Examining "A More Christlike Word"
by Brad Jersak
Day 81
“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.
As
this day’s Journal Journey is essentially part 2 of the last day, I will simply
introduce this with the reminder (we used to be able to say “like a broken record”) that BJ is making bold claims with ZERO evidence from the
Scriptures. He keeps saying that “Jesus” corrects Yahweh but never once shows
where Jesus did this. This fits my contention that he is promoting the “another
Jesus” with a “different spirit” in a “different gospel” that Paul so clearly
warned about.
He
also keeps telling us that only the Scriptures that show how loving Jesus is
can be used while we must ignore all the ones showing how angry he was at the
hypocrisy of the religious elite, how he spoke of wrath against all who would
not obey the call of the gospel and believe in him, and how he is pictured as
the King of kings and Lord of lords inflicting vengeance on his enemies.
This
hypocritical and dishonest methodology is a deception. It is deliberate. BJ
fits the profile Paul warned Timothy about regarding the “evil men and
imposters” who would go around “deceiving” others “and being deceived” by the
evil one themselves.
With
this warning before us, that BJ is one of the people Jesus, Paul, and the other
apostles warned us about, let’s continue to look at how BJ keeps making claims
that are not matched with supporting evidence from Scripture, and that contradict so many
things that are written in God’s word.
I should also add that I truly hope to conclude my journey down BJ’s garden path (soon I hope!) with a summary picture of how Jesus in the New Testament is revealed as every bit the same as Yahweh in the Old Testament.
However, I will share this without
the poison-in-the-pudding mindset of the BJs that Yahweh did horrible acts of
violence against good people. Neither will I impose a vindicative character to
the Yahweh of the Old Testament that is not there in any text about anything
Yahweh led his people or prophets to say or do. Yahweh is love just as Jesus is
love, but they are also holy, righteous, and just. So we will honor the
Triune God as they are revealed, not as they are misrepresented by the BJs.
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BJ’s Claim |
Monte’s Response |
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“Through the lens of Jesus, I can now read these books as part of the
mega-series in which God’s people did and said horrific things in his name –
things that God himself debunks when he arrives” (p. 217). |
First, BJ does NOT mean “through the lens of Jesus” because when we
read “Jesus” in the New Testament, he debunks the BJs! Instead, BJ means,
“through the lens of our ‘another Jesus’”… we get absolutely anything the BJs
imagine (with spiritual help, of course). Second, the books of the Bible that are the ultimate “mega-series” in
the whole wide world do NOT present Yahweh’s people DOING or SAYING
“horrific” things in his name. Instead, the Scriptures present God and his people doing and saying
things that are the just condemnation of sinners who defy the living God with
their promotion of sin (I’m not talking about the ones not endorsed by God).
It is the BJs who are painting the Yahweh of the Old Testament as horrific, and
claiming that his servants portray him as saying or doing things that are
horrific, but that is not what is in the Scriptures themselves. Third, I continue to point out that BJ has not given one example of
“God himself” debunking anything from the Old Testament Scriptures when he
came. The only attempts he made were lies about what those Scriptures said.
The BJs require people to take their word for this when they haven’t
presented anything that shows Jesus or his apostles correcting anything from
the Old Testament Scriptures. What BJ is saying in this quote is utterly
false, and it is scary that people are believing this with zero evidence from
the Scriptures to support such a God-dishonoring claim. |
The
thing everyone should be asking themselves is, why does Satan need people to
believe that Yahweh in the Old Testament is such a horrible person? What is it
that the BJs keep sniping at hoping all y’all will think they have taken down
the worst bad guy in the world? What is it the enemy does NOT want anyone to
believe?
Answer: that sin is so contemptible to the holy God who created us that
it MUST be eradicated from the people of God through the laws of the first
covenant, it must be judged in all the wicked nations that are against God and
his people, it must be expunged from the kingdom of heaven through the death
and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and then it must be utterly destroyed in the
lake of fire so God can create a new heavens and a new earth in which only
righteousness dwells.
And
why is it that Satan is orchestrating this concerted effort to deny that Jesus
was punished for our sins (penal) as our substitute (substitutionary) to atone
for our sins and make us right with God (atonement)?
Answer: because Satan’s purpose in everything is to steal God’s glory.
