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

Examining "A More Christlike Word" by Brad Jersak

Day 80

“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

The purpose of the BJs’ writings is to demoralize people’s faith in the authority of Scripture as the breathed-out words of God. They continue the serpent’s question in the garden, “Did God actually say…?” to replace what God said with what the “evil people and imposters” are peddling for unjust gain.

I could easily use this whole day’s Journal Journey to again share the Scriptures that have just come up today in my morning time with God, my exercise time, and the sharing of our home church. I will just say that when we read Scripture in context, and are sincere in letting it tell us what genre it is speaking in, and we let it tell us when something is allegorical or figurative, it is not difficult to recognize when the details of chapter after chapter of the books of Moses demand the conclusion that this is the true history of Israel, and the true history of Yahweh’s work to fulfill his promise to Abraham. Everything fits, both God’s love for his people and his condemnation of his enemies. He disciplines his own people when they break covenant with him, always with an aim to restoring relationship.

Now, let’s jump in as challengers to BJ’s garden path journey and see where he tries to lead us today.

BJ’s Claim

Monte’s Response

“I have come to believe that Jesus Christ revealed the fullness of God in the incarnation and, thus, he – not the Bible – is the only divine Word and our final authority for theology, faith, and Christian practice” (p. 212).

First, BJ has shown us how he has “come to believe” in his “another Jesus” by demonstrating the misuse, misinterpretation, and misrepresentation of every Scripture he has used. This means he presents himself as the authority and expects his readers to take his word for it that he has found what he claims since it is not in the Bible.

Second, the issue is not whether Jesus “revealed the fullness of God in the incarnation”, but whether “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Part of the problem with the BJs is they deny certain aspects of what Jesus showed us about the Father in his first coming, and they deny that the prophecies of his second coming also reveal aspects of the Triune God that the BJs don’t want to acknowledge. If anytime Jesus affirms God’s judgment and condemnation of the lost the BJs explain it away as not meaning what it says, then it isn’t that Jesus didn’t reveal the same God in the flesh as we see in the Scriptures, but that the BJs are packing their “another Jesus” to leave out anything they don’t like. Essentially, their whole “another Jesus” is Jesus-out-of-context just like the Scriptures BJ has used to bolster his case.

Third, the issues is not whether Jesus is a greater authority than the Bible, but that we do not have Jesus present with us as the disciples did until his ascension. Instead, by Jesus’ own authority, he has left us his word and his Spirit so that the way we know his will is by searching the Scriptures. In Jesus’ parables, he pictured the Master going on a far journey leaving the servants to look after his business. That is what the church is in this age, looking after Jesus’ business until his return.

Because Jesus has left us in an earthly-presence kind of way, we say that the Bible is the final authority because it is what Jesus left us. No one has an authoritative relationship with Jesus where they can tell us that they got a word from him that we all must live by.

Rather, all us servants of Christ have the same manual that Jesus has given us, and it is the final authority over everything until Jesus returns. We will not take our Bibles to heaven with us. But we must live by “every word that comes from the mouth of God” while we are Jesus’ church here on earth.

I will also remind us that when BJ referred to “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12), he lied by claiming this was talking about Jesus, when it is clearly talking about the “word of God” which then was both the Scriptures and what was preached by the apostles, but is now contained in the Scriptures collected into the Bible. When we removed this misleading misrepresentation of God’s word, we find that it is Jesus, the Word, who calls us to treat the “word of God” like it is “living and active” in our churches, and able to pierce and discern as needed. Until Jesus returns it IS our highest authority.

BJ’s Claim

Monte’s Response

“…while I do believe in the inspiration and authority of Scripture, I am among a burgeoning crowd of quite conservative theologians who reject Evangelical bibliolatry in favor of the Christ to whom Scripture faithfully points” (vs 212).

Bogusness.

No, BJ does not believe in what the Bible teaches of the inspiration of Scripture. He changed what it means, so what he believes is not what the Bible says it means. I will put my diagrams in the footnote since I have shared them so many time already.[1]

No, BJ does not believe in the authority of Scripture because he keeps telling us it means different things than it says which makes him the authority over Scripture, not Scripture the authority over us (in the sense that Jesus has left it as his authorized manual for church operations while he is gone preparing a home for us).

No, BJ is not rejecting “Evangelical bibliolatry” because I have already shown that he has lied about what it means that evangelicals view Scripture as the “final authority on all matters of faith and practice.” He made a strawman version of this that would be bibliolatry if it were true, but since it is his deception it is, well, DECEPTION!

No, BJ does not reject an idolatrous view of Scripture “in favor of the Christ to whom Scripture faithfully points” because he has misrepresented the Scriptures that point to Christ in ways he doesn’t like. His “another Jesus” is not found in Scripture, so it isn’t Scripture “faithfully pointing” to his “another Jesus”, “different spirit”, and “different gospel” but the false teachers Paul lamented were so easily received by the churches.

