Now the descriptions of God as man in the Old Testament prepare people,
especially Jews, for this thinking; God in human form. We've had that already.
But it was a challenge to them, especially since they...
since they rejected the Messiah, they rejected Jesus,
to accept the idea that that was God, he actually became a man...
we're in big trouble here.
We'll come back to the fifth reference in a bit, but Jesus against this backdrop,
we've already alluded to this one, I'm not going to belabor the point.
John 1:1 Jesus is the Word of the Lord. "And the Word was God." Yep.
Again, you'll get people who do backflips here to try to make John some sort of Platonic
or, you know, Neo-Pythagorean (that's an anachronistic idea),
but some sort of pagan philosopher.
An amateur philosopher here, in pagan antiquity, to get this idea.
No, John's just reading his Old Testament. Not very complicated.
"The Word became flesh." This is important because
in the Old Testament, it's one thing to have God show up visually as a human.
And in some cases, like in Jeremiah 1, it's even tactile,
"the word of the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth," Jeremiah says.
It's quite another though, to say that God became a man. Was born of a woman.
Traveled through the birth canal, you know, all that. The Word became flesh.
That ups the ante. Now, the descriptions of God as man in the Old Testament
prepare people, especially Jews, for this thinking, God in human form.
We've had that already. But it was a challenge to them, especially since they...
since they rejected the Messiah, they rejected Jesus,
to accept the idea that that was God, he actually became a man...
we're in big trouble here.
Okay, this ups the ante, the language. But the Old Testament idea of God as man,
a Godhead, there's two there; the God, the invisible Yahweh who's everywhere,
and then there's God also on Earth. That prepared them for Jesus.
Click here, go to the next slide,
Jude 5. Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it,
that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt,
afterward destroyed those who did not believe."
Wait a minute, who delivered Israel from Egypt?
Elohim, God, Yahweh,. Angel, the Presence, Jesus.
Now, this is the New Testament writer, applying Old Testament passages and thought to Jesus.
John 17, "I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world."
The name theology. This doesn't mean that Jesus says;
"look, when I showed up, I taught everybody what God's name was."
They already knew that. They have a Hebrew Bible.
Yahweh is in there a couple thousand times. They have Exodus 3, "I Am that I Am."
They don't need to know what God's name is. That's not what he's talking about.
When he says, "I have manifested your name
to the people whom you gave me out of the world...
where I kept them by your name."
He's not just whispering "Yahweh" over them.
"I made known to them your name." What is he talking about?
He's talking about something John says elsewhere in his gospel,
"He that has seen me has seen the Father."
Okay, Jesus was the embodied name.
I've shown them who God is, by virtue of being here.
Okay, I'm the name.
Doesn't Jesus say in John chapter 10, that "the Father is in Me, and I am in the Father."
The father in me, that sounds like a little bit like "my name is in that Angel",
you know, again, this is the matrix of ideas.
When the gospel writers are writing this, Jesus is saying this,
there's a framework already in place for their Jewish listeners to process what's being said.
Acts 5:41, they were counted, the apostles that were persecuted.
They rejoice "that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name."
Yeah, it's for God but it's also for Jesus.
"For they have gone out for the sake of the name, accepting nothing from the Gentiles."
3 John
See, Jesus gets referred to the same way that God got referred to in the Old Testament,
as the name.
Now, here's our fifth reference. Remember the cloud rider?
That this was a stock description of Baal, who no one questioned was an actual deity,
not a sub-deity, a part deity, angel who wasn't deity. None of that.
None of what the Jehovah's Witnesses, let's just say it, want you to think that Jesus is,
or Unitarians. That there's some spark of divinity in Jesus,
or Jesus was just an angel, not really God. No. That isn't what the text says.
Because in Daniel, you get your fifth reference to the one who rides the clouds.
Four times the prophets, the biblical writers will use that description.
It's used only of Yahweh right here, "O Lord Yahweh, you make the clouds your chariot",
so on and so forth. Four times they take this title of Baal
and attributed it to Yahweh. Here's the fifth one.
And it's not Yahweh. It's the second character in the vision of Daniel,
the Ancient of Days, God is already seated. Then "I saw in the night visions
and behold, with the clouds of heaven,
(you could also translate it on the clouds of heaven, but it works either way.)
With the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man,
(like a human being), and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.
And to him was given the glory and the kingdom, everlasting dominion."
This freak the rabbis out, because in the intertestamental period,
they know their Hebrew Bible really well. And they know that this is a description of deity.
But now the description of deity is not applied to God, it's applied to somebody else.
It's applied to this human being, this human, whatever.
And Daniel 7, if you harken back to when we started our session today,
Daniel 7 was a key passage for the Two Powers in Heaven.
It's not one good and one evil, it's two Yahweh. Two Yahweh figures in heaven.
This was part of Jewish theology until Jesus comes along.
In Matthew 26. This is the famous confrontation here. Jesus is before Caiaphas,
and it's the mock trial. This kangaroo court, we call it nowadays.
And Caiaphas says, hey, look, you know, we're hearing all these accusations
tell us who you are. You know, I adjure you (down here in verse 63.) "I adjure you
by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.
Jesus said to him, you've said so. But I tell you,
from now on, you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand power,
(you know, everlasting dominion),
and coming on the clouds of heaven." Jesus quotes Daniel 7:13.
Now, it's easy for us to look at that and say, Oh, Jesus is trying to be clever.
He's trying to misdirect. He's just being evasive. No, he's not.
He's being anything but evasive. He's giving Caiaphas both barrels.
You want to know who I am? Okay, you know what Daniel 7:13 says.
Jesus is saying, I'm the second Yahweh figure. I'm Yahweh as a man.
I'm the one who comes on the clouds. I'm the Son of Man.
And Caiaphas understands instantly that this is what he's doing.
Because look at what Caiaphas does and says, "Then the high priest tore his robes
and said, 'He has uttered blasphemy. What further witnesses do we need?
You have heard his blasphemy.'" and they sentenced him to death.
Because he called himself God. I mean, right there it is.
So this is Two Powers in Heaven thinking that prepares the Jewish community
for what Jesus is going to say and do. And prepares people to listen to the apostles,
especially if they're Jews. They reason from the Scriptures about who Jesus was,
and what he did, why he came, all this. This is a big part of it.
And so this is why around 100 AD back to Segal's book
because this is Segal's book lands, what he shows from his knowledge of rabbinic texts.
Once you got into the II Century, which is the 100 AD
right after the birth of the early church,
the Jewish community declared the Two Powers in Heaven idea off-limits.
They declared it a heresy. They declared a point of their own theology heresy
to protect themselves from Christian apologetics.
There's really no other way to say it. This is what they did.