8 - Deity of Jesus Christ, Part 1

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Praise God for Covid-19

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Well, welcome to the

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Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology.

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We are glad to have you with us today. We welcome all the new students that we have with us and all of you atheist trolls who are trolling the site.

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I'm actually kind of glad some of you guys are there because maybe by watching you'll actually learn what Christianity really is and not what all the atheist blog sites say that Christianity is.

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But we do welcome all of you here. I do want to set right off the bat. If you notice behind me someone had made for us a plaque for the show.

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This is from Rob's Custom Carving. You can find him,

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I should have put this up here, but it's robscustomcarving .com.

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Did some great work as you can see. You can't really see the detail of it, but it's all carved into that wood back there.

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It looks really nice. Maybe if I get out of the way there so you can see it.

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Looks cool. But thank you to Rob. It was a great piece of work that he did.

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I really appreciate it. He designed it and put that together. Did some very nice craftsmanship there.

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So we thank you for that. If you have your syllabuses with you, that is something you have if you are an enrolled student to the academy.

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We'll talk more about that later on, what it means to be an enrolled student, what do you get. But as an enrolled student one of the things you do get is you get to have the syllabus that we have here.

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In your syllabus if you look we are on lesson number six with the deity of Jesus Christ.

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And so as we're going through just as kind of a recap of where we are. So you know we are in book one,

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God's throne room. We are looking at section two on the deity or the doctrine of Christ.

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And specifically lesson number six with looking at the deity of Christ.

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Now with this again I'm going to be hopeful to get through all the material.

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And what I have is just the tip of the iceberg of how much that we could go into.

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We do hope to have sometime hopefully early next year the book on Jesus Christ claims a deity.

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I hope to have it finished written by the end of the year and have that ready to go to the editors and all that.

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But that will go into a lot more detail in showing how much there is out there.

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And so we want to as we go through this and as we discuss this today we want to look at this and study, see what the word of God actually says about the deity of Christ.

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But I say that also recognizing the fact that there's a lot more to the deity of Christ that we just, we don't have time to go into.

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But I want to go into as much as I can and as we go through this I'm going to have to go into what others believe about Christianity.

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Because like I said with the Trinity this is one of the most important doctrines that you need to understand.

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This is tied to the Trinity because this is the deity of Christ is the first thing that people attack.

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And actually that's the, if you accept the deity of Christ the rest of the Trinity is not difficult to accept.

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It's really this one issue that so many people stumble over. And as I tell people all the time, if you do not accept that Jesus Christ is

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God then you have no forgiveness of sin. You're dead in your sins. Because if Jesus Christ was just a temporal being, in other words he's not

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God, he's an angel, he's a man, he's some created being.

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If he is some created being and not eternal then he's not God. And if he's not

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God he cannot pay an eternal fine. That is how important this doctrine is.

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This doctrine literally is the difference of heaven or hell. So let's look, if you're with us there, we have here in your syllabus the introduction there.

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Christians who have contact with any of the major cults,

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Jehovah Witnesses, Mormons, The Way International, Worldwide Church of God and many more or some of the world religions of Islam and Judaism have experienced the need to convince these people of the deity of Jesus Christ.

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In this study we're going to see three indications of the deity of Christ, the names, the works and the attributes.

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And in the book that I'm writing on this we actually break it down into three ways, but three different ways and that is his words, his works and his witness as we go through the

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Gospels, just the Gospels, to see what the Gospels claim of the deity of Christ. We're going to go through more than just the

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Gospels tonight. We're going to look at some Old Testament, New Testament to see how this points to the fact that Jesus is

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God. We're going to dig into this and hopefully you will be convinced at the end of tonight that it is very clear that Jesus Christ claimed to be

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God. And if there's still question afterwards, well we'll have to work with you some more.

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So let's begin with the names of God. And if you look there in your names we're going to first see a couple of names in your syllabus in the

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Old Testament. One is a mighty God and we look here for a passage that's familiar to many and that is

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Isaiah 9 and verse 6. Isaiah 9 and verse 6.

