Words of Jesus Podcast - The Greatest Prophet

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

The Scriptures contain conflicting ideas about the coming of Messiah; one version says Messiah will come and be the King of Israel; the opposing version is that the Messiah will come meek and lowly riding on a donkey. Why this conflict? Why did the people of Israel miss the identity of the greatest prophet and the Messiah?Why did Jesus call John the Baptist the greatest prophet born of a woman? Why was Jesus rejected by the people of Israel? "...God said, ‘Surely they'll reverence my Son." What happened? The wickedness of mankind surprises God.  ***Chapter 22: Jesus Answers John the Baptist Regarding His IdentityJOHN THE BAPTIST was in prison, but he heard about the works of Jesus. He called two of his disciples and told them to go to Jesus and ask: "Art thou he that should come? Or look we for another?" They found Jesus and said to him: "John Baptist has sent us unto thee, saying, 'Art thou he that should come? Or look we for another?" While the two disciples of John were with him Jesus healed many who were inform, many who were suffering with plagues, and others who were filled with evil spirits; also, to many that were blind he gave sight. Then Jesus said unto the disciples: "Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me."***

Think Red Ink Ministries presents The Words of Jesus series with Don C. Harris Hello, I'm Don Harris of Think Red Ink Ministries. Time once again to visit the words of Jesus. Glad to have you, and I'm glad this is a part of your day. If you'd like, I would love to hear from you. If you'd like to write to us, you can write to me, don at thinkredink.com. Let me know what you think of the broadcast and when you're watching,

those kind of things that are very important to us. We have been, we just finished talking about the Sermon on the Mount, and we're going to enter into a discussion about John the Baptist. John the Baptist has a peculiarity to him and his ministry that Jesus actually placed upon him. He makes the statement, and we will read it as we continue, that John bears an identification that is peculiar to him and him alone, and that is that there was not a greater prophet born of a woman than John the Baptist. Now, you know, you might just think that, well, this is his cousin, you know, so this is kind of nepotism and whatever else.

Maybe he was just partial to John the Baptist. But we're going to talk about the fact that John the Baptist is peculiar as a prophet in that regard and why that is the case. I've always been amazed that there is such few words that John the Baptist ever said or preached actually in the scriptures. If he was indeed the greatest prophet, it will not take long for us to find out what his message

was, why Jesus felt that way about him, because we're not having to rifle through an entire book of John the Baptist and determine what he preached and what he had to say and what exactly is the greatest message ever given of a prophet. It'll be easy to do. But I want you to perhaps open your mind a little about John the Baptist. He is probably one of the least quoted prophets of the scriptures,

and all the while bearing this peculiarity that Jesus said he was the greatest prophet that ever lived. And so we're going to try to reconcile those things. We're going to talk about some things today that will be difficult for many people. There is an idea in Christendom that I think needs to be dispelled because it forms a theological base that actually forces us to be incorrect in a lot of areas in our thinking about the ministry of Jesus, the ministry of John the Baptist,

the plan of the redemption of mankind. Everything that Jesus did actually has a foundation that in many of the minds of Christians is a false foundation. And it all stems from the idea, and I don't want you to turn this off so quickly. I want you to stay with me on this because you'll find that the critics of these kinds of ideas will immediately jump to the conclusion, the knee-jerk reaction to this kind of thing is that perhaps I am trying to put forth the idea that Jesus was not divine. And that is not the case at all. But when you remove from Him the man-made, man-conceived

conditions that we have actually placed upon Him that He did not claim for himself you'll find that many people's appreciation or acknowledgement of jesus christ as being divine are based in his ability to fulfill their ideas of what the Messiah should be. Now you have to understand too, you have to have an appreciation for the idea, and I assume still do today, that in Christianity, in religion, that if a God

doesn't have the characteristics of many of our fantasies, then they're not God. God has to be omniscient. He has to be omnipotent. He has to be omnipresent. Not so much with the Jews, but with many of the Protestant denominations. He has to be part of a trinity.

