Was God Manifest in the Flesh?

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July 13, 2015 at 3:12 am#800968
mstrainjr
Participant
I apologize for taking so long to come here. I keep myself quite busy throughout the day, and honestly I forgot about this until just now.
I would first like to point out that Jesus’ divinity is something that has been debated since before the Catholic Church had been established. That being said, I doubt we would change too many minds here. The thing about religious faith is that it’s so embedded into one’s sense of self that most people have a really hard time considering that certain teachings they’ve been raised with are wrong. Who wants to admit that something so important to them may be little more than a deception?
Mark Twain once said, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” Pride is perhaps the main reason for this. No one wants to be wrong. No one wants to feel like they’ve been lied to their whole lives. So in the face of all evidence to the contrary, some people will continue to blatantly deny what is plainly before them.
I was raised in first the Lutheran and then the Baptist church, and I was a Baptist until around the age of 23. One belief that both denominations had in common was that of Jesus being Almighty God in the flesh. While the Lutheran church took this teaching for granted and never really discussed what was already quite accepted, the Baptist church had those Bible verses that it used to prove the doctrine.
And I believed it. It’s what my parents believed, it’s what my friends at church believed, and I believed it too.
But then a wrench was thrown into the gears. I had the blessing (or curse) of being homeschooled through high school, and instead of taking Spanish or French as a second language, I took the opportunity to study New Testament Greek. I made hundreds of flash cards and really got into the lessons. It was cool to me that I was starting to look beyond translation and see the text in the way it was originally written.
One Sunday morning, my preacher was talking about the word “blessed” in the Bible, as used in Matthew 5. He explained to the congregation what the English word meant, and then he started talking about the meaning of the Greek word, markarios. In short, as I sat there in my seat, I noticed that his definition of the word wasn’t quite correct, and he ended up basing most of his sermon around his made-up definition. I looked around at peoples’ faces and I realized that everyone simply took him at his word; they didn’t know any better, so they were simply accepting what he said as fact. The preacher would occasionally say something like, “The King James Version is the closest English translation to God’s Word! Amen?” and then the congregation would in unison say “Amen!”. But what did they really know about it? Nothing! That is what’s called mass hypnosis.
It really began to bother me that most church-going Christians know little to nothing about the original languages of the Bible. And here’s the question I began to wonder: If Muslims are encouraged to read the Quran in its original language of Arabic, and the Jews are encouraged to read their Tanakh (the Old Testament) in Hebrew, why aren’t Christians encouraged by their pastors to study their New Testament in the original Greek? Did church leaders have something to hide?
Now, it’s easy to find things to support your own views, so I decided to look at the Bible from an objective standpoint. I thought the best way to do this was to look for all the Biblical evidence AGAINST what I believed, and I used several sources as a guide. For the topic of Jesus’ divinity, I noticed that most verses used to “prove” that Jesus is God were taken out of context. Also, I started to see a lot of biased translation. While one type of grammatical phrase would be translated one way, it would be translated differently when Jesus was the subject of the sentence.
I determined early on that the KJV is one of the worst translations. I dare to say it’s worse than the New World Translation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, yes even more biased! Yet so many preachers push this translation (or translations based off the same tradition) upon their congregations, convincing them that all other Bibles are of the devil or whatever. This is something that really bothers me. In fact, I find it kind of scary.
Back to my study into the topic of Jesus’ divinity…. As I continued to study, I could feel myself fighting back against the things I was discovering. As I said before, these doctrines become so ingrained into your sense of who you are that it’s very difficult to admit the facts when they’re staring you in the face. I struggled for a long time, and I felt my faith in general starting to fail. If I had been wrong about this one thing, what else in my life was wrong? How else had I been deceived? There was a point where I became very distrustful of others because I didn’t know what to believe anymore. But I pushed through it all and eventually came to the place where I could accept the things I was finding. Within several years of study into this topic, I came to the undeniable conclusion that Jesus was not Almighty God in the flesh, and that those verses that seem to say such things are either taken out of context, mistranslated, added into the Bible, or simply misunderstood.
As someone who has studied the Greek of the New Testament over the course of nearly 15 years, I can say with absolute certainty that Jesus is not YHWH God.
This is just an introduction so you can know where I’m coming from. I know it’s long, but it gets several things out of the way right up front. I have bookmarked this page, and I look forward to presenting my arguments for this case.
Where faith does not equal truth, I always choose truth.
-M. Strain Jr.
July 13, 2015 at 10:03 am#800973
NickHassan
Participant
Hi MS,
Yes GOD WAS IN CHRIST reconciling the world to Himself.
So Christ was not God.
God was not Christ.