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And if we look at this, we're looking here for specifically where it refers to Jesus or the

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Messiah as a mighty God. So, for as a child has been born for us, a son is given, authority rests on his shoulder, he is named

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Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

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So if you see there, you see that the name of the future Messiah, which we would the

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Christ, Jesus Christ, is Mighty God. How about another one?

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The word Lord in Psalm 110, 110 and that is verse 1.

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And it says here, the Lord says to my

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Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool. Now, this one's actually quoted in the

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New Testament. Jesus referred to this and he, speaking of the names of God, he said with this, why is it when the

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Pharisees were asking him questions, why did David say that the Lord said to my

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Lord? Who's the two Lords here? How could a

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Lord of a descendant of David be his Lord?

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Because that's basically what it is. Jesus was the son of David, but David calls him my

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Lord. So, the Lord says to my Lord. So, we see that Jesus, the

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Messiah, would be called Lord. Also, just for the Jehovah Witnesses out there,

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Jesus Christ was called Jehovah. Look at this passage, a great passage to use, and I always recommend if you're going to use this with the

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Jehovah Witnesses, start in verse 5, read verse 5, Jeremiah 23, 5, and ask at the end of verse 5 where it talks of the root of David, who is it talking about?

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Because they will say it's talking about Jesus. Then read on in verse 6, in his days

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Judah will be saved and Israel will dwell securely, and this is the name by which he will be called,

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Yahweh Sikhenu, Jehovah Sikhenu, the Lord our Righteousness.

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We saw that one when we went over the names of God. Great passage to use with them.

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And someone had asked, what about that passage? How do they respond?

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Many of the Jehovah Witnesses, because they have a book on how to respond to Christians, and they don't have that passage in there.

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That's the reason I like to turn to it. They're not ready with an answer for that, and so it catches them off guard.

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One Jehovah Witness explained to me that, well, that's just his name. He wasn't really Yahweh or Jehovah.

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I said, but wouldn't God be committing blasphemy if he's calling a man or an angel

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Jehovah? This is the name reserved just for God. So this is a very strong name from the

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Old Testament referring to Jesus that shows that Jesus was going to be called, was going to be known as God.

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We're coming on to Christmas time, so this would be a good one to look at, and that is familiar to many of us.

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We already looked at Everlasting Father, by the way, in Isaiah 6 .9 .6,

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but Isaiah 7 .14, Immanuel, God with us. Therefore the

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Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him

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God with us. That's the literal translation of Immanuel, God with us.

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So I want you to notice that. You can also see this cross -referenced in Matthew 1 .23,

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but what you see is that here Immanuel translated

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God with us. His name was going to be God with us. Now, his name is

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Jesus. So you say, well, wait a minute, is this a false prophecy? A false prophecy because somehow his name was not

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Immanuel. Now, this is where we get the distinction. Immanuel, his name would be

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Immanuel referring to who he is. In other words, that his name would be

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God with us. Not that his physical name, like my name is Andrew, but it's the meaning behind the name, which

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I don't live up to. Andrew is Greek for manly. Yeah, not. All right.

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Yeah, I hear the snickers in the classroom there. All right. So moving on, we have some of the names in the

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New Testament and in the New Testament, we have some names for Jesus.

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And before we get there, I should have started with this and that is to look at what some of the other religions believe about Jesus.

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Okay. This is where giving you some of the background that I have in studying some world religions.

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I want to give you some of the major understanding of the different world religions.

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All right. Judaism, maybe you've heard of it, but Judaism would state that the virgin birth was a myth and that Jesus Christ is a false prophet.

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Actually, not all of them would say he's a false prophet. Some try to argue he's just a good man. Impossible that he could be just a good man.

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We'll look at that much later. But many will look at a passage in Deuteronomy to argue that Jesus is a false prophet.

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And the argument is just because it says that some will come and be false prophets, children of mothers.

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And so the argument is that it doesn't say children of fathers. Therefore, it's a son of a mother.

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That must be a future reference to Jesus. Yeah. If you look in the context, it doesn't really fit.

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But they would argue at best he's just a good man, but that he would be a false prophet.

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They do not believe that Jesus Christ to be the Jewish Messiah. And they do not believe him to be

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God. They have a view of God, of purely monotheistic, with only one person in the

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Godhead. Where we would hold to a monotheistic God with three people in the

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Godhead. That's last lesson, last two lessons. Actually, I hope if you haven't read on that lesson, make sure you go back.

