Words of Jesus Podcast - Father and Son Authority

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

The obedience of Jesus and the-work-of-the-Father caused Jesus’ actions stand out. Jesus spoke with authority and "not as the Scribes".  He did not follow the practices of the Pharisees or other man-made sects.  Jesus obeyed His Father, YHVH.  The works of Jesus made his position obvious to the religious leadership, the people and the government. The Scriptures record “For [Pilot] knew that for envy they had delivered [Jesus].” Humility is required to hear correction.***Chapter 16. JESUS DECLARES HIS SONSHIP WITH GOD (Part 1)THE AUTHORITIES persecuted Jesus and sought to slay him because he had healed the lame man on the Sabbath and had told him to carry his bed on that day.  Jesus said to them: “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.”These words angered the authorities further; because Jesus had not only broken the Sabbath but had also said that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.     To his persecutors Jesus replied: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things that himself doeth: and he will shew him greater works than these, that ye may marvel. For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom he will. For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son: That all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent him. Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.  Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live. For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself;And hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man. Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, And shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me.  If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true.”            “There is another that beareth witness of me; and I know that the witness which he witnesseth of me is true.  Ye sent unto John, and he bare witness unto the truth.  But I receive not testimony from man: but these things I say, that ye might be saved.  He was a burning and a shining light: and ye were willing for a season to rejoice in his light.”  “But I have greater witness than that of John: for the works which the Father hath given me to finish, the same works that I do, bear witness of me, that the Father hath sent me.  And the Father himself, which hath sent me, hath borne witness of me. Ye have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape. And ye have not his word abiding in you: for whom he hath sent, him ye believe not.”   “Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life.  I receive not honour from men.  But I know you, that ye have not the love of God in you. I am come in my Father's name, and ye receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will...

Think Red Ink Ministries presents The Words of Jesus series with Don C. Harris Hello, I'm Don Harris of Think Red Ink Ministries. My goal is to reinforce Christianity with the wisdom and the words of Jesus, which, incidentally, are recorded in red ink in many Bibles. Do you know what Jesus said? What Jesus did? What Jesus said to do? You will after this

series. It's based on Jesus, His life, His friends, His ministry, and His relationship with His Father as they're recorded in the four Gospels. We'll delve into mysteries that have been hidden. Hidden not from us, but for us In the words of Jesus We just finished chapter 15 in our little book, The Words of Jesus And we found that when Jesus healed this man

That he was in trouble with the church Because he had done that on the Sabbath day. And that idea actually continues into chapter 16 that we're going to read today. The authorities persecuted Jesus and sought to slay him because he had healed that lame man on the Sabbath and had told him to carry his bed on that day. Jesus said to them, My father worketh hitherto, and I work. I'm afraid these sentences sometimes get lost and sometimes even ignored because written in older Elizabethan English is sometimes a little harder to follow.

Instead of running and getting a translation at this particular point, let's just take a look at what he was saying. The Old English uses terms that we don't use anymore today, and many times as a writer I find myself in need of those words and I use them and people, there's some people that feel like that's unreadable or it's not our language. Some people think that you're being uppity. Some people think that you're just being overly religious because that particular word or whatever you're choosing

as a word that I happen to think is very necessary, they feel like is a Babel word and therefore not in our regular language. The fact that it's not in our regular language is lamentable on a lot of different levels, but there are just some words that they're just not in our language. I always think about hither and thither. When people say that something is, or even

a better example I think is whence and hence. We don't have a word in English other than improper uses of words and dangling participles and ending sentences with prepositions to say from here or it comes from here can be used, you're going to have one word which is hence from here. Fence is to there.

And so if we continue to read the King James Bible, which is the only way you're going to understand it, is to continue to read it and essentially learn the language. Now why would we do that? Why wouldn't we just go get another translation? Well, when you get another translation, you're actually running a risk. And the less people with their fingers in the pie, the better. For years,

since it was created in 1611 as the Catholic source of the scriptures you didn't know the King James was a Catholic Bible, right? Yeah, the Protestant Bible was known as the Geneva Bible. And that's a discouragement to some Protestants, but I don't know that because a particular translation or interpretation or whatever has a denominational slant

that it should be accepted or rejected on those terms. I think that its closeness to the original is probably a more legitimate reason to reject or accept it. Well, there's no reason to reject this or run to another translation. We can understand this fully. The Pharisees were concerned about Jesus healing on the Sabbath day. Jesus essentially answered them with,

Look, I don't do whatever I want to do. I do what the Father tells me to do. And if He's working today, I'm working today. That's essentially what He had to say. The Pharisees really could not accept this as an answer because they believed that if anybody in the universe kept the Sabbath, it would be their father.