As with him we have this treasure in earthen vessels.

July 13, 2015 at 3:56 pm#800993
kerwin
Participant
Nick,
Jesus does state he is in God. It is the idea of the unity of the Spirit. (John 17:21)
July 14, 2015 at 9:42 am#801012
NickHassan
Participant
Hi KW,
Yes.
July 14, 2015 at 11:46 am#801017
mstrainjr
Participant
Nick and Kerwin,
Okay, so it seems to me that you’re both on the same page.

Yes GOD WAS IN CHRIST reconciling the world to Himself.
So Christ was not God.
God was not Christ.
That is what’s called the holy spirit, God’s active living force that is channeled through his servants. Jesus used it to raise Lazarus, Elijah used it to raise the widow’s son, and Peter used it to raise Tabitha. So the power that Jesus exhibited didn’t show him to be God.

Jesus does state he is in God. It is the idea of the unity of the Spirit. (John 17:21)
Yes, and he also prayed that his followers would be in him as he is in God so that we would be one together with God. If one were to take this passage to mean that Jesus is God, then we have to consider then that Jesus is praying that we would be God as he is. Obviously that’s not true. Like you said, it’s a unity of Spirit. Paul urged the church to be of one mind, one body, and one spirit; Jesus had such unity with God, but that did not make him God. Again, it is the holy spirit that provides such unity.

At least, those are my thoughts.
July 14, 2015 at 11:54 am#801018
NickHassan
Participant
Hi MS,
“That is what’s called the holy spirit, God’s active living force that is channeled through his servants. ”
Is this written?
ACTIVE LIVING FORCE

“God is at work in you to will and to do”
July 14, 2015 at 12:00 pm#801019
NickHassan
Participant
Hi MS,
The Holy Spirit IS the manifestation of God in His creation.
To lie to the Holy Spirit is to lie to God
Acts 5
July 14, 2015 at 12:05 pm#801020
NickHassan
Participant
Hi MS,
Jesus Christ did not USE the Spirit and neither did the apostles and prophets.
God USED these vessels to do His work.
July 14, 2015 at 1:14 pm#801021
Ed J
Participant
Jesus does state he is in God. It is the idea of the unity of the Spirit. (John 17:21)
Yes, and he also prayed that his followers would be in him as he is in God so that we would be one together with God. If one were to take this passage to mean that Jesus is God, then we have to consider then that Jesus is praying that we would be God as he is. Obviously that’s not true. Like you said, it’s a unity of Spirit. Paul urged the church to be of one mind, one body, and one spirit; Jesus had such unity with God, but that did not make him God. Again, it is the holy spirit that provides such unity.
At least, those are my thoughts.
Hi M. Strain Jr,
I think we’re all pretty much in agreement with your assessment.
_______________
God bless
Ed J
July 14, 2015 at 3:34 pm#801024
kerwin
Participant
mstrainjr,
That is what I hear from Scripture.
July 19, 2015 at 6:31 am#801134
mstrainjr
Participant
By using the term “active living force”, I pretty much meant the same thing as you then said, but you said it better: the manifestation of God in his creation.
I do want to point out that the Greek words translated “holy spirit” are neuter. This means that it’s not a “person” of some kind of trinity. It isn’t quite an “it” either, since it is alive. But hey, we won’t be able to define what God is and how he works.
July 19, 2015 at 6:33 am#801135
mstrainjr
Participant
It looks like there isn’t much of a debate here. Kinda disappointed. So far, we all seem to be in agreement that Jesus was not Almighty God in the flesh, as much of mainstream “Christianity” teaches.
July 19, 2015 at 7:40 am#801137
NickHassan
Participant
Hi MS,
God is spirit. God is in heaven. That is where Jesus told us to pray to Him.
But His Spirit fully expresses his nature and not just His power.
Acts 10.38
”How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with THE HOLY GHOST and with POWER…”

