1 John 3:16


"By this we perceive the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."

Saturday 4 September 2010

Christ’s Divinity

The scriptures claim that the Messiah is God. He has all the attributes of God, was eternal before creation and was the Creator and is the Sustainer of creation. Jesus Himself acknowledged this. Jesus also received worship (Matt 28:17). He was either a liar, insane, or the eternal Son of God.

…has in these last-days spoken to us by his Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds. Who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high. (Heb 1:2-3).

There are many such passages in the Old and New Testaments that declare the completeness of the divinity of Jesus Christ. His taking on of flesh did not in any way, at any time before or after His birth, reduce His divinity.

As the Nestorians tended towards a rejection of His complete divinity, others tended towards a rejection of Christ’s humanity. The earliest Gnostic philosophies held that Christ was a spirit only and did not come in the flesh. They did this because in their dualistic doctrine the flesh was evil. Their teaching concerning Christ was the spirit of antichrist that the Apostle John spoke of (1 John 4:3).

The antichrist is not a person, but a false doctrine that opposes the doctrine of Christ, chiefly that He came as God in the flesh to redeem us by His blood. John said whosoever denies that Christ came in the flesh is the spirit of antichrist. He said that there were many antichrists in the world and that we know antichrist is coming. That is, there would be more doctrines against Christ.

The Christians at Alexandria, the early Mary worshippers, tended to deny humanity. They were more Gnostic and denied the flesh. They claimed to focus on the spirit and sought to punish the flesh in asceticism in the monasteries. When the Reformation came many years later, Luther sought to dispute humanistic liberal theology (more Antiochean) on the one hand and allegorical superstition and idolatry (more Alexandrian) on the other.

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