His “Did God actually say…?” in the Garden of Eden, and through all the false
prophets of every age, all the BJs included, is to blind people from seeing the
glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Instead, by denying what Jesus did to
propitiate the judgment of God against our sin, he ensures that people will
call “to the mountains and rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face of him
who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day
of their wrath has come, and who can stand?’” (Revelation 6:16-17).
Again,
I’m not trying to match BJ’s verbiage and grandiose claims, but to show that
the BJs have NOT presented any Scripture to support the notion of Jesus
correcting Yahweh, and that when we read the whole New Testament, including all
the prophecies that would be fulfilled, we see that there are two comings of
Christ, one to bring salvation, the other to gather the elect to join in
judging the nations. All together, everything we see in Jesus in the New
Testament is the same divine nature as we see in Yahweh of the Old Testament.
They are Father and Son, and there is no disparity between them, not only in
reality, but also in the revelation of both Father and Son in the Scriptures.
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BJ’s Claim |
Monte’s Response |
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“God wants to show us how we still do and say awful stuff in his
name all the time” (p. 217). |
It is interesting to hear BJ dissing the writers of Scripture for apparently
saying awful stuff in God’s name, and then writing that “God wants to show
us…” the things he is claiming when that isn’t true at all. He speaks of
God as if he knows this when he does not. There is no way this is true of the “we” in the kingdom of heaven, the
righteous who are living by faith in the Son of God who loved us and gave
himself for us. We have our faults and our failings, but we aren’t going
around saying and doing awful things to people as if we are authorized by God
to do so! However, doing and saying awful things in God’s name IS true of the
“many” deceivers and the “many” deceived that Jesus and the apostles warned
us about. |
Switching to David Goa’s claims (pp. 217-218):
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BJ’s Claim |
Monte’s Response |
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“If God is ‘one and undivided’ with Jesus Christ, …then we are invited
by the mind of Christ to read the First Testament through the example and
teaching of Christ’s love and the spousal covenant it fully expresses” (p.
217). |
Says who? If the whole Bible, the collection of Scriptures God breathed out, was
written by men carried along by the Holy Spirit so there was no “will of man”
turning the Bible into the God/man hybrid BJ claims (making him a liar), then
we read the whole Bible, all the Scriptures, examining EVERYTHING it says
about the nature of God as revealed in Yahweh the Father and in Yasous the
Son. We do NOT fabricate “another Jesus” who is a mosaic of only the texts
from the New Testament that reveal his love for his church, that leave out
the prophetic descriptions of his life and ministry, and that leave out all
the prophetic descriptions of his second coming in judgment and wrath that
will cause “all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son
of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory” (Matthew
24:30). My point is that BJ is one person telling us what another person says
outside of Scripture, giving us rules about which Scriptures we can include
in describing Jesus, changing the meanings of words so that when Jesus says
“wrath” it doesn’t mean what the Jews understood wrath to mean in their
Scriptures, and it doesn’t connect to John’s description of the “wrath” of
God “on the face of the Lamb”. There is good reason that Paul said he taught “the whole counsel of
God”, and then followed this up immediately by warning about the false
teachers and wolves that would rise up from their own number (the elders of
Ephesus) as soon as he was gone. The BJs do NOT teach “the whole counsel of
God” and are fleecing the flock as they peddle a collection of manmade
doctrines that require absolute denials of what God breathed out in his own
words. |
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BJ’s Claim |
Monte’s Response |
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(Goa) “If we claim the Trinity, then it is impossible to see in God
the Father anything that we do not see in God the Son” (p. 218). |
I agree with the statement ONLY if we include EVERYTHING the
Scriptures say about the Son in both the Old and New Testaments. When we
include everything, there is no disparity between the God of the Old and New
Testaments. It is the BJs who put their “another Jesus” into a box that
leaves out all the qualities of judgment and condemnation from Jesus and then
they lie to everyone that anything about Yahweh that is different from their
“another Jesus” makes the Bible a God/man hybrid that the BJs can misinterpret
however they please. |
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BJ’s Claim |
Monte’s Response |
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(Goa) “Jesus never killed anyone but allowed himself to be crucified
precisely to end the cycle of mimetic contagion” (p. 218).
