Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / ⁠Alex O’Connor vs David Wood: Did Jesus claim to be God || DEBATE REACTION || SLP578

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⁠Alex O’Connor vs David Wood: Did Jesus claim to be God || DEBATE REACTION || SLP578 · The Speak Life Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_02: When Alex O'Connor went on to 25v1 on the Jubilee channel, I thought he did least well on this particular subject.
0:07
SPEAKER_02: Did Jesus claim to be God?
0:10
SPEAKER_01: What is it for you that you would be like, you know what?
0:11
SPEAKER_01: That convinces me.
0:12
SPEAKER_01: Jesus, in his own words, saying that I am God.
0:14
SPEAKER_01: Right, but he does that in John.
0:16
SPEAKER_03: Where?
0:17
SPEAKER_01: Before Abraham was, I am.
0:19
SPEAKER_03: Sure.
0:19
SPEAKER_03: So before Abraham was, I am.
0:21
SPEAKER_03: First of all, as I've said, it only appears in the Gospel of John.
0:23
SPEAKER_03: We don't know if the history of the case.
0:23
SPEAKER_01: But he at least said it once, and the claim is that he never did.
0:26
SPEAKER_02: I think the Christian debaters got the better of him there, which is why I was surprised that he then wanted to debate David Wood on this very subject.
0:33
SPEAKER_02: Initially, the debate was meant to happen earlier in the year.
0:36
SPEAKER_02: Modern-day debates put on and events, but there were others on the platform, and death threats were flying around.
0:43
SPEAKER_04: We had a Muslim debater threatening me, doing a throat-slitting gesture on camera, and declaring that my blood is halal.
0:54
SPEAKER_02: Those death threats were not aimed at Alex himself, but he pulled out of that debate earlier in the year.
1:00
SPEAKER_02: David Wood at that point said this.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: I have mixed thoughts about Alex backing out of our debate.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: On the one hand, I have defended Alex's decision to avoid criticizing Islam.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: He's a young guy, he's easily recognizable.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: He lives in a country where critics of Islam are targeted not only by jihadis but by their own government.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: If he doesn't want to talk about Islam, I understand completely.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: Other people in other places can criticize Islam.
1:27
SPEAKER_00: Alex doesn't need to put his life on the line.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, agreeing to do a debate and then backing out two weeks before the debate is pretty messed up.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: Especially when there's a ton of security and you're not the one being threatened.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: Not only was Alex not being threatened, he would have been the hero of Islamists everywhere for doing this debate.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: He would have been attacking the divine nature of Jesus.
1:56
SPEAKER_02: And at that point, I thought, oh well, we're never going to see this debate until step forward, Roslan.
2:01
SPEAKER_02: Ruslan with the Bless Gods summit in Southern California that was held last week.
2:05
SPEAKER_02: He reached out to Alex, reached out to David Wood, and he made it happen.
2:08
SPEAKER_02: Well done, Roslan.
2:09
SPEAKER_02: Alex was there even though it was his birthday weekend.
2:12
SPEAKER_02: And uh Ruslan also arranged for a birthday present.
2:16
SPEAKER_02: Uh here is David Wood's Twitter feed as they celebrate Alex's birthday.
2:20
SPEAKER_02: And Roslan's got some presents for him.
2:22
SPEAKER_02: He's got like some guitar strings and stuff, and a cake.
2:25
SPEAKER_02: And he's also got a book.
2:26
SPEAKER_03: That's uh is that Glenn's book?
2:28
SPEAKER_03: No.
2:28
SPEAKER_03: Yes, Glenn's book's book.
2:30
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
2:31
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, some guitar books.
2:32
SPEAKER_02: Is that Glenn's book?
2:33
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's Glenn's book.
2:34
SPEAKER_02: It's The Air We Breathe.
2:35
SPEAKER_02: So I I think Alex must have multiple copies of The Air We Breathe.
2:39
SPEAKER_02: If you're meeting Alex O'Connor anytime soon, I will send you free of charge a copy of The Air We Breathe.
2:44
SPEAKER_02: And I'd like you to present another physical copy of The Air We Breathe.
2:48
SPEAKER_02: I think Justin Briley's given him a copy.
2:50
SPEAKER_02: So he's he's got multiple copies now of The Air We Breathe.
2:53
SPEAKER_02: Um, let's just keep on giving him copies of The Air We Breathe.
2:56
SPEAKER_02: Maybe maybe actually How to See Life, which is my 3-2-1 uh gospel presentation.
3:01
SPEAKER_02: That might be good given the topic of this debate here.
3:04
SPEAKER_02: Roslan is uh moderating this particular debate, and he makes uh a really important interjection at the very, very end of the debate, which I was grateful for, and I'm very grateful for bringing these two great minds together.
3:17
SPEAKER_02: They are terrific debaters in their own right.
3:20
SPEAKER_02: And in a sense, I want to give the debate to Alex because I think he did as well as he could with a topic that he couldn't possibly win on.
3:26
SPEAKER_02: You might want to debate that Jesus uh claimed to be God and was mistaken.
3:31
SPEAKER_02: You might want to claim that uh people made up claims uh for divinity and put them in the mouth of Jesus.
3:37
SPEAKER_02: Uh, you might want to claim that all the New Testament documents are uh completely unreliable.
3:42
SPEAKER_02: But I don't think it's plausible to attempt to argue what Alex is arguing here.
3:46
SPEAKER_02: So well done for uh him trying it, and and I think he did as good as he could, uh given that he took on the losing position from the outset.
3:54
SPEAKER_02: Um I'll get into why I think that in just a second.
3:57
SPEAKER_02: I'm actually going to do two videos on this, uh, one video that's uh an overview of the debate, and then a second video that's gonna take a little detour into a sidebar on the issue of the angel of the Lord, uh, this figure from the Old Testament who is of God and is God, and uh forms uh some of the argument uh that David Wood brings to this debate.
4:16
SPEAKER_02: We begin with David Wood.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: So I'd like to thank Alex for finally showing up.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: You gotta give me some wiggle room on time, Rose Long.
4:32
SPEAKER_02: Give the dizzel some wiggle.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: Or you can all quit cheering for Alex.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: All right.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'd like to thank Alex for finally showing up.
4:38
SPEAKER_00: I was a month and a half late, but he finally showed up.
4:41
SPEAKER_00: I'm teasing, by the way.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: Uh people have no clue how dangerous debate con is actually with the lineup they had and the number uh and the volume of death threats against uh multiple speakers.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: So uh plus he lives in what is rapidly becoming the Sharia compliant hellhole of the universe.
4:58
SPEAKER_00: So good to take precautions.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: We don't want to lose Alex.
5:02
SPEAKER_02: Sharia compliant hellhole.
5:04
SPEAKER_02: Um, one of my issues with David Wood is he seems to see Great Britain as Islamistan.
5:09
SPEAKER_02: And apparently we can't move in Britain without tripping over burkers or mosques or or that kind of thing.
5:14
SPEAKER_02: So David's view of uh Britain might be more informed by uh certain social media silos uh than reality.
5:21
SPEAKER_02: Although he is in this country a couple of times, and of course he is debating Islam all the time.
5:25
SPEAKER_02: Uh so you know, perhaps he has a window on things that that I don't, but uh Sharia compliant hell hole is not the way I experience things.
5:32
SPEAKER_02: And Alex later on has a terrific repos to this.
5:35
SPEAKER_00: By the way, are you guys starting to miss Jesus over there in the UK?
5:38
SPEAKER_00: Seems like you should be missing Jesus by now.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: Speaking of Jesus, did Jesus claim to be God?
5:46
SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes, he did, and I'm sure uh many of you have some verses going through your heads right now.
5:53
SPEAKER_00: However, I'm convinced that the primary way Jesus claimed to be God and that his followers claimed he's God uh gets overlooked by most Christians and non-Christians because we've lost touch with first century Jewish culture and we just tend to uh not notice things.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: 100%.
6:13
SPEAKER_00: Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about.
6:16
SPEAKER_00: Here's a quote from Daniel Boyerin in his book, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of Jesus Christ.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: The story of the Jewish Christ.
6:23
SPEAKER_00: He says, Most, if not all, of the ideas and practices of the Jesus movement of the first century and the beginning of the second century and even later, can be safely understood as part of the ideas and practices that we understand to be the Judaism of the period.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: The ideas of Trinity and Incarnation, or certainly the germs of those ideas, were already present among Jewish believers well before Jesus came on the scene to incarnate in himself, as it were, those theological notions and take up his messianic calling.
6:55
SPEAKER_02: Brilliant.
6:55
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely brilliant.
6:56
SPEAKER_02: And it's so important to get Trinity and Incarnation onto the table first before we discuss Jesus.
7:01
SPEAKER_02: Otherwise, we might be debating the topic.
7:04
SPEAKER_02: Did Jesus claim to be a modalist?
7:06
SPEAKER_02: Did Jesus claim to be a patripassionist?
7:08
SPEAKER_02: Did Jesus claim to be a Unitarian God who has come down from heaven as a single person?
7:13
SPEAKER_02: If Jesus had claimed to be any of those things, Jesus would be a heretic.
7:17
SPEAKER_02: And yet underlying this debate topic is the question of the doctrine of God.
7:21
SPEAKER_02: Is the doctrine of God we're talking about a Trinitarian doctrine of God, at least in germ form, proto-trinitarian?
7:28
SPEAKER_02: Is it a doctrine of God that can actually handle multiple persons in the one identity of God?
7:35
SPEAKER_02: Or are we expecting Jesus to say, I am Allah?
7:38
SPEAKER_02: A lot of Muslims expect Jesus to come along and say, I am Allah, because they bring their doctrine of God to the New Testament and expect Jesus to be able to say things of himself that Allah might say of himself if he is to be considered divine.
7:51
SPEAKER_02: But if Jesus claimed to be God in the same sense that Allah is God, Jesus would be a heretic and the gospel would be a nonsense, because heaven has not been evacuated by Christ's descent to earth.
8:00
SPEAKER_02: The Father has sent the Son in the power of the Spirit.
