9 - Deity of Jesus Christ, Part 2

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10 - Deity of Jesus Christ, Part 3

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This week, we will be discussing or continuing the discussion on the deity of Jesus Christ.

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Is Jesus Christ God? Did He actually make such claims? Furthermore, the question would come in is, how do we prove it?

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Because that's what it comes down to. People can say that Jesus claimed things, but can you support it from Scripture?

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Are there ways that we can see that Jesus Christ claimed to be God? If you are a student of the

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Striving for Eternity Academy, I hope you have your syllabus out. We are right now still in, because we didn't finish, still in Lesson 6, and we're going to start in Section 2.

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If you want to know how to become a student of the Academy, you can go online to our website and you'd be able to do that on the website,

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Striving for Eternity. You'll get a syllabus as one of the benefits, but other than that, you can watch for free.

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So, this week, if you remember, we are, just as a quick review, we are in the

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Lesson Section 2 on the Doctrine of Christ, and we are specifically in Lesson 6, the

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Deity of Christ. If you remember last week, we looked at the names of Christ and how they show us that Jesus Christ is

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God. We looked at things like the fact that He's called Lord, He's called the

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I Am, the First and the Last, He's called Savior. These are names for Christ that allude, if not directly, explain

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His Deity. Now, a question that did come up this week that I thought maybe we should spend a little time explaining, something we brought up last week, and that is the question of what does the

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Angel of the Lord have to do with Jesus claiming to be

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God? It was one of the questions in the Facebook group. If you follow along with Striving for Eternity in the

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Facebook, we post some questions related to the show, and so that came up. The question was, how does the fact that the

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Angel of the Lord seems, in many instances, to be the pre -incarnate

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Jesus Christ, and so how do you see that? Well, the way you see that, and I don't have all the texts here to look at it, but you basically look at the passages that talk about Christ in what

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He says He did, and in the Old Testament, there's references where the same thing is referring to the

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Angel of the Lord, and so sometimes what we have when we do that is we look at those, and so the way to view that is to take those passages that have the appearance of the

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Angel of the Lord as the pre -incarnate Christ, and then you'll see that when we look at that, this can't be just a regular angel.

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Now the reason, for instance, a Jehovah Witness would say, well, the Angel of the

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Lord is an angel, and that's Jesus Christ, and therefore Jesus must have been an angel, and then

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He became a man. That's how Jehovah Witnesses would explain it. He was the angel Michael who became a man, and then returned to being an angel.

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The difference with that is this, an angel never accepts worship from men, okay?

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You see that such as in Daniel, when Daniel bows down and Gabriel is there, and Gabriel stands him up and says, don't bow down to me,

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I'm just an angel, I'm a servant like you. Similar thing in the book of Revelation when John sees an angel, and he bows down to worship the angel, and the angel stands him up, but the

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Angel of the Lord never did that. The Angel of the Lord accepted worship just like Jesus, okay?

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So we looked last time at the names of God, sorry, the names of Christ and how they refer to His deity.

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What we want to do this week is start by looking at the works of Christ, and see how that indicates

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His deity, okay? So we're going to look at the works of Jesus Christ, and when we look at these works, the very first work we want to look at is creation, creation as the first work that we'll look at.

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Now when we look at Christ's involvement in creation, it's very interesting when you look at creation, because you'll see that the

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Father, the Son, and the Spirit are all involved in creation.

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If you look, for example, in Genesis, you'll see that it was the Spirit of the

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Lord that hovered over and created. You can look at Colossians 1, 15, 16 and see that Jesus created all things.

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Now I mentioned this before, but I want to mention it again, because this is something if you speak to Jehovah Witnesses, this will come up.

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In a Jehovah Witness Bible, that's the New World Translation, they would say that Jesus Christ created all other things.

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That word other is important, because what they're trying to claim is that Jesus Christ was created as the first creation, as an angel, named

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Michael, and then He created all other things. This has some problems on multiple levels.

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One, Isaiah 14 says that Satan, or Lucifer, was the highest angel, not

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Michael. So right there, if God was going to have an angel create everything,

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He would have His highest angel, not a second one. So right off the bat, you see that.