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Muslim thought. The Muslim thought is that Islam refers to Jesus as the son of Mary. And actually, if you look at the passages where it talks about the

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Trinity, yeah, it refers to Trinity as father, mother, and son.

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Oopsie, wrong definition. But they teach that Jesus was merely a human being.

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And that's why they always refer to him as the son of Mary, not the son of God, because they're emphasizing that he's born of Mary and that he was a messenger of Allah.

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They recognize, and this is an interesting thing, Muslims will recognize that Jesus did supernatural works where Muhammad did not.

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He was supernaturally born. They accept his supernatural birth of being virgin born.

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They accept the miracles that he had done, but they see him as only a prophet, much like Noah and Abraham and Moses.

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That would be Muslim thought. How about Mormon thought? Mormon thought would be this, is that Jesus Christ, the

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Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, sometimes called Mormons, teaches that Jesus Christ was a pre -existing spirit who had become a man and is now

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God. Okay, did you follow that? He was once a man. He had physical parents.

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He was born on a He became God. Okay, big problem with that is if he became

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God, there's a whole lot of issues there, but they're trying, they're actually saying that Jesus was sinful in a previous life.

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He was Lucifer's half -brother, huh? Yeah. All right, Jehovah Witness thought.

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Also, with Muslim thought, just one of the interesting things with that is that they don't accept that Jesus Christ actually died on a cross.

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They actually believe that God took Jesus away. That's how people saw him afterwards, okay, where he was in a risen state.

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They saw him afterwards. It's because God actually put a duplicate up there. Some would say

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Judas, some say someone else, but they would say that Jesus wasn't actually on the cross, okay?

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And the issue is Thomas put his hands in Jesus' hand and his sides, right?

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Look here, come touch the holes. Yeah, it was Jesus on the cross, right?

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But a Muslim will always ask you, how could God die? God's greater than our ability to understand.

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Just always remember that, all right? All right, Jehovah Witness thought. Jehovah Witnesses believe that Jesus Christ pre -existed in heaven and was the first creation of God, and God used

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Jesus, who back then was Michael the Archangel, to direct all of creation.

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So in other words, God the Father created Jesus. He was known as Michael the Archangel.

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Michael the Archangel created everything else, all the other angels, all the other planets, stars, everything, and then he became a man and walked on earth, and we know him as Jesus.

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And then they teach that after he became a man, he didn't bodily resurrect, he spiritually resurrected and became a spirit again as Michael the

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Archangel. They do not believe that Jesus was God. They actually find most of their stuff in a heresy of about the third or fourth century where they tried teaching that Jesus was not

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God, but he was just a man, the Arian debate, and this is just rehashed from back then, all right?

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So, let's look at the early Christian error, all right? The early Christian error.

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The early Christian error during the time of the early Christian church, many heresies, as I mentioned already with Arianism, viewed the person of Jesus Christ as just being a person.

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Now, keep in mind that in the very first century, nobody questioned his deity, they questioned his humanity, okay?

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And this is the point. Because they questioned his humanity, so much of the

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New Testament is written trying to prove his humanity, okay? And so, you end up seeing a lot of that kind of thought in the first century.

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But later on, some heresies started coming up where they started to get entrenched with some of the

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Gnostic thought that ended up leading to the denial of his humanity. They then got into people trying to argue for his humanity so much at the extent of his deity.

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So, you have the Ammonites in 107, actually, was where they were the first to deny the reality of Christ's divine nature, and they held him to be merely just a man.

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Whether natural or supernaturally conceived, there's some question on that. They believe that Jesus was held in a special relationship to God, but that he wasn't

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God, and that from the time of his baptism, the Spirit empowered him to be able to do things that God would do.

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This is a problem. When people say that they see in the scriptures that Jesus didn't do any, he did what he did by the

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Father's direction, it doesn't mean that he did not have the attributes to do it of himself, but that Jesus Christ had the ability because he had the attributes of deity.

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So, it wasn't that at his baptism suddenly he became divine, some taught that, or that he had divine nature just for the time he walked on earth because God at his baptisms did something special with him.

