Words of Jesus Podcast - Jesus Attacked

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Our inherited traditions hamper our ability to hear Jesus. There are gods many. Modern thought uses the "god of the gap" theory as a precursor to scientific understanding, forcing a contrived choice of belief in god or science. In this chapter, the religious leaders allowed their expectations and traditions as justification to disregard the works of Jesus. “Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.” John 16:13 (KJV)“But unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy kingdom.” Hebrews 1:9 (KJV)***62: Jesus Is Attacked In JerusalemJohn 10:22-39Jesus was in Jerusalem for the Feast of the Dedication, which occurred in the winter time. While he walked on Solomon’s Porch, a part of the temple, the Jews came around him and said:            “How long dost thou make us doubt? If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly.”            Jesus answered them saying:            “I told you, and ye believe not. The works that I do in my Father’s name, they bear witness of me. But ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto you. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. And I give them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand. I and my Father are one.”            Those around him picked up stones to hurl at Jesus, who said:            “Many good works have I showed you from my Father; for which of those works do ye stone me?”            They answered Jesus:            “For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God.”            Jesus replied to them:            “Is it not written in your law, ’I said, “Ye are gods”’? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken, say ye of him, who the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, ‘Thou blasphemest’; because I said, ‘I am the Son of God?’ If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works; that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him.”            Thereupon the authorities sought to arrest Jesus, but he eluded them.

Think Red Ink Ministries presents The Words of Jesus Series with Don C. Harris Hello my friends, welcome once again to the Words of Jesus series. I'm Don Harris of Think Ready Ministries, Pai Town, New Mexico. The goal here is to reinforce Christianity with the wisdom and works of Jesus. Incidentally, these words that we study, they're recorded in your Bible. Do you know what Jesus said and what Jesus did and what he said to do? This series is based on Jesus, his life, his friends, his ministry, his relationship with his Father,

as it's recorded in our four Gospels. We're going to delve into mysteries that have been hidden, not from us, but for us, in the words of Jesus. We're in chapter 62 now, and it is titled in our little book, Jesus is Attacked in Jerusalem. Sounds like a newspaper headline to me, but he's been attacked worse than this. I don't know particularly why they chose that title, but we'll go with it. We'll start reading, Jesus was in Jerusalem for the Feast of Dedication, which occurred in the wintertime. While he walked on Solomon's porch, a part of the temple, the Jews came around him and said, How long make us to doubt? If thou art the Christ, tell us plainly.

Jesus answered them, saying, I told you, and ye believe not. The works that I do in my Father's name, they bear witness of me. But ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep. As I said unto you, My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me,

and I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all, and no man's able to pluck them out of the hand of my Father. I and my Father are one. Those around him picked up stones to hurl at Jesus, who said,

Many good works I've shown unto you. For which good work do you stone me? Well, for a good work we stone thee not, but because thou makest thyself to be God. Jesus replied to them, Is it not written in your law? I said, Ye are gods, unto whom the word of the Lord came.

And the scripture cannot be broken, saith of him whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world, thou blasphemest? Because I said, I'm the Son of God? If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. But if I do, though you believe me not, believe for the works' sake, that you may know and believe that the Father is in me

and I in him. Thereupon the authorities sought to arrest Jesus, but he eluded them. There's a lot in this story and uh i i don't know any other way other than just take this you know piece at a time but uh there there's a lot of information here first of all uh the feast of dedication uh many people trying to justify christmas have taken the feast of dedication and saying it's kind of a cognate it's kind of a a derivative of the feast of dedication uh the festival of lights and and people have tried to put this together friend Friend, don't even bother doing that. That's ridiculous.

