In2Freedom: A Journal Journey with Brad Jersak’s “Different” Jesus

Examining "A More Christlike Word" by Brad Jersak

Day 20

“For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough.” (Paul’s concern from 2 Corinthians 11:4)

The False Filter	The Biblical Filter
The word OR the Word	The Word THROUGH the word

Before continuing, as I was packing up my tent for today’s journal journey, I noticed a signpost that clarified what we have already been seeing along our way, and what to watch for as we continue our exploration. It is like one of those signs that warn about certain plants in the area and identifies which is poison ivy, which is the healthy edible plant, and which is poison oak. However, in the case of today’s clarifications in spiritual matters, the differences are more than merely uncomfortable; they are downright deadly. I’m using my contrast between a pendulum that swings back and forth between the two extremes and the plumbline that hangs true. It looks something like this:

Legalistic Extreme	Truth-in-love Plumbline	BJ’s Man-centered Extreme
Legalists attach to the words of Scripture as their law of life that must be kept to their understanding of the “letter of the law” for someone to be accepted into their “Good Boys and Girls Club”. They are often the “power brokers” of churches who ensure things are done their way even if it requires not doing things God’s way.	The ”righteous” who “live by faith” know that “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” so they “let the word of Christ dwell in them richly” so they are able to “teach and admonish one another in all wisdom, sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” to one another always “with thankfulness in their hearts to God.”	The BJs attach to their perceptions and ideas when reading Scripture so that their God/Man “hybrid” word gives them a Writer/Reader hybrid experience that allows them to “correct” the Scriptures under the guise that it is their “another Jesus” who is doing so. This changes the focus from the “breathed out” words of God to the “look what we came up with” words of man.

With that signpost as a warning of what to look for, I’m picking up with the introductory thought to the next section, “The way that Fr. John Behr sees the reader as part of the inspiration process led me to ask him…” (p. 65).

Please note where BJ points us: “the way Fr. John Behr sees…” At the same time, please note where BJ does NOT point us: to the Scriptures!

I would just like to point out that Behr is not an authority. I believe I raised this concern in a previous journal entry that BJ’s focus on changing the meaning of Scripture was so he can bring in people he considers to be more authoritative than God’s word. All I could get from this paragraph is that people are the ones who figure out the meaning of what we are reading rather than diligently meditating on Scripture (biblical meditation, not contemplative/transcendental counterfeits) in order to understand the meaning God put into his word.

As BJ heads into the territory of “infallibility” of the Scriptures, he continues to require the sense that “God-breathed” doesn’t apply to the Scriptures themselves. Instead, God-breathed words are changed to inspired writers who have left us their hybrid documents that we can now interpret however we feel as we (the reader) interact with them (the writers). I have tried to show that a plain reading of the Scriptures does not allow for this, and I have shown that BJ has a 100% failure rate in honestly explaining what his choice of Scriptures really say.

My view of what it means that Scripture is “the word of God”, “the word of the Lord”, “the word of Christ”, is that the words of Scripture have the same character as God. Scripture tells me that “The words of the LORD (Yahweh) are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times” (Psalm 12:6). It tells me that “This God—his way is perfect; the word of the LORD (Yahweh) proves true; he is a shield for all those who take refuge in him” (Psalm 18:30). It contues that, “the word of the LORD (Yahweh) is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness” (Psalm 33:4).

When we come to the New Testament we find that what the apostles proclaimed of the gospel of the kingdom means they “had testified and spoken the word of the Lord” (Acts 8:25). Note that. The message of the gospel of the kingdom, and the Scriptures that already spoke about it, are spoken of as “the word of the Lord”! This is why “when the Gentiles heard this (the gospel of the kingdom), they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord, and as many as were appointed to eternal life believed” (Acts 13:48). They weren’t worshiping the word of the Lord; they were glorifying it as the source of their faith that had made them alive in Christ!

So it is that when Paul was in Corinth and he “entered the synagogue and for three months spoke boldly, reasoning and persuading them about the kingdom of God” (Acts 19:8), and when people in the synagogue were “speaking evil of the Way before the congregation” so that Paul “withdrew from them and took the disciples with him, reasoning daily in the hall of Tyrannus” and “This continued for two years,” it is clear that what Paul was teaching during that time meant that “all the residents of Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks” (Acts 19:9-10). And so “the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily” (Acts 19:20). Yes, the message that was proclaimed, now written into the text of Scripture was considered by everyone to be “the word of the Lord”, which means, the word of God and of Christ together, which means as infallible as they are!