The problem was, is over the course of time, as we talked in our last episode, over the course of time, the Sabbath had turned into a ritual observance and not necessarily a way for people to please God by obeying him, by simply not working on the Sabbath. So he says, you know, they were upset that he worked on the Sabbath. Jesus was saying, that's the day I was told to do it.

Jesus is pretty much offering to them the same reason, if you want to call it an excuse, the same reason that the blind man offered, I'm sorry he wasn't blind, the crippled man offered when they said, it's not lawful for you to carry your bed. And he's saying, now wait a minute. The man who made me whole told me to carry my bed. So here you have somebody who's relinquishing to a higher power,

and now we have Jesus saying, my father is doing this, and therefore I have to do it if I'm going to obey him. There's a concept in Christianity that I think is universal even among all the faiths, and that is we ought to obey God rather than men. You remember the disciples said that one time when they were in trouble and they were forbidden to preach in the name

of Jesus. And they said we ought to obey God rather than men. Matter of fact, I like the way they said it because they said judge ye. In other words, you tell me what's the right thing to do. Should we obey God or should we obey you? Well, although that happens to be an honorable thought and reason and in some cases excuse for doing what we do, it's pretty much going to aggravate the person that is not the authority, which is the case here.

These words angered the authorities further because Jesus had not only broken the Sabbath, but had also said that God was his father, making himself equal with God. Another doctrine that goes through the church is that Jesus was, and they would say is, God. And this is

used as a proof text for that idea. There are some people who have made Jesus out to be God and as you know, if you've listened to this broadcast, I've explained that if Jesus was God, he's a lot less used to us as those of us who want to please God. Mostly it's the denominations that believe that it's all by faith anyway. It doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't matter how you act, what's done on a daily basis. It only matters what you believe. But Jesus was not of that mindset at all.

Jesus's attitude was, I have done this, now I'm telling you to do this. Jesus's attitude was, I came to the earth to be one of you, to serve God in the very same flesh in which you serve Him. And so He has eliminated a lot of our excuses. Well, I'm only human. Well, you may be human, but you've had an encounter with the Father. There's been made available to you grace, not unmerited favor, but the power to become a child of God. Jesus walked on this earth with that. I am not saying that Jesus was equal to us. He didn't even have an earthly father. That in itself makes him different than everybody else on earth. He also had memory of his pre-existence

before his incarnation on the earth. We hear him talk about those things when he talks about the kingdom of heaven is like this, the kingdom of heaven is like that. Well he's speaking from experience. John 17 when he prayed to his father he said, Jesus was well aware and his memories were full of what he was, where he was, and who he was before the incarnation, before he came

to the earth to be a man. So I am in no way saying that Jesus was equal to us. We do know when it comes to a mathematical equation, equal to, greater than, less than, that kind of an idea, the Bible says that He made Himself a little lower than the angels. Well, friend, that's where we are. A little lower than the angels. But nowhere will you find that Jesus considered himself to be

equal with man. Nor will you ever find him considering, expounding, believing within himself that he was equal with God. Now what does this say here that he says that you have by this statement of yours made yourself equal with God? Well friend it doesn't really matter what Pharisees think.

It doesn't matter what we think. Just because somebody says, I am the son of God, therefore you've made yourself equal with God. Well, therefore nothing in your mind, perhaps, that's what I've done. In your mind that may be what you perceive when I say that God is my Father, I am His Son, that that makes me equal with God. But you'll never find Jesus Christ saying that. He never, ever said anything other than the fact that He was the Anointed One, He was the Messiah,

He was the One that was to come was the Messiah, he was the one that was come to the earth, and he was the son of God. You'll never find him saying anything otherwise. Trinitarian doctrines pretty much run the gamut, and most Trinitarian doctrines cannot cannot be studied in a lump sum or in a lump whole because they're very, very fractioned by people's opinion about it. You have to read their description and iteration about it in order to decide whether or not you believe it. Most people just don't even bother. They just give up and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I believe in the Trinity. Why not? And no, they don't look into it and find out, now wait a minute, what is this Trinity? Well, if you look at some of them you'll find

that they are three separate and distinct persons, personality, personages, entities. They're three distinct entities that are, the word they use is co-equal. And anybody whose doctrines and covenants or their articles of faith say that Jesus was equal to his Father, do so without the support of Scripture. Jesus never claimed to be equal with his Father.