I assure you, there wasn't a Jew in Jerusalem at the Festival of Lights, the Feast of Dedication, that thought one minute about Christmas. There was no such thing. Now, there were holidays that were based on Saturnalia, on Nimrod as being the son of God, him being raised from the dead, and him dying and coming back and all these kind of things. There was a lot of pagan rituals. If you want to say that Christmas is based on that, you'll probably get more agreement out of me than you would by trying to couple the Feast of Dedication

with our modern day Christmas. So, you know, that argument really goes nowhere except with people that know better and people who don't. The in-between guy, you know, that doesn't know anything, you know, he's kind of scratching his head and wondering what in the world does this have to do with it. The fact that the Feast of Dedication was held in the winter is often quoted or used in this regard. But the fact of the matter is that Christmas was chosen for one reason and one reason only. It is the birthday of every pagan god that I've ever been able to look up. I mean, I don't know if you're worshiping Ra, December 25th. You worship in

Nimrod, December 25th. It is the birthday of the gods. There's a reason for this. Now, I mean, if you're interested in these things, it was an interest to me. It is that this particular time of year, this particular time of winter, I don't know if you're familiar with the procession of the equinoxes, but as the revolution of the earth decays, as the fact that there's like 365 and a quarter days in a year, these kind of things. The reason we have leap year, as a matter of fact, is to keep our calendar so that July is always a hot month, because if you, and, you know, spring comes when spring's supposed to, or it comes in the month it's supposed to, and winter, and so on. And because if we didn't make allowances for the procession of the equinoxes,

soon, you know, July would be a winter month. If that's confusing to you, it's not really that important. But there is a reason why December 25th was chosen. Now we all know that the winter solstice is not on December 25th today, but there was a time when it was. And this particular day was considered the shortest day of the year. And this particular day was chosen because it was the rebirth of the sun.

We're going from the shortest day of the year, and now it's going to grow and grow and grow until we get to the longest day of the year. And this period of growth has a beginning and its beginning is the winter solstice. So the day is chosen because of a basic worship of the sun. It's a sun god foundational principle. So that's why December 25th is chosen. I don't know if, I don't know how important these things are to you. There's a lot of people that, you know, consider it just

not important at all. And there's some people that are interested in it, but it's well worth your study to find, you know, where these dates come from and why. And then it will progress eventually into, well, then what day was Jesus born? Well, you might be surprised to find this out, because usually a lot of times when you're talking about these kinds of things, people will say, well, nobody knows when Jesus was born. Well, I do. Within a couple of weeks, I mean, taking in the variations of

gestation, I mean, it's really easy to find when he was born. When you couple that time of year that he was born within that couple of weeks, is what I'm saying. And you lay upon it the prophecies of the Son of God coming to tabernacle with men. It's easy to see that Jesus was born on the first day of the Feast of Tabernacles. It's just that simple. Now I can't say that specifically because, well, I wasn't there. And if I'm not willing to make these leaps in logics and force

you to do so as well, we have to say that, no, we don't know what day, but we certainly know within two weeks and we know it wasn't December 25th. There's other things that we know, and one of them is we were never, ever commanded to keep the birthday of Jesus Christ. Birthdays were actually, it's only in our modern day that people even keep birthdays. There were centuries where the human race had no idea what their birthday was. And that's not so uncommon. Chances are, your great-grandparents, well, it would be great, great grandparents, there's chances, there are chances that they're not even sure what year they were born. And it happens. Sometimes people assume

that they're, you know, certain age and they don't keep up with these kind of things well in the in the day and age in which we live where where we all really think really well of ourselves and uh we think that uh you know that we're worthy of birthdays because birthdays were really reserved for royalty and for gods in the earth and hold on to that word because we're going to be talking about it, the birthdays were actually celebrated and kept for these people who were above everyone else. Nobody but a prince, nobody but a king, nobody but a god in the earth would even consider that his birthday was something special um and but today in the day we live in everybody celebrates birthdays and um it's uh i i i assume

it's a harmless thing um if it is coupled with good logical child rearing, it can be a harmless thing. But no child anywhere needs to think that he is anything special. We actually train ourselves, we train our children to believe that they are special. And, you know, okay, individual, I'm with you. We train our children to believe that they are special. And, you know, okay, individual, I'm with you. But special? I don't know how good that is. When you couple that with the pitiful child rearing that we have to put up with today,