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This kind of thinking started coming up. The Dacitates, they were about 70

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AD to 170, they denied the reality of Christ's human body, consistent with Gnostic thought in the 2nd century, but they ended up mixing in some of the pagan philosophy into the church, and the view was, it was a logical sequence from their view that matter was inherently evil, and that if matter is evil,

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Christ had to be pure. They ended up seeing that Jesus Christ could only be God, and they denied the reality of Christ's human body.

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This is consistent with Gnostic thought, but you see these two very different views. We'll look at this in a few lessons, where we see that Christ had dual nature, 100 % man, 100 %

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God, but this is the and therefore they're kind of working these things out in history.

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So, what do we have? We end up having here now is that then you have

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Arian, and the Arians in 325, this is where we see really the teachings of what the

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Jehovah Witnesses believe is really starting to come out now, with the

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Arian thought. So, when we see this, the

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Arians denied the divine nature of Jesus Christ.

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They regarded Jesus as purely human, and this really was in the time when

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Constantine was now emperor, and he was trying to unify the doctrine of Christianity, and they ended up having discussions on this.

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This doctrine then got worked out much more clear as the

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Arian debate, and this is something also to understand. Most of our doctrines that we have were hammered out because of error, because of heresies.

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As someone would bring up a heresy, it needed an answer, it needed a response, and because it needed a response, that was the reason that there would be some kind of reaction there.

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So, we see that pretty common throughout. Much of our doctrine came out of answering heretics.

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In 381, we have the Apolytarians which denied the entirety of Christ's human nature, and according to this view,

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Christ had no human spirit other than that which was furnished by his divine nature.

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So, you see, he wasn't really human, but that Christ was a person and had a body in a sense, but not a human nature.

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And so, you see here that this was being debated. There's a couple others we don't have time to go into, but we see that this has been an issue that's been debated throughout, okay?

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So, this isn't something that was just what Jehovah Witnesses talk about.

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It really isn't anything new. It's something that's been answered for hundreds and thousands of years.

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It's just they've never actually read what has been said. Now, more recent times, in the 1800s, we have something more of a more recent thing called the kenosis theory, and this is based out of Ephesians 2,

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Ephesians 1, no, Ephesians 2, where it says that Jesus emptied himself. Kenosis is the word for emptying, and it is that he emptied himself and became a man, a slave unto death.

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This really started with several theologians in Germany in the 1860s to about the 1880s, and it led over to England in 1890 to 1910 and this view advocated that somehow

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Jesus was God, but when he became a man, he gave up his divine attributes.

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And according to this theory, Jesus Christ emptied himself of some of these divine attributes like his omniscience and his omnipresence, you know, so that on earth he was just a man that depended upon God, okay?

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And so that becomes the way to see this, that this is, that people are looking at this and seeing that, trying to hammer through this distinction, all right?

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So when we look at this, when we look at all of this, we have to understand that Jesus Christ was 100 % fully

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God, 100 % fully man, okay? That's the way to understand this. This week all we're looking at is his deity.

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So let's look at the New Testament, let's look at some of the names in the New Testament. One we must go to, because it's one of the clearest, is

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John 1, 1. In the beginning was the Word, and the

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Word was with God, and the Word was God. And if you look in verse 14 of John 1, you see that the

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Word became flesh and dwelt among us. This Word is

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God. The Word is Jesus Christ. And so what we see is that the

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Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The Word was

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God. Now, if you talk to a Jehovah Witness, because we have to answer this, because this is an argument that often comes up, they will say that there's no definite article.

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If you read this, let's flip it, put it up again, the Word was God. They say if this was saying the

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Word was a God, it would be that it says that the

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Word was the God. Now in the Greek that's true, there is no definite article, and so they change it to the

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Word was a God. Now you have a different problem, because now you have two Gods, capital G God and lowercase g

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God. That's a problem. So what we end up having to do now is figure out how we're going to do this.

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You can't have two Gods, so what do they do? Well, if we look at the Greek, there's nothing in the

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Greek that requires a definite article there. The Word was God doesn't deny that there's somehow two

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Gods. It means that Jesus Christ was God, and so what we have is them trying to argue around this passage.

