The Deity of Christ: Part 1 (Comfort & Durbin)

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Cultish: Interview w/ Warren Jeffs' 65th Wife (Part 2)

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To put it in simple terms, that Jesus is fully God and fully man.

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It's a non -negotiable. I lived in Indiana for the first 14 years of my life. I grew up there in the

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Midwest. And when I was 14, my family and I left Indiana and we moved to the heart of Mormonism.

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We moved out to Utah. My mother got a job to be a professor at BYU out in Provo, Utah.

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And so our whole family picked up and left. And my life changed very drastically. I became very entrenched in this religious culture in Utah.

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We lived in a little town called Alpine, which is almost 99 % Mormon. And so it's all that I knew.

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It was my life. It was my culture. It was my family, my friends, my relationships. I mean, every part of my identity was rooted and grounded in this religious mentality.

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And so I had a sincere desire in my heart to make myself right with God by proving myself to Him and by proving myself to my religious leaders and my parents and the people around me by trying to be as faithful and zealous to the

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Mormon law as possible. So the important thing to think about when you think about the cults and other religions is that while there might be points of contact with somebody from another religion, someone in Mormonism, a

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Jehovah's Witness, someone that is a Rosicrucian, a Christian scientist, whatever, there may be, again, points of real contact.

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You know, love your neighbor as you love yourself. You might have points of contact with, say, Islam, where Islam borrows the monotheism from Judaism and Christianity.

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However, where these religions and cults will often begin to separate is on the deity of Jesus Christ.

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Who is Jesus Christ specifically? And so, say, for example, in Mormonism, Mormons have

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Christian terminology and language. They say things like Jesus Christ. They say Heavenly Father.

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They say Salvation, Cross, Resurrection. They say Bible. They say Church. And so the difficulty in communicating at times is the borrowed or co -opted language.

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They ape Christianity in many ways. And so it really is fundamentally important for us to get to the bottom of the language and say, okay, what do you mean when you say that?

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So, for example, while, again, there's points of contact, the Mormon says Jesus, but the

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Christian also says Jesus. But when the Christian says Jesus, the Christian is thinking in terms of what the

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Bible says about Jesus. A Christian wants to do what's called exegesis. We want to draw out of the text the

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Word of God. What does God say here? What is he saying? Not what does my tradition say, and now

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I'm going to go running off to the Bible to try to find how it coordinates or corroborates with the scriptures. Or what does my philosophy say, and now

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I'm going to run off to the Bible to see what does it say. But Christians are supposed to be, in many ways, focused in upon exegesis.

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That is, drawing out of the text of God's Word, what does it say? So, again, when a Christian and a

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Mormon are conversing with one another and they're talking about Jesus, you've got all this Jesus speak, but you have to get down to definitions.

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What do you mean? So, for example, in Mormonism, the Mormon view of God is not

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Christian. It's not close to Christian. It's not kind of Christian. It's not almost

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Christian. It's not sort of acceptable as Christian. One of the fundamental, explicitly taught doctrines in the

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Christian faith is monotheism. It is strict monotheism. There is only one

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God. He is the eternal God. God has no beginning. Jesus says

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God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. For example, in the morning and evening prayers,

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Jesus would have prayed the morning and evening prayers. Every faithful Jew in the first century would have prayed the morning and evening prayers.

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Jews today quote, in their morning and evening prayers, the Shema. And the

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Shema is from Deuteronomy 6, verse 4. It's central to everything we believe as Christians and Jews.

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And that is, Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. The Shema is not simply a statement about the unity of God or the oneness of God.

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So, for example, Deuteronomy 6, verse 4. In the Hebrew, Shema, Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh Echad, is not simply saying there is only one

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God. It does say that. But it's also about allegiance to this one

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God. It was like Pledge of Allegiance to the one true God, right? And so every

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Jew had as their mantra the Shema. There is only one God.

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And so one of the distinct, very, very specific differences between Mormonism and Christianity is monotheism.

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There is only one God. He has existed for all eternity. While God is tri -personal, there are three distinct co -equal and co -eternal persons within the

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Godhead. There is only one God by nature. So from Genesis to Revelation, there is only one

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God. And He's the creator of all things. In Him, all things hold together.

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God is the beginning and the end, the first and the last. And God actually says in Isaiah 43 .10,

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He says, Before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me.

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I mean, when you think about that, how much more explicit does

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God have to be to describe His existence as the only God? There's plenty more.

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There's Isaiah 44 .6 and 8 where God says, I am the first and I am the last. Besides me there is no

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God. And in Isaiah 44 .8, God asks a rhetorical question. He says,

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Is there a God besides me? Indeed, there is no other God. I know not one. And this is important because in Mormonism, Mormonism actually teaches that God, the

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Father, whom they call Elohim, they use the Hebrew word Elohim, they say this is

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God the Father. They teach that Elohim was once a man who lived on an earth like us.

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And this resurrected God -man went through exaltation to become a

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God of this earth. And this God, Elohim, had gods before Him who went through the same process and gods before Him and gods before Him.

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It's essentially an infinite regression of gods. And in this story of Mormonism, God has a body,

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Joseph Smith taught, as tangible as man's. He has a body of flesh and bone.

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There is a famous sermon from Joseph Smith who's the first president and prophet of the

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Mormon church. And he says in the King Follett discourse, his sermon at a funeral, where he was explicit about the nature of God and who

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God is, he says that God has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man. He says that we've imagined and supposed that God was

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God from all eternity. He says, I will refute that idea and take away and do away the veil so that you may see.

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He says, you've got to learn to become gods yourselves the same way all gods have done before you.

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Now, this is not Christian, not by any stretch. It's not even the same kind of description of God.

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Joseph Smith taught that God was a man who became a god one day, had many gods before him. God has many wives in the pre -existence and in heaven.

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He's a polygamist and he created us as spirit offspring, like he was created by his

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God and father in the pre -existence. He teaches that or he taught that Jesus Christ was a literal offspring of Elohim and one of his goddess wives, along with Lucifer, Satan, and along with all of us.

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And so in Mormon theology, Jesus Christ is not eternal God existing forever and ever as God.

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He is a spirit offspring of Elohim and one of his goddess wives. He is spiritual brother and offspring next to Lucifer, Satan.

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This is something that is stunning in terms of borrowing

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Christian language and importing entirely different meanings into what we're talking about.

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You know, one thing I like in the church too is we are like the survivors of the

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Titanic and the lifeboat of the Titanic. There's plenty of room and all around us, people are drowning.

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Now, if we want, we can polish the brass in the lifeboat. We can shine up the oars. We can do what we want.

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It's legitimate, but not while people are drowning. There are priorities and what's happened in the contemporary church is we've lost the priority of evangelism.

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Oswald J. Smith said, Oh, my friends, we're loaded down with countless church activities, while the real work of the church, that of evangelizing and winning the lost, is almost entirely neglected.

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Bill Bright in his book, The Coming Revival, said only 2 % of contemporary church in America regularly share their faith with others.

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Two percent. Charles Spurgeon said, Have you no wish for others to be saved?

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Then you're not saved yourself. Be sure of that. If you're a Christian, you cannot sit passively while sinners sink into hell.

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It's like, what would you think of someone who polished their car while a child drowned in a swimming pool?

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I mean, he has a legal and a moral obligation to save that child. And love could not let a child drown in a swimming pool, and love cannot be unconcerned that sinners are sinking to hell, that death is consuming people every single day.

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It should burden our hearts. If hell didn't exist, neither would this ministry. But hell does exist.

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God's made a way for sinners to be forgiven and granted everlasting life where they can escape the damnation of hell. How can we not shout this from the house tops?