It risks offence to God to say that His Spirit is only His ”active force”
Blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven so this is important.Mt12.31

Compare mt 12.28 with lk 11.20 and you will see that the Spirit of God is likened to the FINGER OF GOD
July 19, 2015 at 8:39 am#801142
kerwin
Participant
mrstrainjr,
There are few drop by’s of those that claim Jesus is God but of late they have not stayed around long.
July 19, 2015 at 11:28 am#801147
NickHassan
Participant
Hi,
The nature of God is revealed in His creation as in beauty, balance, peace and orderliness.
The prince of this world has infiltrated it with lies and disorder, destruction and death.
July 21, 2015 at 11:34 pm#801219
Proclaimer
Participant
I want to bump this post to the front, so I can read and reply to it maybe tomorrow.
I apologize for taking so long to come here. I keep myself quite busy throughout the day, and honestly I forgot about this until just now.
I would first like to point out that Jesus’ divinity is something that has been debated since before the Catholic Church had been established. That being said, I doubt we would change too many minds here. The thing about religious faith is that it’s so embedded into one’s sense of self that most people have a really hard time considering that certain teachings they’ve been raised with are wrong. Who wants to admit that something so important to them may be little more than a deception?
Mark Twain once said, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” Pride is perhaps the main reason for this. No one wants to be wrong. No one wants to feel like they’ve been lied to their whole lives. So in the face of all evidence to the contrary, some people will continue to blatantly deny what is plainly before them.
I was raised in first the Lutheran and then the Baptist church, and I was a Baptist until around the age of 23. One belief that both denominations had in common was that of Jesus being Almighty God in the flesh. While the Lutheran church took this teaching for granted and never really discussed what was already quite accepted, the Baptist church had those Bible verses that it used to prove the doctrine.
And I believed it. It’s what my parents believed, it’s what my friends at church believed, and I believed it too.
But then a wrench was thrown into the gears. I had the blessing (or curse) of being homeschooled through high school, and instead of taking Spanish or French as a second language, I took the opportunity to study New Testament Greek. I made hundreds of flash cards and really got into the lessons. It was cool to me that I was starting to look beyond translation and see the text in the way it was originally written.
One Sunday morning, my preacher was talking about the word “blessed” in the Bible, as used in Matthew 5. He explained to the congregation what the English word meant, and then he started talking about the meaning of the Greek word, markarios. In short, as I sat there in my seat, I noticed that his definition of the word wasn’t quite correct, and he ended up basing most of his sermon around his made-up definition. I looked around at peoples’ faces and I realized that everyone simply took him at his word; they didn’t know any better, so they were simply accepting what he said as fact. The preacher would occasionally say something like, “The King James Version is the closest English translation to God’s Word! Amen?” and then the congregation would in unison say “Amen!”. But what did they really know about it? Nothing! That is what’s called mass hypnosis.
It really began to bother me that most church-going Christians know little to nothing about the original languages of the Bible. And here’s the question I began to wonder: If Muslims are encouraged to read the Quran in its original language of Arabic, and the Jews are encouraged to read their Tanakh (the Old Testament) in Hebrew, why aren’t Christians encouraged by their pastors to study their New Testament in the original Greek? Did church leaders have something to hide?
Now, it’s easy to find things to support your own views, so I decided to look at the Bible from an objective standpoint. I thought the best way to do this was to look for all the Biblical evidence AGAINST what I believed, and I used several sources as a guide. For the topic of Jesus’ divinity, I noticed that most verses used to “prove” that Jesus is God were taken out of context. Also, I started to see a lot of biased translation. While one type of grammatical phrase would be translated one way, it would be translated differently when Jesus was the subject of the sentence.
I determined early on that the KJV is one of the worst translations. I dare to say it’s worse than the New World Translation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, yes even more biased! Yet so many preachers push this translation (or translations based off the same tradition) upon their congregations, convincing them that all other Bibles are of the devil or whatever. This is something that really bothers me. In fact, I find it kind of scary.
Back to my study into the topic of Jesus’ divinity…. As I continued to study, I could feel myself fighting back against the things I was discovering. As I said before, these doctrines become so ingrained into your sense of who you are that it’s very difficult to admit the facts when they’re staring you in the face. I struggled for a long time, and I felt my faith in general starting to fail. If I had been wrong about this one thing, what else in my life was wrong? How else had I been deceived? There was a point where I became very distrustful of others because I didn’t know what to believe anymore. But I pushed through it all and eventually came to the place where I could accept the things I was finding. Within several years of study into this topic, I came to the undeniable conclusion that Jesus was not Almighty God in the flesh, and that those verses that seem to say such things are either taken out of context, mistranslated, added into the Bible, or simply misunderstood.
As someone who has studied the Greek of the New Testament over the course of nearly 15 years, I can say with absolute certainty that Jesus is not YHWH God.
This is just an introduction so you can know where I’m coming from. I know it’s long, but it gets several things out of the way right up front. I have bookmarked this page, and I look forward to presenting my arguments for this case.
Where faith does not equal truth, I always choose truth.
-M. Strain Jr.

