Examining "A More Christlike Word"
by Brad Jersak
Day 89
“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 |
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.
Objections
(to the diatribe/rhetoric/claim) (p. 242)
Sigh.
I really was smiling to myself that I could just say “bogus” on every page and
just get done the shortcut down the garden path. However, the continued use of
facts not in evidence and loaded questions/statements requires exposing the
finer details of the poison-in-the-pudding.
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BJ’s Claim |
Monte’s Response |
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“When the rhetorical device used bates (sp?) the listener to experience
fear, hasn’t the means of communication become incongruent with the message?”
(p. 243). |
Really? You mean like a parent communicating a message of love to his child
but is “incongruent” when he tells his child to not run out onto the street
because it is dangerous?! |
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BJ’s Claim |
Monte’s Response |
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“I mean, how can we justify using fear to promote a gospel that drives
out fear?” (p. 243). |
First, it assumes that Paul is “using fear” as a fact not in evidence.
Just like a parent who warns a child to avoid something scary does not mean
the parent is “using fear” to motivate the child. He is using love to
motivate and this includes warnings about danger. Second, if the gospel that drives out fear is exclusive, and it
requires repenting of sin, and that requires acknowledging the dangers and
wages of sin, how is warning people of the dangers of rejecting the gospel
incongruent to the gospel that would save them if they were willing to turn
from their sin? |
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BJ’s Claim |
Monte’s Response |
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“And if the gospel frees us from fear, how can our gospel preaching
deliberately incorporate threats? Isn’t that kind of a lie? Do the ends
really justify the means?" (p. 243). |
What bogusness!!! Are we lying when we warn people to flee from the wrath to come? Or
are we lying (as with the BJs) when we think we are loving people to tell
them there is no wrath when there really is? How is that loving? And the “do the ends justify the means” rhetoric is.. well… it really
sounds non-literal to me! |
I’m just going to make some point-form comments here:
· His claim on page 243 that there is a conflict between love of God and fear of hell is just his personal journey, not an objective statement of how things need to work.
· His claim on page 243 that everyone in the early church understood rhetoric and we just don’t is bogus. Plus, no evidence was given.
· His zombie analogy on page 243 doesn’t apply because it illustrates something different than what we have in Scripture.
· BJ (page 243) does not know what he is talking about regarding how much Paul used rhetoric, and Paul most definitely did not use rhetoric to say the opposite of what is written!
· Under the point, “1. Readers may misjudge the referent” (p. 243) it is another bogus claim that Scripture doesn’t mean what it says. The imagery of the sheep and goats is obviously meaning believers and unbelievers, but the warning about the coming judgment is clearly as Jesus himself describes it.
· Under the point, “2. Readers may literalize the imagery” (p. 244), I would simply say that this is one side of the pendulum extreme against BJ’s other extreme of allegorizing the illustrations! Each description needs to be assessed in context, and sometimes we simply accept that God left it in a description that we can’t build a concrete viewpoint on in terms of what it will look like when that event really happens.
· Under the point, “3. Readers may confuse rhetorical preaching with didactic instruction” (p. 245). Here BJ is again lying about clear teachings of Scripture as “rhetoric” and proving by his examples that he is putting himself as an authority over the Scriptures that are given to us as the authoritative word of God. That whole point is bogus.
· In replying to “Peter’s” letter, BJ again presents the absolutely false (and impossible) notion that there is “another Jesus” who is outside Scripture and makes all Scripture “bow” to “the revelation of God incarnate” (p. 246). My question is, where is this Jesus? How do we know what he said? How do we know what he is like? How do we show how one person’s view of this Jesus is more authoritative than Scripture because they know who he is, while someone else doesn’t have the right view of this Jesus because he doesn’t know who he is, but the whole time we don’t know where this Jesus is?!. How do we hear from him apart from Scripture so we can reinterpret Scripture to match him? My point is that BJ is making up “another Jesus” that is actually HIS creation. He cannot be found anywhere. Only in the statements of the people who believe in him. But he is not found in Scripture. And the Jesus in the Scriptures disagrees with BJ’s “another Jesus”. And Paul did warn us about people who would come with counterfeits and was perplexed at why professing believers would follow them!
