Zoo hay...
Posted on 05/08/2009 3:35:50 PM PDT by GiovannaNicoletta
A recent poll claimed that about half of all professing Christians don’t believe that Jesus is God, or that the Holy Spirit and Satan even exist. Smaller but still significant percentages don’t believe that Jesus lived a sin free life or that He is the only way to salvation. This has prompted questions about whether this means they aren’t really saved. I remembered an article on this subject that I wrote a number of years ago and in response to these questions I have updated and expanded it. I believe it will explain what you have to believe about Jesus to be saved. Let’s read it.
The Other Six
Ever suspect while talking with someone that you may have a mutual friend? Then as you get further into the conversation you realize that you are describing two different people who happen to have the same name? So it is with discussions of Jesus. The name’s the same but the descriptions vary widely. Over the years I’ve collected numerous descriptions of men named Jesus. Which one do you know?
First there’s the Jesus of Judaism. He’s known in Jewish writings as the illegitimate son of Miriam (Mary). He lived in the first century CE (they don’t use AD) and led people away from main stream Judaism into a cult. His followers were first called Netzerim (people of the branch) and later Christians. In his name Jews have been persecuted unmercifully over the centuries. Jews who admit to believing He was their Messiah are often considered dead to their families. Jews don’t believe in a second coming because they don’t believe there’s been a first one.
Then you have the Jesus of Islam. He was a prophet and teacher on a par with Mohammed. His role was to help prepare people for the great leader from Allah coming at the end of time to judge the world. He was born of a virgin but was not the son of God because the Quran says “God begets not, nor is he begotten.” He didn’t die for the sins of the people because in Islam salvation comes from good works. Neither was he resurrected. Instead, in a time of confusion God took him live into heaven and someone else was crucified. He will return at the end of the age to defeat the anti-Christ, call everyone to Islam, and prepare the world for judgment.
The Jesus of Mormonism is the spirit brother of Lucifer. Both are sons of a god who was once a man and one of his many wives. This Jesus became a human as the result of a sexual union between the Mormon god and an unmarried Jewish girl named Mary. He’s often called the Savior but never Lord, because although he’s one of god’s sons, he’s not god. If he determines that you’ve done everything you possibly can to earn your own salvation and are still short, he’ll graciously make up the difference. He’ll return at the End of the Age, having protected his saints through the time of Great Tribulation, to set up his kingdom.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses have a Jesus too. He’s a son of Jehovah, but He’s not God. Rather, he was a perfect man just like Adam originally was. Before he became a man he was the Archangel Michael, who The Witnesses believe to be Jehovah’s first created being. Just believing in Jesus is not enough to save us. we also have to become a Jehovah’s Witness, be baptized, and obey God’s laws all of our life to prove ourselves worthy. Their Jesus wasn’t physically resurrected, but came back to life in Spirit form. He returned to Earth in Spirit form in 1914 and will become a physical being again at Armageddon.
Then there’s the Jesus of the liberal denominations. He’s a first century man who lived an exemplary life of such gentleness and grace that it was almost as if he was God. He’ll see that everyone who joins their denominations gets accepted into heaven whether they’re born again or not. Some proponents of liberal theology claim that he’ll also see that everyone who was sincere in whatever other religion they practiced will get to heaven too. For the most part, liberal denominations don’t believe in the literal fulfillment of End Time events. For many, the 2nd Coming happened to each person when they first believed in Jesus.
The New Age Jesus is really one of the oldest. He originally appeared in first century Gnosticism. This Jesus was a man who like 40 other “ascended masters” holds the key to knowledge (gnosis) that when learned will bring about the next phase of human evolution, a spiritual growth that will finally make peace on earth possible. He didn’t die for our sins because there’s no need for us to be saved.
You’ll find variations on these six themes in nearly every major religion and cult around today. It seems every body wants you to think they know a man named Jesus, even if they have to redefine him to suit their beliefs.