I think the thought would be horrendous to him. As a matter of fact, when he had died, he told Mary, I go to be with my God and your God. If Jesus was equal with the Father, how in the world would he be God to him? Now some people take the scripture that in Hebrews at Jesus' coronation where when he was raised from the dead and found to be perfect and complete in his mission here on the earth, the Bible says that God looked

at him and called him God, and he did. But the Father was saying, thy throne, O God, is forever. He was saying that to Jesus Christ. A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of thy kingdom. Therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows. If we don't understand the fact that there is no such thing as co-equal in any idea or concept of Trinity,

we're going to get tangled in a web of illogical thinking that I'm afraid if you don't get out of, you're going to have a very difficult time understanding a lot of things about the scriptures because when you don't understand them, you'll be prone to throw them over into this illogical bucket, so to speak, and say, well, nobody can understand God. Well, okay, yeah, that might be so in some cases or on some levels or in some manners of speech that might be true, but the Godhead is perfectly

understandable. It's perfectly understandable. There is the Father. We've always known Him. Well, not always, but ever since the days of Noah, sorry, ever since the days of Moses, we have known Him as Jehovah. Or in Hebrew, Yehovah. Y-H-V-H is the spelling of His name. We know His name. Jesus was not Yehovah. Jesus was not Yahweh. Jesus was the Son of God. Now what His name was

before He was incarnate, we don't know. John says that in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God, or a part of God. He was God. Now there was a time when I was my own earthly father. And there was a time when I was born and made in...now these things are not revealed in Scripture. People who speculate

on the creation, if you will, of the Lord Jesus, they do so without scriptural, I mean, unless they have some extra scriptural proofs or text or whatever, they're doing it outside of the scriptures because the scriptures really don't make that clear. We do see separate entities.

We see the visitors of Abraham as separate entities. We hear them in creation saying let us make man in our image. Us can refer to 35 persons. It doesn't necessarily refer to three. And it can refer to as little as two. We find that when God uses a name for himself, in some cases he uses Elohim, which is a plural understanding of the God

that we serve. Now I would say that Elohim is that Godhead. But when he refers to himself as I am the Lord, translated by the King James translators as the Lord, he actually said I am Jehovah. Y-H-V-H were what the translators saw on the page when he wrote the Lord. But you're not going to find Jesus Christ saying that he is Jehovah.

It's not going to happen. Forget it. It's not there. Now, does this denigrate Jesus Christ? A lot of people ask that question or accuse me of. You're removing the divinity or the deity of Christ. No, not in the least. Not in the least.

He's the son of God. I'm not. I think people who run around saying that they're Christians and still sin are more so denigrating the deity of God than anybody that talks about these things like I do. Because they say they're sons of God. Jesus is my brother. We're all in one big family. I don't know that that's necessarily so. I think that there are people that are considered to be children of God, but as Jesus clearly laid out, there's such a thing as servants.

There's sons and friends. Well, you can be a servant of God. This is a person who's decided to serve God strictly and simply. They've decided to serve God. So they're a servant of God. Doesn't make them a son. Doesn't make them a son at all. The book of Hebrews talks about the different stations of a child. The Bible says that a child, though he be heir of all things,

differeth nothing from a servant. These are all things worth your reading, and you might be frustrated that I don't give references for these scriptures, but I'm not here to give you references or to have people thumbing through their Bible when I'm trying to preach to them. Some people are frustrated about it, but my only answer is it's there. And if you'd read your Bible and were familiar with it, you'd know exactly what I'm talking about. And if you don't, why don't you

get familiar with your scriptures? We don't need to have references to everything we say. When you quote a book, you don't give the page number. When you quote something you read in the paper, you don't say it's just below the Sears ad on page four. You don't do that. You allow people to find it if they want to and not be bored with the details if they don't want to find it. And so that's pretty much the way I run things. These things are in the Scriptures. You can find these things. You can read the book of Hebrews.