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Second thing is that when you look at that, the word other is not in the Greek. Now they'll make a big deal about the

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Greek with John 1, 1, and we saw that last week, but here they're poor on the

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Greek, because the word other actually is inserted for no other reason, sorry, pun not intended, but it's inserted for no other reason than to change the theology to fit their belief.

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That's a problem. See John 1, 1 says, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was a

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God, or was God. They say a God. Now you could argue that there's no definitive argument, no definitive article, so it's not that the

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Word was the God. And so you could say the Word was a God, but it just says the

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Word was God. And so the issue there is if you say it's another

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God, then you have multiple gods. That's another problem that they'd have. But you see, here in the

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Greek for Colossians 1, now there's a problem because they're actually adding words in.

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They're adding them in because of the fact that if He is the Creator, well then, if He created all things,

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He's the Creator, and only God can be the Creator. Now is that the only passage that refers to Jesus as God?

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Well, we mentioned John 1. Let's look at that context, John 1, 3, we don't have, okay, we don't have any of the verses.

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All righty, good. Open your Bibles. You have your

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Bible, student? Do not come to class without your Bible, okay? A Bible is required for class.

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Just because we put up the verses once in a while, doesn't mean we're always going to. That's one of the reasons I don't put up verses when

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I preach at church. I don't want everyone to just forget their Bible and not bring it to church.

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Bring your Bible to church, look it up on your own. Don't trust someone mistyping, all right?

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Anyway, John 1, 3 says this, all things were made through Him and without Him nothing was made.

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I could be mistaken, but that seems pretty clear. It seems to indicate that Jesus is the

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Creator. Because it seems an awful lot throughout the Bible that, throughout both

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Old and New Testament, that God is the Creator. So if God is the

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Creator, but Jesus is the Creator, what does that say about Jesus? It indicates from the very work

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He does as Creator, in creation, that He is

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God, okay? I'm explaining this and taking the time because this is one of the many ways that people do not see the

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Deity of Christ in the Scriptures and they just read right over these passages. What we end up seeing when we look at the

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Scriptures, we see these things that talk about Jesus having these works and when we see these works, we have to understand that these things are ways that He is explaining and proving that He's God.

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So not only by His words did He show He was God, but also by His works,

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He's claiming to be God and also He's claiming to be

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God by the witness, by the fact that people worship Him. We're going to look at those. And so what we have is several passages where we see that Jesus Christ will claim to be

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God by the very works that He does. The next is this one, forgiveness of sin.

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Jesus claimed very, very clearly that He had the authority to forgive sin.

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Now in the passage in Mark chapter 2, let's turn there, turn in your

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Bible to Mark chapter 2, this passage can also be found in Matthew 9.

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Now Matthew 9, let me tell you why it's easy to remember, why it's good to remember Matthew 9, even though the

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Mark passage goes into more detail. Mark 2 goes into more detail, but if you can remember

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John 8 and John 10, there's two explicit passages where Jesus Christ claimed to be

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God. We see that because He said, He claimed to be I Am. We saw that last week. And He said in John 10,

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I and the Father are one, something happened after He made both statements that we see in John 8, they picked up stones to stone

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Him. In John 10, it says, again, they picked up stones to stone Him. And when He asked, what do you stone me for?

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Not for good works, but you being a man claimed to be God, okay? So John 8, 10, well, if you can remember 8, 9 and 10, sandwich in the middle,

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Matthew 9, and then you have this other clear passage. So in this passage, well, let's return to the one in Matthew just so that we have that one, since I explained that.

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But in Matthew, it says this, then behold, this is

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Matthew 9, verses 2 to 6, then behold, they brought to Him a paralytic lying on a bed.

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And when Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralytic, son, be of good cheer.

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Your sins are forgiven you. Notice He's saying He is forgiving this man.

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Verse 3, and at once some of the scribes said to themselves, this man blasphemes.

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Now, in Mark 2, it says even clearer, it says, why does this man speak blasphemy like this?

