A Journal Journey with Brad Jersak’s “Different” Jesus – Day 91

 

Examining "A More Christlike Word" by Brad Jersak

Day 91

“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

     I ended my last day’s Journal Journey with the realization that I didn’t have room to explore BJ’s thoughts about Psalm 85:10 and would need to look at it in a separate post (p. 263). BJ referred to this beautiful expression:

Steadfast love and faithfulness meet;
    righteousness and peace kiss each other.

Somehow this is supposed to prove that mercy trumps judgment, rather than that mercy and judgment are lifelong friends. Let’s consider what this says, and then look at the context of the Psalm. Does this verse and Psalm show that mercy is glorified above God’s justice and judgment, or that it is one facet of the divine attributes that shines just as gloriously as justice and judgment?

Steadfast love (hesed): loyal love n. — an unfailing kind of love, kindness, or goodness; often used of God’s love that is related to faithfulness to his covenant.

Faithfulness: truth (quality) n. — conformity to reality or actuality; often with the implication of dependability.

Righteousness: righteousness n. — adherence to what is required according to a standard; for example, a moral standard, though not always.

Peace: peace n. — harmonious relations and freedom from disputes; especially during the absence of war.

(Bible Sense Lexicon)

   Someone should write a song about these qualities! Of course these are all equally glorious expressions of the divine nature. Now what else does this Psalm express in worship to Yahweh?

1.     “Lord, you were favorable to your land; you restored the fortunes of Jacob.” Wow, this sounds so much like what I was reading in Joshua and Judges today. God was constantly showing favor to his people when they returned to him in repentance. And “restoring” their fortunes matches what happened when he first judged them and let their enemies steal their fortunes but then showed mercy and restored them when they turned their hearts towards home.

2.    “You forgave the iniquity of your people; you covered all their sin. Selah” This is also exactly what I read about in Joshua and Judges. The people sinned. God judged them. They repented. God forgave them. God covered their sin (foreshadowing the glory of God covering our sin with the blood of the new covenant).

3.    “You withdrew all your wrath; you turned from your hot anger.” Okay, I’m feeling a little bit amazed at how I journeyed through Joshua and Judges this morning (as I shared on Day 90) before getting to journaling through this Psalm! What I shared, particularly in the cycle of the people turning to idols, facing God’s judgment according to the covenant, finally coming to repentance in their troubles, God mercifully providing a Judge to deliver them (press repeat). This verse says God EXPRESSED WRATH and expressed HOT ANGER! “Wrath” means “wrath n. — a feeling of intense anger that does not subside; often on an epic scale” (BSL), and “anger” means “fury n. — a feeling of intense anger” (BSL). The writers are speaking of that part in the cycle when the people were repenting and God withdrew (gathered together) his wrath and turned away from expressing his fury against their sin. Wow, does this ever sound like God’s wrath and hot anger are right up there with his hesed, faithfulness, righteousness, and peace!

4.    “Restore us again, O God of our salvation, and put away your indignation toward us!” Okay, so what we just read in the first three verses was part of another pattern from Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges, that the people would often appeal to how God had already shown them mercy in their sin as a way to call out to him to be merciful once again. Same thing here. God, as you have done in the past, restore us once again. Put aside your just indignation! “Restore” means “to restore v. — to bring back into original existence, use, function, or position” (BSL) and “put away” means “to annul v. — to officially declare invalid or inapplicable” (BSL). Yes, this is what the people would cry out for every time they finally had enough of God’s judgment on their sins! But there it is again: God’s “indignation” was on them! It is “YOUR indignation” just as it was “YOUR wrath” and “YOUR hot anger”. “Indignation” means “anger (emotion) n. — a strong emotion or feeling that is oriented toward some real or supposed grievance” (BSL). And the people are saying that this is YOUR indignation “toward US”! This can’t possibly be turned into something about them (like what bad little children they are) because every part of it is talking about what is in Yahweh! Man, I’m really loving the way this is working out!