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I looked up “mimetic contagion”. It appears that it means the
contagious way that people will pick sides and mimic whoever they support,
often in a cycle that keeps increasing in severity (like the Hatfield-McCoy
feud). I can only guess that he means that whatever one person started by
presenting Yahweh as judging sin, the mimicking of this picture of Yahweh in
the rest of the Scriptures became a contagious cycle of unrelenting mistakes about
God. Of course, this is also a denial that the Scriptures tell us the truth
about Yahweh judging sin, and that Jesus judges sin the same as Yahweh. At
the very least, the guy is only stating his opinion, not something revealed
in Scripture. Question: is it true that “Jesus never killed anyone”? Answer: No, that is not true. Jesus is the image of Yahweh. He is the
exact imprint of Yahweh’s invisible nature. Whatever we read of Yahweh doing
in the Scriptures, Jesus was doing with him. That God put people to death is
without question. Clearly Jesus did just as his Father did. In Jesus’ own
words he said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own
accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does,
that the Son does likewise” (John 5:19). This means that yes, Jesus did what
the Father did in judging the nations, and Jesus will do the same when the
Triune God judges the nations once and for all. It is only the bias of the “another Jesus” BJs that suggests that
there is something wrong with a just and holy God putting sinners to death
for their sins. It is actually what God warned about in the Garden of Eden,
and we have seen people dying for their sins ever since, with each death warning
us “to flee from the wrath to come”
(Matthew 3:7). Question: do the Scriptures clearly show Jesus judging sinners with
eternal condemnation? Answer: Yes. Jesus spoke of this in John 3:16-18 and 36. And, when he
is described in Revelation 19 (right after God refers to the “marriage of the
Lamb”), he is shown as the one who has “a sharp sword” coming from his mouth
“with which to strike down the nations” (vs 15), ending with “And the rest
were slain by the sword that came from the mouth of him who was sitting on
the horse, and all the birds were gorged with their flesh” (vs 21). So, the question is not whether Jesus put anyone to death as recorded
in the gospels, but whether he was acting in union with the Father in the
deaths of their enemies in the Old Testament Scriptures, and is pictured as
putting people to death in judgment in the New Testament. He is consistently
pictured the same as the Father, and their judgment against sinners is always
portrayed as perfect and holy justice against evil and wicked people and nations,
not some horrid injustice against good people. |
Conclusion of Goa’s quote: it is an opinionated expression following the
same methodology of the other BJs to leave out anything Jesus said that sounds
like the Yahweh of the Old Testament, and then try to rewrite Yahweh based on
the “love” mosaic they have created with their selective lovey-dovey texts.
Again, I simply appeal to where in Scripture it says anything like what they
are peddling.
Okay,
back to BJ’s bogus applications (yes, I just started reading the next paragraph
and that is exactly what they are!):
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BJ’s Claim |
Monte’s Response |
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“In other words, through the incredible plot twist of the incarnation,
the divine Author comes to clue us in: we are not to read books like Joshua
or Judges as our justification for holy wars and religious violence” (p.
218). |
Such a half-truth poison-in-the-pudding! I don’t know anyone BJ has spoken about who takes Joshua and Judges as
real history directed by God in fulfilling his promises to Abraham who would
say the application is for us to justify holy wars and religious violence.
That is NOT the point of believing those historical books are breathed out by
God as true history. It is a bogus accusation, right up there with the claim
that if we treat the Bible as the final authority in all matters of faith and
practice while Jesus is away that we are putting the Bible’s authority above
Jesus’ authority. Rather, it is because we all honor Jesus’ authority that we seek to
live by the Book of Scriptures he has given us to teach us how to do his will
while he is gone! It’s his Book; of course we are going to treat it as
authoritative! But not authoritative to start holy wars and do violence against our
enemies! That is a prejudicial comment designed to incite an emotional
response without loading our brains with evidence that quickly shows it is
bogus. |
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BJ’s Claim |
Monte’s Response |
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“Rather, the Author shows us how his people have always justified
hatred, bigotry, and violence against the express wishes of an enemy-loving,
sin-forgiving God” (p. 218). |
All I can say is, show me one place where “the Author” shows how
judgments of Yahweh against his enemies is in conflict with the God who has
always taught his people to love their enemies in the close and personal way
we can read for ourselves in the breathed-out words of God. And then show honestly that the God who always forgives anyone who
repents, always has and always will destroy those who are against him and his
people. So far, not one example to support BJ's Bible-dissing beliefs has
been presented. Verbiage, yes. Evidence, no. |
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BJ’s Claim |
Monte’s Response |
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“Moreover, once Jesus has shown us that such crusades and
death-dealing are wrong, we can be given eyes to see how the books of Joshua
and Judges have already done so too!” (p. 218). |
Again, there is not one example of Jesus saying that what was written
in Joshua and Judges regarding God’s commands to take the Promised Land and
drive out their enemies was “wrong”. BJ is in the wrong for claiming it is so
when he hasn’t presented any evidence. And, at the same time, he has ignored
that Jesus is pictured doing the same thing in the coming judgment, this time
bringing a complete end to his enemies so there is never going to be sin or
sarkiness in the new heavens and the new earth. And for this, we should be exceedingly
thankful! |
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BJ’s Claim |
Monte’s Response |
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“What if they were written to problematize religious warfare, not to
glorify it? Then we’ve never needed those books so badly as we do today!” (p.
