Land and Bible

Outline notes for One God Report Podcast #18 To hear the full podcast click here . In the previous podcast, Rivers and I reviewed reasons for understanding the first phrase of John’s Gospel “In the beginning” as a reference to the new beginning that God is bringing about through Jesus the Messiah. 1. In this podcast we consider how to best understand what or who John meant in by the word “word” in the phrase: “In the beginning was the W/word ”. The Greek word for “word” is logos . We will often refer to the word, “word” using this Greek term, logos . 2. As with the phrase “in the beginning” the meaning of logos, “word” in John’s prologue is best understood and defined first and foremost by other uses of the same word in John’s Gospel. We shouldn’t ignore or dismiss how the author himself uses logos and go looking for its meaning in other extra-biblical literature.   Logos and in its various forms occur nearly 40 times in the Gospel of John, and in the vast majority of occu...

To hear the One God Report Podcast of this transcript, click here .  In a previous podcast, episode #7, called Jesus is the Beginning of God’s New Creation , we saw that the literary context of the Gospel of John requires that we understand John’s prologue to be introducing the ministry and life of Jesus. In our last podcast, episode #15, called More New Creation in the Gospel of John we saw how the Old Testament scriptures anticipated a New Creation, and how language, events and the miracles recorded in John’s Gospel declare the New Creation coming with Jesus the Messiah. This is further evidence that John’s introduction, the prologue to his Gospel, should be understood in a New Creation, or New Beginning context.   In this podcast we will take a closer look at the historical context in which 1 st century readers of John’s Gospel would have understood this Gospel to be about a new beginning. We will also see how other New Testament authors saw in Jesus a new beginning, ...

To hear the podcast click here or  here . There are two places in Scripture, both in the book of John, to which people go to claim that Jesus raised himself from the dead. The claim is that if Jesus could raise himself from the dead, he must be God. Or, because Jesus is God, he could raise himself from the dead. There are big problems with the interpretation that Jesus raised himself from the dead. I’ll break the problems into two categories: 1. Biblical interpretation methodology (hermeneutics). The biggest problem from the perspective of biblical interpretation methodology is that the claim that Jesus raised himself from the dead contradicts a multitude of other Scriptures. The claim breaks one of the main rules of good biblical interpretation: “Interpret a less clear passage from the clear passage(s)”. 2. Theological problems – besides directly contradicting a multitude of other Scriptures, the claim that Jesus raised himself from the dead does not theological...