The Real Jesus
But there is one more man named Jesus. He is not a created being. On the contrary He is our Creator. As Paul wrote in Colossians 1:16, By him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He’s not an angel and he’s not a mere man, because He created both. The archangel Michael might be the first created being, but if he is, Jesus is the one who created him. And Lucifer may have many brothers, but if he does, Jesus created them all.
This is the Jesus of the Bible. He claimed to be God in the form of man (John 10:30 and 14:9). Men who knew Him agreed. Paul taught the Deity of Jesus in Colossians 1:15-16. So did John (John 1:1-3). The writer of the Book of Hebrews also agreed (Hebr 1:3) and included a quote from Psalm 45:6-7 that shows God Himself addressing Jesus as God (Hebr 1:8). And this is not just a New Testament idea. In his prophecy of the Messiah’s birthplace, Micah said He was an eternal being whose goings forth were from days of eternity. Literally from before time and perpetual. (Micah 5:2) He is the eternal God.
Here’s where your knowledge of Scripture becomes really important, because in order to be all the Bible claims, Jesus has to be both 100% man and 100% God. If He isn’t a man He couldn’t have been made like us in every way and suffered our temptations as Hebr. 2:17-18 claim; he couldn’t be our High Priest as Hebr. 4:14-15 assert; and he can’t be our redeemer because he wouldn’t be our next of kin as required by Lev. 25:47-48 and explained in Rom 5:18-19. If He isn’t God He couldn’t be King David’s Lord (Matt 22:41-45) He couldn’t be sinless (Rom 3:20) and He couldn’t be our Savior (Mark 2:6-12 and 1 Ptr 1: 18-21).
Is This a Cult?
Three things distinguish Christian cult beliefs from orthodox theology. The cults deny the doctrine of salvation by grace alone. You have to earn at least part of the salvation they offer. They also deny the notion of eternal punishment for sin. Everyone goes to some kind of Heaven. And most importantly, they deny the deity of Jesus. They portray Him as a great man and role model; a great teacher, a prophet, even a social revolutionary, but certainly not God.
In truth Jesus was all of that. But He was also much more. He was God in the form of man; the Father dwelling in the Son (Col 1:19). To think of Jesus as anyone other than God is to reject the truth concerning Him revealed through out His Word, and to put yourself at risk of trusting in the wrong Jesus for your eternal destiny. The Jesus of the Bible is the only one of the seven men named Jesus who is able to save you.
You wrote:
“Interesting opinion... not a fact though..”
No, it is a fact. 1) Foxe knew it was propaganda and wrote it with the purpose of attacking the Catholic Church. 2) All Protestant cathedrals and Protestant dignitaries in England were ORDERED by the Protestant government to have a copy on hand so that people could be continuously inculcated with the propaganda.
As the old Catholic Encyclopedia points out:
The Convocation of the English Church ordered in 1571 that copies of the “Book of Martyrs” should be kept for public inspection in all cathedrals and in the houses of church dignitaries. The book was also exposed in many parish churches. The passionate intensity of the style, the vivid and picturesque dialogues made it very popular among Puritan and Low Church families down to the nineteenth century. Even in the fantastically partisan church history of the earlier portion of the book, with its grotesque stories of popes and monks and its motley succession of witnesses to the truth (including the Albigenses, Grosseteste, Dante, and Savonarola) was accepted among simple folk and must have contributed much to anti-Catholic prejudices in England. When Foxe treats of his own times his work is of greater value as it contains many documents and is but largely based on the reports of eyewitnesses; but he sometimes dishonesty mutilates his documents and is quite untrustworthy in his treatment of evidence. He was criticized in his own day by Catholics such as Harpsfield and Father Parsons and by practically all serious ecclesiastical historians.
“The RCC has been tryinh to re-write church history for hundreds of years..”