8:03
SPEAKER_02: And when Jesus claims to be God, he claims to be this person, the sent one of the Father, filled with the Holy Spirit, the one who has eternally done the business of the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit.
8:15
SPEAKER_02: That's his claim to divinity.
8:16
SPEAKER_02: His claim to divinity is not to be a modalist, right?
8:20
SPEAKER_02: Modalism is the Trinitarian heresy that there is only one person of God, and that basically the Father becomes the Son in the incarnation, and the Son becomes the Spirit at Pentecost.
8:29
SPEAKER_02: That is modalism.
8:31
SPEAKER_02: That is, you know, the ice melts into water, the water evaporates into steam, and there's just this one substance of God.
8:37
SPEAKER_02: Modalism is a heresy, it is rightly condemned.
8:41
SPEAKER_02: There is another heresy that is modalistic in nature.
8:43
SPEAKER_02: It's the heresy of Patripassianism.
8:45
SPEAKER_02: Patripassianism is that the Father Himself has descended, and he is the one who is dying on the cross.
8:50
SPEAKER_02: If Jesus claimed to be that, Jesus would be a heretic.
8:53
SPEAKER_02: The Christian claim is not that Jesus claimed to be God in that sense.
8:57
SPEAKER_02: We claim that Jesus claimed to be God in the Trinitarian sense, which the Christian says is the one sense that we are to understand God in.
9:05
SPEAKER_02: God has always been triune in nature from Genesis to Revelation.
9:10
SPEAKER_02: Trinity is not a New Testament novelty.
9:12
SPEAKER_02: Jesus is not coming to overturn a unitarian doctrine of God and make us all into Trinitarians.
9:19
SPEAKER_02: He is the Son of the Father filled with the Spirit, who is opening our eyes to what has always been there in Scripture.
9:25
SPEAKER_02: And here's what Daniel Boyarin is saying: that the ideas of Trinity and Incarnation, or certainly the germs of these ideas, were already present among Jewish believers because the Hebrew Bible has been proclaiming this doctrine of God from the very beginning.
9:39
SPEAKER_02: It's so important to begin the debate here.
9:42
SPEAKER_02: I'm so grateful to David Wood for doing this.
9:45
SPEAKER_00: So the ideas were there, paving the way for Jesus who embodied them.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: Now, who's Daniel Boyerin to say that Christian ideas like the Trinity and the Incarnation were already present in some form in first century Judaism?
10:01
SPEAKER_00: Is he a Christian apologist?
10:04
SPEAKER_00: No, he's uh he's a scholar of rabbinic Judaism.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: He's a Talmud scholar.
10:09
SPEAKER_00: He points out that a lot of the beliefs we now think of as distinctively Christian actually weren't.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: The earliest Christian church was embedded in first century Jewish culture.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: But as Christianity spread, it became dominated by Gentile Christians who tended to lose touch with the Jewish framework.
10:28
SPEAKER_00: And something was happening within Judaism as well.
10:32
SPEAKER_00: As Jewish Orthodoxy was forming in the second century, the rabbis tended to weed out certain ideas that had once been familiar in Judaism, but which had been adopted by Christians.
10:43
SPEAKER_00: The rabbis wanted to clearly distinguish Judaism from Christianity, and some of the ideas that were present in first century Judaism were soon deemed heretical.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: So Christians lost touch with the Jewish framework of early Christianity, and Jews abandoned some of the Jewish ideas that became part of Christianity.
11:01
SPEAKER_00: And the result is that today it's easy for us to miss a few things when we're reading the Bible.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: Claims that would have been understood by listeners at the time might not be understood by us.
11:12
SPEAKER_02: So here's what David is saying.
11:13
SPEAKER_02: The Jews who did not jump onto the Jesus train and become part of the way that Christians were saying has always been the way.
11:20
SPEAKER_02: Those Jews who were not also Christians, who named Jesus as Messiah, over the centuries began to harden against what the Christians were saying and began to reject even some of the things that Jews had always been saying for centuries, both AD and BC.
11:37
SPEAKER_02: And the road to orthodoxy for those Jews went on a certain track, just as the road to orthodoxy for Christians went on a certain track.
11:43
SPEAKER_02: As Christians started to really meditate on this divine Son of the Father filled with the Spirit, he is of the very name and nature of God.
11:50
SPEAKER_02: Therefore, what do we mean when we say God?
11:52
SPEAKER_02: And can we use some more technical terminology to put into words what the scriptures have already said?
11:58
SPEAKER_02: The Christian Orthodoxy says, okay, well, let's use technical terms like homoousian, that the Son is of the very nature of the Father.
12:05
SPEAKER_02: And let's start to use language like Trinity, which is not found in the Bible itself, but which summarizes the Bible's teaching from Genesis to Revelation.
12:14
SPEAKER_02: And the road to orthodoxy for Christians was to articulate ever more carefully the multipersonal doctrine of God that has always been there in the scriptures.
12:22
SPEAKER_02: Whereas the road to orthodoxy for the Jews that rejected Jesus was to harden against Christian arguments and to evermore become Unitarian.
12:31
SPEAKER_02: And the Jews of the second, third, fourth centuries AD were a heck of a lot more Unitarian than the Jews of the first century.
12:40
SPEAKER_02: Their road to orthodoxy meant the development into Unitarianism.
12:44
SPEAKER_02: And here's why this is important.
12:46
SPEAKER_02: We can be tempted to think something that is so obviously untrue and yet so widely accepted.
12:52
SPEAKER_02: We can be tempted to think that the Old Testament is a fundamentally Unitarian document, and then the New Testament is doing this novel thing of adding a Trinitarian dimension, a Trinitarian nuance, Trinitarian icing to the fundamentally Unitarian cake of the Hebrew Bible.
13:11
SPEAKER_02: That is a very widespread misconception, but it is a misconception.
13:15
SPEAKER_02: The Hebrew Bible is not Unitarian.
13:17
SPEAKER_02: Unitarianism is a development post-incarnation.
13:23
SPEAKER_02: To harden yourself into that kind of Unitarianism that has no space for a multipersonal doctrine of God is very much a reaction to the Christian church.
13:34
SPEAKER_02: It is not the obvious doctrine of God that was a precursor to the Christian church.
13:38
SPEAKER_02: So it is not the case that the Jews had Unitarianism going along, and then the Christians make this break over here to Trinitarianism, and Christians go on doing their Trinitarian things while the Jews remain faithful to the Hebrew Bible and just remain in their Unitarianism.
13:55
SPEAKER_02: No, Unitarianism is a development and I would say diversion from the Bible.
14:00
SPEAKER_02: From the beginning, there has been a multipersonal doctrine of God.
14:03
SPEAKER_02: There is a Trinitarian Old Testament, even if it's in germ form, as Daniel Bayaran says, it is Trinitarian even in germ form.
14:12
SPEAKER_02: And the Christian claim is that we are trying to be faithful to Moses.
14:17
SPEAKER_02: We are trying to be faithful to David.
14:18
SPEAKER_02: We are trying to be faithful to Isaiah and that multipersonal doctrine of God, which can be articulated with the language of Nicaea and the fourth century, but it can also be articulated in the language of the Greek New Testament, and it can also be articulated in the language of the Hebrew Old Testament.
14:35
SPEAKER_02: It's one doctrine of God that is fundamentally Trinitarian and not Unitarian.
14:40
SPEAKER_02: And it's into this setting that Christ makes his claims.
14:44
SPEAKER_02: He does not come into a Unitarian world and claim to be a monad come from heaven.
14:49
SPEAKER_02: He comes into a Trinitarian world shaped by Trinitarian scriptures, claiming to be the Son of the Father filled with the Spirit.
14:55
SPEAKER_02: And in that setting, of course, his claims are divine claims.
14:59
SPEAKER_00: Here in my opening statement, I'm going to briefly discuss the forgotten Jewish idea that's most relevant for understanding how Jesus claimed to be God.
15:07
SPEAKER_00: And then I'll show how this forgotten Jewish idea illuminates various passages in the New Testament.
15:14
SPEAKER_00: Some of you are familiar with the early Jewish belief in the two powers in heaven.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: Alan Siegel, a Jewish scholar, drew attention to this in his 1977 book, Two Powers in Heaven.
15:26
SPEAKER_02: Here is a slight disagreement that I have with David Wood, which might grow into a more significant disagreement as the debate goes on.
15:32
SPEAKER_02: But I don't think two powers is the right way to think about these things.
15:36
SPEAKER_02: Alan Siegel is a Jewish scholar putting words to what do we do with the fact that Daniel 7 has a divine Son of Man right next to the divine ancient of days.
15:45
SPEAKER_02: Let's talk about two powers.
15:46
SPEAKER_02: I think it's far more scripturally faithful to say that there has always been a father working through his son in the joy of the Holy Spirit.
15:53
SPEAKER_02: There has always been a Most High who operates through his word, through his voice, through the divine angel in the power of the name and spirit of Christ.
16:03
SPEAKER_02: There has always been a divine mediator going on.
16:06
SPEAKER_02: Rather than two powers, two powers sounds like there are two beings, sounds like there are two gods that already throws up dangers of polytheism.
16:15
SPEAKER_02: It already throws up dangers of, well, why two?
16:17
SPEAKER_02: I thought there were three persons to the one God.
16:20
SPEAKER_02: So I just want at this point to raise a tiny, it's not even a red flag, it's not even a pink flag, it's a vaguely beige flag.
16:25
SPEAKER_02: I want to raise a vaguely beige flag at this point and say that two powers in heaven is probably not the best way of understanding even the Hebrew Bible.
16:33
SPEAKER_02: But let's keep going.
16:34
SPEAKER_00: And lots of people, especially Christians, have been interested in the topic ever since.
16:37
SPEAKER_00: Here's the idea in a nutshell.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: The Old Testament is very clear that there's one true God.
16:45
SPEAKER_00: But there are numerous passages in the Old Testament where we see two divine figures.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: I'll give a few quick examples.
16:52
SPEAKER_00: There are tons of these.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: There are tons, dozens and dozens.