218). |
We don’t live by “what ifs?”! Where in the New Testament does it look at any of the books of the Old Testament as condemning anything God led his people to do to take the Promised Land and drive out their enemies? Where does the New Testament present the Old Testament as “problematizing” God’s judgment against criminal nations as if God was unholy to bring judgment against evil and wicked people? Now, here’s a little testimony from Jesus to help see how wrong BJ is.
When Jesus was preparing his disciples to go out on their preaching
mission, he included this description: “And if anyone will not receive you or
listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that
house or town.” That was a way to indicate that such communities were going to miss out
on God’s blessing for them through the good news of great joy. But then he continued, “Truly, I say to you, it will be more bearable
on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town”
(Matthew 10:14-15). Now let that sink in. Jesus just confirmed the judgment of Yahweh
against Sodom and Gomorrah, something we know Jesus did with his Father, and
then announced that it would be even worse in the judgment for any towns that
rejected the apostles than what was written in the historical record of
Scripture regarding those two evil cities. Jesus confirmed that the historical record the Jews had in their
Scriptures was true, accurate and real (not figurative or allegorical), but
then he announced in HIS own words a greater judgment on cities and towns of
Israel that rejected the Messiah when he came. There is no way to reject what
Jesus said there. It utterly rebukes BJ for his lies that Jesus was never
involved in God’s judgment of evil and wicked persons, people, cities, and nations. We do need all the Scriptures as much today as ever, but only so we
can lead the “few” on the “narrow way” according to “every word that comes
from the mouth of God” as we have in “the whole counsel of God” in the
Scriptures. But definitely not the dishonest and boxed-in way of the BJs. |
My
conclusion is this: to believe what the BJs are peddling, we are required to
take Scriptures out of context so that the small portions they actually quote
sound like they are saying something different than what the texts say. We are
required to let the BJs explain the meaning of words in the Bible to fit their
peddling agenda when we can see for ourselves that those words contradict their
teachings. To be in the BJs’ club we are required to deny the attributes of
Jesus Christ that show his wrath against sin, his affirmation of his Father’s
wrath against sin, and his direct leading in carrying out the judgment of God
as revealed in the book of Revelation.
On the
other hand, to encourage us to take another look at the glory of God’s word,
particularly in the prophecies that show Jesus’ suffering and death was indeed
the plan of Yahweh the Father, look at how these Jewish believers in Jesus
Christ use the plain reading of the prophecies of the Old Testament to show
their Jewish people that Jesus is indeed the only one who has ever fulfilled
what was written. And the thing I love is, they never once explain anything
away with their own interpretations, but simply show people what God’s word
says and honor God’s word as it is, the word of God.
This
video is: “Israelis REACT to ISAIAH 53 and More!” I’m sure it will bring up
other recommendations by the same group, or by other ministries of Jewish
believers in Jesus (they usually refer to him as Yeshua). Let these Jewish people who
love Jesus, and love the living and active word of God in the Scriptures, bless
you with their love for our Lord and the lost who need his salvation that can
only be found in “the whole counsel of God” in the Scriptures, but never in the
“another Jesus”, “different spirit”, and “different gospel” of the BJs.
https://youtu.be/xB_ns9fjlWU?si=wXtaQf1P9hKjpOwZ
© 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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