5.    “Will you be angry with us forever? Will you prolong your anger to all generations?” Wow! Again, God IS angry and the people have been bearing his judgment long enough that they are appealing to him to remember how he has had mercy on his people in the past. When we think of how God promised his love to so many generations of those who love him and obey his commands, this is a distinctly Jewish lament that God’s anger appears to be going on for such a long time and they so want him to come to their rescue again.

6.    “Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?” Which means the people are NOT revived, and NOT rejoicing because they are under God’s judgment. This is exactly the way the cycle throughout the books of Moses, Joshua and Judges describes. They are in that cycle, crying out for revival and relief. They want their Father in heaven to RETURN THEM TO JOY!

7.    “Show us your steadfast love, O Lord, and grant us your salvation.” This means that God was NOT showing his hesed (steadfast love) and was not saving them. They are praying and asking him to do what they know he has done in the past.

8.    “Let me hear what God the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his saints; but let them not turn back to folly.” The writer is not hearing what God would speak because he has turned from them in judgment (as per the covenant), and he is declaring his heart to God that he longs to hear from his Savior once again.

9.    “Surely his salvation is near to those who fear him, that glory may dwell in our land.” Salvation is far away when his people do not fear him and turn to idols. Glory leaves the land when they turn to idols. But when the people fear Yahweh and return to him, he saves them and brings them back to their land. These are all beautiful expressions, but they affirm that God’s judgment and mercy are equals, not mercy trumping judgment.

10. “Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other.” Okay, do you see how the symphony has built to this expression of hope? Can you hear the song rising from the lament of longing to the reminiscing of what it is like to walk with God in his salvation? The writer wants THIS instead of what they have, God’s wrath, hot anger and indignation. He doesn’t accuse God of injustice in relating to them that way, but calls on him to turn things around and hear their cries of repentance.

11.  “Faithfulness springs up from the ground, and righteousness looks down from the sky.” This is the song of hope of a repentant people. As we would call sinners to confess their sins to God because he is faithful and just to forgive their sins and purify them from all their unrighteousness (I John 1:9), so the Psalmist sings of what is ahead for them as God hears their confession and repentance. He knows what Yahweh is like (BJ does not, hence his need to correct him), and so he can sing of the faithfulness of God that is like seeds that have already germinated and are about to spring up from the ground. He can sing of the rains of righteousness that are already looking down from the sky and soon will fall on their parched land to make them blessed in their crops once again. When taken in context, this is a beautiful picture of a people who have felt God’s just judgment on them because of their sin, confessing that they still know what he is like and that he will surely come to their rescue and save them.

12. “Yes, the Lord will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase.” Do you see how this completely contradicts the BJs? BJ says that the only thing Yahweh will give is what is good, and he quotes a verse from a psalm where the writer is admitting to all the wrath, anger and indignation they have justly received from their God and that the good he looks for is what he knows Yahweh will do because of his covenant with his people. He “WILL give what is good” AFTER judging his people’s sins! Their land “WILL yield its increase” AFTER being plagued and destroyed because of their idolatries. You see, in both God’s judgment and his mercy he has never left his covenantal love. These are his people. When they commit adultery with idols, he chastises them to bring them home. When they repent and come home, no matter how adulterous and idolatrous they have been, HE WELCOMES THEM!!! Yes, when we agree with “the whole counsel of God”, not just the “Pollyana” parts (I’m throwing that phosfomorphianism in there just to show my age), we see the diamond of God’s nature shining out in all its glorious facets so that when we see the glory of his judgment bearing down on unrepentant sin, and we feel God’s discipline hard upon our hard hearts, we KNOW that the same diamond that shines judgment out from the divine heart is right beside the facets of mercy, forgiveness, and grace that are just waiting to pour out the favor of God the moment there is a change of heart in us.