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Now they're going to do it from the Greek, and you know what? You can just ask them, have you studied Greek? Very few of them have, and if you actually look in a court case, and I don't remember all the court case, but you can contact

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Living Waters, and Mark Spence at contact on the box at livingwaters .com,

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and Mark Spence can tell you. He has the dates of the court case where they have a court case with a guy who actually did the translation for their

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New Testament, their English New Testament, and in front of a court, he had to admit that under oath, he doesn't know

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Greek and Hebrew, so they trust this Greek. They make the whole argument out of the Greek based on a guy who didn't know

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Greek. Oops. All right, so let's look at that.

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So we see that that was where we see the word Lord used, sorry,

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God used for Jesus. Next, if you have your syllabus, and we have not had to give too many fill in the blanks yet, but let's do that now.

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We see here that the second thing in your syllabus under letter B in the New Testament, you see that the

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New Testament names for God, for Jesus, God is used. We also see Lord is used, and your blank there is it's used by Christ.

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So Jesus Christ referred to himself as Lord. Let's look in Luke 6 46.

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Luke 6 46. All right, it says there, why do you call me

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Lord, Lord, and do not do what I tell you?

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He's acknowledging that he's being called Lord, Lord. You can also see his reference, as I said earlier,

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I don't want to bring it up, but you can look in Mark 2 23 to 28.

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You can look where he brings up the passage of Psalm 110, where he's saying that he as a son of David is being called

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Lord by David, right? And the Lord called him

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Lord. We also see in your blank there that not only was

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Lord used by Christ, but it was also in your blank there used by others. Let's see in Acts chapter 10.

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Acts chapter 10 and verse 36. We see that as for the word that he sent to Israel preaching good news of peace through Jesus Christ, he is

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Lord of all. All right? So what you have here is that in this passage, others are calling him

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Lord. This specifically in that passage was his disciples.

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We can look at, do we have any of the others? Okay. So then let's go on.

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You'll see a note in your syllabus, and it says, some would deny that the title of Lord is a reference to deity because it could have been used to refer to a man.

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Okay? Someone that calls him Lord as Lord or master or master.

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Okay? While this is true, it's obviously used in a reference of deity as well.

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And the context determines the usage. And these references are clear statements.

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If you go through in your syllabus, you'll see that we have several of them there where Mary Magdalene and the other

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Marys call him Lord, where Peter calls him Lord, where Paul refers to him as Lord, where John refers to him as Lord.

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And you'll see if you look at the context, because the context gives us the understanding of the meaning.

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If you remember from the school of biblical hermeneutics, it's the context that gives us the meaning.

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And the context clearly shows us that Jesus Christ is being referred to as Lord in the sense of being

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God. Okay? So, all right, let's move on and take a look at Son of God.

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Now, this one causes some confusion. All right? So let me first explain when we have this, when we talk about this, the word

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Son, while it could mean offspring, and that's your blank there in the syllabus, while it could mean offspring, it most often was used to refer to one who partakes in or is identified, identified with one whom is the

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Son. So in other words, it's not the offspring of God, but it is one who is identified with God.

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Okay? Now, people will argue with this all the time, that deny the deity

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Christ, that he's just the Son of God. This is where we have a big issue,

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I believe. We've lost the meaning of Son of God, and this is why

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I encourage people to drop that title, unless they're going to explain its meaning.

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Jesus Christ is God. That's very clear to our culture. Many people don't understand the

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Son of God. And because of that, there's confusion.

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Okay? So it's for that reason I encourage it. He is

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God the Son not God's Son.

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You understand that distinction? He is not God's Son as an offspring, but he is

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God the Son as identification. Now you say, well, hey,

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Andrew, man, you must be an idiot. You don't know that Son means offspring.

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I mean, you're trying to make a case that doesn't exist. You sure about that? Let's take a look at this passage where the phrase

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Son of is used to refer to people that clearly is identification and not offspring.

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Let's take a look. James, the son of Zebedee, and John, the brother of James, to whom he gave the name

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Boreas, that is sons of thunder.

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Now I've never had anybody come to me and argue that James and John were the offspring of two thunder bolts or lightning bolts.

