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Author | Topic: Scriptural evidence that Jesus is Messiah: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
jaywill writes: A lot more is made of His resurrection in the New Testament, then His virgin birth, I think. Absolutely. Jesus’ birth plays a minor role in two of the Gospels and isn’t in the epistles at all. The resurrection is the sole reason for the rise of the early church.
jaywill writes: Paul has belief in His resurrection as a requirement of salvation - "That if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved." (Rom. 10:9) Let’s look at that in context. The verses right ahead of that (Romans 10: 1-8) say this.quote: Paul is clear here, as in many other places in his epistles that we aren’t to judge or worry about who wind up where, but that our faith is about the word of God living in our hearts. The word of God is not the Bible. The Bible itself says that the word of God is in Jesus. Paul also writes this in Romans 2. quote:Paul is saying that God’s word can live in the hearts of people who naturally follow the law. Even Jesus said that he came for sinners. This is from Matthew 9. quote: Your faith essentially makes it all about what it is that you believe or more accurately, what you give intellectual assent to. I suggest that is why you feel that it is so important to make the case for the fulfillment of all the prophesies. Just read through what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount. It isn’t about belief. It is about the heart. This is Matthew 7. quote:Again it is about the heart. The message of salvation is actually a side issue, and again, both Jesus, (again in Matthew 7,) and Paul tell us that we aren’t to judge who winds up where. jaywill writes: However, the virgin birth proves that He was qualified to be the Messianic descendent of David to sit upon David's throne. Had Joseph actually been His physical father, He would have been disqualified to be the Messiah. That's another story. That doesn’t really make sense. In the first place He was to be from the line of David through the father and as you have just said Joseph wasn’t His biological father. More importantly though, Jesus preached a specific message which was vindicated by God the Father through the resurrection. It is the resurrection that justified His messianic claim. Yes, I believe in the immaculate conception but it isn’t important to my Christian faith. It is my belief in the resurrection as an historical event that is the basis of Christianity. Without the resurrection Christianity is very much like other world religions.
jaywill writes: Neither terms sound very good to me.I trust the Bible. I do not worship it. And I love Christ. The attached "anity" means a lot of things to a lot of different people. However, you have faith in an inerrant Bible. What happens to your faith in Christ if you could no longer believe in an inerrant Bible?
jaywill writes:
Sure. It is what it is. That doesn’t mean it’s inerrant.
But what about this? The only Bible that they had at that time was the Hebrew Bible. This was refered to as Scripture. And Jesus said "Scripture cannot be broken" (John 10:35)jaywill writes:
A discussion on inerrancy is essential if we are looking at prophesy and its fulfillment. We have to understand the nature of the text.
I think this may go into a discussion about innerant - what exactly is meant ? jaywill writes: But Jesus was the fulfillment of all the law and the prophets. All through His ministry He clarified and corrected the ancient Scriptures.
But this sound like Jesus taught a ultimately authoritative Hebrew Bible -"Until heaven and earth pass away, one iota or one serif shall by no means pass away from the law until all come to pass." (Matt. 5:18 GDR writes: As Christians we should understand the Bible as the imperfect story of an imperfect people through the lens of the teachings of Jesus. We should not be trying to understand the Bible as the perfect story of an imperfect god.jaywill writes: I agree. The point was that if we understand a perfect Bible the picture we get is of an imperfect God.
Imperfection and being God are incompatible to me. jaywill writes: I only asked him to consider the problem of doubting one detail of Matthew but accepting him on other detail.Now when I first came to the NT, I had a huge filter. Eventually I was persuaded that the whole thing falls or strands together. That pretty much makes my point. Your whole faith stands on an in inerrant Bible. My faith stands on Jesus being the incarnation of God and that the message He espoused is to be the foundation of my life, regardless of whether the Bible is inerrant or not.