However, even without all that evidence that what we have in the Scriptures is the word of the LORD/Lord (and there is much more), the simple fact that Scripture is the word “of God” means it has his character all over it, and nothing in it is contrary to his character. He does not need to be corrected by BJ’s “another Jesus” so that the BJs can have a Yahweh in the Old Testament who can be corrected as they please.

Instead, we come to the Scriptures praying like Paul, “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe” (Ephesians 1:17-19).

Yes, we DO pray for wisdom, knowledge, and understanding whenever we read God’s word, but not as though that is what is inspired (the reader’s interaction with the writer). We are those God is looking for “who tremble at the words” of God. As Isaiah wrote the very words of Yahweh, “All these things my hand has made, and so all these things came to be, declares the LORD. But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word” (Isaiah 66:2). And as we humble ourselves in a contrite spirit whenever we read the word of God, our hearts tremble with awe, and wonder, and longing to understand, because we know we are dealing with the words of God our Creator, our Father, our Redeemer, our Lord.

On the other hand, the BJs want to turn our trembling at the word of God into a tantalizing mix of writers-and-readers determining what is true. We see this in the next paragraph that is simply four loaded statements one after the other.

Loaded Question/Statement	Clarification of What we Know
“With regard to the Bible, we can say that the infallible Holy Spirit partnered with fallible people to coauthor a text that features divine truth and obvious human mistakes” (p. 68).	No, we can’t say that, at least not if we are using “the Bible”! Instead, we must say that God breathed out his words through fallible people in such a way that the Scriptures are completely trustworthy and true.

Loaded Question/Statement	Clarification of What we Know
“Those who deny the mistakes or attribute them to later scribal errors aren’t paying attention” (p. 68).	And how would he know that people who disagree with him would only do so if they weren’t paying attention?! My examination of the rebuttals of such claims is that those people are paying attention very well, thank you very much.

Loaded Question/Statement	Clarification of What we Know
“Knowing that Scripture is inspired but only the Spirit is infallible does not induce the same level of faith crisis as believing the Bible itself is infallible and then being confronted with a long list of blatant errors and contradictions” (p. 68).	No, BJ doesn’t “know” this. And we don’t measure what we believe by the size of the “faith crisis” it causes! Believing the Bible is infallible is because of WHO it is we believe! And, this guy is seriously lying to claim there is any list of blatant errors and contradictions at all, let alone a long one!

Loaded Question/Statement	Clarification of What we Know
“Admitting where the text gets it wrong does not undermine Scripture. But insisting on infallibility inevitably does” (p. 68).	He hasn’t given us any reason to admit the text of Scripture got it wrong (plus he has a 100% failure rate in trying to do so!). And insisting on the infallibility of the original Scriptures does not undermine Scripture.

So, in reading the article he pointed to, I discovered it is the same old claims that leave out obvious information that answers the questions. Because I follow sites that deal with creation science, Muslims, and street preaching, I am quite familiar with the plethora of claims that the contradictions in the Bible prove it can’t be trusted. Evolutionists don't want the Bible to be true; Muslims don't want the Bible to be true, and skeptics don't want the Bible to be true. However, instead of responding to these unproven claims here (since the author hasn’t presented any examples to examine) I simply give a list of links in the footnote to show how thoroughly these accusations have been debunked.[1]

I want to clarify here that what we are talking about is whether Scripture as it was given by God was “God breathed”, or whether it was simply inspired in BJ’s definition of the word so that we have that God/human hybrid he is selling (“inspired” really means “God breathed” to the rest of us, but that’s not the way BJ is using it). I am not able to deal with all the issues of translations, manuscripts, copying, etc, because that is a different issue, and one that has also been quite adequately explained in multiple websites. I understand that in our English translations there may be discrepancies that need to be examined and checked with the most reliable manuscripts. However, we can just as well find articles showing these claims of “human mistakes” are debunked so that we can trust that the Scriptures we have today were given as “breathed out by God”, not a hybrid mix of “divine truth and obvious human mistakes”.

With that in mind, as I continue to rebut the BJ’s claims that Scripture has “human mistakes” in it, and I continue to demonstrate that the Jesus BJ preaches is the “another Jesus” Paul warned about, my focus will remain on “the Scriptures”. I understand that we need to tread carefully in dealing with potential copying mistakes in the manuscripts. We need to take a hard look at translations, especially those that are nothing more than glorified commentaries that hide the authority of what God said. We simply can’t escape that we need to understand the mind of Christ through translations, but that is a separate issue from the foundational one, that “all Scripture is breathed out by God”, and that affects everything else we believe.