16:57
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes God seems to be in two different places doing two different things.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: A common example is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
17:05
SPEAKER_00: The Lord appears to Abraham and tells him that he's going down to Sodom and Gomorrah to see firsthand how bad the people are.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: So he goes down to Sodom and Gomorrah.
17:15
SPEAKER_00: And what happens?
17:16
SPEAKER_00: Genesis 19, 24.
17:18
SPEAKER_00: Then the Lord reigned on Sodom and Gomorrah, sulfur and fire, from the Lord out of heaven.
17:24
SPEAKER_00: The Lord on earth reigned down fire from the Lord out of heaven.
17:29
SPEAKER_02: It sounds like there are two lords here.
17:31
SPEAKER_02: The early church made a big deal about that, Justin Mata, Irenaeus, are talking about this.
17:45
SPEAKER_02: This was not only picked up by the early church, it was also picked up by the Old Testament translations into Aramaic called the Targums.
17:52
SPEAKER_02: In the Targums, these Old Testament translations into Aramaic, we're talking BC, in the Targums, they were adding the word the Memrah of the Lord.
18:00
SPEAKER_02: Memrah is just a word that means word, the word of the Lord.
18:04
SPEAKER_02: And so in the Targums, for instance, in Genesis chapter 18, verse 1, it's the word of the Lord appeared to Abraham.
18:10
SPEAKER_02: And then in Genesis 19, 24, it's the word of the Lord who reigned on Sodom and Gomorrah, fire from the Lord out of heaven.
18:16
SPEAKER_02: Right?
18:17
SPEAKER_02: And so it seems like even before the incarnation, people are trying to do, like, how do we how do we deal with there is only one God, there is only one God.
18:23
SPEAKER_02: But there seem to be two persons who can take the name Lord.
18:26
SPEAKER_02: How do we understand this?
18:28
SPEAKER_02: Well, clearly, it's this divine mediator of the Lord, the word of the Lord, who has appeared to Abraham.
18:34
SPEAKER_02: And clearly, this divine mediator of the Lord, who can take the name Lord, he has brained down judgment from the Lord out of the heavens.
18:40
SPEAKER_02: And so they they had that proto-Trinitarian idea.
18:44
SPEAKER_02: David goes on.
18:45
SPEAKER_00: Watch what happens in Zechariah 2.
18:47
SPEAKER_00: Pay attention, or you'll miss it.
18:49
SPEAKER_00: Come, Zion, escape, you who live in daughter Babylon.
18:54
SPEAKER_00: For this is what the Lord Almighty says.
18:57
SPEAKER_00: Who's speaking?
18:58
SPEAKER_00: The Lord Almighty.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: And he says, After the glorious one has sent me, the Lord was sent by the glorious one, against the nations that have plundered you, for whoever touches you touches the apple of his eye.
19:13
SPEAKER_00: I will surely raise my hand against them, so that their slaves will plunder them.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: Then you will know that the Lord Almighty has sent me.
19:21
SPEAKER_00: The Lord Almighty was sent by the Lord Almighty.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: Next paragraph.
19:26
SPEAKER_00: Shout and be glad, daughter Zion, for I am coming, and I will live among you, declares the Lord Yahweh.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: Many nations will be joined with the Lord in that day and will become my people.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: I will live among you, and you will know that the Lord Almighty has sent me to you.
19:44
SPEAKER_02: So the Lord is speaking, but the Lord has sent the Lord who is speaking.
19:48
SPEAKER_02: And the sent one of the Lord who speaks in the name of the Lord and can be called Lord is just a foundationally Hebrew idea.
19:55
SPEAKER_02: The idea of God from God, light from light, very God from very God, which is a line from the Creed of the fourth century.
20:02
SPEAKER_02: That idea is straight out of the Old Testament.
20:06
SPEAKER_02: Okay?
20:06
SPEAKER_02: There is a Lord from the Lord, okay?
20:08
SPEAKER_02: There is a God from God, light from light, very God from very God, who does the business of the Lord and is a divine mediator.
20:14
SPEAKER_02: This is why I think it's important not to call these two powers in heaven.
20:18
SPEAKER_02: Two powers in heaven does sound a little bit polytheistic and it opens up the question about, you know, why not three and all that kind of stuff.
20:25
SPEAKER_02: Whereas what we do see is the divine mediator of the most high.
20:30
SPEAKER_02: There is the sent one of the Lord who is himself the Lord, and he does all the business.
20:34
SPEAKER_02: And if you are encountering the Lord in the Old Testament, then it must be because you are encountering the sent one of the Lord in the power of the Spirit.
20:41
SPEAKER_02: And in the face of this sent Lord, you are encountering the Most High God.
20:46
SPEAKER_02: There is one God who is approaching you in this irreducibly Trinitarian way.
20:52
SPEAKER_02: That's not a New Testament novelty.
20:54
SPEAKER_02: That is the teaching of the Old Testament in places like Zechariah.
20:58
SPEAKER_00: The Lord, Yahweh, will live among them, and they will know that the Lord was sent by the Lord Almighty.
21:06
SPEAKER_00: So Yahweh rains down fire from Yahweh, Yahweh is sent by Yahweh.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: Plenty of passages like these.
21:14
SPEAKER_00: Then we've got a mysterious figure called the angel of the Lord.
21:17
SPEAKER_00: Whenever you think, uh whatever you think of, when you think about angels, just get rid of that.
21:22
SPEAKER_00: The angel of the Lord is no ordinary angel because this angel is somehow the Lord.
21:27
SPEAKER_00: Angel just means messenger.
21:28
SPEAKER_00: In Hebrew, it can refer to a human messenger, a spirit messenger, or in this case, the Lord himself.
21:34
SPEAKER_00: That's really important.
21:35
SPEAKER_02: As we look into the angel of the Lord, I will do a separate video about the angel of the Lord.
21:39
SPEAKER_02: We will look through every single scripture in the Hebrew Bible about who the angel of the Lord is, and we will see that the angel thinks very, very highly of himself.
21:47
SPEAKER_02: And as we look at dozens of scriptures about the angel of the Lord, we'll fly through them, but we will see that he is of the Lord and he is the Lord, that he mediates the business of the most high God, that he is worshipped, that he blesses, that he He promises that he swears by himself, that he is obeyed as God, that he's the judge of the world.
22:05
SPEAKER_02: He is God from God, light from light, very God from very God.
22:08
SPEAKER_02: Here's a great example from Judges 6.
22:11
SPEAKER_02: Look at Judges 6.
22:13
SPEAKER_00: The angel of the Lord came and sat down to talk to Gideon.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: The angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: Then it switches to the Lord turned to him.
22:25
SPEAKER_00: The Lord answered.
22:26
SPEAKER_00: Then it goes back to the angel of the Lord.
22:29
SPEAKER_00: Then, when Gideon realized that it was the angel of the Lord, he exclaimed, Alas, sovereign Lord, I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: But the Lord said to him, Peace, do not be afraid, you are not going to die.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: If you see the Lord in all his glory, you're dead.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: But if you see the angel of the Lord, who is somehow the Lord, you might survive.
22:51
SPEAKER_00: One more example of this.
22:53
SPEAKER_00: Here's Jacob blessing Joseph in Genesis 48.
22:57
SPEAKER_00: Then he blessed Joseph and said, May the God before whom my fathers, Abraham and Isaac, walked faithfully, the God who has been my shepherd all my life to this day, the angel who has delivered me from all harm, may he bless these boys.
23:15
SPEAKER_00: He, singular.
23:17
SPEAKER_00: So the God, the God, and the angel are all referring to the same being.
23:23
SPEAKER_00: The angel is God, but the angel is the messenger of God.
23:28
SPEAKER_02: Genesis 48 is so important.
23:30
SPEAKER_02: It's so early, it's in the first book of the Bible, and it's also about a Hebrew believer reflecting on what has been revealed to him.
23:37
SPEAKER_02: It's not just it's in the narrative, and later on we can sort of attribute meaning to something that originally did not have that Christological meaning.
23:46
SPEAKER_02: This is Jacob himself reflecting on who is the God who I worship.
23:50
SPEAKER_02: He is the God of my fathers, he is the divine angel, right?
23:54
SPEAKER_02: Old Testament believers were not just being presented with the angel of the Lord, they were responding to him as this God from God, divine mediator, and they were praying to him and they were desiring the blessing of the divine angel for their children.
24:09
SPEAKER_02: It's unmistakable, it's early, and it's understood, this teaching on the angel of the Lord.
24:16
SPEAKER_02: More in a second video.
24:17
SPEAKER_02: But David goes on.
24:18
SPEAKER_00: This is all over the place in the Old Testament from Genesis all the way to the prophets.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: We just don't pay attention to it when we're reading.
24:27
SPEAKER_00: But there were ancient Jews who paid very close attention to passages like these.
24:31
SPEAKER_00: And they realized that something very, very strange is going on.
24:36
SPEAKER_00: There's one God, but there were two powers, two authorities in heaven.
24:40
SPEAKER_02: Here's where my disagreement with David again goes from beige to very slightly pink as I raise this red flag.
24:46
SPEAKER_02: It's not really a red flag, but um it's not very, very strange.
24:50
SPEAKER_02: Um we don't know what very, very strange is unless we come to the Bible expecting Unitarianism.
24:55
SPEAKER_02: If we came to the Bible, if we were a Muslim reading the Bible and expecting the doctrine of God that Muslims are used to, then I guess this is very strange.
25:03
SPEAKER_02: But if we allow the Bible to explain its doctrine of God on its terms, there's nothing strange.
25:08
SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is what Genesis teaches.
25:09
SPEAKER_02: This is this is what the Hebrew Bible itself is teaching from the very beginning, that the Most High is always encountered in the name of his son, his word, his voice, his angel, his divine mediator.
25:23
SPEAKER_02: This is how God always operates.
25:25
SPEAKER_02: And that's not strange unless you expect Unitarianism, but let's not expect Unitarianism.
25:29
SPEAKER_02: Let's not expect one power, and let's not just add Jesus as a second power to the one power.
25:35
SPEAKER_02: Um, let us let the Old Testament explain its own doctrine of God, and its own doctrine of God is not really about one power or two powers.
