Examining "A More Christlike Word"
by Brad Jersak
Day 8
“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)
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The False Filter |
The Biblical Filter |
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The word OR the Word |
The Word THROUGH the word |
Picking up where we left off, BJ now takes his false claim that, “When anything in the rest of the Bible disagrees with Jesus, listen to Jesus” (p. 38), and takes this even further. “So, for me, David’s reflection ‘Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path’ (Ps 119:105 KJV) shifted in meaning from ‘Thy Bible is my lamp and light’ to John the Revelator’s ‘Thy Son is my lamp and light’” (p. 38). Now, is that a valid application, or a slight-of-hand (mind) trick to deceive? Let’s check out what David wrote as carried along by the Holy Spirit (II Peter 1:21).
Again, the word for “word” means “message
(communication) n. — a communication that is most often spoken, but can come
through other means” (BSL). If we continue reading, David gives synonyms that
rhyme with what he just said. They include God’s “righteous rules”
(authoritative rules), his “law” (what all the Jews understood as the law given
through Moses), “precepts” (rules of personal conduct), “testimony” (a solemn
testimony made under oath), and “statutes” (authoritative regulations) (BSL).
All these rhyming thoughts (and Psalm 119 has 176 verses that speak of the same
things, along with David’s joy and delight in God’s words) are speaking about
the message God had spoken to his people that was at that time contained in the
Torah, the Hebrew Bible as far as it had been written to that point. The
parallel in our times would be the completed Bible as the word of God, not
Jesus as the Word of God.
So, not only do we have zero reason to treat
any part of the Bible like it disagrees with Jesus, but the author is once
again being deliberately misleading. The only somewhat honest thing is he
admits, “So, for me…” And THAT is not authoritative in the least, particularly
when this takes him opposite to the direction David was going.
Now, in reference to the “lamp and light” of
God in Revelation, let’s consider the two verses that come up in a search.
First, “And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory
of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (Rev 21:23). Okay, we’re no
longer talking about Christians living in the foreign land of this earth while
awaiting our Forever Home. This is a revelation of what our eternal life will
look like in the new heavens and earth. The relationship of the Father and the
Son will be seen by all as the glory of God will give us light, while the Lamb
will be the lamp through which God’s light shines. This is the way Jesus is
revealed as the Word of God (John 1), the image of God (Col 1), the radiance of
God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s nature (Heb 1), so of course we
would expect eternity to show this in such glory as is described.
However, that is AFTER we no longer need our
Bibles! What we will see of Jesus in eternity does not address how we need the
Bible, the word of God, in the foreign land of the world during the end times.
So, when David delights in God’s word, the Scriptures he had at that time, the
parallel is for us to delight in God’s word in the same ways. We have the
completed Bible filled with the good news of the kingdom of God just as David had
the Scriptures that spoke of the kingdom of God in Israel. We have in God’s
word all the glories of the new covenant in Jesus’ blood, and David had in God’s
word the prophecies about these very things. We have the word for these last
days; we will see the glory of the Word in the new heavens and the new earth. No
contradictions.
The second reference is, “And night will be
no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their
light, and they will reign forever and ever” (Rev 22:5). This is also telling
us that God’s presence will be our light and we will neither need the sun, a
lamp, or the Scriptures, to direct us in how to relate to him. It will be
evident to all who are there.
Again, the fact that “God is light, and in
him is no darkness at all” (I John 1:5) is not being disputed. The issue is
that the author takes a verse referring to God’s word from the Psalms, David
referring to the message contained in the Torah, he changes it to refer to Jesus
as the Word when the Scripture doesn’t do that, and then he wants us all to
believe that, if the Torah ever disagrees with the Jesus BJ wanted to find in
the Bible, we must believe this different Jesus instead of the word of God as
it reveals Jesus. And THAT is a problem.
At this point, let’s consider what David
meant when we use the biblical filter of getting to know the Word through the
word instead of choosing between the Word and the word. When the word of God,
the Scriptures, are the message that brings us to the Word, Jesus Christ, we
can delight in the written word as David did with hearts that love our Savior
so much more than the message about him. At the same time, we can also know that even the feet of
those who bring the good news of God’s word to us are beautiful because that
good news is what brings us to Christ (Is 52:7; Rom 10:15).
Okay, so now we get to the real issue, how
BJ feels about the way God is revealed in the Old Testament Scriptures. That is
also where things seemed to be for the man who was posting things online that
didn’t match God’s word that alerted me to this different Jesus. In the
author’s mind, he has shown that we can exchange “the Word” for “the word” and
then pit one against the other. He hasn’t even come close to making such a
case, but he continues as if that is now well-established. So, with Christ dishonestly
separated from Scripture, he can declare,
…when Christ becomes your final revelation of the nature and will of his Abba, reading the Bible can trigger various spiritual and emotional responses. When the Scriptures describe God and his acts in ways that look nothing like the Abba who Christ revealed, it can throw you into a crisis of faith. If you pay close attention to what the narrators actually claim, you begin to see evidence of a very un-Christlike (lowercase) word (pp. 38-39).
