Kingdom Ready

It is evident that the average church-goer has no real grasp on the biblical meaning of Messianic titles such as ‘Son of God,’ ‘Christ,’ or ‘Son of Man.’ According to Dr. Hugh Schonfield, author of The Passover Plot, the majority of the Christians he conversed with “were not even aware that Christ was simply a Greek translation of the Hebrew title Messiah (Anointed One), and supposed that it had to do with the heavenly nature of the Second Person of the Trinity.”[1] The significance of such titles is clearly being overlooked. However, their importance is not to be understated, for Jesus himself said that it is “upon this rock,” namely the fact that he is the Christ, that “I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it” (Matt 16:16,18). Thus, it is essential to have a correct understanding of such Messianic titles, for a vague or unbiblical understanding of Jesus’ titles will lead to a corruption of the gospel message he preached, and ultimately, his identity.

To understand this term, one must also seek to understand other closely related phrases, like sons of men and children of men. Firstly, all of these terms are applied to mankind in general. These terms indicate the difference between God and the human race. The phrase son of man is the strongest way to distinguish between deity and humanity!

Psalm 115:16 (usage – children of men)
Consider the contrast between God and mankind: God dwells in heaven; man dwells on the earth.

Psalm 145:10 – 13 (usage – sons of men)
Here’s another contrast between God and mankind: God is big, strong, powerful and eternal; man is small, weak and temporal.

Well, it’s been quite awhile since I’ve posted an article here.  Far too long in fact.  I apologize for my hiatus. No real good excuses, just the usual things in life that pull us in all directions – job, kids, family commitments, home projects, watching too much football (yes I really do enjoy watching college and professional football – maybe too much), etc..  And probably the worst and certainly dumbest thing is just getting out of the habit.  Of course it seems that may be the case with a lot of my fellow KR contributors.  But let’s see if I can start a trend of coming back to the well here.  Let’s see if I can start off easy and work back into pushing out some fresh content for those have kept coming here and visiting the site.

I thought I would publish here on KR an excellent paper by Ken Westby.  Ken runs the great One God website www.Godward.org  – also known as “The Association for Christian Development”.  This paper actually just ran as a paid-for full-page ad in “The Journal”.  This is the little newspaper that the Churches of God put out.  And the interesting thing here (some might call it a bold move), is that the Churches of God (off-shoots of the Armstrong World-Wide movement) are decidedly Binitarian (the “God Family” belief).  Ken sent a pdf copy of the entire newspaper (link is here) along with a note saying that his article (on page 19 – and printed here below), was followed up by a 9 PAGE rebuttal in support of the binity belief. I think he may have struck a nerve!

I was taking a break from most everything when I was out-of-town on vacation last week. This week I’m taking a break from getting into the second section of my paper/series to post something I ran across on the web awhile back.  While I haven’t fully had a chance to dig real deep into this site’s content, what I have found I believe to be quite good.

The site I’m talking about is called “The Trinity Delusion” and you can find it at this address: http://www.angelfire.com/space/thegospeltruth/trinity.html

Not only does it contain an immense wealth of content (which I invite everyone to check out for themselves), I find the guy who started it and writes it, to be very interesting.  Here’s a little of his story (as he lists on his own “About” page):

Back in Sept 2010, I presented some facts and stats about God. It became apparently clear that the Bible teaches that the Father, whose name, according to the OT, is YHWH, is the only God. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not all God subsisting in one Godhead. YHWH of the OT, of whom Jesus continually addressed as Father – He is the only God; therefore, we’ve come to understand that God is truly unipersonal, not tri-personal.

To understand this wonderful plan, one must journey back to the beginning, starting with Adam.

Genesis 1:26 – 28
By observing Adam, his rightful position under God was his appointment to rule over all of God’s works (v26, 28). The word rule here means to “dominate, govern, to prevail against, chasten, tread and crush.” But one must note that this rulership was predicated upon obedience to God – of which Adam forfeited by disobedience.

Psalm 8:3 – 8
David continues in his Psalm, acknowledging God’s divine appointment for man – rulership over this earth (v6 – 8). This was/is man’s crowning glory, majesty and honour (v5).

This is what Easter is suppose to be about. When you strip away all the commercialism and pagan customs, it is about remembering why we can escape the death penalty we all deserve as sinful humans.  It was this one human man, the 2nd Adam, the Messiah of Almighty Yahweh that died an undeserved death in our place and became the FIRSTFRUITS of those who are asleep!

Acts 17:30-31

Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.

The following is another new article from my website. 

It is amazing how many people who call themselves “Christian” don’t actually know what the word means. A “Christian” is a follower of Christ, but like most people, I did not know what the word “Christ” meant for many years. Like some, I assumed that it was part of his name. Others know that it is a title, but don’t know exactly what it means. The fact is, however, that the word Christ comes from the Greek word christos, which means “anointed one.” It is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word, mashiyach from which we get our English word, Messiah. The titles Messiah and Christ mean exactly the same thing: an anointed one.

By Charles Hunting 

This article was originally published in the August 2000 issue of Focus on the Kingdom.