He has to be born of a virgin. He has to be all these things in order to be part of a trinity. He has to be born of a virgin. He has to be all these things in order to be divine. My contention is that he, I happen to believe that he was born of a virgin. However, to place that belief, so to speak, into a list of criteria for someone I think is extremely unfair. There are many people who have read the Bible for hundreds of years that never saw the word

virgin. They said that he was born of a young woman. And so they don't necessarily feel that the virgin birth is something that they have to believe. There are people today that say that if you don't believe that, that you're not Christian, you don't have faith, that somehow your faith is flawed, and these kind of things. But the truth is that as we grow in Christ and think, you'll, you'll probably find if you continue to look into the theology of who Christ is and, and the, the, the plan of the redemption of mankind, you'll see that the virgin birth plays a huge role in that. And it's, I mean, for proper theology,

it's absolutely necessary. But some people haven't come to that. They haven't come to that understanding yet. You don't have to have good theology to be Christian. However, you do need good theology to have an understanding of who he is and who he is to us, to understand what is going on in the world, I guess I should say in the real world. So I'm not downplaying theology or doctrine. What I am downplaying and trying to remove from our thinking

is the dogma that we insist that other people believe. You know, just leave folks alone. They have one teacher. The person that you're aggravating and you're trying to teach all the time, that person has one teacher and it's not you. There's one person and there's a being in the universe that is very capable of understanding exactly what that person needs. So we need to let them teach. Jesus says you have one teacher. That's me. One rabbi. That's me. There is no other. The apostle John said, you have no need that any man teach you. The same spirit that brought you into this family and is bringing you along now, that spirit is fully

capable of teaching you everything that you need to know. So I think we kind of need to leave people alone. Let them find their way. So what is our duty? Well, it comes down to the three things that I tell you all the time. Keep the commandments of God. There's a doctrine. There's an unchangeable doctrine. Keep the commandments of God. Never disobey your conscience. That's good advice in any situation. I don't care if you're a Buddhist. That's good advice. And the third one is take time every day to hear the voice of God. For what purpose? For this very purpose we're talking about right now. For teaching. Because He's our teacher. And there's only one way to receive that.

And that is by the word of God. And if you exchange the word of God for the scriptures and insist that the scriptures are what teaches us first of all you're changing an entity that Christ is trying to claim for himself. He makes it very clear the scriptures make it very clear that he is the Word of God. And that if we understand that when we

use our Bibles that we can hear the Word of God and learn from the Word of God, we'll stop learning from our Bibles and start learning from him. Now this is a fine line that a lot of people just they just simply don't understand because we're raised in a society that teaches us to find teachers people who are in life where we want to be and have them teach us and tutor us and train us and guide us and give us hints along the way way, and a whole list of snappy answers to people's questions, and all these kinds of things that are so superfluous,

and many times get in the way of good counsel, of good friendships, of good relationships. It is the very thing that has the denominations that supposedly all worship the same God, use the same scriptures. They can't even fellowship with each other. Oh, why don't, you know, we're assembly of God. Why aren't we down there at the church of God building?

Wow, they believe that sanctification is instantaneous. And we believe that it's progressive. Okay, so we can't eat with them? Is that the idea? Well, it does get that silly. And, you know, pardon me for bringing up an actual argument between denominations, but they get even worse than that. Those people baptize by dipping them face first.

And we know that it's supposed to be the other way. And we get ideas like this, and so they just cause divisions and such. Let's be nice to one another for a change. Now, when it comes to the redemption of mankind, we've been sold on an idea that is well, it causes problems, not so much at the outset, but in the interim and toward the end of a person's theological studies

it starts causing trouble, and people start trying to work around it somehow. And that is the omniscience of God. Now, here's what you should know. God is not divine because you consider him to be omniscient, or because you consider him to be omniscient or because you acknowledge that or because you use that word. God is divine because he's divine. He's outside of our human realm of understanding. He's in a different dimension.

He thinks differently. He acts differently in ways that we don't necessarily understand. Because, and I've said before, you have to understand that even if God had no supernatural knowledge, let's just say he is, and I know people are going to take this and run with it and run around and try to make this into heresy, but if you'll just listen for a moment, you'll understand what I mean. Let's just say God's not divine. Let's just say he's a 6,000-year-old man. Let's just say he's just lived for 6,000 years.