So, now that the Jesus BJ wanted to find is
separated from Scripture, it can be claimed that Scripture is not Christlike
enough (hence the we-were-warned-where-this-was-going title of the book). All I
will say here is that we can honor Jesus as the “final revelation” of God as
the New Testament teaches (Heb 1 makes this focus) without nullifying anything
whatsoever from the word of God that is still in play. We can have all kinds of
“spiritual and emotional responses” to what we read without ever thinking God must
be in our image. Even the notion that Christ revealed a different Father than
did Moses, David, or the prophets is the author’s unproven bias, not something
the Scriptures ever claim (which is why he needs his readers convinced to
choose between the word and the Word). And it is only when we look at Jesus in
that “another Jesus” way Paul warned about that we would imagine that the word
(the Scriptures) were un-Christlike. In other words, these are the author’s
ideas, but none of them are substantiated by anything he has presented.
I should also say that having a “crisis of
faith” is not an objective judgment on the Bible. It exposes the condition of a
person’s soul, but it has no authority over what God has written in his word.
It is only the author’s claim that God is portrayed as unChristlike in the
Scriptures. The real question is, does Jesus say that the God of the Scriptures
is unrighteous, unholy, or something other than like his Son?
It’s interesting that BJ begins with quotes
from Deuteronomy, the book of Scripture Jesus quoted more than any others
except Psalms. That would suggest that Jesus was quite okay with people
thinking of it as Scripture. However,
the real issue presented is whether God did even one thing in the Old Testament
record that Jesus corrected. We already saw that when BJ used Jesus’ “you have
heard, but I say to you” statements to prove Jesus corrected the Bible he was
100% wrong on all six counts. Now we must watch for what other ways the author
claims Jesus is correcting the Bible when nothing of the sort is happening.
Next, we come to BJ’s “tough questions” (p. 39).
And my first question is, do BJ’s tough questions have authority over the
Scriptures? Yes, that is rhetorical; “Obviously NOT” is the reply!
So, I’m not going to go through all BJ’s
questions, or all his examples of what bothers him about the Scriptures. It is
easy to go online and do searches regarding whether the God of the Old
Testament is unChristlike. There are also online commentaries for those who
want to explore specific passages of scripture to see what they say about what
God did and said. Anyone can go to a site like www.gotquestions.org and try out a
variety of questions on this topic. I typed in, “Is the God of the Old
Testament genocidal?” and got “about 220 results”. Here’s that link in the
footnotes for anyone who wants to read up on those things.[1]
Instead of answering all BJ’s tough
questions, I will focus on the one that covers them all: did Jesus Christ, the Word,
say anything anywhere and at any time that corrected any of those historical
events where God carried out judgment on his enemies, or where he laid down
laws about how to treat their enemies after a victory? We already saw that BJ’s
claim from the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus corrected the Bible was 100%
false. He was correcting the message and example of the religious leaders, not
what was written in God’s word. So, what about the rest of this book? Does BJ
have some secret-weapon statements by Jesus where Jesus states his disapproval or
displeasure with anything written in the Scriptures?
BJ’s new focus is, “Could the Abba Jesus
revealed say, ‘Wipe out the foreigners. Take their women and sort them into
virgins and nonvirgins’?” (p. 39). The focus in this is not what words were
recorded in the Scriptures (and however we have them translated into English),
but whether there is a difference between “the Abba Jesus revealed” and the
Yahweh the Scriptures reveal. BJ has been wrong about everything so far that
suggests we must choose between the word and the Word, and we have found
nothing wrong with approaching this as getting to know the Word through the
word, so we will continue to test this to see whether we must now separate the
Scriptures from the Savior, or, instead, let the Scriptures lead us to the
Savior in the “faith comes from hearing, and hearing from the word of Christ”
(Rom 10:17) kind of way. You know, like we have always understood that we build
our faith in Christ as we “let the word of Christ dwell in us richly” (Col
3:16).
The author clarifies his challenge with, “Abba
said so? Or someone said so. In God’s name. It’s there in Numbers 31” (p. 39).
This raises the question of the authorship of the Scriptures and whether those
authors said something about Yahweh that was a false teaching. You see, what BJ
is claiming is that his teaching is true (even though we have already seen how
false it is) but Moses was false in what he described in the Torah. So the
question is, did Jesus correct Moses? Or David? Or the other Prophets? Is a twenty-first-century
author with a different Jesus telling the truth and Moses telling a lie, or at
least misrepresenting Yahweh?
The answer will lie in whether BJ can show Jesus
correcting Moses. It doesn’t matter one bit how many questions BJ asks with a
broken heart about whether God could be like that; our issue is whether the
Word corrected the word. If all we have is a man who doesn’t like God’s justice
against his enemies telling us that he doesn’t like the Yahweh Moses, David,
and the Prophets spoke about, that means nothing. Lots of nations hated the
Yahweh of Israel back then, just as all the nations hate the Son of Yahweh now.
Only if Jesus, the Word, tells us that Moses was wrong about Yahweh would we
have reason to adjust our beliefs to match what the Word says in the word. BJ
is neither the word nor the Word, so he will either be found continuing to
present lies or clearly presenting the truth in love for everyone to see with
their own eyes of faith. And that is what I will focus on in my next day’s
journal journey through these heart-wrenching claims.
© 2024
Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8
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.)
A More Christlike Word © 2021 by Bradley Jersak Whitaker House 1030 Hunt Valley Circle • New Kensington, PA 15068 www.whitakerhouse.com
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
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