I will also say that BJ’s “burgeoning crowd” is what Jesus called the “many” false teachers, and the “many” who will say “Lord, Lord” in the judgment, and Paul called the “evil people and impostors” who “will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived”. So never let grand words like a “burgeoning crowd” lure you away from the “few” who persevere on the narrow road to glory.

I read a few more pages where BJ tries to justify his mistaken view of Scripture as mistaken (yes, that makes sense and is not redundant). However, this is all based on his failed attempt to change “inspired” from what Paul said of God “breathing out” the Scriptures, including the whole of the Old Testament, to his version where it means something magical that happens when we read the God/man hybrid Scriptures he has invented.

However, the next thing I see is how he is using fictional writing-styles to suggest that the Bible includes fictional writing. That is like using worldlings as illustrations of how to live as God’s people! However, that is not the way Jesus or the apostles spoke of the Hebrew Scriptures, so if anyone believes BJ it is because they are taking his word for it instead of what is written. Let me respond to this bogus claim:

BJ’s Claim

Monte’s Response

“The compositor of I Samuel writes as if the narrator is all-knowing (which he isn’t), but because this book is in the Bible, we mistake the narrator for God himself” (p. 216).

Let’s simply rewrite this to make it biblical. Remember, all we need to do is look at how Jesus and the apostles treated the Hebrew Scriptures. We have shown that they did NOT correct even one thing about the Scriptures. BJ is chomping at the serpent’s bit to convince us that Jesus corrected Yahweh, but he hasn’t presented anything that shows Jesus or his apostles even suggesting that the Scriptures were not authoritative as written.

When we reject BJ’s attempt to change inspiration from where Paul presented it (between God and the writers of Scripture) to where he wants us to trust him to put it, we find that it is the God who breathed out the books of Samuel (originally just one book) who is all-knowing so that the true author IS “God himself”.

Peter agrees when he says that “no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (II Peter 1:21). This rebukes BJ for his claim that Scripture could ever by a God/man hybrid. Peter makes it clear that no Scripture was ever a result of “the will of man”. NONE!

So every Scripture, Samuel included, was what men spoke “from God” (making the true author “God himself”), and they did this as “they were carried along by the Holy Spirit”, making the Holy Spirit 100% complicit in what is written in all the books of the Old Testament, endorsing them all as the true history of God’s work to create for himself a people in the image and likeness of his Son.

My conclusion is that BJ is still trying to convince us to forget what Jesus and the apostles said about the Scriptures so he can push this idea that they are nothing better than good men mistaking what God said. That is deception. And that means BJ is a bad man mistaking what God said, leading him to deceive because he is “being deceived”.

After again using fictional examples from Hollywood and TV, BJ claims, “So it is with the Bible” (p. 216). Before reading what he says next, no, a book that is the collection of Scriptures breathed out by God through men who did not interject their wills but wrote as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit is not going to have any comparison in the sinful fiction of the worldling mind. So there is “so it is with the Bible” in relation to the fanciful writings of worldlings.

So he claims,

BJ’s Claim

Monte’s Response

“Individual characters, narrators, and compositors have a limited field of vision. This becomes obvious when we see them contradicting each other. If only we knew what the divine Author was thinking…” (p. 216).

The “field of vision” of a man doesn’t matter when he is writing down the breathed-out words of God!

The “contradicting each other” has been proven bogus.

And we DO know “what the divine Author was thinking” since the Bible is his breathed-out words.

The only reason BJ claims we don’t know the mind of Christ in the Scriptures is because he needs us to deny what is so clearly revealed or we would never receive his bogusness!

Under the title of “4. Then God Himself Appears in the Flesh” (p. 216), BJ continues trying to show a conflict between the Scriptures of the Old Testament and the Scriptures that tell us about Jesus. However, if we read the whole New Testament Scriptures, speaking of everything from the first to the second comings of Christ, we find that the Jesus of the New Testament IS the same as the Yahweh of the Old Testament and that it is the BJs who are lying about what the Scriptures say about Jesus so they can lie about what they say about Yahweh.

BJ’s Claim

Monte’s Response

“When God arrives in the person of Christ, we get the Author’s perspective through his own mouth, and that right within the Story!” (p. 216).

If it wasn’t for the fact that the BJs misrepresent how the Hebrew Scriptures ARE “the Author’s perspective”, we could agree that God showed his perspective through the Old Testament Scriptures, he showed his perspective through his Son, and now he shows his perspective through the New Testament Scriptures that tell us about his Son in perfect unity with all the work of the Father. The whole Bible is “the Author’s perspective through his own mouth” which is why Jesus told us to live “by every word that comes from the mouth of God” and Paul told us that “all Scripture” came from God’s mouth when he “breathed out” his words through the writers and into the Scriptures.

I would also add what Jesus said to his disciples after they came out from Sychar with lunch and wondered why he had been talking with a Samaritan woman. He said, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work” (John 4:34).

Jesus was speaking to Jewish disciples who knew that “the will of him who sent me” meant Jesus’ Father, the Yahweh of their Scriptures, and they knew that the “work” Jesus came “to accomplish” was the work God prophesied in their Scriptures.