Nope. The truth is that Protestants invented a fantasy history of the Church which they successfully passed off to their deluded and ignorant adherents. The proof of this is that even Protestants and secularists now recognize facts which their forefathers denied. This is true even in Biblical studies. Hence, DA Carson, who is most definitely a Protestant, can so easily admit that it is just Protestant bigotry which prevents Protestants from admitting that Peter is the Rock in Matthew 16. Times have changed. Just as we now know that the liberals have been lying to us for decades in newspapers and on TV, we now know that Protestants (the fathers of liberalism) were lying about history.
“There is just too much (valid) church history for that to happen though..”
Unlike you, I’m a Church Historian. I studied it on a professional level - and it doesn’t support your fantasies in the least.
Yes, it is my choice. Just as it is my choice to interpret Jesus as I understand and interpret Him without someone claiming the franchise and calling the rules.
Hay-seuss
Thanks for your scriptural citations showing complete concurrence with my views. That was very generous of you.
Zoo hay...
I like to cut to the chase.
But folks will STILL argue over the meaning of EVERY word in verse 29!
I like to cut to the chase.
But folks will STILL argue over the meaning of EVERY word in verse 29!
Anyone who claims to have the only correct view is selling something I won't be buying. The seeking of the meaning is probably or perhaps possibly the real value anyway.
I would call that defaming John Foxe..
Talk about propaganda.. The RCC running from its misdeeds is one thing..
Denying them is another..
Telling the truth is not an attack..
Many ex-priests have exposed the RCC for wrong doing...
Martin Luther is not the only one..
Roman catholic church history is a re-write.. and not a subtle one either..
You buy RCC history instead of the real stuff.. your choice..
I post mainly for the lurker.. and seeker allied with no side..
An honest seeker can Google himself and determine what he "will buy"..
and REJECT what appears to fluff and boondoggle..
Exactly..
Reading to others about how God changes your heart indeed did cause quite a few problems, not limited to forfeiting your life through fire at the stake.
Other Bibles were fine specifically because the uneducated people could not understand the language in which they were written.
The translation of scripture is an active issue even to this day. Rome has not exactly established itself today in using scripture that is a strict translation. For example..The King James is not a strict translation. This would by definition of your previous justifications, make Rome today guilty of heresy.
It seems to take less mental gymnastics to simply admit that men utilized the fear of eternal judgment in the political arena and this cost those in the way of that their lives.
No, again, no one was ever burned at the stake for reading the Bible since reading the Bible was not a crime. Reading the Bible aloud was not a crime either.
__________________________________________
English Protestants and French Huguenots were burnt at the stake, etc for reading the Bible...
Reading the Bible, even owning own was a crine...
Only the Catholic Church, and the nobility had Bibles...If the nobility were Protestants, or if anyone else had a Bible they were murdered...
In the 1680s 200,000 Huguenots fled from France...
Plus the thousands who left in the earlier pogroms...
They hid their Bibles by baking them inside loaves of bread...
If they were caught with a Bible they were murdered...
In one episode in 1572, alone, the St Batholomews Day Massacre, 30,000 French Huguenots were murdered ..
You wrote:
“I would call that defaming John Foxe..”
Telling the truth about Foxe is not defaming him.
“Talk about propaganda.. The RCC running from its misdeeds is one thing..”
The Catholic Church committed no misdeeds. People did. The Church didn’t.
“Denying them is another..”
I deny no truth. You just haven’t presented any.
“Telling the truth is not an attack..”
No, what you’re doing is.
“Many ex-priests have exposed the RCC for wrong doing...”
No, actually none have. Again, people do things that are wrong. The Church doesn’t. SUVs don’t kill people either - in case you didn’t know.
“Martin Luther is not the only one..”
He never was one. He also invented things. He also denied that Revelation and James were scripture. What does that tell you?
You wrote:
“Roman catholic church history is a re-write.. and not a subtle one either..”
No, actually Catholic History is simply history: accurate and truthful.