jaywill writes:
This is the whole point. With an inerrant Bible you are left in the position of trying to justify a god who would call His people to go out and stone someone to death for picking up some fire wood on the Sabbath. If you want to worship a god like that then so be it. I worship the God that I see in His incarnation who completely repudiates that message. We should remember that there were also the sins offering and trespass offering. I think therefore that immediate execution was probably not the only course of action.Don't forget that in all this strictness you also have the atoning and redemptive offerings. The story is very clear. It doesn’t talk about another course of action. They are to take the poor guy out of town and stone him to death.
jaywill writes: It is the same God indeed. Have you forgotten the mercy shown to the harlot Rehab and her whole household ?God did not, therefore, wait until the New Testament to show His empathy and compassion on the wayward woman. Rehab sought God and God's people. And quite a record was reserved for her in the Hebrew Bible as an example to all. That’s my point. In one part of the OT we have God saying that prostitutes should be stoned to death and in another part he shows mercy. Does this all sound like the same perfect god?
jaywill writes: I understand the imperfect people. God however, by definitiong is right and righteous eternally so. The Bible is about how He can redeem us and transform us and conform us in His salvation until we match Him.The Bible clo ses with a marriage of these saved formerly imperfect ones and the perfect God - Bridegroom and Bride. Marvelous! Fine, however it doesn’t take an inerrant Bible to do that. In fact, it doesn’t require a Bible at all. Two points though. As I said earlier both Jesus and Paul tells us not to judge who is to be saved and secondly, I don’t think that either you or I are going to be matching Him anytime soon.
jaywill writes: And since this is a PROCESS I see no reason why on the way, we have some doubts and misconceptions about His word. Why do you call the Bible his word with that understanding. Yes God speaks to us through the Bible but that does not mean that it has in essence been dictated by God. Jesus was the Word of God. Word is used to denote God’s essence in the world. I’m quite happy to use the term for the Bible as the word of God but not the Word of God. The early Christians only had the Hebrew scriptures and most of the Gentile followers wouldn’t have even had that. It has only been in the last few centuries that the BIble was in any way accessible to the vast majority of Christians. Please explain to me why it is that now, it is important that the Bible be inerrant.
jaywill writes: Amen to that, but the question is faith in what. I suggest that that the faith is in the message of love that we hear from Jesus, and that isn’t restricted to those who hold particular theological views.
" ... the end of the charge is love out of a pure heart amd pit pf a good conscience and out of unfeigned faith; From which things some [teachers] having misaimed, have turned aside to vain talking ..." jaywill writes: Some teachers want to teach how to disbelieve the word of God. I am into teaching people how to believe the word of God. Fine, but my thought is that you are teaching people the wrong way to believe in the word of God.
jaywill writes: I think Jesus may have expounded Isaiah 7:14 as Matthew His discple related it to us. I don't know that.Either way , I believe Christ was the ultimate fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14. If the Holy Spirit moved Matthew to write that about the fulfilling of the words, that is also God telling him so. I'll believe it. You can make your choice. Jesus is the fulfillment of the entire OT, including all of the laws and the prophets. The original Abrahamic covenant was that the message was for the world. God spoke through the imaginations, minds and consciousnesses of the early Jews. In the written accounts it is obvious that some of what they wrote could well have been inspired by a loving god but also a great deal of what was written couldn’t have been. All of it is culturally or personally conditioned. In Jesus we can understand how that was fulfilled in a way that no one understood ahead of the event. I guess my main point is that it isn’t crucial whether or not the virgin birth was supernaturally prophesied or not. (It does seem strange that the virgin birth or more accurately the virgin conception is only in the 2 gospels and not mentioned by Paul. Interestingly enough it is in the Qur’an. It does seem a bit of a stretch to tie Jesus to the Davidic line through Joseph and then tell us that Joseph isn’t the actual father.) I go further and say that the virgin birth isn’t important to the Christian faith. However, Jesus certainly did seem to have a divine understanding of the scriptures. He was able to separate the wheat from the chaff in the scriptures in a way that was vindicated by God through His resurrection. The ancient Jews did have a fore-shadowing of the incarnation in their