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About Jesus - Steve (Stephen) Sweetman The
Jesus I Serve The Jesus I serve, "from the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). "The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us" (John 1:14). Our English word "Word" in John 1:1 is translated from the Greek word "logos." Logos is a complex word that denotes words or speech, yet in a broader sense speaks of the rational mind. In this broader sense, John described Jesus as being the rational mind of God, who was not only with God, as in separate and distinct from God, but was in fact God. There appears to be a unified duality here. Then there is the Holy Spirit, forming our concept of trinity, a unified plurality, the original form of community.
Considering
the above, some say, based on their view of hermeneutics, that the
pronouns "us" and "our" in "let us make mankind
in our image" (Genesis 1:26) refers to the triune nature of God.
Based on my hermeneutical view, I question that since those to whom this
verse was originally directed knew nothing about Trinity.
Laying aside Genesis
1:26, many in the first-century, Greco/Roman world understood logos to
refer to the Supreme God, the god above all gods.
Maybe that's why John used the word "logos" to describe
Jesus, a significant word in the Greco/Roman world of his day. Luke 1:35 states how
Jesus was conceived into a human embryo.
"The Holy Spirit will come on you [Mary] and the power of
the Most High will overshadow you. So
the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God."
Mary was Jesus' mother. God
was Jesus' father. Jesus,
then, while on earth was fully divine and fully human. He hinted at
this when He said
"before Abraham was born, I am!" (John
8:58). Jesus rose from the
grave with what some say was His "eternal resurrected body."
He confirmed that He wasn't a ghost. "Look
at my hands and my feet. It
is I myself! Touch me and
see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have," He
said (Luke 24:39). Some say
that since Jesus said He was flesh and bones and not flesh and blood, He
had no blood in His resurrected body, proving it was His eternal body.
I am far from convinced of this.
Could Jesus' resurrected flesh and bones body have been
transformed into a different existence once He disappeared from sight
and into the
clouds on His way to heaven? I
suggest that might have been the case since Paul wrote that "the first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam
[Jesus] a life-giving
spirit" (1
Corinthians 15:45). Is
Jesus a life-giving Spirit right now, without flesh and bones?
Laying aside the above
speculations, some day "we shall be like him [Jesus], for we shall
see him as he is" (1 John 3:2).
It's why Paul wrote "for those God foreknew he also
predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be
the firstborn among many brothers and
sisters" (Romans 8:29). Jesus
is the first born of a new creation of eternal beings who are
resurrected Christians that I think live on the Revelation 21 New Earth.
Until the appearance of
the New Earth, Jesus said that "all authority has been given
to me in heaven and on earth" (Matthew 28:18) that is, until He
hands it back over to God His Father. "The
Son himself will be made subject to him [God the Father] who put everything
under him, so that God may be all in all" (1 Corinthians
5:28). God the Father, as was in the
beginning, will be the ultimate universal authority.
Christians, then, will be that new creation of being whom Jesus
was the first born.
This description of Jesus is the Jesus I serve, assisted by the "Spirit of Christ" within me, who if you don't have within you, "you do not belong to Christ" (Romans 8:9). This is the historic and eternal Jesus who is both with God and is God, who hopefully has been made flesh and dwells within you.
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