I think it just adds to the problem. Frankly, I didn't accomplish anything on my birthday last year, for example. There's no need to celebrate the fact that I didn't die. Of course, as you get a little older, that is kind of becoming an accomplishment. Perhaps I'll change my mind on birthdays after 60. But the idea that we celebrate birthdays, I think is, I don't know. I have a hard time coupling that with the humility that is so difficult for us to grasp anyway. So difficult for us to incorporate into our lives the humility that is necessary to be Christian, to have a relationship with God, have a relationship with other people. I don't know that I need any more bolstering of my ego than that. Now, what I do do on my birthday is I always

send my mom flowers. She's the one that accomplished something. She's the one that did something wonderful that day. And so on my birthday, I'm going to give a gift to my mother, but I don't expect one the other direction. But this isn't hard and fast. I'm kind of giving you a personal testimony here. I'm not telling you that, you know, that these things are wrong, but they really ought to be considered.

I'm not really against giving children birthdays, you know, when they're young, you know, maybe six, seven through perhaps 12 years old. But, you know, it's time to grow up after a while, to sit around and pout because nobody remembered your birthday or you didn't get a card from somebody or, you know, these kind of things. You know, come on, grow up. So I'm not sitting here telling you that birthdays are wrong, celebrating birthdays are wrong but as I say it's just a bolstering of a problem that we already have inherently called ego and self-importance and so you want an opportunity to be humble there's there's a great opportunity but what about all the stuff we're going to that we could get? Well, okay. What are you selling? What are you trading for the pottage, right?

All right, so it kind of handles Christmas, kind of handles birthdays, and it brings up a subject that we're going to be talking about, which is gods in the earth. We have a tendency in our particular language, our vernacular, that when someone says God, we think of a supernatural, ethereal being that has supernatural powers and these kind of things. And to call a man a god there is a there is a connotation in the

bible of of a god being the lord god there was an example that people got together and listened to a particular king's speech one time and said this is the voice of a god and not a man now listen to what he said a voice of god a voice of a god and not a man this is a totally different idea altogether this is someone who is, who the accolade is making the claim that this person is not an ordinary man. He is, he's a God. Well, we know that, you know, that was, that was frowned upon by the Lord. If you know the story, it turned out bad. but what i want you to do is i i want you to understand that many times when the bible talks about a god it's not talking about an ethereal being it's not talking about a supernatural being it's not talking about especially when the word god is attached to a person jesus made the statement he says he says you know that in the psalms it says or did i not say ye are gods

gods now who's saying this well this is this is our lord god saying that you are, that there are men that are indeed above other men, and they are above other men for this reason. The word of God has come to them. Jesus said it this way. He says, He says, Oh, goodness. I've lost the place here it is he says um is it not written in your law i said ye are gods if he called them gods unto whom the word of God came and the scripture cannot be broken say ye of him whom the father has sanctified

and sent into the world thou blasphemest because I said not that I am God by the way Jesus never would never blasphemously refer to himself as God. He knows better than this. Jesus actually has a God. Did you know that?

He told Mary, remember at the tomb? I go to my God and to your God. Jesus Christ has a God? Certainly he does. It's a great God, Jehovah. It's his Father. We know who he's talking about. If Jesus has a God, we are immediately seeing a hierarchical structure of the kingdom of God in heaven. Are we not? you know, the idea of Jesus being co-equal with God, it's hogwash. It's ridiculous. Well, I mean, it's certainly not scriptural, but the idea is so old now that we just accept it as fact. The Father, Son, the Holy Ghost, all co-equal, a co-equal trinity. No,

I don't know where you got the word co-equal from, but you know, even the Spirit of God, the Bible says that the Spirit of God that is sent to us will not speak of himself, but whatsoever he heareth, that shall he speak. Again, you can see a hierarchical structure of what many people call the Trinity. And so the idea of gods in the earth is not so repulsive as we might make it, we might think. You realize the president of our United States, he could easily, in biblical language, scriptural language, be called a god. All right.