25:43
SPEAKER_02: The Old Testament doctrine of God is about the Most High who always encounters him to his people through the Son and by the Spirit, to use that Trinitarian language.
25:52
SPEAKER_02: There's nothing strange about this.
25:54
SPEAKER_02: This is the Hebrew doctrine of God.
25:58
SPEAKER_00: If you put all of the passages together, it seems like there's God you can't be around because his presence would destroy you, and God you can be around somehow.
26:10
SPEAKER_00: There's God you can't be around, and God you can be around.
26:13
SPEAKER_00: The God you can't be around is distinct from the God you can be around.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: They interact with each other, one sends the other, and yet they're both God.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: This was all very, very confusing to first century Jews.
26:26
SPEAKER_02: Okay, I'm gonna raise the flag again, and it's gone to a definite shade of pink here.
26:31
SPEAKER_02: Um I think this will come back and bite David Wood on the backside when it comes to uh the open dialogue that they have with with Alex.
26:39
SPEAKER_02: Um it's not very, very confusing.
26:42
SPEAKER_02: And actually, what we'll see in the New Testament is that people, even the enemies of Christ, get a lot of this.
26:48
SPEAKER_02: They get enough of it to see that Jesus is making claims to divinity, and even the enemies of Christ start to understand that he is making claims to divinity when he claims to be the divine sent one, when he claims to be the sent one, the son of man, all that kind of language.
27:03
SPEAKER_02: So, yes, there is confusion in the New Testament, and Jesus can say in Mark chapter 12, you know, how can people say that the Messiah is the Son of David when David calls him Lord?
27:12
SPEAKER_02: And then he quotes Psalm 110, and people are like, oh yeah, cool.
27:14
SPEAKER_02: So I'm not denying that there's confusion about the doctrine of God in the first century.
27:18
SPEAKER_02: There's confusion about the doctrine of God in the 21st century.
27:20
SPEAKER_02: Two, there's definitely confusion in the doctrine of God, and yet enough people knew enough of the Old Testament for Jesus to be able to appeal to Old Testament categories and for people to understand them on their own terms.
27:32
SPEAKER_02: I don't think it was very confusing.
27:34
SPEAKER_02: And if you start to say that all this stuff was very confusing until the New Testament, you kind of undercut the Christian claim that this is how God has always interacted.
27:44
SPEAKER_02: So I don't think it was very confusing.
27:46
SPEAKER_00: If there's one God, why are there two powers in heaven?
27:53
SPEAKER_00: Why are there two powers who both act like God?
27:56
SPEAKER_00: They tried to deal with this problem in a number of ways, but mainly they were confused.
28:01
SPEAKER_00: And then Jesus came along.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: And he says, in effect, you know those two powers that you've been reading about in the scriptures?
28:08
SPEAKER_00: You know those two powers that you're so confused by?
28:11
SPEAKER_00: I can tell you about those two powers because I'm one of them.
28:17
SPEAKER_00: That's the primary way Jesus claims to be God.
28:20
SPEAKER_00: It's the primary way his followers claim that he's God.
28:22
SPEAKER_00: It's a primary way, uh it's a primary issue that enrages his opponents.
28:27
SPEAKER_02: And I think you can see why the two powers things might not be the best way of framing things, because Jesus doesn't claim to be one of the powers of heaven, does he?
28:34
SPEAKER_02: He claims to be the sent one of the father filled with the spirit.
28:37
SPEAKER_02: That's why I think Alan Siegel and the Two Powers thing is naming something that is really there in Scripture, but it is better named as there is a divine mediator of the Most High, and people have always understood that to be the way in which the one God works.
28:51
SPEAKER_02: So of course, when Jesus steps into human history and claims to be that sent one of the father filled with the spirit and does all the business of God in God's name and on God's behalf, people ought to have understood him to be the divine Messiah, the great I am, the Son of Man, God in that sense.
29:06
SPEAKER_02: His statements in the Gospels don't tend to be of the flavor I am one of the two powers.
29:10
SPEAKER_02: They tend to be either he he speaks in terms of I've come from the Father, or his language and his actions are to simply act and to speak as God, right?
29:19
SPEAKER_02: And in both those senses, I think this idea of the divine mediator fits the data of the Old Testament, it fits the data of the New Testament a lot better than just to talk about two powers.
29:30
SPEAKER_02: I've said that enough, let's keep going.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: But did Jesus really claim to be one of the two powers in heaven?
29:36
SPEAKER_00: Since Jesus is a highly controversial figure and since there's a skeptic in our midst, I would suggest that if we want to know what someone like Jesus is claiming about himself, we can look at six things.
29:47
SPEAKER_00: We can look at what Jesus says and what Jesus does, what he says and does as they relate to our topic.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: We can look at what his friends say and what his friends do.
29:57
SPEAKER_00: Here I mean what they say and do in reaction to him.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: And we can look at what his enemies say and what his enemies do, again in reaction to him.
30:04
SPEAKER_00: So what Jesus says, what Jesus does, what his friends say, what his friends do, what his enemies say, what his enemies do.
30:10
SPEAKER_00: I would put all of that together and say that's our evidence that we need to account for, and that will give us the best indication of what Jesus was claiming about himself.
30:17
SPEAKER_00: I don't have a ton of time left, so we'll consider a few things Jesus says and does, and a few things his friends say and do.
30:23
SPEAKER_00: Along the way, we'll see the reactions of some of his enemies, and maybe I'll add a few more uh examples in the rebuttals.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: What does Jesus say?
30:32
SPEAKER_00: Jesus claims to be one of the two powers in heaven in multiple ways.
30:36
SPEAKER_00: I'll give you three.
30:38
SPEAKER_00: The most familiar is the father-son language he uses.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: Jesus claims to be the son of God.
30:44
SPEAKER_00: Now, someone can be a son of God in various ways in the Bible.
30:47
SPEAKER_00: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
30:50
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus claims to be the Son of God in a unique divine sense.
30:55
SPEAKER_00: One example, Matthew 11, 27.
30:57
SPEAKER_00: All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: And no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.
31:09
SPEAKER_02: You'll notice David is going to Matthew here.
31:11
SPEAKER_02: He's not going to go to John because he expects that Alex will dismiss John.
31:15
SPEAKER_02: And so he's going to what are thought to be earlier Gospels.
31:20
SPEAKER_02: That's why it goes to Matthew.
31:21
SPEAKER_02: Also, Matthew 11 is just stunning, this father-son relationship, which seems to be the original family secret.
31:28
SPEAKER_02: No one knows the father except the son, no one knows the son except the father, and then the son comes to reveal the father in the power of the Holy Spirit.
31:35
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus is that Son who's been in on the divine secret from before the foundation of the world.
31:40
SPEAKER_02: This is a very exalted view of himself.
31:43
SPEAKER_00: All things were handed over to the Son by the Father.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: No one knows the Son except the Father.
31:47
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, the people around Jesus knew him in some sense, but they didn't really know him.
31:53
SPEAKER_00: Only the Father really knows him.
31:55
SPEAKER_00: And no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.
32:01
SPEAKER_00: No one can know the Father unless the Son chooses to reveal him.
32:05
SPEAKER_00: This should sound somewhat similar to the Old Testament idea that there's God you can't be around and God you can be around.
32:11
SPEAKER_02: But you can know the Father in the Son.
32:13
SPEAKER_02: And that's why I think Father-Son language is more helpful than two powers.
32:16
SPEAKER_02: Um powers just sounds like you've got these two billiard balls that are just complete in themselves and and there's no sort of mutual inherence.
32:24
SPEAKER_02: But but father and son, there is a God you can't be around, but you can know the God that you can't be around in the sun, right?
32:31
SPEAKER_02: And and you are genuinely brought to him.
32:33
SPEAKER_02: You are you are not kept at a distance from the Father when you come to the Son.
32:37
SPEAKER_02: You are precisely brought to the Father in the Son.
32:40
SPEAKER_02: That's why Father and Son is a much better conceptuality to the two powers in heaven.
32:44
SPEAKER_02: I promise you, that will be the last time I talk about two powers in heaven.
32:47
SPEAKER_00: Two powers, Father and Son.
32:49
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the Son.
32:51
SPEAKER_00: Mark twelve.
32:53
SPEAKER_00: While Jesus was teaching in the temple courts, he asked, Why do the teachers of the law say that the Messiah is the son of David?
32:59
SPEAKER_00: David himself, speaking by the Holy Spirit, declared, The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.
33:09
SPEAKER_00: David himself calls him Lord.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: How then can he be his son?
33:15
SPEAKER_00: So whose son is the Messiah?
33:17
SPEAKER_00: He's the son of David, but David calls the Messiah his Lord.
33:21
SPEAKER_00: How many lords do we have here?
33:24
SPEAKER_00: The Lord said to my Lord, according to Jesus, the second Lord here, the Lord of King David is the Messiah.
33:30
SPEAKER_00: So we've got two powers in heaven, and Jesus is one of them.
33:34
SPEAKER_00: On a side note, if you're a Christian and you're wondering why we're talking about two powers instead of three, where's the Holy Spirit?
33:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh he's there.
33:42
SPEAKER_00: But but we're focusing on how Jesus claimed to be God, and that's connected to the two powers in heaven.
33:49
SPEAKER_00: Mark 14.
33:50
SPEAKER_00: Again, the high priest asked him, Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?
33:54
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus said, I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven.
34:01
SPEAKER_00: And the high priest tore his garments and said, What further witnesses do we need?
34:05
SPEAKER_00: You have heard his blasphemy.
34:07
SPEAKER_00: What is your decision?
34:09
SPEAKER_00: And they all condemned him as deserving death.
34:13
SPEAKER_00: What do the enemies say?
34:14
SPEAKER_00: This is blasphemy.
34:16
SPEAKER_00: What do they do?
34:17
SPEAKER_00: Tear their garments, that's what they do when they're outraged about blasphemy, and condemn him as deserving death.
34:23
SPEAKER_00: Why do they react like that?
34:25
SPEAKER_00: The Son of Man, that's Jesus' favorite title for himself, will be seated at the right hand of power.
34:31
SPEAKER_00: So there's the power, which sounds like God, and there's the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven.