· So, no, we do not need to choose between BJ’s two limited extremes. Inbetween squeezing the true Lord Jesus Christ into “the violence texts” (BJ’s wording, not the biblical wording), or turning to this “another Jesus” “different spirit” and “different gospel” of the BJs, is the true Lord Jesus Christ revealed all through the Scriptures as working in intimate fellowship with his Father to judge sin and save sinners.
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BJ’s Claim |
Monte’s Response |
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“For me, Jesus Christ is the final authority, and every text must be
read through his living demonstration of God’s true nature” (p. 246). |
Again, this is bogus only because BJ’s “another Jesus” is not found in
Scripture. We can’t find him anywhere. We must take BJ’s word for it that
this “another Jesus” exists, and that he is the way BJ describes him. This
makes BJ the authority! And I will not let someone who so poorly handles the
Scriptures tell me he has “another Jesus” outside the Scriptures who corrects
Yahweh of the Scriptures when the Jesus IN the Scriptures clearly affirms his
Father in everything he does! And when Jesus appears, I will GLADLY leave behind the authority of the Bible, the manual Jesus left us in his own words, to live with the Word in the joy of his words thrilling my lil’ ol’ heart for eternity! But until Jesus returns, I will obey his word and live "by every word that comes from the mouth of God" as we now have them in the Bible, the word of the Living God. |
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BJ’s Claim |
Monte’s Response |
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“Jesus himself demonstrates this practice: ‘You have heard it said,
but I say…” (p. 246). |
I already proved this bogus! Jesus was talking about what the people
heard from their religious leaders, and when he said “but I say” he was
declaring himself as the Messiah. He was NOT correcting what was written in the Scriptures! And, what is fascinating is that, even though BJ claims there is
“another Jesus” outside of Scripture who interprets Scripture, he
misrepresents Scriptures about Jesus to tell us what his “another Jesus” is
like when it is NOT what the Jesus in Scripture actually SAID! |
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BJ’s Claim |
Monte’s Response |
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“So did Paul. He even deletes lines of the Old Testament when quoting
the prophets in order to bring their message into conformity with Christ’s
revelation of God” (p. 246). |
Now is that ever IRONIC! Here is BJ who constantly quotes only parts of Scriptures to tell us
what his “another Jesus” is like and then claims (without any evidence, I should add) that
Paul leaves out parts of Old Testament Scriptures in order to restrict our
view about the Jesus in the Bible! How bogus does bogus need to be! |
·
BJ’s
3 points on page 247 simply repeat his ideas of trusting his “another Jesus”
who is outside of Scripture so that we can erase anything from Scripture that
contradicts BJ’s version of Jesus, and write off as “rhetoric” anything that
proves BJ is wrong about God’s judgment, condemnation, vengeance, and wrath
against sin. It’s all bogus, and I am not going to trust someone’s “another
Jesus” that requires me to take their word for it when my reading of God’s word
for decades has shown me the glory of the word of God as a cohesive whole that
does not require me to write off any of it to believe in Jesus as he is
presented in the breathed-out words of God.
· I absolutely deny BJ’s bogusness that his “another Jesus” is “our guiding star and Lord” (p. 247) (don't forget that "even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light" ~ II Corinthians 11:14). I will stick with Paul and hold to “the whole counsel of God”, not BJ’s condensed version, and let all the word of Christ dwell in me richly so I adjust to it instead of adjusting it to me, and instead of a mere human who claims authority to tell me which parts of the Jesus in the Bible are true and which are false.
So,
There’s No Wrath or Judgment? (p. 247).
Because BJ has been wrong every time we have looked at a Scripture about
God’s wrath and judgment, it isn’t admirable that he concedes a bone after
taking away the dog’s supper.
Let me
remind you of the way BJ’s non-literal “Literal Sense” extreme is in contrast
with his strawman “Literalism” extreme while ignoring the Plumbline of the
Historical-Grammatical Sense that seeks to understand God’s word in the context of
God’s word.