However, hearing God’s word in translation obviously isn’t a problem in itself since Jesus himself spoke in translation of Hebrew into Aramaic and Greek, and the New Testament has many quotes from the Old Testament that are clearly from the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. That’s part of the beauty of the Scriptures, that God’s word can be put into any language so that people can have a true sense of what God said, what he meant, and how we can live by every word that proceeds from his mouth.

My point is that I am keeping the focus on the foundation, the Scriptures. That is what BJ is attacking, the authority of Scripture as the foundation of what we believe and how we live. There are plenty of good ministries showing that BJ is wrong about contradictions in the Bible. He is wrong about “human mistakes” in the Scriptures (as originally given). And he is wrong that there is a Jesus in the Scriptures who corrected the Yahweh in the Scriptures.

Now, maintaining our focus on the foundation that “all Scripture is breathed out by God”, let’s test BJ’s conclusion to this section: “all pointing upward and forward to the only infallible Word of God, Abba’s Messiah, Jesus Christ” (p. 68). When Jesus told us what his Father gave him to say, was Jesus infallible but the Father was not? When Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would also teach what the Father gave him to say, was the Holy Spirit fallible in speaking for a fallible Father? When Jesus spoke the word of God, was he infallible but what he said was not the moment someone wrote it down? What about when the apostles preached the gospel of the kingdom and it was called the word of God, the word of the Lord, and the word of Christ, was all of it filled with “human mistakes” simply because it wasn’t audibly coming from the mouth of Jesus at that exact moment?

Or is the Triune God infallible and their word equally so? If God is infallible as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, their word would be infallible as well. And if their word says that “all Scripture is breathed out by God,” we have every reason to believe that the best translations of the best manuscripts give us God’s word that is authoritative and infallible.

As you can surmise, I deny BJ’s claim that we can isolate his version of Jesus as the Word from the Father and the Spirit, or from any way that “the word” of God was spoken and transcribed (Scripture). The Triune God has spoken his word, and those who tremble at his word delight him as a Father who smiles to see his children attaching to his words in order to truly know him in their hearts.

I had a break after what I last wrote as it was Sunday morning and I was getting ready for home church. One thing we have done for years is listen to a “church prep” message before we get together as a way to prepare our hearts for the fellowship. With it being the May long weekend I hadn’t sent anything out to the others, so I looked up some messages that focused on the same things BJ addresses in this section and went for a morning walk to listen to them. It was so refreshing to hear three different men speak of the authority and infallibility of God’s word using God’s word! I put the messages in the footnotes, and I highly encourage everyone to listen to these great videos that show the alternative to what the BJs are trying to sell.[2]

Because the rest of that section on infallibility continues the claim of fallibility without evidence, I will end this day’s journey here, make camp for this beautiful Sunday evening, and tomorrow we will see where the garden path leads next as we find out BJ’s thoughts about “Inerrancy”. After hearing R.C. Sproul explain these terms so wonderfully this morning, a good night’s sleep should have me rarin’ to go in hiking the next root-tangled path of the BJ trail.

Email: in2freedom@gmail.com

Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.)

Jersak, Bradley. A More Christlike Word: Reading Scripture the Emmaus Way. Whitaker House. Kindle Edition.

Definitions from the Bible Sense Lexicon (BSL) in Logos Bible Systems

[1] Isn’t the Bible Full of Contradictions? (Paul F. Taylor of Answers in Genesis)

https://answersingenesis.org/contradictions-in-the-bible/isnt-the-bible-full-of-contradictions/

Bible Contradictions? A Response to Bart Ehrman (Glenn Hohnberg of TGC)

https://au.thegospelcoalition.org/article/bible-contradictions-a-response-to-bart-ehrman/

The charge of 101 contradictions, by Muslim apologist, Shabbir Ally refuted! (By: Jay Smith, Alex Chowdhry, Toby Jepson, James Schaeffer)

https://www.bible.ca/islam/islam-bible-contradictions-refuted.htm

Solutions to Bible “Errors” (Defending Inerrancy)

https://defendinginerrancy.com/bible-difficulties/

[2] This is Don Carson on the theme of, “Subtle Ways to Abandon the Authority of Scripture”

https://youtu.be/YdfZV0iNHGw?si=tarrVnZYwCViDXuc