I believe Jesus is God however I am having trouble explaining this to a friend. I have a dilemma with her because she doesn’t believe in any religion, all the beliefs she has she comes to on her own interpretations only from the Bible. Even though she won’t admit it, her beliefs are most closely related to Jehova Witness.
Some of the beliefs she has that I would appreciate if people can help me disprove.
- The bible often speaks about Jesus as “the son of God”, she believes this means he is less then God and is totally different.
- Hebrews 12:2 “fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” she quoted me stating that he is sitting next to the father but still isn’t God himself. I couldn’t find anywhere online to refute this specific passage.
- she believes Jesus was once less than the angels and that the Jesus and Holy spirit have powers from God but that these powers can be taken away. Jesus had to work his way up to be better than the angels
It is hard to figure her beliefs out since I can’t really gain much of a reference point but she is a Bible ONLY beleiver so i know i can only use the bible.
Help would be appreciated! God Bless
I might try to respond to her by answering on a more personal level.
What does it mean to you that Jesus, as a man with a history and a biography, is God?
Looking at God from the perspective of the Being that which no greater can be conceived, how does the concept of Jesus being God make the essence of God greater than if this simple son of a carpenter was not God?
For myself at least, Jesus being God gives an indescribably more grander concept of who God is, rather than if he was fully transcendent to our lives. To say that God is love, and love is the greatest thing that could exist, is also to say that the lover must desire to experience the beloved in every way and at every level. Anything less would be less than what we ourselves as humans experience. To be God must mean to experience love more than how we experience it, and not less.
God in the flesh is the only way that it can really be said that God indeed is love. For to love means to become one with the person that one is in love with. It is that one flesh union that is the essence of love itself.
If people can’t understand that, then there is little more that I could offer to make it comprehensible.
But if they can, the next step would be to consider that if God indeed did become a man like us in order to experience love at a more complete level, then what kind of man would God be?
Well, Bahai’s and Shiite Muslims and even Buddhists could point to any number of historic and/or semi-mythic figures that they construe as Emanations of God, according to their own languages of spiritual things, of course.
In my mind though, there has only been one historic figure that could really fit that role. Going point for point for the kind of person that he was, the message that he delivered, the compassion that he had for people that were of no particular importance to anyone else, to the great courage that he lived his life with, to his joy, and to his forgiveness, and even to his righteous anger, and his indignation against injustice, step for step, Jesus alone has laid out a path for us, unequaled by any other human being.
For God to be the kind of Being that which none greater can be conceived, he must at some level be human, and in the whole history of humanity, there is only one figure that rises head and shoulders over the rest, and that would be Jesus.
