the Son was merely a shell, a husk that the Spirit animated. The Gnostics played with a similar idea for several centuries; there was a reason they had to come up with their own pseudo-scriptures instead of being able to substantiate it from the canonical Bible.

You don't know what a trinity is. You'll have to learn what it is before you can understand it.

You've not said a thing that might enlighten me, nor have you proven that Father, Son, and Spirit did not all pre-exist the Incarnation. Simply repeating yourself does not constitute a rational argument.

Explain trinity.

Just as a human is made up of many parts and yet is one being, so is God made up of three distinct parts, and is yet echad. The classical formula, going back to Yeshua's Great Commission, is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. However, it is equally valid to refer to the members of the Trinity as the Will, Word, and Breath.

The Father is the Will of God, and while the Son and the Spirit are ontologically One with the Father, they are nevertheless subordinate in role: "Then answered Yeshua and said unto them, 'Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do: for what things soever He doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise'" (John 5:19), and "'Howbeit when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth: for He shall not speak of Himself; but whatsoever He shall hear (i.e., from the Father), that shall He speak: and He will shew you things to come'" (16:13).

The Son is also the Word of God, and was long before His Incarnation. The Word is God's action part, for it is by His Word that He brings all things into being ("Then God said, 'Let there be . . .'"); thus, we also see Him being described in the Tanakh as God's strong right arm. Moreover, the Son is the part of God which physically manifests in the world of Men; in the Tanakh, He manifests as the Angel of YHVH, while in the NT, He manifests as the Son of Man. While the nature of the manifestation has changed for the express purpose of giving us a Kinsman-Redeemer into that of the Son of Man.

The Spirit is the Breath of God (Ruach and Pneuma both mean "Breath" more than they do our modern idea of "Spirit"), that by which He gives life (Gen. 2:7, Job 33:4, John 6:63). Because Yeshua has atoned for our sins, making us clean before God, the Spirit can enter in and dwell with us, giving us eternal life. Part of that new life, a downpayment on the immortality to come, are the gifts that the Spirit gives us for the express purpose of edifying and bringing life to the Ekklesia, the Church. And He gives inspiration (i.e., prophecy) and direction.

All three purposes--Will, Manifestation/Action, and Life-giving Direction--are present even before the Incarnation.

Now, this is of course hardly a comprehensive discussion of the nature of the Trinity, because I'm not interested in writing a whole book. But it's a suitable overview.

Adam named Eve. As I said, Eve is the great, however many times grandmother of Mary, who was the Mother of God.

Yet before Mary was the mother of the Messiah, God was her Father. And so too is Yeshua both the Root and the Branch of David (Rev. 22:16); the Second Adam, like the first, came before the Second Eve (if that title is appropriate to Mary; I personally don't think so, but I'll go with it for the sake of this discussion), even though He was her son in regards to His flesh.

Mary is the Mother of God. She is the Mother that gave birth to God and facilited the incarnation of the Holy Spirit. God is the Father of all the living, w/o exception. That includes His incarnation, the beginning of His Trinity.

Again, simply repeating your tautologies does not constitute a logical argument. If you can't do better than that, this conversation is over. Have a nice evening.

2,542 posted on 12/20/2006 4:40:51 PM PST by Buggman (http://brit-chadasha.blogspot.com)
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