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You know, the two lightning bolts struck each other, and all of a sudden there's thunder cloud and out came

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James and John. What? Right? Clearly you see that and you go, yeah, that means that they were just thunderous.

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They were loud and boisterous and just kind of that personality was just loud.

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Okay. That we can identify with. Oh, that's the word, identification.

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It's not offspring. We see that Judas was called the son of perdition.

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We see that Barnabas was called Barnabas because he is the son of encouragement.

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That's not actually his name. You can look that up in Acts 4, 36, but he's the son of encouragement.

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Encouragement didn't somehow have an offspring. He's identified with being so encouraging that he actually became known as Barnabas.

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Bar meaning son. Barnabas, son of encouragement. All right.

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So looking at that, we see son of God is a term of deity.

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Now here's the thing. When you read through the New Testament, read through the gospels and look at who called

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Jesus Christ son of God. Jesus most often called himself the son of man, emphasizing his humanity.

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It was the demons that knew him that called him son of God. It was men who recognized that the things he did could only be done of God and called him son of God, like the

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Pharisees even. All right. So let's look at another one there.

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The word, the word. And let me provide the significance of the word.

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We saw it in John 1 .1. And so in here we see that the word to the

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Hebrew has the idea meaning that the word is that which is essential communication, essential communication.

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Hope the blank is long enough there for those for that. But in Hebrew, the word, the idea of the word in Greek, it would be the logos would be essential communication.

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Thus, Jesus Christ is considered the full communication of God to man.

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We saw that in John 1 .1 compared with John 1 .14. All right.

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You can also see in your syllabus, there's Revelation 19 .13. So we see there that the word is referenced in such a way to say that Jesus Christ is the essential communication.

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We could see the first and the last. He's called the first and the last. And the significance with that is that the

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Lord Jesus Christ in his revelation to John used over and over again to describe the title, okay, if you're looking there of Yahweh or Jehovah, that's your blank there for the first and last is

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Yahweh or Jehovah in the Old Testament. In other words, first and last is a reference to the eternal being the self existent

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God. Okay, so when Jesus Christ in the book of Revelation is referred to as the first and the last, this is a reference to God.

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And so we have we see that there. All right. As we go on, let's take a look at I Am.

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And in this case, and if you need descriptors for first and last, you can look at Isaiah 44 .6.

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You look at Isaiah 48 .12. You can then correspond that to the book of Revelation 1 .11

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.17. Revelation 2 .8. And Revelation 22.

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I think about the verse 13 or 14. You can then look at if we look at the next one there is

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I Am. The I Am. This is a statement of deity extremely clearly.

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It emphasizes the preexistent nature, the eternality of Jesus Christ. And so when we see this, we see that God being the eternal being, this is the name for God in Exodus 3 .14.

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And if you look in John 8 .58, Jesus said to them, very truly,

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I tell you before Abraham was, I am.

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Now, if you look at that, and you see this, how do you know that this is a clear claim of deity?

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All right. It looks like Jesus is just saying before Abraham was, I am. I existed.

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So the Jehovah Witnesses would say this is an evidence of his preexistence. Okay. But the issue that you see here is this is not an argument for his preexistence because if you keep reading in the very next verse, which we don't have up, but in verse 59, the

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Jews pick up stones to stone him for blasphemy, for being a man he's claiming to be

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God. Okay. This is a very clear, very clearly he's claiming to be

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God. All right. Let's look at the last one for the names of God in the

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New Testament. That is Savior. Savior. The significance here, if you look in your syllabus, is that Yahweh or Jehovah in the

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Old Testament was known as the only Savior, yet this title is given to Jesus.

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And that's your blank there, Jesus. So I want you to track with me here. If Jesus Christ is the only, or sorry, that God the

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Father is the only Savior in the Old Testament and that title is given to Jesus, that name is given to Jesus, that He is the

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Savior, then what we end up seeing is that Jesus Christ must be by that name

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God. He's being synonymous with the only Savior. Okay.

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Do we have a, we don't have the passage there. Okay. You can look at many Old Testament passages. You can look at Isaiah 43.

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You could look at Isaiah 45. You could look at then Luke 1, 47, look at Titus 3 and 4, and you can see that this title is used.

