Sermon Archives (December 15, 2000):

Is Jesus Lord?

If there were evidence that Jesus was the Messiah, would you be willing to examine that evidence?   And if the evidence proved compelling, would you have the integrity to act on those findings?

Is Jesus Lord?

For 4000 years the Jewish people have looked for the Messiah.   Jesus Christ was embraced by the Gentile world as that Messiah, but rejected by his own people.   Mistakes happen, and one should ask was this rejection one such mistake?  What if Jesus Christ was the Messiah?   Have you the patience to examine the evidence, and the integrity should it prove compelling to accept Jesus Christ to accept his as your Messiah?   The stakes are high.   This may be your only chance or it may be your last chance.   Your life, here and in eternity, as well as your family, your children, your relatives, and all that is dear to you may well hang in your ability right not to honestly and maturity approach this issue.   Consider then this evidence.

The evidence begins with the issue of annihilation:    Moses said, (Deuteronomy 18:18-20 CJB), “Adonai (God) said to me, ‘They are right in what they are saying.  I will raise up for them a  prophet like you among their kinsmen.  I will put My words in his mouth.  He will tell them everything I order him.  Whoever doesn’t listen to my words, which he will speak in My name, will have to account for himself to Me.”  Has God  raised up such a  prophet “like” Moses - of that same high stature as Moses - which the Jewish people did not accept?  Yes.   Elsewhere in scripture, the warning is even stronger:  “Every soul, which will not hear that prophet, shall be destroyed from among the people.”

After Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, thousands of Jews heeded these warning, repented, and accepted Jesus as the Messiah.   However, many thousands more were not convinced.   The average Jew as people today discounted God’s word.  “God is distant.  Surely,” they reasoned, “God will not allow his people to be destroyed.”   They set aside Moses’ warning!  

1900 years passed and the Holocaust fell upon the Jews of our day.  How then would God respond to a people in their darkest hour that had rejected his son?   Again consider the words of Moses this time the Song of Moses, (Deuteronomy 32:24-25)  “Fatigued by hunger, they will be consumed by fever and bitter defeat; I will send them the fangs of wild beasts, and the poison of reptiles crawling in the dust.  Outside, the sword makes parents childless; inside, there is panic, as young men and girls alike are slain, sucklings and graybeards together.”   In Hitler’s death camps, were not the Jews “fatigued by hunger”?  Were not the Nazis every bit the “wild beasts” with “fangs”?  Did not our people die by the millions in the gas chambers with “poison” in a state of “panic”, while outside parents lost their families by the “sword” of the machine gun?   When their bodies were burned in the crematoriums, were not the Jews reduced to “dust”?

(Hosea 4:6)  “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”  God is not distant.  He is very close.  He is a God of love, but also a jealous God.  Here then is the beginning of your evidence:  6 million Jewish graves in Europe all attesting to the truth that God stands by his word.   God said that those who would not accept this prophet “will have to account for himself to Me.”  God said, “Every soul, which will not hear that prophet, shall be destroyed.”    One may scream, “Never again! Never again!” but even now is not Israel surrounded and anti-semitism on the rise?  (Psalms 111:10) “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of understanding.”  No one can bring back the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust.   But human compassion requires us to at least attempt to save the 12 million Jews alive today who by their unbelief  remain still at risk.

If our God is one, how can He be three?  The unbelieving Jew will say to those who believe in Christ as the Messiah:  “Our God is one!  He is not two!  He is not three!  He has not a son!  Our God is not divided.  He is one God!”  Let us consider this complaint in light of the Jewish scriptures.   Most Jews can not recite from childhood the “Sh’ma”.  From Deuteronomy 6:4, the prayer is sung “Sh’ma, Yisrael, Adonia Elohenu Adonia e’chad.”, meaning “Hear, O Israel:  The Lord our God is one Lord.”   Look carefully at the word God used in “Sh’ma” to represent “one”.  The Hebrew “e’chad” is translated in some areas of scripture as an absolute one, and in other areas as a compound unity.   An example of this compound unity is Genesis 2:24 speaking of a man and a woman uniting in marriage, is says “and they shall be one (e’chad) flesh.”  Two people - a man and a woman - becoming one.  By analogy, water has three states: steam, liquid, and ice as a solid and yet water remains one substance.  Describing the congregation, Ezra 2:64 states, “The whole congregation together (echad) was forty and two thousand, three hundred and threescore.”  The same Hebrew word “e’chad” is translated as the English word “together” to represent 42,360 people in one congregation as a compound unity.   