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Who can forgive sin but God alone? Okay? The scribes, those who understand the

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Word, those who study the Word, understand clearly that Jesus Christ is claiming to be

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God. He's saying He has the authority to forgive sins. Now, Jesus Christ quickly says, no, no, no, guys, you got it wrong,

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I'm not saying that. No, you know what He does? Not only does He forgive the man's sin, but He reads their mind, something that only

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God can do. I know many of you wish you could read the minds of another person.

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Guys, I know you wish you could read the minds of your wife and understand her.

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Sorry, God wanted us to suffer and just be puzzled. Okay, so hopefully my wife's not watching.

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No, but seriously, what we see is that He reads their minds, and if we continue in Matthew 9, it says in verse 4, but Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, why do you think evil in your hearts?

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For which is easier to say, your sins are forgiven you, or arise and walk?

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Now, if you think about it, they're both easy to say. What's the difference between those two statements?

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The difference is that one of them, rise up and walk, can be seen immediately where your sins are forgiven cannot.

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And so, what you have there is, He's making it very clear,

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I'm going to prove that I have the authority to forgive sins, in other words, that I'm God, and He turns to the paralytic and says, arise, take up your bed, and walk.

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So, not only does He forgive sin, but He has authority to heal a man,

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He has power over the man's physical body to give him not only the ability to get up and walk, but He restored the man's legs with full muscles.

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I mean, you don't walk for a while and you have atrophy, you need to go through physical therapy to be able to learn to walk again.

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This man got up and picked up his bed and walked. Why? Because when God does a healing, it's complete.

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He also read their minds. Three different ways in that passage that He proved that He's God.

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So, you can look at that. Let's look at one other, and that is that He is giving of life,

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He is the giver of life. And here we have our first blank, if you're following along in your syllabus, this first one is the physical life.

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And here we have John 11 and 30, 37 to 44, and you can actually see where, you know, where Jesus healed

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Lazarus from the dead, you know, brought him back from the dead. Jesus went walking along the road.

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He was, came upon a time where He sees a woman who's an only, she lost her husband and here's her only son, he's dead.

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And Jesus raises him from the dead, kind of puts an end to a funeral procession, you know, everyone's wailing.

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And Jesus walks up and says, come on out of the coffin. Yeah, okay.

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So, I'm sure there was much rejoicing. But you see here, so what we have is we have that Jesus Christ is the giver of life.

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Now, in the Old Testament, it is God who is the source of life. It's very clear.

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So, when Jesus Christ gives life, He does that. Now, there's a difference here because if you're a good

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Bible student, you're going to go, wait a minute, didn't Elijah raise the dead?

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Didn't he raise the dead, that widow's son who is dead? Yes, he did.

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Did Elijah do it of his own authority? No, that's the difference.

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Jesus Christ, when He did this, did it of His own authority. And that's the big difference.

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Jesus' authority is very clear that He's doing this for the purpose of showing that He was

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God. And so, what we have there is we have the fact that Jesus was trying to make that clear.

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All right? And that becomes a difference that we see. Okay? So, we see that Jesus was in physical life.

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What other kind of life could Jesus have possibly been the one to give, to be the giver of life?

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Well, that would be your second blank there, your second blank, and that is eternal life, eternal life.

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And in this one, what we have, okay, is we see here that this is eternal life in John 10, 18, would be a passage you could look up.

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And so, there Jesus says that, and I give them eternal life and they shall never perish.

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Neither shall anyone scratch them out of my hand. Now, who is the one that can give eternal life?

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Well, that's God. Now, a great passage to turn to, if you get someone that says, well, like a

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Jehovah Witness, they would say, God never said that hell is eternal.

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We talk about eternal life, but what about hell? Well, turn in your Bible to Daniel 12.

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We talked about the deity of Christ on YouTube. You can look it up where Michael Stockwell and I chatted about the deity of Christ, and I couldn't find this passage off the top of my head, but here it is,

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Daniel 12. And so, a good way to remember where it is, is think of Daniel 12, 1 and 2, even though the verse 2 is what you want, but 12, 1, 2.