13. “Righteousness will go before him and make his footsteps a way.” Notice the WILL? Think about it. The writer began with the past tense. God “you WERE” favorable. You “restored”. You “forgave”. You “covered”. You “withdrew”. You “turned”. All of those were past tense because they weren’t happening any longer. Whoever is writing this was in the midst of a people who were not experiencing God’s mercy because they had not repented of their sin. Then he goes into praying about what he wants to see, but as things that are up ahead. And then he pictures how close God’s mercy is that the seeds have germinated and the rain clouds have formed, and then he concludes with hope-filled confidence that God WILL give them what is good just as he has always done in the past, and their land WILL once again flourish. Followed by the beautiful and confident outro: “Righteousness WILL go before him and make his footsteps a way!” Isn’t that beautiful! And I can see how there is anthropomorphic harmonies added to the realism of the melody to help us feel all the more that it is God’s RIGHTEOUSNESS that is constant, and that righteousness always knows whether to express judgment or mercy based on how the people are relating to their God. Now, to get technical again, “Righteousness” means “righteousness n. — adherence to what is required according to a standard; for example, a moral standard, though not always” (BSL). It is God’s RIGHTEOUSNESS that is the standard. His love, his mercy, his judgment, his wrath, his vengeance, all harmonize with his righteousness. And, the writer is not claiming that God’s righteousness is unjust to be angry with them, or to judge them in their sin. He was doing what was in the covenant with Moses. And the songwriter knew that God’s righteousness would guide his footsteps to the mercy and forgiveness that he always gives to his people when they repent.

   Do you know what the wonder is in all of this? That when we fully admit what we see of God’s judgment against the sins of his people, and we see his wrath, anger and indignation at them constantly turning to idols, the fact that he keeps taking them back, coming to their rescue, saving them, restoring their relationship as if they had never sinned, MAGNIFIES God’s hesed (steadfast love), his grace, his mercy, his faithfulness BECAUSE these were people who needed justice and vengeance to confront them with the horrors of their idolatry.

   I know that in BJ’s book I’m still reading quotes by the Isaac guy claiming that clearly revealed attributes of God are “anthropomorphic – i.e., figurative” and are “far removed from His Nature…” (p. 264). But BJ has just found other false teachers from the past who were holding to the same opinion as BJ wanted to find in the Bible and they have become the “blind guides” who are “deceiving and being deceived” because they think they have the right to “tamper” with the breathed out words of God. I hope my surprising jaunt through Psalm 85 (after the gift of God’s grace in Joshua and Judges set the stage) has returned someone to joy that we can hold to “every word that comes from the mouth of God” and trust that what we have in the Bible is God’s word, the manual Jesus left for us as our ultimate authority over the church until Jesus returns. We do have the Holy Spirit with us, but his work is to teach us the manual, and to remind us of what the manual says, so we can stand up to false teachers and “let the word of Christ dwell in us richly”.

   Well, I have 4 pages to go in this chapter, and I know it is just going to repeat the opinions of people who found the same god in Scripture as the BJs, so I will try to just point out what is most necessary to reprove and correct them according to God’s word.

1.     “This is the point of immutable love: it never, ever turns away” (p. 264). Bogus. Or bad choice of words. Yes, God’s love turns away. That’s all through the Old Testament. His people turn away. They reject all his advances to have them back. He turns away in judgment and lets them bear the consequences of their sins. And he waits for them to come home. His love never fails, but it does turn away.

2.    I challenge the notion that “all human speech is figurative when it comes to God” (p. 265). Of course no human speech can contain God, but it can make true statements about him. In our daycare, when a one year old says his or her first corrupted version of my name, it thrills my heart that they have identified who I am. Incomplete? Yes. A faulty version of my name? Yes. But not the least bit figurative. A heart-to-heart attachment in words and meanings that always leaves us the children with God, but looking up into the face of a Father who smiles with knowingness that we have attached to realities of him that leave us both delighted to put him into words while knowing that every song finished is begging for another to begin.

3.    With Saint John of Damascus, I will simply say that him mixing God’s divine nature of “wrath” in with anthropomorphisms of sleep, hands, and feet (p. 265), is just BJ quoting someone who does the same thing as him. It must be tested with Scripture, and it doesn’t pass the test.

4.    Saint Anthony the Great brings us closer to the early generations of the church. And what Anthony states is that the responses of God to people as described in Scripture means God does not respond to his people as described. It reminds me of a book of logic puzzles I have entitled, “What is the Name of this Book?” In explaining how logic puzzles work it asks, “What happens when an irresistible object hits an immovable post?” Now an irresistible object is one that can knock over anything it hits, and an immovable post is one that cannot be knocked over by anything. The point is that some things are not logic puzzles because they are logically contradictory. In other words, there cannot be both an irresistible object and an immovable post. So too, there can’t be kazillions of references to God’s attributes expressing themselves in one historical event after another and it also being true that God did not express himself in the ways described.