Those who believe Christ Jesus do not then worship three gods.   Rather the whole of scripture – old covenant and new covenant - infers a plurality in the Godhead.  The word for God in (Genesis 1:1) is “elohim” in English is translated “God”.  However, in Exodus 20:3, the same word “elohim” when used to describe false deities is translated “gods”.   Genesis 1:26 and Isaiah 6:8 use plural pronouns for God, and Isaiah 48:16 implies plurality.

Had the Sh’ma been intended to communicate an absolute singularity, the word “yachid”, not “e’chad” would have been used.   (In Genesis 22:2), God commanded Abraham, “Take now your son, your only (yachid) son Isaac.”   “Yachid” defines Isaac as being exclusive to all others.

In another area, (Genesis 1:5) God said, “And the evening and the morning were the (e’chad) first day.”   Two things – evening and morning – making up a compound unity of a single day.

God said, “Let us make man in our own image.”  The Hebrew words “us” and “our” both express the concept of God as a compound unity.

God is represented as a plurality of unity (in Psalm 110:1), “The Lord said unto my Lord, sit you at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”   The first Lord is translated from the word YAHWEH, while the second Hebrew word “Adonai” means Master.   Both YAHWEH and Adonai are taken as God, and yet in this verse there are two beings representing the one Godhead.   Thus, the scriptures shows that God reveals himself in three personas, but as one God.

Was the Messiah to be born of a Virgin?  There are those, both Jewish and of other backgrounds who question the claim that Christ was born by a virgin.  Again let us look to the Jewish scriptures.  The Jewish scriptures teach that Messiah would be born by a virgin.  (in Isaiah 7:14)  “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel (meaning God is with us).”   The Hebrew word used to translate the English word “virgin” was “almah”.   This Hebrew word may however be translated either “virgin” or “young woman”.   Critics of the “virgin” translation claim that if the intent was to mean a virgin, the Hebrew word “bethulah” would have been used.   However, the word “almah” is used meaning a virgin likewise in many of the Hebrew Scriptures: Genesis 24:43, Exodus 2:8, Psalms 68:26, Proverbs 30:19, and Song of Soloman 1:3 and 6:8.   If “almah” was not to mean virgin in Isaiah, one must fairly ask why the same word referring to a virgin is used in all these other places of scripture always to mean virgin?  

Moreover one must question the apparent self-serving interpretation the critics claimed.  Interesting, when the accepted Jewish scholars during the 3^rd and 2^nd century before the birth of Christ translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, these Jewish scholars translated the Jewish word “almah” within Isaiah 7:14 to the Greek word “parthenos”, which in Greek always means virgin.   Because certain Jews were not prepared to accept Jesus for their own reasons, they appear to have been willing to abandon the very scholarship and theology of their own religion.  Moshe Kohen ibn Crispin, a 14^th century Spanish rabbi typically commented in rebuttal to the critics of the virgin birth:  “This prophecy was delivered by Isaiah at the divine command for the purpose of making known to us something about the nature of the future Messiah … in order that if anyone should arise claiming to be himself the Messiah, we may reflect and look to see whether we can observe in him any resemblance to the traits described here.”   It is unprincipled to abandon ones own theology simply because God sends a prophet not to ones personal liking.

The extraordinary nature of the birth is brought out by the word “sign:”  “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign.”   A sign in Scripture is something out of the ordinary that attests and confirms a word from God.   There are eight occurrences of this word “sign" refer to a miraculous event in scripture (Examples of this are to be found in Exodus 7:3, Deuteronomy 4:34, and Isaiah 20:3).  On must fairly ask, what would be so miraculous and out of the ordinary that it should constitute a “sign” for a young woman to conceive and bear a child?   Would not a virgin to conceive be out of the ordinary?

