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Jesus
- The First Fully Human Being
Here is a simple yet profound truth that is
shocking to the orthodox church. If
this were ever accepted in the Christian community it would absolutely
turn the conventional church upside down. Here it is in a single page
nutshell.
Summary
of Being Human - Past/Present/Future The
first Adam rejected his humanity; the second Adam embraced it in faith.
God's
Standard of Righteousness
Once one understands that
neither God's justice nor His righteousness is based on law, the entire
legal religious system of self-justification by works falls apart at the
seams.
Parallel Worlds in
Conflict Imagine that
right here on planet earth there coexists two distinct worlds, or,
realities, within which people live.
Not just figuratively, but literally.
How is this possible you might ask?
It’s possible because the reality we each live in is dependent
upon the perception we have about what is real.
Each one of us can have a slightly different perception about any
number of things, and yet we live on the same planet at the same time.
I contend that there are two primary, master perceptions and
related realities, as experienced by every human being.
These perceptions and their resultant realities control the state
of our lives individually and together.
A
Story of Perception and Deception
Laboring under the
burden of repressed shame following the Garden incident, mankind has
spent at least 6,000 years creating a god after its own image, while
struggling to come to grips with it's own sense of lost glory.
It is the story of children created to live in a environment of grace
and rest with their Parent, but who instead were deceived into
choosing a relationship based on knowledge and the performance
of it. Perfection began to
be conceived of in terms of external behaviors rather than internal
qualities such as sincerity, honesty, and openness.
Sabbath
Heart
Some folks within the
sabbatarian community (where I used to solely reside) have been fond of
admonishing others outside their group to examine and sometimes set
aside preconceived notions gleaned from religious tradition. Now I am
using that same approach in asking both sides who debate over the
sabbath issue to stop long enough to step out of their own preconceived
notions of orthodoxy and hear yet another voice on this important topic.
Dare to think outside the box and still be true to the
Scriptures.
Seeing
Ourselves More Clearly Who
I really am—my true self—is a person created in God's image. What we
know most fundamentally about God is that God is love. We come from God.
God's essence is love. Our true essence is also love. We long to love,
and we long to be loved. That is who we are under all the fears and
distortions about ourselves, under all our ego and pride and defenses.
We are spiritual creatures created in the image of the God of love,
created to love and to be loved.
Perceiving
God's Reality of Rest Placed
in the Genesis post creation account, this cosmic sabbath stands as an
indispensable reminder throughout eternity that the relationship between
our Creator/Father and his children is not based on knowledge and it's
performance, but “Rest”. Rest
is that secure place where God loves and accepts us as his
morally/ethically imperfect children.
The
Heart "Above
all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life."
(Proverbs 4:23-NIV)
Taking
the Mystery Out of the Atonement
Usually the doctrine of
atonement is defined within a discussion about original sin...unless
someone completely sinless steps in to pay that death penalty for the
rest of us, we will all die, since our own sinful ways can never atone
for anything...Others say that the idea of anyone paying the penalty for
someone else is ridiculous; that the death of Jesus the Messiah
benefited us only as an example of how we should let no sacrifice stand
in the way of living according to the moral precepts of God.
However, I want to show that there is no reason for such a controversy
to exist once we have a different view of what happened with regard to
the nature of Adam's sin.
Who
is Accountable For Your Sins, Anyway?
Ezekiel 18:20—"The soul that sins shall
die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, the father
suffer for the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous
shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon
himself." Read verses 1-20 to get the entire picture.
God holds each man and woman responsible for their own sins.
One cannot blame dad and mom, or anyone else for that matter, for
the choices he or she makes concerning behavior.
Two Trees — Two
Realities; This World and the Next (PowerPoint Presentation)
Prepare
to understand, perhaps as never before, the nature of your heart's
captivity by Satan, and the nature of your heart's release by Jesus, the
Messiah of God. Healing
begins now, with complete restoration at his glorious return and the
ushering in of the Kingdom of God on earth.
Two
Trees--Two Realities; This World and the Next (same as above, in
Word Format)
The
Kingdom of God; Present or Future? On
the lips of Jesus the term Kingdom of God unquestionably summarized the
very heart of His Message. "The Kingdom of God is the central theme
of the teaching of Jesus, and it involves His whole understanding of His
own person and work" (Theological Word Book of the Bible,
Alan Richardson, p. 119).Yet the voluminous discussions of the meaning
of the Kingdom of God, the heart of the Gospel preached by Jesus,
and therefore the Christian Gospel, continue to leave the impression
that the subject is complex in the extreme, indeed that the truth of the
matter is virtually beyond recovery. An enormous amount of scholarly
energy has gone into analyzing the biblical and non-biblical evidence in
an effort to explain what Jesus taught as His central theme. Can it
really be that our New Testament records provide no clear idea of what
Christ and the Apostles meant us to understand by the Kingdom of God?
Nothing less than the Gospel message of salvation is at stake.
The
Simplicity of the Christian Message The
point and purpose of Christianity has been buried under a mass of
theological tradition. There is general agreement only about the ethical
demands of the present Christian life: a Christian must love and serve
his neighbor. But almost nothing at all is known of the ultimate purpose
and goal which Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, intended for those who
follow him. Contemporary religion, which claims the name of Christ, has
abandoned the purpose of the faith which is clearly spelled out by Jesus
in his Gospel message -- the Gospel about the Kingdom of God (Luke 4:43,
etc.). Angels,
Demons, and Elohim: by Anthony Buzzard
The existence of angelic “spirit beings,” both good and evil, is
assumed without question by the biblical writers, and their views are of
course shared by the Lord Jesus.
The
New Testament Declares the Existence of Demons: by Anthony
Buzzard
The student of Scripture who "trembles at the Word of God"
must decide between a theory which denies the existence of demons, and
Luke's account which presents Jesus as responding to a personal
articulate being, the demon, who is not the human sufferer, though the
demon speaks through the victim.
Satan,
the Personal Devil: by Anthony Buzzard
The works of Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, spokesmen for the Church in
the second century, show no Trinitarianism in the later, Chalcedonian
sense (though they do not retain belief in the fully human Messiah of
the New Testament); they contain no belief in the survival of the soul
in heaven after death, nor in eternal hell-fire; they are also strongly
millenarian. The notion that Satan is not a personal being, however, is
utterly foreign to their writings. |