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But it says this, I'm just going to read verse 2. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake.

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Okay, so that's clearly talking about those who are dead. They're asleep in the dust of the earth and they're going to awake one day.

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So how are they going to wake? Well, it says right here, some to everlasting life.

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And the Jehovah Witnesses say, yeah, I got no problem with that. Oh, but keep reading. It says, some to eternal life and some to shame in everlasting contempt.

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Do you see the issue there? If Jesus, if God is saying that some are going to be raised to eternal life,

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He's also saying that contempt that we call hell is also eternal. It's not that you're going to be there for a while and burn out, okay?

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So we have that Jesus Christ is the giver of life, both physical and eternal.

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Let's look at the next thing. Not only is He the giver of life, but He is accepting of worship.

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He is accepting of worship. By accepting of worship, by accepting worship,

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He could not be a mere man. If He was a man accepting of worship, that would be blasphemy.

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That's very clear in John 10, like we mentioned that. But if you go to verse 33, the

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Jews answered Him saying, for what good work, the

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Jews answered Him saying, for what good work we do not stone you, but for blasphemy, you being a man claim to be, make yourself

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God. So a man cannot accept worship, okay?

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Now Jesus accepted worship. He did not make people stand.

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And when they bowed down to Him, that is the difference. And they weren't bowing down in a sense of seeing

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Him as a king. Well, He was a king, the king of Israel, but not a king in a physical sense.

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He wasn't a king of Rome, all right? So that was the thing. But if you were to go and look, one of the clearest passages would be from Thomas.

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After Jesus rises from the dead, remember the events. Thomas is not with the disciples when they first see

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Him. He's there with them the second. What ends up happening? Thomas was doubting. He was saying, if I have to see the nail prints in His hand and see the nail prints on His side, then

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I'll believe. What you end up having is Jesus shows Himself and says, Thomas, come check it out. Thomas says, my

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Lord and my God. So He wasn't saying

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Lord as if He's some sort of ruler, someone above me, He's being my master.

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No, because He's calling them God. It was an act of worship, all right?

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So we see also, not only does He, by accepting worship as men, can

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He not be a mere man, but by accepting worship, He must be

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God. And not only would He not be a man, He would have to, He can't be an angel, okay?

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He can't be an angel. So let me deal with that one.

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So He can't be a mere man. He can't be an angel, all right? We look at the passages in, say,

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Revelation 19, where we see that John falls at the feet and the angel stands him up and says,

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I'm a fellow servant like you. Well, if an angel won't accept worship, but Jesus did, then somehow

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Jesus realizes what He's doing. He's claiming to be God by His very work, all right?

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But He also, by accepting the worship, must be God. He must be

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God by accepting the worship. Now, if He wasn't God and accepted the worship, then

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He is not a man to follow because He's committing blasphemy and He's deceiving people, all right?

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And so we see that in Matthew 14, when people come out of the boat and they worship

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Him, they say, truly, you are the Son of God. And if you remember, we talked about this, that Son of God does not mean offspring of God.

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It is a name to mean He has the identification as God. In other words,

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He's claiming to be God, okay? All right, so let's look at another, and that is the last in this category of works, and that is the judgment of mankind, the judgment of mankind.

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Jesus Christ claimed that He was the judge over mankind.

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I mean, that's throughout the Gospels. Jesus said He would be the judge in the final day.

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He would be the one that people would be facing and He would judge them.

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But it's even more than that. Not only did Jesus say that He would act as the judge, but He actually said that He is the source of judgment.

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If you're ashamed of Him, you cannot get into heaven. If you don't accept Him, you won't get into heaven.

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And that is the thing. When we look at Him as a judge,

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He's more than just the judge, but the source of judgment. When we stand before God, the question is not going to be, are you a good person?

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The question is going to be, what did you do with Jesus? Jesus Christ, God Almighty, died in your place.

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Did you accept His gift as a payment for salvation, or are you going to pay it on your own?

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That's all that matters. We're not a good person, and that's why God is going to judge us. It is

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Jesus Christ who says He is going to be the judge. And what He's going to judge us by is whether or not we repented and received

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Him. That's the standard of justice. Why? Because the standard really is going to be the law of God that we've all broken.