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BJ’s Literal Sense |
The Historical-Grammatical Sense |
BJ’s Literalism |
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Claims “literal” but means “tropological” (moral of the story), his
“different gospel” (from outside of the Scriptures), and “typological”
(allegorical), none of which mean "literal". |
The grammatical-historical method means reading the Bible in a plain
manner, respecting grammar, word meanings, and other factors with an emphasis
on context, Context, CONTEXT. |
BJ puts people here who ascribe to the plain meaning of Scripture as
if they are stifling the Holy Spirit and missing the point of the divine and
human authors. |
One thing BJ is leaving out in all his talk of rhetoric is that God himself is outside every culture speaking of spiritual things into a natural world that cannot understand them. To what extent he speaks in our language is open to speculation. But never can we leave out that he is speaking of his kingdom and righteousness beyond what any culture can contain, and that he has given us "the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you" (John 14:26). He most definitely does NOT restrict himself to BJ's understanding of the rhetoric used by Gentiles outside the kingdom of heaven!
And a
second thing BJ is leaving out is the other half of almost every Scripture he
has shared! Putting aside rhetoric, or diatribe, or algorithms… I mean…
allegories, and we still have “every word that comes from the mouth of God”
collected into Scripture as “the whole counsel of God” so that we ought to be
like the Bereans who were “more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received
the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these
things were so” (Acts 17:11). And what I find when I examine the Scriptures
every day I am examining BJ’s book is that the things he is saying are NOT so!
Now, since
this is actually a bit shorter than so many other times, and we are at the end
of a chapter, let me share what I am learning in God’s word right now.
Yesterday and today, I meditated on the first two “woes” Jesus pronounced on the
religious elite of the “scribes and Pharisees”. Because of my present journey
through Matthew, I had to do some research on the differences between Pharisees
and Sadducees. I discovered that the Sadducees were the predominant influence
over the activities in the temple, while the Pharisees were mostly influential
over the synagogues.
So,
when Jesus specifically addresses the “scribes and Pharisees” in seven “woes”,
and each time calls them “hypocrites”, he is focusing on them because they were
the Gatekeepers of the Scriptures. They were the ones who had the Scriptures in
their care and read them in the synagogues. They were the ones who were far more
focused on Scripture than the Sadducees. In other words, they ought to have
known what the Scriptures said about the Christ, they should have recognized
that Jesus met all the qualifications of the Messiah, and they should have been
steering everyone to open their hearts to him.
Instead, Jesus begins his woes against these men with these two
judgments:
1. “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. For you
neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in.”
2. “Woe to you, scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single
proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child
of hell as yourselves” (Matthew 23:13-15).
Are we clear that this is the true Lord Jesus Christ speaking? Are we clear that he is speaking woes of judgment against these men? Can we identify the three things he condemns them for?
A. They refuse to enter the kingdom of heaven.
B. They slam the door of the kingdom shut in the faces of people who want to enter.
C. They make converts who are double-dose children of hell as themselves.
Who do
we know who was totally unwilling to enter Jesus’ kingdom, did everything he
could to stop people from entering, and was a double-dose child of hell as his
mentors?
If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless (Philippians 3:4-6).
Now
listen to his testimony:
But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead (Philippians 3:7-11).
There
we have the judgment and mercy of God at work. Friends. Two sides of the same
coin of justice. Jesus declared his judgment on men like Saul of Tarsus.
Without salvation, Saul would have died in his sins. But Jesus extended his
mercy to Saul by literally zapping him with grace that made him blind and gave
him sight. And after Saul’s conversion, as the apostle Paul he could say,
Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain (I Corinthians 15:1-2).
My
contention in critiquing BJ’s book is that he is NOT passing on the gospel Paul
preached. So many people are NOT holding fast to the word Paul preached to them
in the Scriptures. To say we “believe” the gospel, but while we do not hold to
the apostles’ teachings is to believe “in vain”, or “for no reason; to no end”
(BSL).
And
that’s why I have been prefacing each day’s Journal Journey with Paul’s
warning:
“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)
BJ is
such a “someone” who peddles “another Jesus”, “a different spirit”, and “a
different gospel”. I share this in the hope that someone will realize they are
really tired of putting up with his man-centered twisting of God’s words and wants to get back to the Berean lifestyle of searching the Scriptures to find out
what THEY say, instead of denying the Scriptures because of what the BJs say.
© 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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