I don't know how you feel about the president of the United States, but this is not a compliment. This is not an accolade or an elevation of our president to the status of a god. You see, you're still thinking that a god is a supernatural being and not a man. You need to understand that there is a difference when the scriptures talk about, I said, ye are gods. We're going to have to rectify this are we not he said i said ye are gods uh he said oh let's see was it uh moses he says he told moses i will make you a god to pharaoh

what does he mean by that he's going to make him into a supernatural being? No, he didn't do that to Moses. Moses wasn't a supernatural being. He was a human being. But I'm going to make you a god to Pharaoh. What he meant by that was he's going to see that you're elevated status. And you're not someone to be trifled with, as gods in the earth are even in our day. But we don't call them gods, and we're kind of afraid of the term. But we really shouldn't be afraid of that term. I'm sure that people with sinister motives can take what I'm saying right now and twist it and turn it into some really weird stuff. But the fact of the matter is, is there is such a thing

as a God in the earth, and there's such a thing as a God in heaven. And there is a hierarchical structure that a human being cannot surpass. There's no way that a human being can become a god. You know, in deference to some of my Mormon friends, I'm sorry, but that is not going to happen. only one person that was elevated to the status of god but he was half god at the time and that's jesus christ you know when jesus christ arrived in glory and and made atonement for us and his blood was applied to the heavenly altar and he was judged by our god and his works were evaluated in the earth he says thy throne oh god is forever the lord said unto my lord this day i've begotten thee the lord said unto my Lord that you're a God. Why?

Because thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity. Therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows. Is this coming together or is this just becoming more confusing for you? I don't know how important this is for you, but if you want to understand how Jesus could defend himself, calling himself the son of God by claiming a scripture, the truth of a scripture that says, didn't I tell you, you are gods unto whom the word of God came? He says, if you can, if you are gods unto whom the word of god came he says if you can if you are gods if i consider mankind on the earth to be god not to be god but but to be as gods to others which is an elevation

above the people in the earth unto whom the word of God has not come, then why are you accusing me of blasphemy? I haven't claimed to be God. Well, you see, there was an attitude among the Jews, and I assume still is today, that when Jesus says, I and my Father are one, or to claim that you're the son of god it makes you equal with god in their eyes but there is no son anywhere ever that is equal to his father not without his father endowing him with that power relinquishing the family to that son and you

see that's exactly what happened at the coronation of jesus christ when he says you are god and when he looks when the lord said unto my lord when and god says you are god he made Jesus Christ the Lord God of the whole earth. All judgment is in his hands. This is his creation. It was his commandments. It was him that came to the earth and gave himself for us. He created us. He redeemed us.

Therefore, he is God to us. A lot of times when I talk about Jesus not being God when he was on the earth, people run around with their hair on fire about that, and they just have all kinds of trouble with it. You're taking the divinity of Christ. No, I'm not. No, I'm not. Will you just listen for a moment? There is no way I'm saying that Jesus Christ was just a man. Of course he wasn't just a man. Do you know who his dad was? Do you know how he came to be? You know, there is no way that he was just a man. However, he was made God the day that he was begotten of God. This day have I begotten thee. It's really kind of an interesting study if you want to look into it.

But here we find that Jesus says, I'm the Son of God. He's never had a problem saying that. He is the Son of God. He was the Son of God when he was here on the earth. And he is God to us today. Without a doubt. So them saying, you are claiming to be God. No, he didn't. He didn't claim that at all. He said, I'm the Son of doubt. So them saying, you are claiming to be God. No, he didn't.

He didn't claim that at all. He said, I'm the son of God. Why are you upset with me? Because I said that. The other portion in here, our time is gone. My goodness. The other portion in here is where Jesus says, there's a kind of a parenthetical

or at least a separated portion of a sentence here that we probably ought to look at. We'll do that next time. But he said, you know, if I said you are God's, and then he says, and the scripture cannot be broken. Are you one who believes that the scripture cannot be broken? Because if you do, you have all the Jews as your friends because they believe it. And probably, you know, 99.9% of the Christians believe that this is a magic book

and the words in it can't be messed with or broken. So we're going to talk about that next time. And so join us then, will you? I'd love to hear from you. Why don't you write to me? Questions, comments, whatever is on your mind. I'd love to hear from you that you're listening to the broadcast. You can do so simply by writing to Don at ThinkRedInc.com. All right, until next time, Think Red Inc. We'll see you then. Bye-bye. C. Harris of Think Red Ink Ministries. Email don at thinkredink.com. That's thinkredink.com. Join us again for the next episode in the Words of Jesus series. you