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But the standard of being made right with God, to have your name in the Lamb's book of life, would be to have that, your name in the

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Lamb's book of life, you had to have accepted Jesus Christ. And that becomes the thing.

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So, where we have there is with Jesus Christ, when we look at this,

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He did the works that only God could do. Okay?

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He did works that only God can do. He was the creator. Okay? He forgives sin.

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He's the giver of life. He accepted worship. And lastly,

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He, believe it or not, some people have a hard time with this, but He is going to be the judge of all mankind.

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Now, why is that so interesting? It's interesting because so many of the atheists out there who deny

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God, they deny Jesus. And you notice they go out of their way to deny

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Jesus, but they won't go after like Allah. I mean, really guys, stand on your convictions.

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You know? But seriously, what we see is that they are going to be judged by the very

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Jesus that they went out of their way to mock. I feel bad.

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You know, I mean, just picture being the men who actually crucified Christ or even worse, those

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Pharisees who committed Jesus to the judgment of death.

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I mean, could you picture what happens the moment they die and all of a sudden they're facing

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Jesus as the judge? Now, there's a couple of things when we think of the judgeship, okay?

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A couple of different ways we view this in different religions. Jehovah Witnesses will say that it's only

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God the Father that judges you. Mormonism will actually say in some of the writings that it is the

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Trinity that will judge you and Joseph Smith. Oop, Joseph Smith just became a third part of the deity?

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Ooh, that's not good. Um, some would see in Roman Catholicism that Mary almost acts as judge because if you go to Mary, Jesus can't refuse her.

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So, if you do something wrong, you go to Mary and Jesus is going to accept her. So, it doesn't say that in Catholic doctrine, but there's many who make that argument based on Catholic doctrine.

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And then you have Muslims that would just say that it is Allah, God, who judges man completely by His mercy, okay?

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If it's completely by His mercy, what does that say about God's mercy? Well, it says that He's either going to be merciful and forgive everybody or He shows favoritism and just forgives some people.

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Now, if He forgives some people based on their works, then it's not grace. And that's why Islam is so much a works -based salvation because they are completely, um, completely focused on their works.

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Now, you have moderate Muslims who don't really live that way. Um, and so, what you see is the case, uh, where basically you have those who are moderate

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Muslims, I mean, just like you have moderate Christians. I mean, you have people that say they're a Christian, but they're not really a Christian. They don't know the first thing about Christianity, okay?

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Some of them go to church only on Christmas and Easter, okay? But, uh, what we have is we have the case where, um, we have to look at what

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Scripture actually says. And what Islam would say is that we have to be really, really, really good and hope, plead and beg that Allah would be merciful.

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And that's why they call Allah the most merciful. But if He's merciful the way they describe,

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He's not just because He's showing favoritism and He's doing it based on people's works, okay?

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And so, He's not just. Now, let me deal with one thing that, uh, just to be clear because when we look at these different world religions and we say that Jesus Christ is

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God, there's some religions that we talk to Jehovah Witnesses, clearly going to dispute that. They're going to say, no.

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You're going to have the, uh, Jews clearly going to deny that. You're going to have the

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Muslims clearly deny that. But you're going to have some that are going to have confusion. For example, you'll have some

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Christians that will say that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Now, they're really professing

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Christians, I think. But they do not mean that He is God. They mean He's some sort of offspring of God.

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And therefore, they're not seeing Jesus Christ as God. If Jesus isn't God, then when

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He died on that cross, His death, His eternal death that He paid being an eternal being can't be made for all people.

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He'd just be a temporal being that can pay a temporal fine. Now, I want to also describe this because when you deal with the

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Latter -day Saints, now making a distinction here, many people refer to Latter -day

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Saints as Mormons. There's two different ways that many of them view that. You have those that would say

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Mormons. They're more of the old school. They accept some of the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of the

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Latter -day Saints. But that name, Mormon, has kind of got a rap of being a cult for good reason,

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I would say. But what you've been seeing is many of them are going away from that name.