34:37
SPEAKER_00: How many powers in heaven?
34:39
SPEAKER_00: I see two here, and Jesus claims to be one of them.
34:42
SPEAKER_00: So who's glee- who is Jesus claiming to be at his Jewish trial?
34:47
SPEAKER_00: He's claiming to be the Son of Man prophesied in Daniel 7, 13 to 14.
34:51
SPEAKER_00: Daniel says, In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven.
34:58
SPEAKER_00: He approached the ancient of days and was led into his presence.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: He was given authority, glory, and sovereign power.
35:04
SPEAKER_00: All nations and peoples of every language worshiped him.
35:07
SPEAKER_00: His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.
35:14
SPEAKER_00: So there's the Ancient of Days, God, but there's also the Son of Man, who will be worshipped by all nations, whose dominion is everlasting, and who comes with the clouds.
35:31
SPEAKER_00: Humans don't, angels don't.
35:34
SPEAKER_00: Isaiah 19, see, the Lord rides on a swift cloud.
35:38
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 104, the Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment, he stretches out the heavens like a tent, and lays the beams of his upper chambers on the waters.
35:46
SPEAKER_00: He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: God comes with the clouds.
35:52
SPEAKER_00: So we've got the ancient of days, who sounds like God, and we've got the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven, who sounds like God.
35:59
SPEAKER_00: Two powers in heaven, and Jesus claims to be one of them.
36:03
SPEAKER_02: We will get back to Daniel chapter seven.
36:06
SPEAKER_02: And if anybody in the first century could possibly have understood that Son of Man was this divine title, I think on the very surface of things, Daniel 7 already is showing you that the Son of Man is a divine title.
36:18
SPEAKER_02: I think there are a number of intertestamental documents that say that Hebrew believers absolutely thought of the Son of Man as this divine Messiah.
36:26
SPEAKER_02: I think Jesus using the title as the Son of Man goes to show that it had some kind of significance to people in the first century.
36:33
SPEAKER_02: And I think that the high priest tearing his robes goes to show that this title was understood to be a very exalted title.
36:40
SPEAKER_02: For all those reasons, I think it is right to point out that the biblical doctrine of God is of a father always working through his divine son, and Jesus is claiming to be that divine son.
36:49
SPEAKER_02: In the rest of David's opening, he goes on to talk about how Jesus does certain things that are the divine prerogatives of only God.
36:56
SPEAKER_02: God judges, and Jesus says, I'm come as the judge of the world.
37:00
SPEAKER_02: I will wrap things up at the end of history.
37:02
SPEAKER_02: He then goes on to talk about what Jesus' friends do.
37:04
SPEAKER_02: What did Jesus' friends do?
37:06
SPEAKER_02: Well, Jesus' friends say that he is God.
37:08
SPEAKER_02: And he goes to Philippians 2 and Paul's great hymn of Christ, being in very nature God.
37:14
SPEAKER_02: He did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking on the very nature of a servant, being found in human appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on the cross.
37:25
SPEAKER_02: Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord.
37:33
SPEAKER_02: Okay?
37:33
SPEAKER_02: So all of that is a profoundly Hebrew doctrine of God, isn't it?
37:36
SPEAKER_02: The Apostle Paul was Saul of Tarsus, studying under Gamaliel, understood the Hebrew scriptures backwards, was understanding who Jesus is, and when he understood who Jesus is, he did not have to reinvent his doctrine of God.
37:49
SPEAKER_02: What he did have to see is identify, oh, Jesus is the divine Son of Man.
37:54
SPEAKER_02: Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God.
37:57
SPEAKER_02: Jesus is the Lord sent from the Most High God in order to save and bring us back to the Father.
38:02
SPEAKER_02: Lots in Saul had to change.
38:04
SPEAKER_02: His doctrine of God did not have to change.
38:06
SPEAKER_02: And when he articulated that doctrine of God, it's a profoundly Hebrew doctrine of God.
38:11
SPEAKER_02: And that is expressed in Philippians 2.
38:13
SPEAKER_02: But Philippians 2 is written in the language of, for instance, Isaiah chapter 45.
38:16
SPEAKER_02: And David talks about Isaiah chapter 45.
38:19
SPEAKER_02: I am the Lord and there is no other.
38:21
SPEAKER_02: And he says, before me, every knee will bow by me, every tongue will swear.
38:25
SPEAKER_02: Now, interestingly, those Targums that I mentioned, those Aramaic translations that are BC, they also looked at Isaiah chapter 45, and they spoke of it's the word of the Lord before whom every knee would bow, every tongue would swear.
38:42
SPEAKER_02: They picked up, even before the incarnation, they picked up that the person to whom every knee will bow and every tongue confess is the word of God, who also is God.
38:52
SPEAKER_02: He's God from God, He's the Word.
38:53
SPEAKER_02: This is what Hebrew believers BC were thinking.
38:56
SPEAKER_02: It's certainly what the Apostle Paul said in Philippians 2, and it's a thoroughly biblical, ancient doctrine of God.
39:03
SPEAKER_02: And so David talks about what Jesus' friends said and did.
39:06
SPEAKER_02: He talks about 1 Corinthians chapter 8.
39:08
SPEAKER_02: Uh, for us there is one God the Father from whom all things are and for whom we exist, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things are and through whom we exist.
39:16
SPEAKER_02: From the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit, that is the way God has always operated.
39:21
SPEAKER_02: This is not a New Testament novelty, this is a Hebrew doctrine of God.
39:25
SPEAKER_02: This is God's doctrine of God, as he has expressed it from Genesis onwards.
39:29
SPEAKER_02: David mentions John chapter one, in the beginning was the word, the word was with God, and the word was God, he was with God in the beginning.
39:35
SPEAKER_02: Is John writing for Platonists?
39:38
SPEAKER_02: Is he writing for Greek philosophers and therefore using the word word with a capital W, pressing into this understanding of the logos, this Greek word for word, who makes all things?
39:47
SPEAKER_02: Well, that sort of stuff was swirling around in the culture, but the word of God was a thoroughly Hebrew idea, and you can go back in the Old Testament, you can do a word study in the Word of the Lord, who is described in quite personal divine terms at times, and certainly the Targums are speaking again and again of the Word of the Lord, who also is the Lord, as the one who mediates the business of God.
40:08
SPEAKER_02: And John is writing into that mixture.
40:10
SPEAKER_02: Trinity is not a Greek philosophical accretion, it's a profoundly Hebrew idea that there is a word who was from God, who is God.
40:19
SPEAKER_02: Now, where did Paul and John and the other friends of Jesus get this idea?
40:22
SPEAKER_02: Where did they get this doctrine of God?
40:24
SPEAKER_02: Well, the best explanation is they got it from Jesus.
40:27
SPEAKER_02: They understood the teaching of Jesus.
40:29
SPEAKER_02: Jesus is a very good communicator, he is the greatest communicator that has ever been, um, and he communicated his divine identity to his friends in ways that were captured, and that has led to the articulations of the New Testament and the language of the early church and the creeds and all that kind of stuff.
40:45
SPEAKER_02: But it all goes back to Jesus, who is using a profoundly Hebrew doctrine of God.
40:49
SPEAKER_02: David finishes by talking about what his friends do.
40:52
SPEAKER_02: They worship him, they pray to him, they sing hymns to him and about him, they baptize in his name, they compose liturgy and doxologies to honor and praise him.
40:59
SPEAKER_02: That's the sort of thing you do to someone who is the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One, God from God, light from light.
41:05
SPEAKER_02: He didn't quite have time to get into what his enemies said and did about him, but what his enemies said and did about him was to proclaim him worthy of death, and they killed him as a blasphemer.
41:14
SPEAKER_02: They kind of understood enough about a doctrine of God and they understood enough about Jesus' claims that Jesus was a blasphemer and therefore he had claimed to be God.
41:22
SPEAKER_02: That's David's opening, and I think it's a magnificent opening in order to get us into Trinitarian territory as we're discussing the divine identity of Jesus.
41:30
SPEAKER_02: If we're not in Trinitarian territory as we discuss the divine identity of Jesus, we'll never understand who Jesus is.
41:36
SPEAKER_02: And so I'm very grateful for that kind of opening.
41:38
SPEAKER_02: What did Alex say?
41:39
SPEAKER_02: Let's get into some of the highlights.
41:40
SPEAKER_03: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
41:44
SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
41:44
SPEAKER_03: Or as we say in England, Asalam Hawalaikum.
41:53
SPEAKER_03: Alaykum salam.
41:56
SPEAKER_02: That's the that's the Muslim greeting.
41:58
SPEAKER_02: Um so he's coming back at David for saying it's a we are a sharia compliant hellhole, or whatever he called England.
42:05
SPEAKER_02: Salam alaikum.
42:06
SPEAKER_02: Um good on him.
42:08
SPEAKER_02: That's a that's a great comeback.
42:09
SPEAKER_02: He's got another great line uh where he talks about uh he's in a hotel room and they're right next to Legoland.
42:14
SPEAKER_03: I was thinking about how to approach this given that I didn't know which approach David was going to take.
42:19
SPEAKER_03: I woke up this morning in this fine resort um opposite Legoland, which means that there's a uh a roller coaster just outside of my room.
42:29
SPEAKER_03: And being a bit jet-lagged, I woke up quite late to the most peaceful of noises, that is, the sound of children screaming for their lives.
42:37
SPEAKER_03: Hearing the sound of innocent children screaming for their lives, of course, reminded me to read the Old Testament.
42:43
SPEAKER_03: And I wanted to begin with a verse.
42:52
SPEAKER_03: That was too easy.
42:55
SPEAKER_03: Good on him.
42:56
SPEAKER_03: I factored that into my time as well.
42:58
SPEAKER_03: I want to begin with a verse from the Old Testament which might become relevant momentarily.
43:03
SPEAKER_03: And that is, well, a psalm, not in its entirety, but Psalm 82.
43:08
SPEAKER_03: Psalm 82 is a curious psalm because it opens by saying that God presides in the great assembly.
43:14
SPEAKER_03: He renders judgment among the gods.