Do you know how much, how incredibly much wiser he is than you? Do you know how much, how incredibly much more knowledge he has than we do? I mean, if just by virtue of the fact that he has been around since the beginning of mankind, let alone the billions of years before that. But just in the life of mankind in general, if he'd just been a regular old guy

with a properly functioning brain, and he lived for 6,000 years, he would be really worthy of your attention. So we need not make him into something that he's not in order to call him divine. He's divine because he is divine, not because you say so or because I say so. And you can't remove his divinity

by saying something different or believing something different or me saying something different about it. He is what he is, which was his message, by the way, to Moses. You know, Moses says, who shall I say sent me? You know, when he called him to go get the people out of egypt and bring them into the promised land he says uh who shall i tell them sent me and he and the lord essentially said to moses even if you gave them a name they would know it if you went back and told them my name was bob they would know it i've never told anybody my name was Bob, they would know it. I've never told anybody my name. So you say, who shall I say sent me? That won't do you a bit of good in the world.

I am who I am, no matter what they think my name is, or you think my name is, or anybody thinks my name is, I am who I am. This is why the misunderstanding, many people preach that God told Moses that that is his name. I am. But it wasn't I am who I am. He says, I am that I am. I am that I am. What I am, that's who I am. And so names hardly mean anything here. But by the way, Moses, if you want to know, my name is Yehovah. Now nobody's ever known me by that name. Not even Abraham knew him by the name Yehovah. Abraham likely worshipped him and served him under a pagan name. That's amazing to even think about. But he told Moses, nobody's known me by this name.

I'm telling you all this because we're going to be talking about some things that likely do not fit in your present understanding of theology. And omniscience is a part of what we're talking about because people have a tendency to believe that God knows everything, which is a pretty wide-sweeping statement. It makes it easy to refute. If they believed, if the doctrine was, it makes it easy to refute. If they believed, if the doctrine was that omniscience meant that you know 90% of everything, then we would all be

arguing about what 10% he doesn't know. But it would be more difficult to refute. But when somebody says God knows everything, that means He knows everything. That means there is nothing that He does not know. As you read the Old Testament, you'll find that He does indeed, in some cases, say that He didn't know. That certain things turned out in a way that he was not expecting. As a matter of fact, if you want to know one thing in particular that totally baffles him is your propensity to sin. He does not understand, you know, sin and wickedness and selfishness and all these things, they're not anywhere near any attributes that he has. He simply does not understand that.

How can you be so wicked? You know, I did this for you and I did this for you. He would tell the prophets, you know, I've done everything I know to do for these people and I can't get them to stop doing stupid stuff. I can't even get them to preach my word. They stand up and preach and they say, thus saith the Lord. I didn't say that.

There was a time when he said to one prophet, when the children of Israel were taking their babies and laying them in the red hot arms of Molech and having them consumed in the fire, he says, it never entered into my mind that it would be that wicked now so so here's a an omniscient god it only takes one thing to break the the word of all-knowing um if if he If there is something that he does not know, then there is no reason to develop a doctrine that says that he knows everything.

But there is a being that knows everything. You might be interested in worshiping such a being. His name is Santa Claus. He knows who's naughty and nice and all these kind of things. He's even got the omnipresence down pat. He can deliver toys all over the world in one night. He can be every place at once. So

what I'm saying is that we've really developed some fantastic ideas about God and painted Him with these labels and expect Him to perform like we expect Him to perform. I started to tell you that one of the saddest things about the Jewish situation and the fact that Jesus came to save His own people and that they rejected him was that the Jew

essentially, I mean the religious Jew is probably better versed in the scripture than any Christian you know. Granted there are many who know the New Testament but not many. They feel like it's unnecessary for obvious reasons, but when it comes to Old Testament and it comes to prophecy and such as that, they're second to none. Well then, if they knew that John the Baptist was going to be born at Passover,