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And they're saying they're members of LDS or they're LDS members or Latter -day Saints.

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And they're referring to that. Giving themselves a new branding. These are the ones I want to address. Because, see, if you talk to someone that says they're a

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Mormon, they're more than willing to say what they believe. Those that go by the more modern way are trying to sound more

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Christian. So they're going to use similar language but have different meanings, okay?

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That's why you got to make sure you define terms. Always, always define your terms. Someone asked me this week, am

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I a Calvinist? And I said, I don't know. What do you mean by that? And he got all upset. And I said, define?

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He says, well, you know, do you believe in tulip? I said, what is tulip? Now, I know what it is.

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And he said, you know what it is? I said, yeah, I'm asking you what you think it is. He didn't want to say.

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Instead, he just wanted to blast me. Okay, it kind of shows that he's not really sure what it is.

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He just knows he attacks it. That's the thing. So, what we have with those that are

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Latter -day Saints is that they would say that Jesus Christ is Son of God, but they mean something a little different than the identity of God.

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They would say that Jesus was God, but they would say that he became

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God, that he was once a man that became God, just like everyone else, just like God the

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Father. That's a big difference. That's a totally different Jesus. Jesus, who is the half -brother of Satan, who had physical parents.

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Now, let me explain why this is such a big deal. If I tell you that, if I say to you that I know my friend

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John, my friend John is six foot four. He's got black spiky hair, and he's really overweight.

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And you're saying, dude, I know your friend John. He's blonde. He's five foot two, and he's really, really thin as a rail.

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Now, if you're listening to that, you quickly realize, dude, we're talking about two totally different people, right?

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It's not the same person. Same thing here. When we talk about Jesus, the question is which

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Jesus? We're talking in this class about the Jesus Christ, who is God Almighty, always has been from everlasting to everlasting.

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The Jesus who not only had the names for God, but he also did the works of God.

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And let's look at this last one in the remaining time, that he has the attributes of Christ.

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The attributes of Christ are that of God. The attributes of Christ indicate his deity.

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Well, what attributes are those? Now, if you remember, we did the attributes of God, and we had gone through that.

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And we had seen in that lesson that there were certain attributes that were only and specifically mentioned that were only true and only held to by God, by the

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Trinity. And so, what we have is we see here that Jesus Christ had certain attributes.

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Let's look at the first one. We could see, as we saw the first attribute that we talked about, that God is incomprehensible.

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Jesus Christ claimed to be incomprehensible, and we see that said of him by Paul in Ephesians 3.

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In Ephesians 3, we see that it says,

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Ephesians 3, 8 and 19, to me who is less than the least of the saints, is

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Paul speaking, this grace was given that I should preach among the

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Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ. To know and to love

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Christ which passes knowledge, you may be filled with the fullness of God.

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In other words, Jesus Christ is beyond what we can know. All right? So, what we have is that he's incomprehensible.

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But more importantly, we see that he's sovereign. He's sovereign.

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Romans 14, 10 and 12, you can look those up and see that Jesus Christ is sovereign, okay?

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That every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is

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God. Let's look at the next one in your syllabus there under section 3, letter

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C, omniscience. We already looked at this. We already saw this in Mark 2 and Matthew 9.

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But Jesus Christ had omniscience. He could read minds. He knew things no one else could know, all right?

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We see that he's omnipotent, that Jesus Christ had, is all -powerful.

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We see that he is omnipresent. Jesus Christ said to the disciples,

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I will be with you always. Now, if Jesus Christ is with you over there in your room watching this video, and yet he's with me over here in this studio, how could he be at both places at both times?

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Because he's with us always because he's omnipresent. He's also immutable. Hebrews 13, verse 8,

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Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, all right?

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Another one is that Jesus Christ is eternal. We saw that in Revelation 1 .8, okay?

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That he is the first and the last, the alpha, the omega. In John 1 .1,

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that he was in the beginning. In other words, before there was a universe, before there was anything, there he was.

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So, last one is holiness, that he has the attributes of holiness, that he's completely separate from sin.