temple. The Temple was where God dwelt but Jesus saw what He was doing as a temple movement in that He would forgive sin essentially saying that they no longer had to go to the temple to be forgiven. In light of the whole story of Jesus and my belief in the incarnation I accept the virgin conception. However, even if it could be shown that it was actually a legend placed into the gospels in order to strengthen the messianic claim, it wouldn’t undermine my Christian faith. Would it yours? The signature I have used is from Micah 6:8. It essentially tells us that what God wants of us is that we be humbly kind and just. That is the straightforward Bible message as it is taught by Jesus. Of course in addition to that there is the story that stretches through creation to the final re-creation. Those are the two distinct elements of the books that make up the Bible. It isn't believing the story that makes us righteous. It is about having a heart that rejoices in humble kindness and justice and that isn't the private domain of any particular belief. Edited by GDR, : typo and small wording changeHe has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
Eliyahu writes: In all seriousness the above example is no different then the lists claiming 200/300/400 prophecies fulfilled by Jesus. They claim the odds against a single person fulfilling them are astronomical. Or of their claims that passages like Psalms 22, or Isaiah 53 are about their messiah/god. Consider this well when you see or hear the claims made by missionaries or just simple Christians who you may meet. If not there may be a prophecy that does really apply: 'They are a people bereft of council and they don't have understanding.' If you go back to the post you replied to you can see that I didn't claim any of that. I don't make any claim that Jesus fulfilled all prophesies. Most of the prophesies were meant to apply to the Israeli nation and not the messiah anyway. Here is one possible way of looking at it. Let us assume that Jesus is nothing more than a man, the same as any other man. (Personally I believe more that that.) He grows up in an environment where he is immersed in the Hebrew Scriptures. In this study He starts to see Himself in the narratives. Now let's face it, there are many conflicting expectations for a messiah and the most common one was that a messiah would lead the Jews in the defeat of their enemies and rebuild the Temple. That was understood by all of the other aspiring messiahs such as Judas Maccabeus, Simon bar Kokhba and all of the others in between. Jesus however takes a different message from the Scriptures. He says that it is the Romans who are the enemy but that it's evil itself, and that the weapon that defeats evil is not the sword but love. Jesus goes on to say that He is the replacement and that the temple exists in the heart of his followers. So Jesus sees himself as the messiah of the Scriptures but in ways that hadn't been understood previously. He understood the prophesies in a general sense and consciously went around fulfilling them to a degree. He intentionally rode a donkey into Jerusalem so that first century Jews would understand what was going on, and the same for His quote from Psalm 22 on the cross. The psalm 22 quote was obviously meant to be for the Israeli nation but Jesus saw himself as standing in for the nation and took it on himself. The question is then whether or not Jesus was wrong in His understanding or even delusional? He wouldn't be the first or last to have a messianic complex. It all comes back to what happened on the first Easter day. Was Jesus resurrected? If He was then God the Father vindicated and confirmed Jesus' message. If not then Jesus was just another failed messiah. In order to understand what Jesus was doing we need the OT Scriptures but in order to understand God's message for us in the OT we need the NT. All of that though is dependent on whether or not Jesus Christ was bodily resurrected.He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8
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GDR Member Posts: 6202 From: Sidney, BC, Canada Joined: Member Rating: 2.3
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I would argue that using OT prophesies as evidence of the messiahship of Jesus really isn't about that at all.
Trying to use the OT as evidence for the resurrection is simply a misguided effort to prove an inerrant Bible. Jesus certainly understood His messianic mission from the Hebrew Scriptures and saw Himself as the fulfilment of them. He explained what He was doing to His Jewish audience by using the scriptures but that is another issue. There are only two issues in the Bible that are evidence of Jesus' messaihship and they are both in the NT. The first is Jesus' claim to messiahship and the second is the vindication of that claim by the resurrection of Jesus by the Father. If Jesus was resurrected He was the messiah. If Jesus was not resurrected He wasn't regardless of any prophesies.He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8 |
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