Written by John Thomas

Brethren Of Christ Articles - Articles Expounding Biblical Subjects

A very important Question?

Athanasian divines, like the old Scribes and Pharisees, "Err" in their ideas of Jesus, "not knowing the Scriptures."  Nor will they ever come to know them while as nurselings they receive the traditions of their fathers, and, for the sake of the loaves and fishes of "the Church," blindly seek to prove them by Scraps of Scripture wrested from their appropriate contexts.

The Jews sought to kill Jesus because he made himself equal with God in saying that God was his Father (John 5:18).  He made himself God in claiming to be the Son of God.  "Thou being a man," said they, "makest thyself God."  They called this blasphemy or evil speaking.  Jesus, however, rebutted the charge, and argued, that in the Psalms Israelites are styled "gods," as, "I said, Ye are gods," now, said he, if the Spirit styled them gods unto whom the word of God came, "how say ye of him whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the world.  Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?" (John 10:33-36).

The Spirit speaking through Jesus said, "I and the Father are one;" "He that seeth me seeth him that sent me; He that hath seen me bath seen the Father;" but when Jesus speaks as of himself alone he says, "The words that I speak unto you, I speak not of myself; but the Father, that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works" --- "My Father is greater than I."  That which was born of Mary is styled in the Psalms, "a body prepared;" and the Spirit of God there says through David to the Father, "A body hast thou prepared me." This Prepared body was the medium or God-manifestation, and divinely named ‘Jesus’ or ‘Joshua.’  It was the Cherub in which the Father took up his temporary abode when he anointed it at its baptism in the Jordan.  At its crucifixion the Father forsook it, as was foretold (Psa. 22:1).  It was laid in a cave.  The Father was not entombed in death; for he is deathless.  The Father did not suffer, but the prepared body, which the Father forsook while it was expiring (Matt 27:46).  On the third day the Spirit of God returned to the body, and in filling it formed an indissoluble union with it; and at that crisis it became "the Son or God with power according to the holy spiritual nature by its resurrection from the dead."  The Father who dwells in light, "whom no man hath seen nor can see, (1 Tim. 6:16) shines through the resurrected Jesus by his Holy Spirit.  "No man," said John. "hath seen God at any time" (John l:18); but many had seen Jesus both before and after his resurrection; therefore Jesus is not God in the Athanasian sense; nor in the sense which "God" is used to designate Him who dwells in unapproachable light, and who only hat deathlessness or immortality.

"Divines" do not understand the Scripture doctrine of God-manifestation; hence the foolishness wrapped up equally in Trinitarianism, Arianism, and Unitarianism.  "God is a spirit," not human flesh, mortal or immortal; this is but the medium or his manifestation to terrestrials, who unveiled would be too intensely glorious for their beholding.