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Mark 1 .24 says, let alone, what have we to do with you, Jesus of Nazareth?

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This is a demon speaking. Do you come to destroy us?

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I know who you are, the Holy One of God. You see, he knows that he's holy.

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He knows that Jesus Christ is, and he knows who

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Christ is. He knows that he's holy, all right? So, finally, if you look in your syllabus there, finally,

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Colossians, I can get this right, why can't I speak today? Si, you're in the chat room.

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Why can't I speak? Oh, he's going to say because I don't know what I'm talking about. So, what we have is, we have, finally,

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Colossians 2 .9. Ascribes Christ one of the greatest statements of his deity.

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For in him, Jesus Christ, in him dwells the fullness of the

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Godhead bodily. There you go, okay? So, after examining all these, and there's more that we could look into.

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There's, as I said to you, working on a book, going through all the Gospels with this, all right?

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So, what we see is that after examining the totality of this information, on the deity of Christ, one must say one of three things, all right?

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You cannot, in any way, under any circumstances, say that Jesus Christ was a good man, okay?

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He was not a prophet, and he was not a good man. There is no way you can make that claim. Why? Because of this.

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It was because of the fact that Jesus Christ, with his claims of deity, was one of three things.

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He was either a liar, that's your first blank there. He was either a liar, that is, that he deceived those who followed him into telling them he was

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God when he wasn't. He was either a liar, or he was a lunatic, that's your second blank there.

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A lunatic, that is, that he was so deluded that he did not know what he was saying when he claimed to be

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God, or that he actually believed he was God, okay? So, he's either a liar, or he's a lunatic.

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Neither one of those cases would make him a good man. So, he's either a liar, he's a lunatic, or there's only one other choice that he could be.

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Lord, and that's your third blank. He's Lord, that is, he is who he said he is, the

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King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. Now, if you have your syllabus, if you're a student of the academy and you have your syllabus, look at the assignment that I have for you for this upcoming week.

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The assignment that I have for you is not to fill in the thought questions, though I may post some in the

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Facebook group, so I encourage you to keep watching for that. But it is this, to study and commit to memory the necessary verses to demonstrate the deity of Christ.

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Why? Why is that so important? For this simple reason, you are going to have to deal with this.

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If you are going to be out there on the streets talking to people about Jesus Christ, people are going to challenge you, and they're going to challenge you with the deity of Christ.

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Okay? That's why it's important. Now, I did this last week, but some of you may not have watched.

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I want to show this again, a real short, about a minute or so video, that shows the many different ways, when you read through the

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Gospels, this is just some of the categories, as I went through the book of Matthew, that I found how

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Jesus Christ directly and indirectly claims to be God. In all of it, and you'll see that it's like 44 % of the

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Gospel of Matthew alone, are these claims in many different categories. So let's hit that and see how that is.

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Many people say that Jesus never claimed to be God. However, when we take a look at these things, we will see in the categories that Jesus Christ said that His words,

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His works, and His witness will claim to His own deity. The reality is He made words in both explicit and implicit statements.

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We look at His works. He was omniscient. He said He would be with us always.

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In other words, omnipresence. The fact that He had the power to forgive sins. He had authority that could only come from God over illness, over death, over demons, over weather, over the physical things.

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He claimed to be the judge of all mankind, and He was even said He was the source of the judgment.

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We have to accept Him. He was witnessed to as God. We can see that He was virgin born in the titles that were given to Him.

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Lord, Son of God, Son of Man, Son of David, the Christ, Messiah.

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He was worshipped as God. He was recognized to be God by God the Father, by the

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Scriptures, by holy angels, by men, by His disciples, even His enemies and the demons, attested to the fact that He claimed to be

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God. There's over 1 ,070 verses in the book of Matthew, and yet when we look in these categories, we see that over 470 of them refer to Jesus in one way or another as God.

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That's 44 % of the first of the four Gospels refer to Jesus as God. It's pretty clear

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Jesus is trying to say He's God. And there you have it.

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So, next week we're going to look into something else. We're going to look into the fact, the humanity of Christ.