July 21, 2015 at 11:34 pm#801220
Proclaimer
Participant
@mstrainjr
The Trinity has been hotly debate for over a decade in these forums, but the Trinitarians have basically ran off. There are still a couple who visit from time to time, and we hear the same old arguments from them, but so far they have not been able to explain the scriptures we give them. When it comes down to it, they say we use logic too much. lol. That makes scripture logic. And they reply by telling us we need to be born again to see the Trinity.
They have failed and so it is that the Doctrine of the Trinity has failed when it is tested and this doctrine has been tested severely here.
July 21, 2015 at 11:37 pm#801221
Proclaimer
Participant
By using the term “active living force”, I pretty much meant the same thing as you then said, but you said it better: the manifestation of God in his creation.
I do want to point out that the Greek words translated “holy spirit” are neuter. This means that it’s not a “person” of some kind of trinity. It isn’t quite an “it” either, since it is alive. But hey, we won’t be able to define what God is and how he works.
While it can be dangerous to compare God to a thing, I would like to point out the following metaphor as a way to explain God and his spirit.
We know that the Father is in Heaven and his spirit is here on Earth, perhaps not exclusively.
We also know that the sun is in the heavens and the rays of the sun are on the Earth and throughout the solar system. When I put sunblock on it is to protect me from the sun or to be more precise, the rays of the sun. We talk of the rays as if they are the sun.
God is the God of the living so I hardly think his spirit is dead or non-alive. Further, it is his spirit that gives us life.
That said, I think of it like this:
Who is God? He is the Father.
What is God? He is spirit.
The Spirit is a manifestation of God who is the Father.
All creation is in one sense a manifestation of him as the heavens declare his glory.
So it is that the Spirit proceeds from God, but the son was begotten.
The difference is not subtle. One is God and the other is another but of God. The son of God to be exact.
This is why we see the following difference regarding the spirit and the son of man. Clearly the spirit is God.
“Therefore I say to you, any sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven people, but blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven. “Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come.
July 22, 2015 at 9:29 am#801240
NickHassan
Participant
Hi,
Our job is to promote the God of the bible and the door to God revealed by His son.
Those who receive the message like children are called by God.
Selling a trinity god to kids is impossible .
July 26, 2015 at 3:56 am#801352
terraricca
Participant
hi T8
“Therefore I say to you, any sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven people, but blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven. “Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come.
I love this scripture;but many do not understand it ,for they do not understand that Jesus came down to do a demonstration of what God’s truth is and how we can benefit from it ,Jesus has kept saying “I TELL YOU THE TRUTH ” or “I AM THE TRUTH ” but at the same time he said “I CAME TO DO THE WILL OF MY FATHER ” and ” THE WORDS I SAY ARE THE WORDS MY FATHER HAS GIVEN ME ” and so on so then what his the “HOLY SPIRIT OR THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH ” ? OTHER THAN WHAT GOD’S WANTS AND SAYS IS GOD NOT THE SOURCE OF THE TRUTH ? YES HE IS AND WHO CAN STAND AGAINST THAT TRUTH ? ANYONE THAT FIGHT AGAINST IT WILL BE DESTROY BY IT ,for no one can have a will that would over power God’s will end of story ,so if you lie when the truth of God as been presented to you you really blaspheme that truth (rejected as truth) then tell me what is left to you to be save and live a everlasting life ?
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