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All right. And so when we look at all of this, we see that the names of God, okay, show us that God, that Jesus is

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God when we see the names of Christ. Now we're not going to have time to get into part two here of the, part two and three.

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We're going to end up having to stop here, but I do want to take a little bit of time to show a quick video to show how

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Jesus Christ claimed to be God in the, throughout the

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Gospels. This is through just some of the work that I was doing for the book, and this is part of what you'll see in the book that's coming out,

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Jesus Christ Claims a Deity, just looking through the book of Matthew. So let's see if this will work. Many people say that Jesus never claimed to be

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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, that if we have to accept

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Him. He was witnessed to as God. We can see that, 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 scriptures, by holy angels, by men, by His disciples, even

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His enemies and the demons, attested to the fact that He claimed to be 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. Alright, well

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I hope that helps to clarify just some of the ways that we see that Jesus was making it pretty clear that He's God.

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Now, we have a question that came up from last week, and that is that I mentioned something about Jesus Christ suffering eternally.

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This is an important thing to understand. This is why I say if people deny that Jesus Christ, if they deny the deity of Jesus Christ, they cannot be saved.

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They're still dead in their sins. Why do I say that? If Jesus Christ is just a temporal being, then

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He's not eternal. If He's not eternal, He can't pay an eternal fine.

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He has to be eternal to pay an eternal fine. Our death, our second death, is eternal.

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So Jesus Christ, being an eternal being, can pay for sin, be the payment itself for sin, for all of eternity.

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And so that's the thing that we have to look at. When we look at the deity of Christ, this is what people struggled with in the first century.

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The struggle was Jesus Christ had to be God to pay an eternal fine.

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But at the same time, Jesus Christ had to be a man to pay a fine for men.

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And so that becomes the thing to understand. Alright, so we want to, if you have any questions, you can contact us.

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Email us at academyatstrivingforeternity .org. academyatstrivingforeternity .org.

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Alright? And so if you have questions, you can also go to the

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Facebook group and from there you'll be able to contact, you know, dialogue with other students of the academy.

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Many of us are on there. We talk throughout the week on the Striving for Eternity group in Facebook.

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If you're not on Facebook, you can just join us. I know that in the chat room the link would have been given.

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Want to encourage you, I didn't have a person for, a person of encouragement for this week, which

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I guess means to, actually you know who we should, because I didn't put the thing up, but the person to encourage would, and I don't know if he's in the group, but it would be,

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I'll tag him in the Facebook group, but it's Rob from Rob's Custom Carvings.

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But if you go to robscustomcarvings .com and check out some of his work, you could email him at robscustomcarving at hotmail .com.

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Rob's Custom Carving at hotmail .com. And it's all spelled out,

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Rob's, that's plural, Custom Carvings. So, I'll try to get that in the, he's the one that made this wonderful plaque behind us, and which is really nice work.

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So, we should have him as the person to encourage. I will make sure that if you're in the Facebook group that he's in the group.

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I'll make sure right after class tonight that he's in the group and tagged. And so, just want to encourage you to consider becoming a student of the academy, because with that you get, some of the benefits you get are that you do get the syllabus that we've been talking through.

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The syllabus is, I think about 70 or 80 pages of notes.

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You get, as we'll have right after the end of this call, in about five or 10 minutes, we have a conference call for those who are enrolled students.

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Want to also encourage those students that are enrolled to consider enrolling for next year.

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It's a yearly, right now, at least the way we've structured it, it's a yearly subscription. And with that, you'll probably get about two syllabuses, which means we barely break even.

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So, you know, but we're not doing it to make money, but it pays for the syllabuses and things like that.

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But jump on the call, gives you an opportunity to ask any questions that you have. I want to encourage you to go to the website, strivingforeternity .org.

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Consider enrolling in the Striving for Eternity Academy, so you can get the syllabus. You can get the conference call afterwards.

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If you are a student from last year, now as we're approaching December, I don't know how that happened, but it has been a year and almost that we've been doing these classes.

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And so it's time to enroll for next year's class. Want to encourage you to be doing that. All right.

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So we want to encourage you to remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.