Posts

The Prologue of John - - in the Body of the Gospel of John

The words and themes that are introduced in the first verses of John’s Gospel are developed in the body of the Gospel of John. That the the Prologue's words and themes are reiterated later in the Gospel is evidence that the Prologue is about the human person Jesus of Nazareth and his ministry, not the Genesis creation. As simple as this may sound, the Gospel of John’s first sentences introduce his Gospel, not the Genesis creation. In the previous One God Report podcast episode we explored that while there are a few linguistic connections between John’s opening sentences and Genesis 1, the connections are actually very few.   And, the few words that are the same: “in, beginning, light and darkness”,   mean something different in John 1 than in Genesis 1. Light and darkness in John 1 is not the light and darkness in Genesis 1. The topic of John 1 is not the same topic as Genesis 1.   In this current episode we will examine how the language and themes in the Prologue ...

"I Share My Glory with No Other" - - "See, Jesus is God". What?

Image
God: “I am Yahweh, that is my name. My glory I give to no other” Deity of Christ Believer: “See! Jesus is God”   To hear this podcast  click here .  Isaiah 42:8 (cf. 48:11) I am YHVH (Yahweh, Yehovah), that is my name; my glory ( cavod , כָבוֹד ) I give to no other, nor my praise to graven images.   Deity of Christ theologians claim that since Jesus has (God’s) glory, or was given glory by God, he must be God, because God doesn’t give His glory to anyone else.   That claim is a philosophical, rationalistic kind of claim that no one in the Bible makes. It’s kind of an end-around claim that runs into dead ends.   For instance, if Jesus is God, why did God have to give him glory? Can God lose his glory and than someone else who is God give it back to God?   This kind of claim really reveals a certain kind of biblical ignorance, or a willing ignorance. It’s the kind of claim that reveals a desperate search for some evidence to make Christ i...

The Big Lie: “Death is the Separation of the Soul from the Body”

Many mainstream Christians claim that at death, only the body dies while the soul lives on, consciously entering the presence of God. In this view, believers never really die—they skip over death entirely by transitioning instantly into eternal life. Related but slightly different, mainstream Christianity has introduced the idea of spiritual death —a supposed separation from God while a person is literally still alive. They assert that Adam, after he sinned, was only “spiritually dead” to God. But the idea is not in the biblical text. Adam’s death was that he would return to the dust from which he was formed. The focus in this post is that: There is no place in the Bible that defines death as the separation of the soul from the body. So where did this concept come from? Plato’s Influence: Not the Bible The idea that "death is the separation of the soul from the body" doesn’t come from Scripture—it comes from Greek philosophy, especially Plato .   In his d...