You know where all these things are. I mean we have a Bible. Let's use it. And I'm not doing any of your studying for you if it's all the same to you. Another frustration of mine are the people who do what I call soundbite theology. They pull out a scripture here and a scripture there, and that doesn't do anything but get us into trouble. I can show you, and probably will as time goes by, I'll show you a scriptural example of well-meaning disciples

of Christ who took two scriptures and put together an instruction for themselves, followed that instruction, and actually did something against the will of God. Don't think that if they could make that mistake that you couldn't. So when Jesus says that I am the Son of God, it is, you have to understand that he doesn't use words indiscriminately. And if he were equal with God, he would have said he was equal with God. He would not be embarrassed about it or ashamed of it or hiding from the Pharisees or, oh, I don't want to offend anybody. If it's true,

he would have said it's true. But he didn't. All he said was he was the son of God. When you read in here that they say you've made yourself equal with God, well, that's your understanding of it. That's your vernacular. That's the age that we live in. That's a colloquialism that you use.

I don't necessarily use that colloquialism. If I was equal with God, I'll tell you. Isn't that what he said one time? He said, if it were not so, I would have told you. So let's not make him out to be shy. Make him out to be retiring or afraid of people or just trying to go along to get along or not offend anybody because that's not the case at all. So what's wrong with believing in a trinity? I don't care.

You can do that if you want to. I think you're going to have trouble trying to understand the scriptures because you're going to find that this third person of the trinity, the Holy Spirit, which is God Himself, there's hardly a place for this third person. The Bible talks about the Godhead. It's talking about the Father and the Son. Father and the Son. Father and the Son. As a matter of fact you're going to be hard pressed to find the Apostles using Father, Son, Holy Ghost in the same verse. You're going to have trouble doing that.

I say, if I'm going to have trouble doing that, why am I defending a word and a concept that I can't even find in Scripture? Well, you can deal with the baptism. We have the voice from Heaven, Jesus in the water, and a dove. Well, why isn't a dove the third person in the Trinity? Why don't we have a dove? There it is. He manifested himself as a dove.

The other definition that people give about Trinity is the different ways God manifested himself. My goodness, really? And we're just going to pick this one? He manifested Himself in all different ways. There was a time when His voice came through the mouth of a mule. But we don't want a jackass to be part of the Trinity, so we're going to move on. We have, like I mentioned, the dove here. We have all kinds of manifestations of God in the earth, but we're not sticking them in. Why is there three? Why is there only room for three? You know, if you want to study these kind of things on your own,

I encourage you to do so. You're going to find that there's a little sandy unwalked trail that goes out to the Celtic Islands and a man named St. Patrick. And so I'm thinking, why am I wasting time with this? I don't need to do this. Who says that I need to believe a trinity or be a heretic? The church. The church around us. The big shot preachers. the big denominations say that,

but I don't find that in here. I hear that if I deny, anybody who denies the Father and the Son is antichrist. That's what the scriptures say. Denying the Father and the Son, that I'll never do. Never in a million years. If it's all the same to you, I'm not going to ever do that. But, you know, this idea that this is all important is, I think, a very dangerous thought.

I think it's a worthless thought, to tell you the truth. I don't find it to be a hindrance, not in the least. So they were concerned that he was calling himself God. You know, in another location in the scriptures, he says, what are y'all bent out of shape about the word God anyway? You know, God doesn't just apply to the father. We call him God, but it's incorrect. It's not his name. There are many gods. Paul says there are God's many and Lord's many. There's one that pertains to us. And he says, don't you remember in the book of Psalms where I said, ye are gods? If he called them gods unto whom the word of God came,

why are you offended at me because I said I'm the Son of God? What a perfect opportunity for him to have said, why are you upset with me because I said I'm God? See, but he didn't, did he? What did he say? I'm the Son of God. All right, it looks like time is gone for now. That's all for this particular time.

Will you do something for me? I need to hear from you. Tell me who you are and where you're from and how you're listening to this broadcast. You can simply write to Don at thinkredink.com. That's very easy to do. Don at thinkredink.com. And if you have a question or a comment,

I'll be glad to deal with it with you personally. We deal with questions over our radio show all the time. So if you'd like to avail yourself of the other ministries, we would love to have you. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. ThinkRedInc.com. That's ThinkRedInc.com. Join us again for the next episode in the Words of Jesus series. you