“You buy RCC history instead of the real stuff.. your choice..”
No, I studied history and I know history, and you simply don’t. You’ve already proven that by going belly up.
“I post mainly for the lurker.. and seeker allied with no side..”
No, you post for the anti-Catholic.
You wrote:
“English Protestants and French Huguenots were burnt at the stake, etc for reading the Bible...”
Nope. Not one. Reading the Bible was not a crime. How could what happened every day in every church and every monastery and in many homes be a crime?
“Reading the Bible, even owning own was a crine...”
Nope. Not even remotely. Show me the law from the Vatican that says so. Show me the national law from any nation-state of the Middle Ages or Early Modern Period that says so.
“Only the Catholic Church, and the nobility had Bibles...If the nobility were Protestants, or if anyone else had a Bible they were murdered...”
Again, nonsense. The truth of the matter is simply this: few people outside of the clergy or nobility had the education necessary to read Latin or even the vernacular. As time went on, and medieval society became more stable, wealthy and educated, even the middle class, and yes, even shepherds read books - including the Bible. Not surprisingly, you are unaware of the following: http://www.geocities.com/militantis/biblechp11.html (Graham was a former Protestant by the way).
And S.R. Maitland was never anything but a Protestant, but he still had the courage to tell the truth unlike so many of his fellows. In his classic work, The Dark Ages, he tells us about the numerous cases of Bible reading in the Middle Ages that he encountered in sources. Of course, those cases time and again, were about priests, monks, nuns, bishops, abbots and nobles. After all, how many other could read until late in the Middle Ages? The fact that few had the money to buy an education does not mean that the Church either killed anyone for reading the Bible, nor that it kept the Bible from anyone. Look at the third world today. Missionaries can hand out all the bibles they want to illiterate people, but they still won’t be able to read them. IS that such a difficult concept to grasp? In America, who is more likely to be literate today? The well off or the poor? Clearly the well off.
“In the 1680s 200,000 Huguenots fled from France...”
So what? In the 1840s, 1,000,000 Catholics fled from Ireland...
So what?
“Plus the thousands who left in the earlier pogroms...”
Again, so what? None of that - NONE OF IT - says anything about the Bible, or literacy, etc.
“They hid their Bibles by baking them inside loaves of bread...”
1) I have no reason to believe a LeFevre-like baking story. 2) If the French were looking for Huguenot bibles then that was French policy - not CATHOLIC policy. The French also granted the Huguenots toleration, and then they rescinded it. Again, the French did what they did.
“If they were caught with a Bible they were murdered...”
1) What the French did to their citizens has nothing to do with the Church. 2) Show me the French law that says having a Huguenot bible meant death. Remember the The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, October 22, 1685, was by the king, the grandson of the Protestant king of Navarre who abandoned his heresy in a heartbeat to become king of France and once issued the Edict of Nantes. This was all FRENCH policy. It was not conducted or insisted on by the Church.
“In one episode in 1572, alone, the St Batholomews Day Massacre, 30,000 French Huguenots were murdered ..”
Nope. The number that most scholars agree on is much closer these days to 5,000 than 30,000. And it is irrelevant in any case since that too was a French decision and had nothing to do with the Church. For the death tolls at the low end see: Philip Benedict, “The Saint Bartholomew’s Massacres in the Provinces,” The Historical Journal, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Jun., 1978), pp. 205-225. For the toll at the high end see: F. Fernández-Armesto and D. Wilson, Reformation: Christianity and the World 1500 - 2000, Bantam Press, London, pp. 236 - 237.
No one really knows.
What we do know is this - the Church had nothing to do with it.
No as John ch 10 suggests I'm not for the protestants either(or roman catholic)..
Sheep pens are not heresy.. but merely denominations (you know->schisms)..
I'm for the catholic(<-universal) church..
The roman catholic church is NOT "THE church" merely "A church"..
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