43:17
SPEAKER_03: Elohim.
43:18
SPEAKER_03: That is definitely the word for gods.
43:20
SPEAKER_03: This seems to be an indication that God is talking about, or the psalmist is talking about the so-called divine counsel, which also shows up in Job, for example.
43:27
SPEAKER_03: Later in the Psalm he says, I said you are gods, you are all sons of the Most High.
43:33
SPEAKER_03: The psalmist is referring to beings here who are definitively not Yahweh, but calling them gods, which is kind of interesting.
43:40
SPEAKER_03: I'm not trying to make a point out of that.
43:42
SPEAKER_03: Jesus is going to do that for me as we turn to what I think is the most important Christological gospel of the four, which is of course John's Gospel.
43:49
SPEAKER_03: Many people think that I just dismiss John's gospel because it's written too late or something.
43:53
SPEAKER_03: It is, of course, the least historically reliable of the Gospels, but I'm willing to just treat it as if it's historically reliable for the purposes of this debate.
44:00
SPEAKER_03: And see what Jesus actually says about himself.
44:03
SPEAKER_02: This is going to wrong foot David because I think David thought that Alex would dismiss John and therefore he'd have to camp out on the Synoptic Gospels.
44:10
SPEAKER_02: But in instead, Alex said, Well, let's just treat John as though it's a reliable source.
44:16
SPEAKER_02: So thank you, Alex.
44:17
SPEAKER_02: So that's very charitable of him, but let's look to where he's going to look to.
44:22
SPEAKER_02: John chapter 10.
44:24
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus is calling himself the good shepherd, right?
44:27
SPEAKER_02: And and any anyone who knows any Hebrew scriptures, you might know the Lord is my shepherd, okay?
44:32
SPEAKER_02: To call yourself the shepherd is to make a singular claim about yourself.
44:38
SPEAKER_02: The Lord is my shepherd.
44:39
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus says, I am the great shepherd.
44:42
SPEAKER_02: And in verse 27, for instance, he says, My sheep listen to my voice, I know them and they follow me.
44:47
SPEAKER_02: I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.
44:50
SPEAKER_02: No one will snatch them out of my hand.
44:52
SPEAKER_02: My father who has given them to me is greater than all.
44:54
SPEAKER_02: No one can snatch them out of my father's hand.
44:56
SPEAKER_02: I and the Father are one.
44:58
SPEAKER_02: So here we have this Father-Son union.
45:00
SPEAKER_02: Jesus is the good shepherd.
45:02
SPEAKER_02: Jesus gives eternal life.
45:04
SPEAKER_02: Jesus preserves all believers, and he is one with the Father.
45:08
SPEAKER_02: Again, his Jewish opponents picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus said to them, I've shown you many good works from the Father, for which of these do you stone me?
45:14
SPEAKER_02: We're not stoning you for any good work, they replied, but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.
45:20
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so the charge of blasphemy is your claiming to be God because you're claiming to be the Son of the Father.
45:25
SPEAKER_02: What is their doctrine of God?
45:26
SPEAKER_02: Again and again in John's Gospel, even the enemies of Jesus at least understand enough to say that the claim to be the unique beloved son of the Father is the claim to be God.
45:35
SPEAKER_02: So just quickly in John 5, verse 16, Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath.
45:39
SPEAKER_02: The Jewish leaders began to persecute him.
45:41
SPEAKER_02: In his defense, Jesus said to them, My Father is always at work to this very day.
45:45
SPEAKER_02: I too am working.
45:46
SPEAKER_02: For this reason, they tried all the more to kill him.
45:49
SPEAKER_02: Not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own father, making himself equal with God.
45:55
SPEAKER_02: What is their doctrine of God?
45:57
SPEAKER_02: To be this uniquely beloved Son of the Father, who is Lord of the Sabbath, is to be equal with God.
46:04
SPEAKER_02: It's not even to be a servant of God or underneath God.
46:07
SPEAKER_02: It is to be equal with God.
46:09
SPEAKER_02: The Son of the Father shares in the name and nature of God.
46:14
SPEAKER_02: What is their doctrine of God?
46:15
SPEAKER_02: Even the enemies of Jesus have a Trinitarian doctrine of God.
46:19
SPEAKER_02: They might not have used the word Trinity.
46:20
SPEAKER_02: Of course, they didn't use the word Trinity.
46:22
SPEAKER_02: Trinity is a third and fourth century kind of word.
46:26
SPEAKER_02: But they were utterly Trinitarian.
46:28
SPEAKER_02: The enemies of Jesus were utterly Trinitarian.
46:30
SPEAKER_02: To be the unique sent Son of the Father is to be equal with God.
46:36
SPEAKER_02: That is a Hebrew doctrine of God.
46:37
SPEAKER_02: And even the enemies of God had it.
46:39
SPEAKER_02: So back in John chapter 10, Jesus has said, I and the Father are one.
46:43
SPEAKER_02: They pick up stones to stone him for blasphemy because you and mere man are claiming to be God.
46:48
SPEAKER_02: Because to claim to be in this relationship, this unique and original relationship with the Father, is a claim to be God.
46:55
SPEAKER_02: So Jesus, in order to get out of this particular stoning, because he needs not to be stoned, he needs to be crucified for other reasons.
47:01
SPEAKER_02: But in verse 34, to get out of this stoning, Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law I have said you are gods?
47:07
SPEAKER_02: And this is Psalm 82.
47:08
SPEAKER_02: If he called them gods to whom the word of God came, and scripture cannot be set aside, what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world?
47:20
SPEAKER_02: Talking about himself.
47:22
SPEAKER_02: Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I I said I am God's son?
47:26
SPEAKER_02: Right?
47:26
SPEAKER_02: So to get out of this particular stoning, he is saying, Well, look, Psalm 82, there are lots of people who can take the name God.
47:34
SPEAKER_02: He's he's he's putting them through their theological paces.
47:36
SPEAKER_02: Do you do you really understand the doctrine of God?
47:38
SPEAKER_02: Do you really understand Psalm 82?
47:40
SPEAKER_02: What's going on here?
47:41
SPEAKER_02: And it's it's a nice move of wrong footing his opponents.
47:45
SPEAKER_02: And he's acknowledging that there are some beings who can be called God who are not God in the capital G sense, but at the same time, he's slipping in this thing about himself, that he is the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world, that he is in an original and eternal relationship with the Father.
48:03
SPEAKER_02: Are they going to believe that?
48:04
SPEAKER_02: Verse 37, do not believe me unless I do the works of my father, but if I do them, even though you don't believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.
48:13
SPEAKER_02: Again they tried to seize him, but he escaped their grasp.
48:16
SPEAKER_02: That's what John 10 actually says.
48:17
SPEAKER_02: Here's what Alex says about it.
48:20
SPEAKER_03: The question we're interested in here is the relationship that Jesus has to his father.
48:24
SPEAKER_03: David has been speaking about the two powers in heaven heresy, and saying that Jesus' relationship to the Father is the kind of relationship that uh the people who believed in these two powers was talking about.
48:36
SPEAKER_03: Well, let's investigate that in Jesus' own words.
48:38
SPEAKER_03: There is one place in the Gospels where Jesus is directly accused of claiming to be God.
48:45
SPEAKER_03: Do you know where it is?
48:47
SPEAKER_03: It's in John chapter 10.
48:49
SPEAKER_02: I think we've just seen that that's not true.
48:50
SPEAKER_02: I think John chapter 5 um is also uh people understanding Jesus to claim to be God because he claims to be the Son of the Father.
48:58
SPEAKER_02: Um so I don't think that's true.
48:59
SPEAKER_02: Let's see how he deals with John 10 anyway.
49:01
SPEAKER_03: In John chapter 10, his Jewish opponents come to him and say, If you're the Messiah, tell us plainly.
49:06
SPEAKER_03: And Jesus responds by saying, I and the Father are one.
49:10
SPEAKER_03: I'm told by Christians this is a direct Christological claim.
49:13
SPEAKER_03: Who can claim to be identical to the Father except for someone who is God?
49:18
SPEAKER_03: And there was no confusion about this.
49:20
SPEAKER_03: The Jewish opponents picked up stones to sown him to death for making this claim.
49:24
SPEAKER_03: Now, how does how does Jesus respond?
49:26
SPEAKER_03: Does he agree with them?
49:27
SPEAKER_03: Or does he correct them?
49:29
SPEAKER_03: He says in response to the Jews, Is it not written in your law, I have said you are gods?
49:38
SPEAKER_03: Quoting, as you'll probably realize, the psalm that I just quoted and explained briefly a moment ago.
49:42
SPEAKER_03: So directly asked about his Christological status, Jesus decides to quote a psalm which is explicitly talking about beings who are not in fact Yahweh and yet are called gods.
49:54
SPEAKER_03: Why would he pick that psalm if the message he wanted to convey was that he is in fact, in some sense, God, that is, identical to Yahweh?
50:02
SPEAKER_02: Because he's boxing clever and he's avoiding this particular stoning, and at the same time, he is slipping in this divine self-identification that he is the unique one set apart by the Father and sent into the world.
50:14
SPEAKER_03: Jesus continues, if he called them gods, why wouldn't he call me God?
50:18
SPEAKER_03: The one who the Father has sent and set aside?
50:20
SPEAKER_03: So why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said I am God's Son?
50:25
SPEAKER_03: Like in the divine council, you shall be called God, that is, sons of the Most High.
50:31
SPEAKER_03: So it's a misunderstanding.
50:32
SPEAKER_02: It's so interesting how he kind of swallows his words when he reads John 10, and anyone who has a Bible can just check this out.
50:39
SPEAKER_02: Verse 36.
50:40
SPEAKER_02: What about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own, his one and only, and sent into the world?
50:47
SPEAKER_02: Jesus' understanding is not that he was born in Nazareth and he's going to God.
50:52
SPEAKER_02: His understanding is that he has been set apart by the Father and sent into the world.
50:56
SPEAKER_02: This is a very high Christology that he has.
50:59
SPEAKER_02: It's a very high understanding of his own identity.
51:02
SPEAKER_02: And Alex has to swallow that verse.