Where was the Messiah to be born?  The Jewish scriptures help to validate Christ as Messiah by declaring the exact place and time of his birth.  (Micah 5:2-3)  "But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth to Me  the One to be Ruler in Israel, whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting."  There were two Bethlehems in ancient Israel:  One in Judah (1 Samuel 16:4), and a second in Galilee (Joshua 19:15).   Micah makes it clear, that the Bethlehem in Judea was to be the place from which the Messiah would come, where in fact Jesus was born.

When was the Messiah to first appear? The time of the Messiah’s birth is also clearly revealed by the prophet Daniel.  (Daniel 9:25-26)  "Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the command  to restore and build Jerusalem  Until Messiah the Prince, There shall be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; The street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublesome times.  And after the sixty-two weeks Messiah shall be cut off, but not for himself; and the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary.”   This foretells three successive periods of time till Messiah will return:  70 weeks, 62 weeks, and then a single week

In each of these prophetic periods, a day of each week represented a single year.  Thus, the first 70 weeks of Jeremiah’s prophecy was to be 490 years, and the 62 weeks 434 years, and the last week 7 years.   The first 490 years occurred between the destruction of Jerusalem by King Nebuchadnezzar, and the exile of Israel to Babylon.   The second 434 years or 62 weeks occurred from the return of Nehemiah and Israel from Babylon to Israel in 454 BC and the rebuilding of the temple, Jerusalem, and its walls in 408 BC till the first “desolation of abomination” by Syrian King Antiochus Epiphanies when he conquered Jerusalem and set up idol worship on the temple grounds.   Following this desolation of the temple, the Messiah, defined in Hebrew here as the “Holy of Holies” was to come and be killed followed by yet another destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Roman “prince” Titus in 70 AD. 

There have been those within the leadership of Jewish theological teaching who have argued that Daniel’s prophecy points not to the Messiah, but instead to the death of Manasseh, the last King of Israel.   Their argument is bad history and poor theology.  King Manasseh died at Messada, 36 years after the destruction of both Jerusalem and the temple, when the prophecy describes the “Kados Kados” or “Holy of Holies” dying before the last destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.  Daniel defines the purpose for Messiah’s first coming in verse 24, “to restrain transgressions”, “to seal up sins”, “to cover over iniquity”, “to bring in everlasting righteousness”.   King Mannesseh never qualified as the “Kados Kados”, having nothing to do with restaining transgressions, sealing up sins, coving iniquity, or bringing in everlasting righteousness.

Verse 27 of Daniel 9 reads this way, “Then he (the Messiah, our Christ) shall confirm a covenant with many for one week; But in the middle of the week he shall bring an end to sacrifice.”  Christ’s ministry could last no longer than a week or seven years, but Daniel prophecies here that Christ would be “cut off”, that is killed in mid-week or after three-and-a-half years, the exact duration of his ministry.

Could the Messiah be the nation Israel?  For the Jew, the most complete description of the Messiah’s first coming, ministry, and death is Isaiah 53, which is as follows:  “Who believes our report?  To whom is the arm of God revealed?  For before him he grew up like a young plant, like a root of dry ground.  He was not well-formed or especially handsome.  We saw him, but his appearance did not attract us.  People despised and avoided him;  a man of pains, well acquainted with illness, like someone from whom people turn their faces, he was despised.  We did not value him.  In fact, it was our diseases he bore, our pains from which he suffered;  yet we regarded him as punished, stricken and afflicted by God.  But he was wounded because of our crimes, crushed because of our sins.  The disciplining that makes us whole fell on him, and by his stripes we are healed.  We all, like sheep, went astray.  We turned, each one, to his own way.  Yet God laid on him the guilt of all of us.  Though mistreated, he was submissive.  He did not open his mouth.  Like a lamb led to be slaughtered, like a sheep silent before its shearers, he did not open his mouth.  After forcible arrest and sentencing, he was taken away.  None of his generation protested his being cut off from the land of the living for the crimes of My people, who deserved the punishment themselves.  He was given a grave among the wicked;  in his death he was with a righteous man.  Although he had done no violence and had said nothing deceptive, yet it pleased God to crush him with illness, to see if he would present himself as a guilt offering.  If he does, he will see his offspring, and will proclaim His days, and at his hand God’s desire will be accomplished.  After his ordeal, he will see satisfaction.  By his knowing pain and sacrifice, my righteous servant makes many righteous.  It is for their sins that he suffers.  Therefore I will assign him a share with the great.  He will divide the spoil with the mighty  for having exposed himself to death and being counted among the sinners, while actually bearing the sin of many  interceding for the offenders.“