and he was, why did they miss him? If they knew that John the Baptist was going to show up just before Jesus did, then why did they miss him? If they knew that John the Baptist was going to show up just before Jesus did, then why did they miss him? If they knew what he was going to preach and they heard him preach that, then why did they miss him? They said, you know, you're baptizing. Well, John the Baptist is going to come. When Elijah comes, he's going to be baptizing. I don't know where they got that from. There's obviously scriptures missing somewhere. But they were under the impression that he was going to precede the Messiah. They even set a place for him at their Passover table every year. But John the Baptist shows up, preaches, is rejected, murdered,

and never recognized as Elijah the prophet. And how did that happen? You see, you have to understand that, you know, when, and we're going to read it. Probably should get into the reading, huh? These things are important to me because as I started looking at the redemption of mankind and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, when you start looking into it and you start listening to preachers and you start reading books about it and things, you keep noticing that there is that foundational flaw that keeps coming out in many of these writings and sermons and such. And that is that, well, there's a song that says he left the splendor of heaven knowing his destiny. Do you believe that? Do you believe that Jesus Christ came to the earth to be crucified, to be murdered

for your sin? I assure you, friend, that's not so. It's just not so. He came to be the king of Israel. He came to give his life for Israel. Remember when he said, my life belongs to me. No man takes my life from me. Boy was he ever wrong. Why did he look at John and say there should be some standing here that will not see death until they see the kingdom of God? I'm telling you he came here to establish the kingdom of God and found out as he continued that the plan was not working. Why do you think he spent the time in Gethsemane

crying tears that came from him as if it were drops of blood? What was he crying about? What was he upset about? What was his father let this cup pass from me? What was that crying about? What was he upset about? What was his father let this cup pass from me? What was that all about if he knew what he was getting into to begin with? These questions are not answered. Oh, there'll be things that we just won't know until we see him or whatever. You know, people make excuses for it.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? What was that? You know, I mean, so these things need to be answered. Well, I found out as I was studying the scriptures and looking at what Jesus actually had in mind to do that there are prophecies in the Old Testament that talk about him coming and being the eternal father, the everlasting king to come and sit on the throne of David.

And there are prophecies that says that he was going to be cruelly crucified and murdered. Well, here we go again. Did God know what was going to happen or not? Well, I think that what his message to us was that the condition of mankind was going to very well determine what was going to happen when his son came to the earth to redeem us. Do you remember when Jesus told the story? where he said that this lord of a vineyard left his vineyard in the hand of husbandmen.

Now friend, that is nothing more than the church, Israel, on the earth, same thing, left on the earth to guide themselves to as Jesus talked about occupying until he comes in other words do what you're supposed to do until i get back well the the lord of the vineyard wondered wonder how the vineyard's doing i need to send somebody down there to see about it and they did well they came and obviously these inquisitors asked too many questions.

So they killed him. And so he sent another and they killed him. They sent another and they killed him. You see the parallel here, don't you? The prophets that were sent by God to the earth in order to find out the status of what was going on on the earth and how things were going, so to speak, were all killed. Wasn't it Jesus that said, which of the prophets haven't you crucified? Which of the prophets haven't you persecuted unto death? All of them, all of them. So then here's the part of this metaphor, this parable that Jesus is painting here,

that I think if we have a lick of intelligence, we can understand that these are not just idle words on the part of Jesus. These are the words of his father. As the prophets were murdered and thrown out, cast aside, sawn asunder, all the horrible things that happened to them, he had an idea. I know what I'll do. I'll send my son.

They'll reverence my son. Boy, was he ever wrong. Again, good idea, didn't work. Just didn't work. Nope, he sent his son, and they murdered him. And that's exactly what happened. Oh, time's gone. My goodness.

There's so many things to talk about here, but I'm begging you to stay with me. Don't discount this too quickly. I know it's new stuff. I know it sounds strange, but you'll see that this all has a wonderful conclusion. Got to go for now. See you next time.

Bye-bye. you've been listening to don c harris of think red ink ministries ThinkRedInc.com. That's ThinkRedInc.com. Join us again for the next episode in the Words of Jesus series. you