51:04
SPEAKER_02: Um, what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world?
51:10
SPEAKER_02: Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said I'm God's son?
51:13
SPEAKER_02: He is very clearly claiming to be far more than the gods of Psalm 82.
51:19
SPEAKER_02: Like the the argument of this is an A40ori argument.
51:23
SPEAKER_02: Like, if it is possible to call beings like the Divine Council gods, see Psalm 82, it is far more appropriate for me to call myself God's son, because I am the Son of the Father sent to save the world.
51:40
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so Jesus is very clearly claiming to be more than the kind of divine beings of Psalm 82, but he has to swallow verse 36 and not really like lay it out there in order to make this.
51:52
SPEAKER_02: But then he goes on to verse 37.
51:54
SPEAKER_03: Jesus immediately afterwards clarifies further and says, Believe the works, that is, the works of my Father through me, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I am in the Father.
52:06
SPEAKER_03: Another pretty intense Christological claim.
52:09
SPEAKER_03: What does it mean?
52:11
SPEAKER_03: Let's turn to the most important Christological chapter in John's Gospel, which is, of course, chapter 17.
52:16
SPEAKER_03: Jesus is praying, first for his disciples, then for all of his believers.
52:20
SPEAKER_02: This is beautiful.
52:21
SPEAKER_02: I just I just love that we are spending time looking at John 17.
52:25
SPEAKER_02: I think he's absolutely right.
52:26
SPEAKER_02: It's it's probably my favorite, it's certainly my favorite chapter of John's Gospel.
52:30
SPEAKER_02: Um, it's one of my favorite chapters in all the Bible.
52:33
SPEAKER_02: And here we are, we're we're getting to soak in the waters of John chapter 17.
52:37
SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Alex, for taking us here.
52:39
SPEAKER_02: Genuinely, from the bottom of my heart.
52:41
SPEAKER_02: The stuff that we are talking about in this debate is so soul enriching, if only we have ears to hear it.
52:47
SPEAKER_02: Um so let's hear from John 17.
52:49
SPEAKER_03: Remember, in John chapter 10 so far, Jesus has made two claims.
52:52
SPEAKER_03: I and the Father are one, and I am in the Father, and the Father is in me, addressing the relationship that he has to his father, which David thinks is the two powers in heaven.
53:02
SPEAKER_03: What does Jesus say in his own words?
53:04
SPEAKER_03: John chapter 17, verse 20 onwards.
53:07
SPEAKER_03: My prayer is not for them alone, the disciples, I pray also for those who believe in me through their message, that is, all of you, that all of them may be one.
53:16
SPEAKER_03: Hen, H-E-N, the same Greek word used in John 10.
53:19
SPEAKER_03: Father, just as you are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.
53:26
SPEAKER_03: This is crucial, this is pivotal.
53:28
SPEAKER_03: When Jesus is asked to clarify his Christological status, what is his relationship to the Father?
53:32
SPEAKER_03: He says, I'm in the Father and the Father's in me.
53:34
SPEAKER_03: He then later prays that all of us will one day be in God in the same way, just as cathos in the Greek, which doesn't just mean as, it means in the same way as, just as.
53:45
SPEAKER_02: I think we'll get into um occasionally some points about language are made in this debate, um, but not by linguists.
53:54
SPEAKER_02: Um I don't know how much New Testament Greek Alex has.
53:57
SPEAKER_02: He's probably got a a few years, I've got a few years under my belt.
54:00
SPEAKER_02: Um I'm very aware of uh the danger of a little knowledge.
54:05
SPEAKER_02: Um there is a great danger in knowing a little bit about a language, and I think that shines through when he talks about kathos, this this word that is just as, in the same way as.
54:15
SPEAKER_02: Just as uh Christ is in the Father and the Father is in Christ, so we will be in Christ um just as.
54:22
SPEAKER_02: And there is no word in any language on earth that has the meaning of in the same way, that is therefore context independent.
54:31
SPEAKER_02: Um cathos is of course context dependent.
54:34
SPEAKER_02: Um like all words are uh context dependent, but actually in the same way is an especially context-dependent word.
54:41
SPEAKER_02: Jesus will say to the disciples, just as the Father has sent me, so am I sending you.
54:46
SPEAKER_02: He says that in John 17, he says that in John 20.
54:49
SPEAKER_02: Just as the Father has sent the Son, so the Son has sent his church out into the world.
54:53
SPEAKER_02: Um that cannot possibly mean in the same way in every single regard, because the Father has sent the Son individually into the world, and the church are a group of many people.
55:05
SPEAKER_02: The Son is sent into the world in order to live our perfect life and die a cursed death on that cross for us.
55:14
SPEAKER_02: That is not the way in which the church is sent into the world.
55:17
SPEAKER_02: Christ is sent into the world to be the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
55:21
SPEAKER_02: The church is not sent into the world to be the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
55:25
SPEAKER_02: Oh, but it's cathos.
55:27
SPEAKER_02: So therefore, we must be sent in exactly the same way.
55:30
SPEAKER_02: Well, you cannot load onto the word cathos an expectation of exact similitude in every sense.
55:37
SPEAKER_02: It is context dependent.
55:39
SPEAKER_02: Don Carson speaking about the dangers of uh a little bit of language knowledge speaks of illegitimate totality transfer.
55:47
SPEAKER_02: You know, a word means one thing in one context, and we think it means exactly the same thing when we slot it into this sentence over here in this context, and that is an illegitimate totality transfer.
55:57
SPEAKER_02: Um I think I think Alex is doing that with the word cathos.
56:00
SPEAKER_02: But it is so beautiful to press into the word cathos in the same way that the father is in the Son, I am in the Son, and the Son is in me.
56:11
SPEAKER_02: Now there are things that are going to be the same about the innness of Father and Son, that's the same as the innness between me and Christ.
56:20
SPEAKER_02: But there's also things that'll be very different.
56:22
SPEAKER_02: Um The Father and Son are in an eternal relationship.
56:26
SPEAKER_02: I think we've seen enough evidence of that, but there's plenty of it in Scripture.
56:29
SPEAKER_02: The Father and Son are in an eternal relationship.
56:32
SPEAKER_02: Jesus says that in John chapter 17, verse 24.
56:35
SPEAKER_02: Um, it's assumed in John chapter 17, verse 5.
56:38
SPEAKER_02: In this very chapter, twice Jesus makes a claim to eternality.
56:42
SPEAKER_02: That is a unique sense in which the father has always had a son.
56:45
SPEAKER_02: And of course he's always had a son.
56:47
SPEAKER_02: If he didn't always have a son, he could never be the eternal father.
56:50
SPEAKER_02: But the eternal father has always been father because he's always had a son.
56:54
SPEAKER_02: And there is a mutually constitutive in-ness between the father and the son that is eternal and that is by nature and that is a one and only.
57:03
SPEAKER_02: And John's gospel is very focused on the one and only Son who comes to make us children, right?
57:09
SPEAKER_02: There's a one and only ness between the Father and the Son.
57:13
SPEAKER_02: But just as the Father and the Son is in the Son, the Son is in the Father, just as, so now we are in the Son and the Son is in us, bringing us into that relationship with the Father.
57:25
SPEAKER_02: And there's a real appropriateness to the word just as.
57:27
SPEAKER_02: Just as the Father loves the Son, so the Son loves us.
57:30
SPEAKER_02: Jesus says that in John chapter 15, just as the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.
57:35
SPEAKER_02: You're like, oh my goodness, that's incredible.
57:38
SPEAKER_02: The entirety of John's gospel is this beautiful doctrine of, you know the Father-Son relationship in the joy of the Spirit, you know that.
57:45
SPEAKER_02: That is an eternal Niagara force of love crashing down from the Father to the Son in the joy of the Spirit.
57:50
SPEAKER_02: You know that?
57:52
SPEAKER_02: You're invited into that.
57:53
SPEAKER_02: You can come in.
57:55
SPEAKER_02: So that just as I am in the Father and the Father is in me, so I will be in you and you will be in me.
58:00
SPEAKER_02: And there is something unrepeatable and unique about the Father-Son relationship, and there is something that is open and universal about the Father-Son relationship.
58:08
SPEAKER_02: We saw it in Matthew chapter 11, didn't we?
58:10
SPEAKER_02: No one knows the father except the son, no one knows the son except the father.
58:13
SPEAKER_02: They're in this family secret, it's all locked up, but then no one knows the father except the son and those to whom the son chooses to reveal him.
58:20
SPEAKER_02: There is something that is unique and eternal and unrepeatable and unparalleled about the father-son relationship in this in the spirit.
58:30
SPEAKER_02: And there is something that is opened up in the gospel by the Son and through the Spirit so that we are welcomed into that original, eternal Father-Son love.
58:40
SPEAKER_02: And the whole of John's Gospel, you can understand the whole of John's Gospel in this way.
58:44
SPEAKER_02: What Jesus is originally, eternally, and by nature, we can become in time, corporately, and by grace.
58:53
SPEAKER_02: What he is originally, eternally, and by nature, we become in time, corporately, by grace.
59:00
SPEAKER_02: He is the one and only son who comes to make all of us children.
59:04
SPEAKER_02: And the Greek word kathos is entirely appropriate to describe that beautiful gospel reality.
59:11
SPEAKER_02: Because there is no possible way that I could become an eternal son of God by nature, because I'm not.
59:19
SPEAKER_02: I came to exist at a certain point in time.
59:22
SPEAKER_02: There was a moment when I was not a child of God, there's a moment when I became a child of God.
59:26
SPEAKER_02: I became a child of God, not by nature, I became a child of God by grace.
59:31
SPEAKER_02: What Jesus is originally and eternally and by nature, I become corporately in time and by grace, but I am by the Spirit brought into the very love of the Father for the Son.
59:42
SPEAKER_02: Now I am in Christ, loved with the very love which both predated and produced the universe.
59:48
SPEAKER_02: This is why it's so beautiful.
59:49
SPEAKER_02: We're in John's gospel.
59:50
SPEAKER_02: And thinking about John 17, and the truths that are on Alex's lips are just so they are so beautiful if we have ears to hear them.
