JESUS THE LAST WORD - OK
15/01/25 18:44
I was astonished on a mission trip to India when one of our number assured some teenagers in a Bible study we were conducting that there is an authority higher than Jesus to be deferred to: In His opinion this was the Bible. A more overt example of Bible Deism, it would be hard to find!
BIBLE DEISM
He told the boys that views of Jesus were subordinate to the scriptures. But the scriptures are subordinate to Jesus. They take their meaning from Him, because as Jesus said, ‘The scriptures testify of Him.’ Such a confused view is not surprising if we do not live in the Spirit because this is the result of our legalised gospel. Not surprising because such a gospel places the abstraction of the law above the Christ and the trinity, depersonalising one’s Christianity and draining it of life. Unsurprisingly such Christianity is wooden.
JESUS DECLARES HIS SUPREMACY
“St Matthew recounts how in his sermon on the mount Jesus set his own word, ‘but I say unto you’, above that of the commandments of the decalogue, thereby claiming divine finality for his own teaching.‘
“Heaven and earth will pass away but my words’, claimed Jesus, ‘will never pass away.’
DIVINE FINALITY
“This claim to divine finality is also apparent in the way Jesus constantly reinforced his teaching with the emphatic ‘amen, amen’, and called for absolute obedience to himself from all who would follow him, even to the extent of taking up their cross in complete self-renunciation. The evangelists all record events in which Jesus acted and spoke with utterly astonishing divine authority in his commands to the sick, the paralytic, the lame, the blind, evil powers and even to the dead and to the forces of nature.” (1)
As the final authority, Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.’ Gospels that do not align with Him and His accomplishments and the witness of scripture are ‘no gospel at all’.
(1)Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 44). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.