A thousand years after Christ’s death, leading Jewish rabbis began to redefine what had been commonly accepted Jewish interpretation of Isaiah 53.  The Jewish leadership after Christ’s ministry now claimed that Isaiah 53 no longer described a man, the Messiah, but that Isaiah 53 represented Israel.  In other words, the Jews who had been historically supporters and defenders of literal interpretations of their own scriptures, now abandoned those scriptures and argued Replacement theology; that God’s word is in some respects a hidden lie; that God’s scripture does not mean what is written, but rather that the scriptures mean something that was not written.   Note the words of (Isaiah 53:5-6)  “But He was wounded for our transgressions.  He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.  …  And the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.“   How can one honestly construe the pronoun “he” or “him” to mean anything other than an individual?   How does one practically or even reasonably lay “the iniquity of us all” on a nation, let alone Israel?  Again a self-serving argument, an abandonment of both scholarship and truth, denying all prior Jewish scholarship and the Jewish scriptures themselves, was brought forth as dogma quite apparently as a means to the ends simply to deny the scriptural truth coming of God’s Messiah.

Is the Messiah both man and God?  The Jewish position by those who deny Jesus is that Jesus was a good man, but not divinity.  The Hebrew Scriptures however say the very reverse:  (Isaiah 9:6)  “For unto us a Child is born. Unto us a Son is given.”   Notice here again, we hear and read these words. “a Son is given.”  The mention of God’s Son is made.  The verse continues. “And the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called  ‘Wonderful Counselor’, ‘Mighty God.’”  Note, the Messiah, this child, this son’s name would be called “Mighty God.”  

The critic asks, how then can man become a God?   The simple fact is that scriptures do not teach that a man became God, but rather that God became man so as to be able to communicate His love for His children. An all-powerful God certainly has the power to do anything to bring about His purposes, including becoming a man.  Recall our early examination of  (Micah 5:2-3)  "But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth to Me the One to be Ruler in Israel, whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting."    The Jewish scriptures tell us that such an eternal entity is in fact God.  (Psalms 90:1-2)  “Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations.  Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever You had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God.”   The prophet Jeremiah taught that the Messiah would be God,  (Jeremiah 23:5-6) "’Behold, the days are coming,’ says the LORD, ‘that I will raise to David a Branch of righteousness; a King shall reign and prosper, and execute judgment and righteousness in the earth.  In His days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell safely; Now this is His name by which He will be called: THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.“   Within the Hebrew text, this title “THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS” is actually in larger type for emphasis.   The notion that Messiah was nothing more than a gifted man is contradicted by this plain statement declaring the Messiah’s eternal pre-existence – an attribute belonging only to the LORD God.  Habakkuk 1:12, The Talmud (Persahim 54a) and the Rabbinic Commentary on Genesis (Genesis Rabbah 1:4) state that the name of Messiah is one of the things that existed before the creation of the world.

The voice of the Messiah speaks (in Isaiah 48:16-17)  "Come near to Me, hear this: I have not spoken in secret from the beginning; From the time that it was, I was there.”   The Messiah is presented as eternal, having existed from the beginning.  The Messiah declares who has commissioned him.  “And now the Lord GOD and His Spirit have sent Me."   God in this commissioning is presented as having two persons; that of God Almighty but also as a Spirit.   The Godhead is then represented in its totality as three personas:  “Thus says the LORD, your Redeemer, The Holy One of Israel”.   The first persona being Lord our God Almighty.   The second persona being our Redeemer or the Messiah.  And the third persona being the Holy One of Israel or God’s Spirit.