59:59
SPEAKER_02: Let's try and hear them.
1:00:00
SPEAKER_03: If this is supposed to indicate that Jesus is claiming to be identical to Yahweh, what does that make the rest of us?
1:00:06
SPEAKER_02: Children of God.
1:00:07
SPEAKER_03: And how I'm interested in knowing is David going to interpret these verses where Jesus is specifically asked to clarify his relationship to the Father and tells us that he is only in relationship with him in such a way that everybody else can be in relationship with them too.
1:00:22
SPEAKER_02: False.
1:00:23
SPEAKER_02: Even in John chapter 10, the very chapter that Alex has raised, even there, Jesus says he is the one who is set apart by the Father, the very one set apart by the Father and sent into the world.
1:00:34
SPEAKER_02: I have not been sent into the world.
1:00:36
SPEAKER_02: I am not the one set apart.
1:00:38
SPEAKER_02: Okay?
1:00:38
SPEAKER_02: Even in the very scripture that Alex is appealing to, um, the uniqueness of Christ is front and center.
1:00:44
SPEAKER_03: The same thing is true of another important quote from John's Gospel, which is when Philip asks Jesus to show him the Father.
1:00:52
SPEAKER_03: What does Jesus say?
1:00:54
SPEAKER_03: Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.
1:00:57
SPEAKER_03: Another intense Christological claim.
1:01:00
SPEAKER_03: He then follows up by saying, How can you say, Show us the Father?
1:01:03
SPEAKER_03: Don't you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?
1:01:06
SPEAKER_03: The words I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority.
1:01:09
SPEAKER_03: Rather, it is the Father living in me who is doing his work.
1:01:13
SPEAKER_02: Now, if if any of us said that to another human being, if you want to know what God looks like, just look right here.
1:01:18
SPEAKER_02: Okay, that would be blasphemous.
1:01:20
SPEAKER_02: It would be ridiculous as well.
1:01:21
SPEAKER_02: It would be blasphemous to say that.
1:01:24
SPEAKER_03: This is a unique claim to divinity, right?
1:01:27
SPEAKER_03: So again, Jesus clarifies his relationship to the Father, this time saying that he doesn't speak on his own authority.
1:01:32
SPEAKER_03: But there's more.
1:01:33
SPEAKER_03: In the same chapter this time, chapter 14, just a few verses later, he says to those same disciples who he's just told, I that if you've seen me, you've seen the Father, because the Father is in me, and I'm in the Father.
1:01:45
SPEAKER_03: He speaks of a future day, past his crucifixion, and says, On that day, verse 20, on that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.
1:01:56
SPEAKER_04: Glory.
1:01:56
SPEAKER_03: So to recap, Jesus is directly asked to clarify his relationship and his Christology to the Father.
1:02:01
SPEAKER_03: And he says that I'm in the Father, and the Father's in me, and guess what?
1:02:04
SPEAKER_03: You'll all be one with us too, one day.
1:02:06
SPEAKER_02: Glorious.
1:02:07
SPEAKER_03: If this is a claim to be Yahweh, then well, lucky us, I suppose.
1:02:11
SPEAKER_02: Oh, yes, lucky, lucky us, Alex.
1:02:14
SPEAKER_02: Very lucky us, very lucky us.
1:02:16
SPEAKER_02: Oh.
1:02:17
SPEAKER_02: You've just said the most beautiful thing it is possible for a human being to say that the very relationship of Father and Son by the Holy Spirit, that relationship that was there before the foundation of the world, the love which brought the cosmos into being, that love has been opened up in Jesus, the one set apart from the Father, sent into the world to take on our flesh, to become the Son of Man, to become human, to become our brother.
1:02:49
SPEAKER_02: He became all that we are, so that we can become all that he is.
1:02:55
SPEAKER_02: I mean, we can't become eternal.
1:02:57
SPEAKER_02: I can't I can't suddenly become somebody who has always existed.
1:03:00
SPEAKER_02: I can't suddenly become somebody somebody who is by nature a son.
1:03:06
SPEAKER_02: He is eternally and by nature the son of God, but he has come to invite me to be in time by grace a child of the very same Heavenly Father, loved with the very same love, filled with the very same Spirit, and one with Christ forever.
1:03:24
SPEAKER_02: Alex, you have just named the most beautiful truth it is possible to name.
1:03:28
SPEAKER_02: If you can find a better gospel, if you can find a better good news, let me know.
1:03:34
SPEAKER_02: Lucky us, I guess.
1:03:36
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:03:39
SPEAKER_02: Really.
1:03:40
SPEAKER_02: Really very lucky us.
1:03:41
SPEAKER_02: Very very blessed us.
1:03:44
SPEAKER_02: Very blessed.
1:03:45
SPEAKER_02: This is the greatest news in the world.
1:03:48
SPEAKER_02: And look you you might be listening into this debate and and you're not a Christian.
1:03:53
SPEAKER_02: This is the most beautiful thing.
1:03:55
SPEAKER_02: If this is not true, um you've saved yourself a lot of time.
1:04:01
SPEAKER_02: You don't you don't need to look into Christianity any further if this is not true, but there should be a sadness to you if this is not true.
1:04:08
SPEAKER_02: Because if this is not true, then you've got to turn your back on the greatest news the world has ever heard.
1:04:14
SPEAKER_02: We have come from love, we are shaped by love, we are determined for love.
1:04:19
SPEAKER_02: And Christ has come into this world out of love to invite you into that eternal relationship.
1:04:24
SPEAKER_02: Of course you can't be exactly the same as Christ.
1:04:28
SPEAKER_02: He is the eternal Son of God, and you're not eternal.
1:04:30
SPEAKER_02: You're not naturally a child of God, but he makes you one by grace, if you will let him.
1:04:36
SPEAKER_02: If this isn't true, you should be sad about that.
1:04:40
SPEAKER_02: You should want this to be true.
1:04:42
SPEAKER_02: It's more than just lucky us.
1:04:44
SPEAKER_02: It is this is a gospel that is worthy of the kind of God who would bring this world into being.
1:04:50
SPEAKER_02: It is so good.
1:04:52
SPEAKER_02: It's not so good it can't be true.
1:04:54
SPEAKER_02: It's not too good to be true, it's so good it must be true.
1:04:56
SPEAKER_02: Um look, I'm gonna have to leave this video here.
1:05:00
SPEAKER_02: We're gonna have to come back to this uh video because uh there's so much more to look into.
1:05:05
SPEAKER_02: I want to do uh another video about the angel of the Lord, um, because I think that so clearly shows us that in its own context, the Hebrew scriptures are proclaiming a multipersonal doctrine of God, not simply a two powers in heaven, but the one power of God who is always the most high working through his sent one in the power of the Holy Spirit.
1:05:28
SPEAKER_02: That Hebrew doctrine of God is the doctrine of God that Jesus is assuming.
1:05:32
SPEAKER_02: It's the Hebrew doctrine of God which largely both his friends and his enemies share, um, even if they don't believe that he is the sent one of the Lord.
1:05:41
SPEAKER_02: And it's the doctrine of God that makes sense of why Christianity kind of took the shape that it took.
1:05:46
SPEAKER_02: I think a lot of things follow from uh the angel of the Lord.
1:05:49
SPEAKER_02: So we'll we'll do a video on that and we'll do a video on the second half of this debate.
1:05:53
SPEAKER_02: I've only got to the 37-minute mark.
1:05:55
SPEAKER_02: Go and watch the whole thing on Roslan's channel.
1:05:58
SPEAKER_02: I thought he did a fantastic job making this thing happen, and then watch out for his final contribution uh at the end of the debate because I think he raises the same points that I've just raised.
1:06:09
SPEAKER_02: That actually there is a glorification that happens in Christ so that we get to share in the Father-Son relationship by the Spirit.
1:06:16
SPEAKER_02: Roslan is tracking with that.
1:06:18
SPEAKER_02: Rosaland is dropping that right at the end of this debate, and uh I think it's a really helpful contribution to the whole thing.
1:06:25
SPEAKER_02: So well done, Rosalind.
1:06:26
SPEAKER_02: You did such a great job with this.
1:06:28
SPEAKER_02: And uh, so go and watch the video, come back.
1:06:30
SPEAKER_02: We're gonna do another couple of videos about this debate, because I think this debate has everything in it.
1:06:36
SPEAKER_02: Um, in order to get that, you're gonna have to subscribe to the channel, aren't you?
1:06:38
SPEAKER_02: So subscribe to the channel so that you can get uh get updated on all this kind of stuff.
1:06:42
SPEAKER_02: Like this video, share it around the place, and also will you do three two one?
1:06:46
SPEAKER_02: Alex, maybe you could do three two one.
1:06:47
SPEAKER_02: I think it'd be uh a real blessing to you.
1:06:49
SPEAKER_02: You've got multiple copies of The Air We Breathe, uh, one of my other books.
1:06:53
SPEAKER_02: I could send you a copy of uh How to See Life, which is the 321 material, uh, because it will teach you about the Fatherhood of God, who in the Son we are brought by the Spirit as children to receive the love of the Father in Christ and by the Spirit.
1:07:08
SPEAKER_02: This is not something to be scoffed at.
1:07:10
SPEAKER_02: This is not something to say, oh lucky us, I guess.
1:07:13
SPEAKER_02: Uh this is really good news.
1:07:15
SPEAKER_02: I'd love to love to have a conversation with you about it, Alex, if you've ever got time.
1:07:19
SPEAKER_02: What you here think of as nonsensical or as undercutting of the logic of Scripture is in fact the logic of Scripture, and it's the logic of love, and it's the best news in the world.
1:07:31
SPEAKER_02: Um, you guys can do 321 as well.
1:07:33
SPEAKER_02: You can go there immediately, just go to 321course.com, start an account, and you're in.
1:07:38
SPEAKER_02: Eight episodes.
1:07:38
SPEAKER_02: You can binge it in one go, or you can take your time over it.
1:07:42
SPEAKER_02: Tens of thousands of people are doing 321.
1:07:45
SPEAKER_02: You can be one of them, go to three21course.com.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_02: I'll see you on the next one.