This means that Jesus was again showing the absolute unity and harmony of what we have in the Old and New Testaments. The first revealed “the will of him who sent me” and “the work” that would be done. The second revealed how Jesus did the Father’s will and “accomplished his work”. No corrections of the Father by the Son.

BJ’s Claim

Monte’s Response

“The only divine Word-made-flesh has a very different perspective from the character Samuel or the narrator of I Samuel” (p. 217).

Not true.

And, once again, no EVIDENCE!

When we read the whole New Testament without twisting away any of the words we don’t like, and we acknowledge how Jesus is revealed in both his comings (coming for salvation in his first coming and condemnation in his second) we find that our Savior is every bit the Judge of sinners as we see prefigured in Samuel. All we need to do is read the whole New Testament, connect the dots between the prophecies of what Jesus would do (and how those are fulfilled in both comings, not just the first one), and we will see the wrath of God expressed through Jesus Christ just as much as ever other attribute (not anthropomorphisms) of the divine nature.

BJ’s Claim

Monte’s Response

“When the omniscient Author speaks directly about mercy, about love for one’s enemies, about forgiveness, we must radically reconstruct our reading of I Samuel and reorder our understanding of what’s happening in this new light” (p. 217).

That would be like saying that if we only took Hitler’s love letters between him and his mother, we would have to rewrite the history books and portray him as a really nice guy.

So too, if the only thing we read about Jesus are his love letters to his church, and reject or ignore everything he says about his judgment on the world, we could imagine him to be so different than Yahweh working through Samuel.

But when we read the whole of the New Testament, including Jesus’ own words about God’s coming wrath, and the book of Revelation describing Jesus personally involved in shining out God’s wrath on the nations, we find that the theme of God’s justice against his enemies is all through the Scriptures, and both Yahweh the Father and Yasous the Son are glorious in their justice, their mercy, and their faithfulness.

BJ’s Claim

Monte’s Response

“Two corollaries are very important here: on the one hand, this phenomenon means that both the narrators and the characters of Scripture must always bow to the revelation of God the Word when he came in the flesh – and sometimes their perspectives are completely inadequate” (p. 217).

I just showed that “this phenomenon” is only happening in BJ’s mind and not in Scripture. So that makes this whole point moot at best (having no bearing on the case) and dishonest and deceptive at worst (which we have already arrived at on the garden path).

No, no Scripture must bow to the Scriptures that show the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us since they are all breathed out by the same God and were written down by men who were carried along by the same Holy Spirit. So their perspectives may be “completely inadequate” for supporting BJ’s “another Jesus”, but they are entirely in line with the Jesus of the New Testament because it is still the Scriptures telling us what God wanted us to know about everything.

BJ’s Claim

Monte’s Response

“Okay, I’ll say it: errant. And Jesus says it too” (p. 217).

Such bold claims need evidence.

Not only have we not seen any “errant” conflicts between Scripture and Jesus, but NO, Jesus did NOT say that the Scriptures were errant. That is totally dishonest and already proven bogus. Again, no evidence is presented!

I mean, except for the evidence that BJ is lying.

At this point, these are such dishonest fightin’ words, that I really felt the need to continue until we got to the next heading! However, when I tried to do that, I doubled the length of this day’s journal journey, so I’m coming back to this spot, dividing the journey into two days, and hoping it helps everyone come from the garden path into the light of God’s glory and grace.

What I continue concluding in the second part of this book is that BJ keeps making claims as if he has proven something when he has not. I am not going to give up what I can read for myself in God’s word because someone can’t stomach God’s justice against sin. I don’t like that we are all sinners. I don’t like that we have all fallen short of the glory of God. I don’t like that we are absolutely helpless without a Savior. My flesh (sark) desperately wants to find my own way just like all the other religions, and just like the BJs and their messengers with all their manmade ideas that contradict the word of God. That IS what our flesh (sarks) want, to decide for ourselves what pleases us independent of anything our Creator has to say on the matter.

However, having come to know that I am a sinner, and that my sin is contemptible, and it is a horrible abhorrence to the holiness of our Creator, and that the only thing awaiting every sinner is the utter condemnation of our sin, to see throughout the whole Bible that it is a story of redemption from first to last, from beginning to end, and that God will not fail to carry to completion the good work he has begun in me no matter how many BJs try to lure me off the narrow way (it is God holding me there, no thanks to any mind-strength of my own), has me clinging to Jesus Christ as the Savior who has satisfied God’s just demands against my sin, and clinging to the promises of God about the coming kingdom where sin will be eradicated as all the elect are perfectly and completely righteous in God’s sight, and all the unrighteous are cast into the lake of fire for their destruction.

I have said this before, but it needs to be said again. Because BJ continues to diss the Scriptures in the Bible as the breathed-out words of God that are GOD’s word (not a God/man hybrid of BJ’s imagination), I share this reminder: “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).

How BJ does not tremble to tamper with God’s word as he does, I can’t even imagine. But this is for the “few” who hear this word of God and realize that we want to be those people Yahweh looks for, and watches over, who tremble at his word in the whole of the Scriptures as contained in the Bible.

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

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