5.    I can see where Brad is confused. On page 266 he makes a false equivalence of God being moved by sympathy (or judgment) meaning his “character (love/goodness) is jerked around by external forces.” No, God’s character is unchanging, but he is relational. From within that character that never changes, of course he can relate to his enemies in vengeance at the same time as lovingly saving his children from those enemies! I just see so many false equivalences in this, and I’m so close to the finish line of the garden path, that I consider ‘nuff said!

6.    Under the “Takeaways” ending, BJ speaks of “the authority of the early Christians who gave us the New Testament…” (p. 267). All I will say is that none of those people had “authority” over the Scriptures. NONE! Plus, BJ has merely quoted figures who said the same thing as he wanted to find in the Bible, an incomplete God who makes no sense of justice.

7.    To clarify, the people BJ quoted are NOT “patristic giants” (p. 268). They are men who believed what BJ believes. And I’m not going to study how they fit into the whole gamut of all the men who are known as the church fathers. It is enough to test them by Scripture. And, people like the Got Questions ministry are serving God by trying to answer all kinds of questions people are asking about such things, so please read more broadly than the BJs to make sure you are hearing from people who believe the whole counsel of God.

8.    I am not ignoring “the way those who gave us the Bible actually read Scripture” (p. 268). However, those people did not GIVE us Scripture. They ACKNOWLEDGED what was Scripture. God gave us Scripture. And how people in the past read Scripture can be just as suspect as today since Jesus and the apostles already told us how bad it would be. Paul was already dealing with false teachers in his day and warned about the wolves that would come the moment he was gone. We must be just as wary of wolves among the “saints” of the past as the peddlers of God’s word today. None of us are under ANY obligation to honor someone from the past for their interpretation of Scripture just because they are from the past.

9.    I also reject BJ’s association of the men he quoted with the “cloud of witnesses” of Hebrews 11 (p. 268). The people in Hebrews 11 were people of faith. The list is breathed out by God. No one after the writing of Hebrews is on that inspired list. From here on in, we must test everyone. We must test every spirit. And people with big followings past, present, or future, are not automatically on the list. In fact, many of the people on the list weren’t seen as the people of faith they were to their generation. Look at all the complaining Moses' generation verbalized about him! I am not saying that there are not believers we know who seem to be just as exemplary in their life of faith as the ones we read in Hebrews 11. I’m only saying that BJ’s list is not equal to the Scriptural list and everyone is free to test each person and decide that they did not rightly handle the word of truth so they are not a good example of living by faith (since they do not trust so many things God said!).

10. And, I reject BJ’s claim that Jeremiah 6:16 applies to the people he mentioned. We can’t cherry-pick Scriptures, pick whichever people from the past support our views, and then equate them with what God says about the “ancient paths” when we are rewriting the ancient paths to suit the god we wanted to find in the Bible!

11.  Instead, the call of Jeremiah 6:16 is to you who are buying into what BJ is peddling of his “another Jesus”, “different spirit”, and “different gospel”. “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.” In other words, please come back to the Scriptures, to Jesus’ words, to the prophets and apostles, to those who were carried along by the Holy Spirit to write down the breathed-out words of God, and find rest for your souls in “every word that comes from the mouth of God”!

12. Sigh. But now I find that BJ once again did not quote a whole verse! What is the last line of Jeremiah 6:16? “But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’” You know, like Paul said, “you put up with it readily enough”.

      Well, 97% of the way down the garden path, only about 10 pages to go by the looks of it, and I contend that the majority of what BJ has used to make his case for a Yahweh-needs-to-be-changed approach to Scripture comes from (drum roll please…) OUTSIDE SCRIPTURE! And since that has zero authority over believers in Jesus Christ, I will leave it where Jesus and the apostles put it. Perhaps one more visit to the garden path and we can be done with this!

 

 

© 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