Please help me to understand what is meant here. If Jesus was "a god" then He could be THE God or a false god. What else could this mean? How can Jesus be "a god"?
Jesus is the Messiah/Christ
A man anointed by his God...
“Christ” God or title?
Dr. Hugh Schonfield, in his book the
Passover Plot. Reported that many Christians he spoke with were not even aware that the term "Christ" was simply a Greek translation of the Hebrew title Messiah, and thought somehow that it referred to the Second Person of the Trinity. "So connected had the word ‘Christ’ become with the idea of Jesus as God incarnate that the title ‘Messiah’ was treated as something curiously Jewish and not associated.”
N.T. Write, the Bishop of Litchfield, agrees: “One of the most persistent mistakes throughout the literature on Jesus and the last hundred years is to use the word ‘Christ,’ which simply means ‘Messiah’, as though it was a ‘divine’ title.”
Who was Jesus? p.57.
According to its OT usage, the term Messiah, the Anointed One, indicates a call to office.
Most certainly, it was not the title of an aspect of the Godhead. This is a later Gentile invention that came about by ignoring Jesus’ Jewish context and inventing a doctrine called the Incarnation- the idea that a second member of the Trinity, God the son, became a human being. As Lockhart says, in
Jesus the Heretic, p.137. “Christianity ignored the ‘Messiah’ and theologically worked the ‘Christ’ up into the ‘God-Man.’ Jesus as the ‘Messiah’ is a human being; Jesus as the ‘Christ’ is something entirely different.”
Jesus calls himself "a man" (John 8:40)
"But as it is, you are seeking to kill Me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God; this Abraham did not do. and the apostles call him "a man" (Acts 2: 22; 1 Tim. 2:5). Act 2:22
"Men of Israel, listen to these words: Jesus
the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with miracles and wonders and signs which God performed through Him in your midst, just as you yourselves know-- 1Ti 2:5
For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,
He is constantly contrasted with and distinguished from God, his Father.
The Hebrew Bible or OT, predicted Jesus would be a man (Is.53:3). But never does the scriptures use the term "God-Man" to tell us who Jesus is. The Greek language of the day had a perfectly good word for “God-Man” (
theios aner) but it never appears in the New Testament. So why do we persist with these extra-biblical terms? Why do we continue to employ non-biblical (i.e. unbiblical) language to describe Jesus?
The Bible verse saying is true which says that we are very quick to spot the speck in the eye of another's theology, but how blind we are to the beam in our own. Mary is not the mother of God, according to the scriptures. And neither is Jesus God the Son, nor is he the "God-Man" according to the Bible. And he is nowhere called "God of from God" as the later Nicene Creed called him. Protestants, people of the Bible ought to know that the contentious extra-biblical word used at Nicea,
homoousios, meaning ‘of equal substance,’ “did not come from Scripture but, of all things, from Gnostic systems.” Quote from
Born Before All-Time? p. 500. Kuschel.
The result was that such terminology introduced alien notions into Christian understanding of God. In other words, "an epoch-making paradigm shift has taken place between Scriptures and Nicea.”
Born Before All-Time? p. 503. Kuschel
To the Jewish mind, accustomed to Old Testament teaching on the principles of agency and representation by which God appoints a man to speak or act on his behalf, such a concept was both familiar and acceptable. Whilst it is true that some of Christ's enemies believed him to be usurping or laying claim unlawfully to certain Divine rights or powers, not a single Jew ever thought that the miracles performed by Christ proved that he was a Divine being, and the gospel record indicates that many recognised that he was a man Divinely appointed to exercise power and authority on God's behalf.
Hope this helps Jack,
Paul