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The humanity of Christ. And we're going to see that Jesus Christ was human.

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Now, that's not questioned nowadays, but as we're going to see, that was questioned back then. If you have any questions for us, if you have questions we didn't answer, you can go to our

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Facebook page or you can email us at academyatstrivingforeternity .org.

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If you want to consider becoming a student of the academy, you can go to the website, Striving for Eternity Academy, and you can enroll as a student.

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And you'd be able to do that. So, we also want to remind you if you have, if you are going to be around in the

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New Orleans area, or you want to travel to New Orleans area, and want to join us for the Super Bowl outreach,

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I think there is only like a few spots, like in the handfuls, maybe, of open spots right now.

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Go to superbowloutreach .org and let them know you want to be on my team when you fill out the registration.

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And if you can't go, would you please consider sponsoring somebody? I know there's someone on my team that needs a sponsorship.

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They need the money to get out there. They need the $250 fee for the Super Bowl outreach.

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Would you consider doing that? If you need to know who that is, you can email us at academy at strivingforeternity .org.

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We'll let you know who that is. Well, we may not let you know who it is, but we'll make sure the money gets to the person, I should say.

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And you can also go to the Super Bowl outreach page, and there's a place where you can support someone.

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And if you need to know then, you'll need to email us so we can let you know at least the first name of who it is to support.

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Or just let them know me, and I'll make sure to make sure that they know who it is.

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So this week, who do we have we want you to encourage? The person of encouragement for this week is somebody who

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I've gotten to know personally very well. She is somebody who is on my evangelism team here in New Jersey.

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Just one of my favorite people actually to go out and watch evangelize because we go to the boardwalk and within minutes, she has a crowd of young people around her and they're talking.

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And that is Casey English. By the way, it's two E's. Casey is with two

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E's there. But there's her website there where you can see some of the things she does because she's a wedding photographer by trade.

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And you'll see some really, well, you'll see some magazines that she's been in. And you'll see some of the photos she's done.

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But this girl has a heart for the gospel. And she just really, really sees a need to share the gospel.

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People has a heart for it and is just so relatable, which is an important thing.

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If you want to share the gospel with people, please be relatable to them. And Casey is.

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I mean, she just can walk up to almost anybody and just start a conversation and start relating to them.

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So go to her blogspot, kenglishblogspot .com. You can check out her stuff.

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You can also check out her Facebook page. I'm sure that it shall be posted as the sister of the week to encourage.

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Why do we ask you to encourage people? For a very simple reason. Most of us only say encouraging things about people after they're dead.

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Wouldn't you like to be encouraged now? So does everybody else. And so that's why we want you to make a habit of encouraging people.

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And if you have someone you want us to encourage, email us at academyatstrivingforeturning .org.

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Let us know. But don't just give us the name, because if it's not someone that we know personally, we're not going to have anything good to say about them.

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And that'll be kind of silly just to give a name. Let us know something about them. Give us some insight into them on who they are, why we should encourage them.

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All right. So email us that way. And we want to remind you, next week we're going to start the

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Humanity of Christ part one. There's no way I'm going to get through the whole lesson, so I know it's going to be part one and part two.

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It's even in your syllabus that way. So make sure you enroll for the academy. What you get for the academy is the syllabus, which is about the student syllabus is over 70 pages, about 80 pages of material there.

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And you have that that you'll have at your hands, readily available. You can follow along with class, but it also makes it available for others to be able to watch this.

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We offer this absolutely free of charge for you who watch it on Ustream or watch it later on YouTube.

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But the real thing is that it costs money to do this. We don't ask for a lot.

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What we do ask is for your support, and we don't give, we don't do that without something. And what we do is we give you the syllabus for supporting us.

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We don't make much. I think we make a couple of dollars off of each syllabus. So, but we ask if you'd help us out.

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We hope to make it up in volume. So tell your friends, if you enjoyed the classes, please post it on Facebook.

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Let your friends know, let your church know, because if you sign up as a church, you get a discounted rate because it costs us less to ship to the church.

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So we want to remind you to go out and strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.